The blue line between Snowdon and Jean-Talon was to be closed Sunday till 7 pm, but it remains closed for an indefinite period now, with a bus shuttle running instead.
Updates from April, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The boss of the Port of Montreal says he’s open to moving some port activities to allow riverside developments around Cité du Havre, where the Plante administration hopes to see new industrial and residential buildings.
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Kate
Yves Boisvert gives us part 1 of the epic of Daniel Jolivet, still in prison after 30 years, who claims he did not commit the four 1992 murders of which he’s accused. Jolivet’s already been the subject of TV, radio and podcast episodes. Boisvert gives the outline here and explains how the prosecutor withheld evidence that might exonerate the accused.
Update: The other sections of the story are posted here.
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Kate
A blue-green alley is being constructed in Point St Charles, this being both a rain retention pond and a green park. CBC says that a second project in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, described here in a hopeful 2017 piece in Metro, has stalled for lack of support.
Spi
I hope more thought was put into this than the awning on the plaza, someone should make sure that the designers/engineers know that stagnant water is a breeding ground for mosquitoes.
hank
Probably where https://modernfarmer.com/2023/04/meet-the-dumpster-diving-chef/ finds his produce
Kate
Not likely. It’s not completed and I don’t think they’re planning to put food plants in, but rather native plants that would naturally be found in wetlands. Essentially this project is about creating artificial wetlands that will soak up rainwater like real ones do.
I don’t know what the plan is about mosquitoes, but that’s a good question. I think that if the plants and terrain are looked after properly, the water will not be stagnant but circulating to some extent, so maybe that’s been thought of.
Uatu
There’s no standing water. There’s a drain in the middle of each garden patch that drains overflow into the sewers.
Spi
You’re right, the metro article that I read characterizes the diversion of gutter water as more permanent than transitory.
nau
Looking at the plans, it’s clear that if there’s a serious excess of rain, there are overflow drains to limit the amount of water that stays in the retention basins. So the water should be kept to an amount that can be absorbed into the soil or taken up by the plants over a certain period, much like what happens in yards all over the city after heavy rainfall, though perhaps in a manner that permits the planting of less commonly found water-loving plants.
Batiment 7, where this is happening, does have an urban agriculture aspect, which will be diverting some of the water from this set up. It being a forward-thinking kind of place, I don’t see why they wouldn’t share their produce with the chef if they had a surplus, but that article makes it pretty clear he has arrangements with grocery stores to take edible products they don’t think they can sell, with, to quote the article, “no dumpster diving required.”shawn
I love this water stuff. Remember there’s also Parc Pierre-Dansereau at the Campus MIL: https://repertoireouq.com/projet/parc-pierre-dansereau-un-parc-de-quartier-resilient-pour-une-gestion-ecologique-des-eaux-pluviales/
Kate
Also, don’t forget the water square at the Place de Fleurs de Macadam, which we discussed last fall.
Where my sister lived in the northeastern Netherlands, there was a “canal” outside her place, but it didn’t go anywhere, it was more or less a linear pond, and I saw a lot like that in the area. I doubt it was ever navigable. Seems to not be dissimilar. I was there at Christmastime, though, so I don’t know what the mosquito situation is like. mare?
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Kate
Three triplexes on de Lorimier were evacuated Saturday after signs that they may be on the brink of collapse.
Update: All but one household were allowed back in to reinhabit their flats, Saturday evening. La Presse clarifies that work was being done in the basement of one of the buildings.
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Kate
Here’s La Presse on Métropole francophone des Amériques as a city slogan, with the new logo.
Quebec has also appointed four advisers to help save French online – including Louise Beaudoin.
Ephraim
Better slogan than… On est le 4ieme Metropole francophone
Kate
Port-au-Prince is in competition for French metropolis of the Americas, but I gather that although French is an official language there, almost everyone actually speaks Creole.
Ephraim
By population (not French speaking population), Paris isn’t even first…. it’s second. Montreal is 10th and Port-au-Prince is 15th. By French speaking population, Montreal is 4th and Port-au-Prince is 5th, but barely…. the 5th, through 8th all have about 2.4M: Port-au-Prince, Dakar, Doula, Yaoundé. Incidentally the next French city is 9th…. Lyon. And the next on the list in French is Marseille at 15th
Kate
The stats will always be a little wobbly because determining who can be said to speak a language is not black and white.
Chris
And the borders of cities are also blurry.
DeWolf
Many nominally francophone cities are not actually French-speaking on the ground. From the Wikipedia entry on Kinshasa, for example:
“Kinshasa is the largest officially Francophone city in the world, albeit that the vast majority of people either cannot speak French, or struggle in speaking it.”
But if we just take any metropolitan area whose official language is French, we get the following list:
1. Kinshasa – 17 million
2. Paris – 12.2 million
3. Abidjan – 6.3 million
4. Douala – 5.8 million
5. Montreal – 4.5 million
6. Dakar – 3.9 million
7. Yaoundé – 2.8 million
8. Port-au-Prince – 2.6 million
9. Lubumbashi – 2.6 million
10. Lyon – 2.3 millionHopefully somebody here has been to some of the cities in West Africa and can share what the everyday linguistic situation is like.
Ephraim
@DeWolf – Kinshasa is about 12.8m French speaking, it’s about 75% to 80% French speaking. After this there is Ouagadougou, Bamako, Mbuji-Mayi, Antananarivo and then Marseille. And after that is Lomé, Brazzaville, Niamey, Toulouse, Kigali, Nice, and Goma.
It starts to get murky when you look at just French speakers, France is the largest, then DR Congo, Algeria, Morocco and then… Germany, Italy, Cameroon, the UK and finally Canada.
By percentage of French speakers, you have France, Monaco, Luxembourg, Belgium, Mauritius, Andorra, Switzerland, Gabon, Congo, Seychelles, Tunisia, DR Congo, Djibouti. Under 50% you start with Haiti. Canada is way down there with just over 28.5% Francophone.
DeWolf
Mauritius is a funny one. It was a British colony for 158 years, and a French colony for less than a century before that, and yet French remains the main language of business and media, even if English is the language of government. Of course, most people speak neither in their daily lives, they speak a creole language.
It all comes down to the flux of language. We see this here, where Montreal is very clearly a primarily francophone city in the way it works on a daily basis, but if you do funny things with statistics, you can come to the conclusion that less than 50% of Montrealers are francophone, simply because native French speakers are a minority.
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Kate
Something about the response of the groups mentioned in this item on the RCMP investigation of “Chinese police stations” in Montreal sounds a bit too edgy, exactly as people do when lashing out after being caught in a deception.
No, I have no idea whether the two named groups have any links to Beijing, but the story about Chinese surveillance worldwide isn’t easy to ignore.
DeWolf
It’s not a secret that the CCP uses community groups to serve its interests. It’s official policy arranged through something called the United Front Work Department:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Front_Work_Department
Of course there are also a lot of legitimate Chinese community groups, so it’s unwise and unfair to assume they’re all simply CCP fronts. I would be very surprised if May Chiu (quoted in the CTV article) has ever had any official dealings with the Chinese government. She’s a grassroots rabble rouser whereas front organizations tend to keep a low profile.
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Kate
The city has been subsidizing to a surprising 90% the decontamination of land in the east end, where petrochemical industries have rendered a vast area too toxic to redevelop. However, almost nobody has been taking them up on it, because the work has only been paid for when completed to satisfaction. Now they’re moving to paying 50% in advance.
Ephraim
And the work will be never done… they will simply abscond with the money. (Remember that I said so, when it inevitably happens)
GC
Yeah. I feel like that’s a good reason to not pay until the work is completed. (With “to satisfaction”, from Kate’s post being very important.)
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Kate
Inbound Louis-Hippolyte-Lafontaine tunnel to be closed Saturday night and part of the blue line will be closed all day Sunday.
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Kate
Metro has a list and map of the sections of street that will be pedestrianized this summer, and the dates.
DeWolf
A bit strange they include Ste-Catherine in the Quartier des spectacles, which is permanently pedestrianized year-round, but they forgot about St-Paul in Old Montreal, which is a summertime pedestrianization.
Kate
Good point. I dropped them a line.
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Kate
The body of a man who’d been missing for a week was found in the Back River off Montreal North. Police said it didn’t look like foul play.
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Kate
An employee of CN died Friday in an incident on CN territory in the east end, but no further details are mentioned.
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Kate
The REM, still in its testing phase, is already being called too noisy by people living near the line. People on Nuns’ Island in particular are already unhappy about the noise.
Tux
Oh boo f-ing hoo, I lived next to the train line in Montreal West for years. Your china cabinet rattles and you pause your conversation for 30 seconds. This is a city, there’s gonna be noise.
Anton
Well if the train comes every two minutes, per direction, and you need to stop conversation for 30s each time, then you need to pause like half the time. But I doubt the light rail is that loud.
John B
It’s kind of hard to have sympathy for someone who chose to live beside a railway line or the busiest bridge in Canada complaining about noise.
On the other hand, the Nuns’ Island request of an anti-noise wall seems pretty reasonable, and an opportunity to block out some sound from the freeway as well if done right. For those who bought near the train line in Griffintown, it’s kind of reasonable to be surprised at the increase in rail traffic. Even if they bought expecting train use to become more common and the number of trains per day to double or triple, they probably didn’t expect an additional 450 trains per day, (20 hours / 3.5 minutes * 2 directions).
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Kate
Things to do on the weekend from Metro, CityCrunch, CultMTL, Sarah’s Weekend List.
It will be a wet weekend, though.
Weekend traffic miseries.
shawn
I don’t where else to put this but here’s something we can all feel good about: Autoroute 50 is being renamed to honour Guy Lafleur: https://www.ledroit.com/actualites/2023/04/28/lautoroute-50-sera-renommee-lautoroute-guy-lafleur-SUKTMZRCBVDARPBYHDOG6N527U/
Shawn Goldwater
Cruise ship season is officially underway now too with the Zaandam scheduled to leave Old Montreal after a brief stop here: https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/with-new-ships-more-passenger-visits-and-record-shore-power-use-the-2023-cruise-season-is-officially-underway-at-the-port-of-montreal–854070405.html
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Kate
The drowning death of firefighter Pierre Lacroix in 2021 has, not surprisingly, been ruled accidental. Coroner Géhane Kamel has recommendations that have already been predicted: better equipment and better training if the fire service is also expected to do river rescue.
dhomas 22:39 on 2023-04-30 Permalink
It’s up and running again now, according to the CBC article.
Kate 08:43 on 2023-05-01 Permalink
Here’s the story Monday morning.