Traffic has been banished from a block of de Lanaudière in the Plateau, which has been turned into a square beside the elementary school named after Paul Bruchési (Roman Catholic archbishop of Montreal 1897–1939). Emergency vehicles will be able to get past, but no others.
There was a party for the opening Thursday.
An internal report at the STM is talking about shutting the metro at 11 pm as well as deep cuts to bus services, if the CAQ refuses to bump up money for transit.
11 pm…wtf….the world doesn’t just stop at 11 pm..steps backwards environmentally and will exacerbate various issues we’re facing now.
Cut service leads to lower ridership which leads to lower income which leads to more cuts in service. That’s a recipe for downward spiral.
If people can’t get home late at night from bars on public transit, I wonder if that’ll mean more drunk driving.
Cutting the hours of transit services is a bad idea for so many reasons.
And I used to live in the West Island (and am currently back now.) I remember going out to concerts and other later-at-night activities, sometimes going out with friends after, and then going home on the metro/buses later at night. If I go to events downtown now, I might have to end up leaving early or really rushing to catch the last metro.
That will happen to a lot of people. And might cause some suburbanites to use their cars more to go to and from downtown.
Montreal being the whipping boy of a crappy provincial government is getting old very fast. And the federal inaction on housing.
I no longer have confidence in the long term outlook of living here, due to that and cost of living increases. Increasingly looking at emigrating at retirement age. It’s very sad.
Billions continue to be wasted on highway expansions (free roads for SUV drivers).
We don’t live in a democracy. We live in a managed oligarchy that is crumbling from environmental degradation.
Yes that’s why the STM is underfunded. Clearly. Thank you for your insightful commentary.
Maybe if we just get rid of the suburbs nobody will have to go there, problem solved. We’ll just have to figure out what to do with all those nasty smoke trees.
I’m concerned what will happen with people who have to get home from second shift, or have to arrive for graveyard shift. I’ve worked both in my time and completely relied on metro and bus to get me around.
These are not jobs for which people are likely to have the means to pay for a taxi or an Uber every shift.
When I started teaching in Saint Anne some 7 years ago I had a night class that finished at 10:30. The misery of waiting outside in the winter at 10:45 for the 211 bus aside, I never got home beore 12:30am at the earliest. Most of my students took the same bus. By the time we got to Dorval it was at least half full.
I guess I could have taken another bus from L-G back up to Mile End but I would have been in pretty rough shape (or rougher shape at least) for the 8:30 class I would be teaching the next morning, as I would have to catch the bus to the metro at 6am.
In my experience, LOTS of people have very good reasons to be taking the metro after 11pm.
I guess cutting service after 11 is one way to deal with the driver shortage…
There are so many health care people who work evenings and finish at 11.30…11.45..who depend on the metro to get home across the island, including every second Saturday & Sunday. Many don’t have the means to pay the $1400 of parking fees charged to staff. Makes me wonder when Legault and his MSSS crew talk about making the non-daytime shifts attractive for personnel, if that would include an Uber credit to travel to/from work….beyond belief how clueless these blowhards are as to the daily reality of so many….from the patients who lay on a cot in our ERs waiting for a ward bed to open to those who try to care for them and their loved ones while hearing code-surge (over-capacity) announced every 6 hours.
I remember in high school being able to take the regular bus home (on a reduced schedule, but not the weird limited night buses) at 2-3 in the morning.
Looks like we could get about 10% of the money back from not having the police overspend their budget, or even more if we cut back on police spending like the majority of the population wanted.
Don’t worry, we’re going to have a big, big conversation about that someday.
If I don’t vote projet again, it will be over police funding.
It really did feell like a betrayal of their core social responsibility platform. That said, I certainly won’t vote Ensemble… we are primed for another PM style “cowboys outta nowhere” shakeup on the municipal scene.
Yeah, I’m not saying I will never vote Projet again (I am generally not unhappy with them), just that this would be why I vote for someone else. Not Ensemble, definitely.
@ Ian: “Yes that’s why the STM is underfunded. Clearly.”
There are only so many billions of dollars for transportation infra, and all those billion-dollar highways are free for drivers, for some reason that has never been explained.
Being so dependent on highways actually costs the average Québec taxpayer more than subsidizing transportation more heavily would.
The obvious way to recuperate money for public transport is to tax driving much more heavily. Like an additional 10% tax on every car purchase, automatic tolling on highways and bridges, and increased costs of everything that drivers of cars do (parking, storage, fuel deliveries).
Being car dependent makes us economically uncompetitive as a nation as well. We will not recover any of our industry if our workers require 10,000 dollars per year additional because we unwisely spent all our money on car-cars.
I can see you don’t understand how taxes work but yeah ok, whatever.
Your one-lever obsessiveness is tiresome, yes, but at least you’re not blaming everything on “Westmount Rhodesians” and the anglosphere these days.
I wonder where you imagine buses will run when we no longer have highways or roads. I guess if your dream of getting rid of suburbs comes true it will be moot.
I’d like ot remind you again that even Baie d’Urfé has higher population density than Sherbrooke so unless you want to mysterioously wipe the entire province clean except downtown Montreal I don’t know what you have in mind there.
I agree that qatzelok/bumper cars can have something of an idée fixe with respect to cars. But he’s not entirely wrong. The CAQ gave a 2-year holiday on driver’s license renewals. I used to pay about 115$ for my driver’s license renewal. I paid less than 25$ this year and last for my renewal. Considering there are about 5.7M driver’s licenses in active use in Quebec, that means a shortfall of roughly $1.1B. Why? We were all accustomed to paying the full price. This is an extra $1.1B that could have gone to other infrastructure. Why did we need this bribe? It makes no sense.
The background on the suspected arsonist in the fatal Place Youville fire gets ever more lurid. Denis Bégin was an escapee from prison when the fire was started. He has a dark criminal past, and has been called a psychopath by more than one expert.
I hope questions get asked about why he was in a minimum security prison. Why have other kinds if not for people like him?
That is a relevant question, Tim S.
It’s this simply skapegoating? Arsonists and murderers are two entirely different types of criminal. And what would be the motive? This just seems like they need to close a case. Where is Keith Morrison? Was he paid to do this?
@Ephraim it kinda looks like it. There is not much actually linking him to the fire, at least from what’s been publicly reported. It just looks like “bad dude on the loose; something bad happened’ it must have been this bad dude.”
at least from what’s been publicly reported
That’s been my assumption. La Presse is more likely to hold something back than take a floater on a baseless accusation.
A man who says he became schizophrenic after ingesting magic mushrooms has been declared not criminally responsible for the murder of his father‑in‑law.
This is how it was reported in June 2022 when it happened.
A reputable psychiatrist testified in this case. I wasn’t aware that full‑blown psychotic schizophrenia could be triggered by shrooms, but if he says it happens, I guess it happens.
can anyone shroom-overdosed to the schizophrenic state really be able to hurt anyone else?
I have a few times of shroom overdose (10x) with obvious schizophrenic experiences, but I was also totally constrained from moving out of the toilet because I just couldn’t stop vomitting. I think shroom overdoser cannot kill anyone including themselves, because the corporal experience is so traumatic and a total deprivation of motor skills. Until now, I cannot help but shudder in disgust and fear even with the idea of take some magic mushrooms again.
Yes I really want to try use shroom again for the philosophical mental state, but I cannot brace up to do it, for the past year. my physical body cannot agree with my mind on this resolution.
Aineko, I’m sorry that you had that experience, but you can’t really declare that someone having a ‘shroom overdose cannot harm another person based on your one experience. Try it again with a 2x overdose, then a 3x overdose, then a 4x overdose, etc. Recruit a dozen people to repeat the experiment. Now you have data. If none of those people were capable of harm during any level of overdose then you can present a hypothesis. But based on one experience? No.
Also, the article says the claim is that the mushrooms triggered the schizophrenia, but the actual crime took place months later while in a schizophrenic state (due to having “become” schizophrenic earlier) with no mention of him being high at the time.
However, I’m not sure I’m buying that one dose of mushrooms can bring on relapsing schizophrenia. I’m not an expert, but a quick search for info found a number of articles (NY Times, US National Library of Medicine, etc.) that warn that they can induce psychotic episodes while the drug is active, but they do not mention relapsing episodes when not using the drug. An article from Scientific American (2015) says they found no link between psychedelics and psychosis.
The thinking these days seems to be that psychedelics have “brain resetting mechanisms” (National Library of Medicine, and paraphrased in NY Times) that show promise treating mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, PTSD, etc., but they warn that it should be in small doses and that it hasn’t been well researched yet.
Maybe: if psychedelics have brain-resetting mechanisms, maybe this guy was already schizophrenic but so mildly that it was never noticed before, and perhaps had even “healed” (if that is the word) and the dose of mushrooms basically “reset” him back to a state of schizophrenia. That’s just me speculating, obviously.
Late 20s is slightly late for schizophrenia to develop in a man, but within the normal range. Possibly just chance timing.
It can happen from pot as well. Generally under 26 or 27. Mostly in men. High THC, no CBD.
I did have a friend back in the 80s whose schizophrenia kicked in after a fairly large dose of LSD. I took the same dose and was fine.
I’ve taken 8 grams of mushrooms at a time a few timee, it’s lots of fun. Unless you are a barfer or prone to psychosis, I guess. It certainly does help keep my depression under control when I catch myself spiralling downward.
Ian, I also knew someone who was encouraged to take LSD by his friends, and was never quite right afterwards. So we’re anecdotally demonstrating that this kind of thing does happen.
Anecdata is qualitative research 😉
Syd Barrett was probably the msot famous acid casualty, but his macrodoses were way beyond anything I ever tried.
Students are planning a big demonstration Monday against tuition hikes.
And a half-day strike has been scheduled for Nov. 6 by public sector workers.
Sol Sol Sol…
I’ll have to dig out my red felt square for solidarity with the students.
The public sector strike on the 6th is specifically in support of the nurses but there will be more Front Commun action soon.
p.s. I’m shocked, shocked that GND hasn’t come out against the tuition hikes. /s
Like we need more proof that QS is just the leftist ethnonationalist party now.
He sure was against them when it was coming out of his own pocket.
Lonely Planet has named Montreal the third-best travel destination in the world. We’re only outclassed by Nairobi and Paris.
too many these wild rankings in these days. I really doubt that whether they are compiled by armchair tourism/livability/lifestyle experists whose investigations are solely based on other dodgy online data.
They’re taken seriously though. I lived in Colombia when Lonely Planet declared it the world’s second best country to visit and it wasn’t long before hoards of tourists started showing up to a country that was completely unprepared for them.
If I were younger and traveling more I would use these ratings as recommendations of where NOT to go. And not even in the tired old “I’m a traveller not a tourist“ way. (Remember that?)
Julius Grey is going to court to fight the PREM system that keeps family doctors out of Montreal. The doctor he’s defending, Dr. Mark Roper, says the government is working from bad data.
Morgan Lowrie has an interesting report here on one of the city’s social intervention squads but also reports on a negative statement about them from Ted Rutland’s group. Yes, the squads try to help the homeless – although there aren’t enough resources to go around. But, as Rutland says, their mandate pulls them in contradictory directions: “You can’t at the same time say, ‘I’m here to help you, you can trust me,’ and the next day show up to remove someone from a public space because you received a complaint.”
It feels like Lowrie had more to say on this topic but was constrained by word count. No journalist actually wants to say that society lacks the political will to provide enough resources for the homeless – you need a Ted Rutland to say that.
TVA reports on homeless people starting to camp at the doors of shelters.
Ian 07:37 on 2023-10-27 Permalink
What a great initiative! There are a LOT of schools downtown that have nowhere for the kids to play but a crowded blacktop (FACE comes to mind) which really does seem like a form of cruelty.
Nicholas 09:28 on 2023-10-27 Permalink
The last link got deleted and reposted here.
Kate 09:41 on 2023-10-27 Permalink
Thank you, Nicholas.
DeWolf 10:15 on 2023-10-27 Permalink
Interesting detail from the La Presse article: CAA-Québec conducted a study at several school zones around Quebec and observed 425 dangerous/illegal manoeuvres in the space of 45 minutes.
// Les automobilistes représentent d’ailleurs 83 % des comportements problématiques décelés, à savoir 352 d’entre eux. Le reste a été commis par des piétons, des cyclistes ou des trottinettes (48), des parents aux abords des écoles (25) ou encore des conducteurs d’autobus scolaire (23). //
Ian 10:17 on 2023-10-27 Permalink
Schoolbus drivers even? Wow. Those little transport SUVs the boards use are often former cabbies and they are maniacs, but actual schoolbuses? I am surprised.
Joey 11:48 on 2023-10-27 Permalink
Clearly what we need is another puff piece on Fady Dagher.
dhomas 12:01 on 2023-10-27 Permalink
I wish they would do this for more schools. My kids’ school is in an area of RDP which is quite literally hostile to pedestrians. The roads are all windy and narrow but still two-way for some reason AND they have no sidewalks. No sidewalks! It gets even worse in the winter when snow makes the roads even narrower.If I had my way, I would turn all those windy, two-way streets into one-way streets and add sidewalks with the extra space.And finally, I would simply close the street next to the school, like they did in this article. I doubt I would get much support, though. The people in the area are addicted to their cars (though they don’t have much choice, especially since they’ve neutered the train link). It’s not even cold out yet, but at least 50% of the parents leave their cars idling while they walk their kids to the school. It’s sickening. Ok, I have to stop ranting. I’m putting myself into a bad mood. 😀
Nicholas 17:05 on 2023-10-27 Permalink
Paris has done this a lot, pedestrianizing streets in front of schools, and it has spread to other French municipalities. The car drop off and pick up does just get pushed to an adjacent street, but it does make it easier and safer to walk, and just more fun. It would be nice to see this expanded.