Yves Desjardins has written a book on the history of Park Avenue. Le Devoir talks to him about the street and his links to it.
Desjardins says Park is the city’s third main street, after Ste‑Catherine and the Main. He may be right – remember the swell of popular revolt when Gérald Tremblay wanted to rename it after Robert Bourassa?
The REM was stopped for nearly an hour at afternoon rush hour Monday by unspecified technical problems.
I sure hope it wasn’t the light snow…
This item says vaguely that it was a computer problem.
Tuesday morning, radio news essentially said they turned it off and turned it back on again.
Also Tuesday morning, a piece of maintenance equipment was stuck on the tracks, which held up service again.
Two experienced Black firefighters are bringing a comprehensive complaint of racism against the fire department, the city and their own union, which they say has done nothing to stop a barrage of racist bullying to which they’re subjected daily.
One of the men most concerned by the accusation, a lieutenant in the service, even invoked freedom of speech when his frequent use of the “mot en N” was discussed.
A bike path along Terrebonne in NDG which was abolished after causing endless alarm and despondency during the first wave of the pandemic is being revived in a somewhat different format.
My house is at the corner of Terrebonne so I’m impacted by this. The first attempt in 2020 was 1 lane each direction for cars and 2 uni-directional lanes for bikes and all parking was removed.
Seems that the new version will be : 1 travel + 1 parking lane for cars plus 1 bi-directional bike path
Seems a bit strange that 200 spaces will be removed from approximately 250 available. Would expect a 50% reduction.
Previous attempt in 2020:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/terrebonne-bike-path-removed-ndg-montreal-1.5708689
Oh it’s ok, only 1% of parking on the whole island is affected.
I am optimistic about the bike path overall, but I really, really can’t stand it when cycling groups use pedestrians as rhetorical cover:
” “We welcome this initiative, as Terrebonne Street desperately needed to be reconfigured, not only for people cycling to work or school, but also for pedestrians who don’t feel safe crossing the street,” said Jason Savard, president of the Association of Pedestrians and Cyclists of NDG”
If you want to do something for pedestrians, encourage cyclists to obey stop signs and red lights, stay off sidewalks and out of parks.
@Ian I thought you’d be happy that in this case, a traffic study was conducted.
Oh, I am – I’m just being snide about stats 😉
TBH I think it’s a great location and it does seem like the residents are being considered.
@Tim suggested edit: If cyclists want to do something for pedestrians, etc.
While we’re at it I’d love to see cop cars not driving/ parking in parks and bike cops setting an example by not riding three abreast on sidewalks & pedestrian park paths.
Glad to see the city not abandon the idea altogether but also not refuse to compromise somewhat. That said, I am really not a fan of bidirectional bike paths (or painted lines that run opposite the flow of traffic on one-way streets). Terrebonne is a quietish street so the risks are probably pretty low, but you just need to spend a couple of minutes watching the chaos on the Rachel St path, or a lesser extent on Clark, to see how dangerous things can get when you add a busy bidirectional path to a street with lots of cars turning.
Should be called the Marvin Rotrand Memorial Bike Path.
(Coderrite City councillor Marvin Rotrand was the driving force getting Version 1 of this bike path closed and removed, and he was darned gleeful while doing it.)
Projet really doesn’t like to take no for an answer, do they?
Members of my household use Terrebonne every day and we have never seen anyone doing any sort of traffic study, and I am extremely dubious about their measurement of traffic levels given the multi-year projects that started earlier this year on Cote St. Luc and Somerled.
@Joey Bourbonnière is a brand new bidirectional path that is a good example of how it can be done safely. The key is making it safe at intersections, which either means four-way stops or completely separate traffic signals for cars and bikes. That’s easier on north-south streets because the blocks are longer and there are fewer intersections.
Rachel is crazy because there are tons of intersections, most of which have only a stop sign for the cross street, which creates a lot of unsafe interactions between all road users.
Generally speaking the city has moved away from bidirectional because it is demonstrably unsafe in most cases. There was even a public health report about it. But in certain cases they make sense.
Team “I didn’t see it so it didn’t happen” has entered the conversion.
Personally, I am happy my mother can take her grandchildren for bicycle rides now, safely.
University students are holding a protest downtown Monday afternoon against the tuition hikes for anglo universities. Video from CTV at that link.
Not seeing any report on francophone media, but it may yet show up.
UdeM is pretty mad, you never know.
I’m seeing some talk in the French media but no corporate media.
I do find the spin of this headline from La Presse regarding the most recent protest rather telling:
“Manifestation contre les frais pour les étudiants des universités anglophones”
So much for the claim that this bill is not meant to punish anglo universities specifically.
La Presse dissects the reasons why work on the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel is running late.
It’s the first time I’ve gone for a walk in sandals on a Saturday, then woken up to see snow on the ground on a Monday.
I went for a nice ride on my motorcycle on Saturday. This morning I put my elephant toothbrush in my car.
Independent restaurants, coping with rising rents and chronic inflation of supply prices, are under threat.
Meantime, some restos are also coping with extra charges from Lightspeed, explained in this CBC piece, and the SAQ is hiking its prices.
The words ethical and credit card processor should RARELY be used in the same sentence. Most of them are on contracts. Most want you to rent the equipment and then charge you a fee to send it back or a fee to get it repaired… but it’s their equipment! And there there is the differences between systems, so for example, you want to automate billing for a hotel and also be able to charge guests in person… two systems, two different fees, plus a “gateway” fee. And the bigger the rewards, the higher a percent they take.
The random fees I used to fight credit card processors about. What are they for? Why are they suddenly high? Can you give me any information about this fee at all? No.
Last time I looked, the point of renting was that you paid a lot but they just did the upgrades/repairs/whatever for you immediately, instead of buying once and having unexpected irregular expenses/repair times. Nice for the companies that they now get both.
We see it time and time again – tech companies corner you into a dependency and then jack up the prices for profit. I’m not fully in the know about lightspeed but is it another tech company that’s backed by big investors that allow it to run at a loss to solely to establish a monopoly?
Yeah, Cory Doctorow talks about it a lot, he calls it enshittification.
“Traditionally”, my company’s policy is, if you run our software on un-certified hardware, you’re on your own – you don’t qualify for our customer support service. But we don’t charge you extra for this! Gotta say, that’s pretty lame.
The SAQ price rise is not much, just 0.7% on average, or 14 cents on a $20 bottle of wine, or 3 cents a glass, which restaurants are probably selling at $10+ each. Not nothing, but vineyards, shipping, etc., is all subject to rising prices.
They also note the impending reduction on Wednesday of the 20 cent fee on large aluminum cans to 10 cents (and the rise of smaller cans from 5 to 10 cents), which technically means a reduction in price for those items. (Get your large cans in ASAP!) Unfortunately the wine/glass bottle deposit has been delayed, AGAIN, for another 16 months, surely due to SAQ pressure.
“Unfortunately the wine/glass bottle deposit has been delayed, AGAIN, for another 16 months, surely due to SAQ pressure.”
Probably not due to the SAQ, Nicholas.
As mandated by the Quebec government, the expansion of the deposit system is being managed by the Quebec Beverage Container Recycling Association, an independent body not controlled by the SAQ or any other retailer.
This first phase of the expansion is limited to aluminum containers because the QBCRA was able to leverage the existing automated infrastructure (the gobeuses/reverse vending machines, mostly found in large grocery stores) to handle the additional volume.
However, there’s next to no automated equipment around that can identify and accept glass bottles and issue proper refunds. The delay is mainly to allow that infrastructure to be installed and allow wine producers around the globe to add deposit barcodes to their bottles.
As far as I know, once that happens, we’ll be returning all refundable beverage containers, including beer bottles, to these return sites. Paying the dep for a litre of milk with beer can returns will be a thing of the past, as will also be the case, beginning this Wednesday, for any beer, cooler or other cans purchased at the SAQ, which until now could only be redeemed at the monopoly.
Carswell, not solely the SAQ, sure. The SAQ’s longstanding opposition to bottle deposit is well documented (from 2007!), and they definitely slowed the process (as did retailers) by saying they needed more time. But it is fair to spread the blame around. There were multiple delays by the government, and though it promises no more delays, I’m not holding my breath. And there’s blame for the QBCRA, too, though, to be fair, according to the timeline on its Google Sites webpage it is so new it appointed its board of directors after being designated as the body to run the system a year ago. (That timeline has not even been updated to show the delayed 2025 date.)
As well, there are lots of machines that can handle glass containers in an automated way; we just have spent years not buying them. Here are just some of the offerings from TOMRA, the Norwegian company that makes many of the machines we use now, and many of these models take glass. Here is a video of one in operation from their Argentine distributor; this video shows only glass, but they can take plastic and aluminum too in the same machine. Some of them even take crates (such as this one in the Netherlands): you just deposit your box on the bottom and it slides in and the scanners scan the bottles from the top. I’ve used them on holiday all over Europe for years, including the crates in Germany, and Wegmans, based in Upstate NY, has had them for years too (video). There’s even a new machine that will allow you to pour a bag of up to 100 plastic and aluminum (not glass) containers into an opening and close the door and it will automatically count them (and then crush them).
The machines all scan the barcodes (that’s how they know to reject certain brands), which seem to be on most if not all bottles of wine already. The new regulations have removed the requirement for the word Quebec to appear, or even the specific amount. As QBCRA notes, “The statement ‘Return for refund where applicable’ is an accepted generic statement,” and all wine bottles at my house, including those bottled overseas, already have that.
I understand this file has been delayed, for a variety of reasons. And I get you can’t just snap your fingers and replace all your bottle machines, adjust storage space, create distribution channels, find glass purchasers, etc. But these are all solvable problems, problems which have been solved in other provinces, states and countries, one that people have been complaining about for well over 15 years. And either the timeline was unrealistic, or the project was badly managed (or both), but if the powers that be wanted it more, it’d have happened already. The excuses are getting a little old.
There’s no denying that Quebec is behind the times on this and that the SAQ was not only long opposed to a separate glass recovery system but lobbied hard to avoid any changes to the old curbside recycling system (“selective collection” in Quebenglish). They were also reluctant to embrace a deposit system for glass containers because most models at the time were for it to be similar to the beer bottle deposit system, where you could return empties to any store that sold the filled containers, because many SAQ stores, nearly all of them leased, don’t have the space or workforce to handle returns of the millions upon millions of wine and spirits bottles the SAQ sells every year.
A few years ago, for whatever reason, the monopoly had a change of heart. Maybe they were ordered by higher powers but more likely were prompted by the bottom falling out of the mixed-colour glass market and the implications of that for sorting centres. which can’t profitably sell the stuff, and landfill sites. In recent years, however, I’ve also detected a change in the corporate mindset, with environmental issues being given more importance, a change driven in part, I suspect, by the undeniable and ongoing effects of climate change on winegrowing (though I’m sure government corporation greenwashing is a factor too).
So, historically, you’re right. But in recent years, the SAQ has been quite gung-ho about the deposit system expansion, even running pilot projects in some of its shopping mall stores that had space to spare. That’s what I was referring to. As far as I know, the SAQ has had nothing to do with the latest 15-month delay.
Also, when I said there’s next to no glass RVMs around, I didn’t mean in the world but in Quebec. Determining which systems are best for Quebec’s particular needs, which includes sorting the glass by colour, and the ability to work in our climate, finding places for them so they aren’t prohibitively distant for container-returning consumers (there was even talk, though I’ve not heard any recently, that some RVMs would have to be housed in dedicated spaces, an additional complication), ordering, funding and installing the equipment, determining who gets paid for the glass and handling and how, training store employees, setting up a RVM repair force, arranging recycler pick-ups (will special vehicles be required?), allowing sorting centres to make the necessary adjustments (which means installing special equipment?), informing the public where to go and how the system works, etc., etc., and doing all that across the entire province — not just in Montreal but also in far-flung places like Amqui, Chibougamau, Natashquan, Cap-aux-Moules— are a huge undertaking, especially at a time when the retailers where many of these new systems will be housed are still dealing with the pandemic’s aftermath. Unless I’m mistaken, these merchants — not the SAQ — are the ones now favouring a go-slow approach.
Also, not all wine bottles — in particular private imports — currently have regulation barcodes, and getting the thousands of SAQ suppliers around the globe, some of them small farmers who hate bureaucracy and technology, just want to make wine and not eff around with things like labels can be a huge endeavour (case in point: a few years ago, one cult natural wine producer was told by the SAQ that he couldn’t just slap a regular 750 ml bottle label on his 1.5 L magnums, so he sent the next shipment with two 750 ml labels on each magnum; another famous Jura producer is so natural that he “glues” his labels onto the bottles with an ephemeral paste of flour and water).
Personally, my big concern with the expanded deposit system is that I live a 15-minute walk from the current closest return site, which is a store I don’t frequent, and I also don’t have a car. Am I going to lug metal and (heavy) glass containers over there, wait in line to use the machine (assuming it’s working) and then queue up to cash my receipt, all for a measly 10 cents a container? I suspect a lot of my wine bottles — plus the beer cans I currently redeem at the corner dep — are going to end up in the recycling bin where they can be fished out by midnight scavengers, who can probably look forward to a boom in their business.
And BTW my handle is spelled all lowercase, with no initial cap.
I bring all my glass bottles to Stanstead, where the SAQ has a glass-only dumpster located beside the store.
The city is changing its rules about residential construction with an eye to making it more attractive for promoters to put up new buildings.
Further on this in La Presse. It’s always about finding a way to motivate developers via something other than direct profit, which is a hell of a job.
Does anyone know whether there are legal definitions of affordable and social housing, and where to find them?
The two terms were enshrined by the Règlement pour une métropole mixte which came into effect in April 2021. I’m not sure if they’re defined in any other municipal or provincial laws.
Social housing is pretty clear: it’s subsidized non-profit housing. Affordable housing is a little more ambiguous, but the baseline is that it’s lower than market rate.
https://montreal.ca/articles/metropole-mixte-les-grandes-lignes-du-reglement-7816
1. Aux fins du Règlement, un logement social est un logement dont la construction est subventionnée par un programme de logement social et communautaire de la Ville de Montréal ou du gouvernement du Québec. Les logements sociaux et communautaires sont développés par des coopératives, des organismes à but non lucratif et l’Office municipal d’habitation de Montréal.
2. Distinct du logement social, le logement abordable prévu au Règlement vise une diversité de ménages dont les besoins sont moins bien desservis par le marché privé. Pour réaliser ces logements, le Règlement combine un rabais sur la valeur marchande offert par le constructeur avec divers programmes de subvention en habitation qui en maintiennent à long terme le caractère abordable.
A good distinction in this quote from yesterday’s article on the push for social housing in Park Ex:
“I see that affordable housing is often disguised as social housing and kind of masqueraded as a solution, but it really isn’t,” Darwish said. “It’s not calculated as a percentage of tenants’ revenue, but rather of the market rate. And in most cases, it just ends up being way too expensive for the vast majority of tenants in Parc Ex who are struggling to find a place to live and who are being forced out of the neighbourhood.”
As explained in Les affaires, « un logement est considéré comme abordable lorsque son loyer représente au maximum 90% de la médiane du marché. »
Thank you, DeWolf and SMD.
90% in this market is far from affordable for many.
DeWolf 07:24 on 2023-10-31 Permalink
I got a copy at the book launch last week. Haven’t read it yet but looking forward. (Especially since, to my surprise, I make a cameo appearance.)
Incidentally, there’s an exhibition of old photos of Mile End from the 1980s and 90s at the Mile End Library. One of them is from around 1985, depicting a newsstand at the corner of St-Viateur and Park with the block towards Bernard visible in the background. Wow, was the street looking rough back then. No trees, asphalt sidewalks, garbage everywhere, horrible highway-style lampposts. The revamp in the late 80s really made a difference.
Ian 09:07 on 2023-10-31 Permalink
Alhthough I was regularly coming to Montreal since 1986 I only first came to this neighbourhood in 1991 so that exhibition was a real blast. St V is barely recognizable!
My kid went to Lambert-Closse, pretty wild that they just had a paved yard back then compared to what it is now!
Blork 09:24 on 2023-10-31 Permalink
I don’t think I have ever seen a “then and now” comparison in Montreal where the “then” had more trees than the now. No matter when the “then” was (OK, anytime in the 20th century basically) there is always a dearth of trees compared to now.
Kate 09:29 on 2023-10-31 Permalink
I must get to that exhibit before it closes.
When I was small we lived in Verdun, but we sometimes went to visit my godmother, who lived in one of those big dark apartment buildings on Park south of St‑Viateur. Park Avenue was a different urban vibe from Verdun, which was very white bread in those days. I liked it.
dwgs 10:14 on 2023-10-31 Permalink
DeWolf, is that the Richler library? If so, do you know when the exhibit ends? I looked at the website but didn’t see anything.
Meezly 11:08 on 2023-10-31 Permalink
Our retired neighbours have lived by Ave du Parc since the 80’s and recalled how junkies would shoot up in the alley and how they’d hear the occasional gunshot, so they attest that the area has improved significantly over the years!
I was at the Richler library briefly (a quick in and out to return my kid’s library books). I did notice some photos on display but didn’t stop to look. I’ll try to go back there today!
Kate 12:04 on 2023-10-31 Permalink
dwgs, the exhibit is indeed at the Richler library. This item says it ends on November 12.
DeWolf 16:31 on 2023-10-31 Permalink
@Blork Downtown before Dutch elm disease. Sherbrooke and other streets were lined by huge, glorious trees.
But yeah, most working-class neighbourhoods were completely denuded.
GC 18:39 on 2023-10-31 Permalink
Thanks for the tip, DeWolf–and details, Kate. I’ll definitely check out those photos.
Ian 19:54 on 2023-11-02 Permalink
Strangely Toronto used to have way more trees than it does now, especially downtown. I think part of their being heavily treed is that there were way more maples than elms. It’s stll surprisingly green, the Don Valley Ravine runs just the other side of Jarvis & Bloor – it’s not unusual to see foxes and sometimes even deer at Yonge & Bloor in the morning. There are surprisingly large & fairly wild green patches all over.
As an older, more industrialzed city, Montreal opted for the European style narrow sidewalks up to the stoop then rough streets with no grass divider. Look at Old Montreal. Old Toronto was a port, some stockyards, and a fort.
Kate 21:21 on 2023-11-02 Permalink
Further note on that photo exhibit at the Richler library: on November 12, the day it closes, there’s to be a two‑hour event at 2 pm with the photographer, Michel Élie Tremblay, Yves Desjardins, and Michel Hardy-Vallée, who organized the exhibit, discussing the neighbourhood and its evolution.