A five-alarm fire is burning on Notre‑Dame at Gauvin, a one‑block street west of Victoria Square. CTV says it’s 639 Notre‑Dame West that’s on fire – a handsome gray stone building from 1891.
Update Saturday: The building is a total write‑off. And the fire is under investigation.
Ooh, and guess who owned it?
What do we know about the political leanings of the Institut du Québec?
A recent report from this think‑tank says that, while we have a great quality of life in Montreal, we’re not productive enough. Not enough of us have university degrees, and we spend too much time stuck in traffic. Reading between the lines, we also spend too much time on terrasses, and not enough generating GDP for our capitalist masters.
(Now get back to work!)
Maybe it’s precisely because we’re not obsessed with productivity that we have a great quality of life 😉
I don’t always agree with Ian but I just tipped a month’s worth of likes into his comment.
If quality of life includes things like health services, city infrastructure, and (dare I say) civil rights, then have I got news for you!
It depends what you’re comparing it to, Annette.
It’s very difficult for Quebec to remain competitive in manufacturing (productivity) because it uses the Canadian dollar, which is over-valued because of oil exports.
https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/800870/chronique-incertitudes?
And yet Ontario uses the same dollar. Crazy, I know.simehow their dirty anglo magic makes it work? Must be a Halloween thing.
La Presse says Quebec’s going to increase its transit funding offer to the transit commissions in the Montreal area, all struggling with deficits – but not as much as they need.
Weekend notes from CityCrunch, Montréal Secret, 24Heures, Sarah’s Weekend List, CultMTL.
Highways to hell this weekend.
Toula Drimonis’s Friday column.
Despite moral panic about Projet removing parking spaces, the total number that were abolished between 2018 and 2022 add up to 5834 – between 1.1% and 1.2% of the total. This piece estimates the city as having between 475,000 and 515,000 parking spots.
I imagine even one lost parking spot is too many for anti-cycling car advocates.
While I do agree that this hot button topic is blown out of proportion,this justification is predicated on a seriously flawed analysis. If that amount were dispersed equally across the island, sure – but it’s not. It’s easy to game the numbers by conveniently expanding the dataset.
I’m pretty sure that percentage is much higher in say, Rosemont & the Plateau than in Mercier or VSL. Or directly on Bellechasse, say.
Not unlike talking about “medians” as an indicator of anything meaningful, this kind of handwavey self-expulcation is predicated on the assumption that the general population is innumerate.
That’s a straw man argument.
Are you arguing with yourself, Ian?
Oh sorry, when I posted that Meezly’s post came in after mine…. but looking at the timestamp I’m guessing that was my connection, not your server.
How Cities around the world are eliminating parking
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/sep/27/cities-eliminating-car-parks-parking
@Ian the central neighbourhoods are under far more pressure for space than places like Mercier or VSL. In many cases, parking is permitted or tolerated where it shouldn’t, and probably counted in the statistics when it is removed (ex. inside 5 meters of a crossing).
I’ve already had to contact my councillors because some paid parkings were installed within 1 meter of a pedestrian crossing and it was hazardous. In that case, the parking was probably counted in those statistics, but didn’t follow the CSR guidelines, so shouldn’t have been put in place since the beginning.
https://journalmetro.com/local/le-plateau-mont-royal/858192/pres-de-10-des-parcometres-en-zone-de-stationnement-interdit/
Be that as it may, it’s not the argument being made in this article.
Your argument, Alex, is fair and makes sense in terms of local pressures. I also see legal parking too close to corners. Heck, I saw a cop car parked in a crosswalk at the end of my block this morning. The article, on the other hand, is basing its arguments on false equivalencies anad the assumption that most readers don’t understand math.
Similar logic, flipped:
In 2022, 392 people were killed on the roads of Quebec according to the SAAQ. With our population of 8.8 million according to the ISQ that’s only 0.00445454545% of the population, so who cares?
Whether you agree with the gist of an article or not isn’t the point, making spurious arguments based on questionably evaluated stats is a disservice to the cause you are promoting, in that it is insulting the intelligence of those you are attempting to persuade.
Ian you’re right, that statistic may be used wrongly, I suspect it is to counterbalance the negative and very often biased discourse about removing parkings. But if we use more local numbers, what scale do we use? Le Sud-Ouest, for example, integrates many different neighbourhoods with distinct housings, density, etc. Ville-Émard or Lasalle aren’t at all similar to Griffintown or Pointe-Saint-Charles.
Non central neighbourhoods tend to have fewer on-street parking spaces, since many have newer housings that integrate parking requirements. If you remove a parking space on a street that has very few to start with, let’s say 5, the percentage is high. I don’t have any numbers to back my assumption, but I suspect central neighbourhoods are the ones who actually have more on-street parkings. Many streets in Mercier don’t even have on-street parkings.
How about the percentage of spots in those specific neighbourhoods where bike paths were put in? It seems pretty obvious.
A St-Laurent bakery – the Journal typically gets around the proscription on naming it by including a photo of the door with the name Andalos visible – was shot at in the early hours of Friday. Item doesn’t mention whether anyone was working there overnight, but nobody got hurt.
What is it with attacks on bakeries?
Bakeries have been targetted by the mob for a long time. Probably not protection money, it could be a warning to change suppliers. I remember some bakery getting set on fire a few years back for using the “wrong” flour.
That harks back to the old pizza ingredient wars in the days of the Violi empire.
Not to be confused with the current pizza ingredient war regarding pineapple…
Pineapple belongs on pizza, along with ridiculous amounts of mushrooms.
Pineapple and mushroom pizza is the best, glad we agree here. Onion is also nice on this pizza.
They key to pineapple on pizza (IMO) is restraint. Small bits scattered around, not honking big chunks or full rings. And contrasting other ingredients like mushrooms, ham, chilles (or all of the above). There I said it.
I too like pineapple on pizza. Especially with Italian ham and banana peppers. I also agree on small chunks vs rings.
I may have to banish you guys. I never realized I was harbouring a cabal of pineapple pizza lovers.
We should just firebomb them into submission.
I don’t know if I can keep reading this blog knowing how close minded you are about this important issue.
Well if pizza is problematic as long as there’s Andalos we can always have lahmajoun.
You people are disgusting!
It’s a year since the L‑H‑La Fontaine tunnel was half closed for major repairs. People living along feeder streets are very unhappy about the increased pressure of traffic and all its consequences. Two pieces on the subject from La Presse.
I live in the area. The construction has added a lot of extra traffic around my house. Many frustrated drivers going way too fast on residential streets; people going about 60km/h on my street which is a 30km/h zone. They also pass the drivers respecting the speed limit via the bike path (even more than usual). Lots of dangerous manoeuvres with drivers speeding up to catch the yellow light or straight up blowing through red lights. Also many drivers using the Place Versailles parking lot as a thoroughfare. There should be much more police presence. They’d make a fortune in tickets. A red light camera at the corner of my street would pay for itself in a day, I’m sure.
To add a little bit to it, here is an example of a traffic light that is often ignored:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/BvoV3CfUUaFZqPGg8
Since the street becomes one-way in the southbound direction, many drivers see no risk in blowing the red light to turn right (from the viewpoint of the gmaps image) as there is virtually no chance of cross-traffic. Except there’s a park right across the street and very often pedestrians and kids (including my kids) will cross at this intersection. Earlier this week, I saw a driver in a pickup aggressively go around a car stopped on red at this very intersection, as if the stopped car was in the wrong. He didn’t even slow down. It very easily could have been disastrous, had a pedestrian been around.
dhomas, that’s bad. Air quality must be suffering too. I hope the complaints mentioned in the La Presse pieces get at least some attention from the authorities, but unfortunately keeping the traffic moving is always priority #1.
A man was shot Thursday evening in St‑Léonard, but is not expected to die. There have been no arrests.
Nicholas 22:20 on 2023-10-27 Permalink
Shockingly, there’s apparently a development planned that, I assume, would have had to spend a lot of money (and use up a lot of space) incorporating the facade. Complete coincidence, I’m sure!
Kate 08:21 on 2023-10-28 Permalink
When I posted that item, I had been going to add a remark about how the fire would clear the way for a developer, but I thought that was too harsh. And yet this morning, Nicholas’s is not the only comment I’ve seen suggesting just that.
Nicholas 11:07 on 2023-10-28 Permalink
There was also a comment to the same original tweet that a worker at an adjacent building heard an explosion before the fire. Don’t blindly trust third hand information online, but….
It is odd that the plans were on Agora two years ago, but the building is for sale. Had the developer given up?
qatzelok 11:01 on 2023-10-29 Permalink
The relationship between economic elites and organized crime… (add your own verbs)
qatzelok 11:18 on 2023-10-29 Permalink
“…Landlords – whose status was theoretically defined through the percentage of income derived from exploitation as opposed to labor– had their land confiscated and they were subjected to mass killing by the CCP and former tenants, with the estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions. The campaign resulted in hundreds of millions of peasants receiving a plot of land for the first time.”
Wikipedia entry: “Land Reform Movement” (Maoism)