Details of how we recycle are set to change this year as the St‑Michel sorting facility closes.
Updates from January, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Man leaves his SUV parked in Montreal North with his two kids in it while he goes into an ATM. When he comes out, the vehicle is gone. The kids were dropped back off, but presumably the vehicle is gone, and no arrests have been made.
(Is CTV using an AI translation app? “A father was reunited with her two children… A father left the […] SUV for an unknown reason with her three and 11-year-old children in the back seat….”)
Chris
Presumably the father uses she pronouns. It’s 2024 Kate.
Kate
Chris, CTV has now corrected the pronouns to be masculine ones.
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Kate
Pierre Poilievre says the mayors of Montreal and Quebec City are incompetent because they can’t ordain residential construction at will.
Ian
“When someone wants to become prime minister and says things like this, they’re basically telling François Legault and the Quebec government that they don’t care about the rules that are established,” (Marchand) said.
To be fair, François Legault doesn’t care about established law either. Bills 21, 14, and 96 come to mind.
This is what I mean when I say governing by fiat is anti-democratic.Chris
To be fair, Justin Trudeau doesn’t care about established law either.
Ian
What does that have to do with the discussion at hand? Or is this just whataboutism?
Trudeau isn’t squeaky clean by any means but what does this have to do with government by edict?
Brett
Bill 96 wasn’t passed by fiat. It was passed in the house of commons and the vote was 78 yay and 29 nay. Sounds democratic enough to me.
MarcG
Patrick Déry has a good article on his Quebecsplaining blog.
Uatu
PP thought Bitcoin was a good idea and at one point wanted to make Canada the blockchain capital of NA. Anything this guy says is full of it.
DeWolf
Thanks MarkG, that’s a good analysis.
Debbie Coté
@uatu Bitcoin is up 156% in 2023. Still only for foolish speculators, but facts are facts and Bitcoin is not presently collapsing in value. However, I still advise people not to buy it as it has no underlying asset value.
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Kate
The city is already doing some pothole repair work.
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Kate
The Journal is running with the idea that there are two Quebecs – Montreal and the rest of the province – and that Montreal is getting less and less “Québécois” and this is a big problem.
These guys should page through the old census forms from 1901, 1911, 1921, 1931. I’ve done this while doing genealogy for myself and a few others. So many non-French names all over town! Hochelaga, where my dad was a boy in 1931, was about half French names and half others – mostly English and Irish names. In other parts of town there are Polish and Ukrainian names in some areas, Italian names and typically Jewish names in others. Montreal is not in decline from being purely French, and to say so is to perpetuate a big xenophobic lie.
Ian
Considering how many people that didn’t feel like they fit in left after the first referendum and subsequent provincial governments have been fine-tuning immigration, it’s amazing the brain trusts of Quebec nationalism aren’t satisfied with how much more French Quebec has become. It’s lke they are working towards reviving a fictive past francotopia where Quebec was just French people, everyone was small-town Catholic, and natives didn’t exist.
Uatu
Blah blah blah. Anything to distract from the housing crisis, labor shortage, healthcare problems etc . Gotta keep Journal readers busy while sitting in the ER for 12hrs.
steph
Maybe Montreal could separate from the rest of this province. We clearly have a different history & identity. I suppose these are criteria for separation that the rest of Quebec understand…
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Kate
François Legault has told Justin Trudeau that Quebec can’t absorb more asylum seekers.
From the perspective of the housing crisis this makes some sense, but our population replacement has been falling, and we need more workers – we’re using thousands of temporary workers while denying them residency, an untenable and inhumane situation. There has to be a response to this situation that benefits the largest number of people, but I don’t think Legault is the man to figure it out.
walkerp
I think in this case there is some merit in Legault’s request, we could use the resources. But I suspect the real reason he is doing this is to distract from the shitshow his government made of the teacher’s contracts. Create fear about the other!
carswell
Or the shitshow that is the increasingly dysfunctional healthcare system, with ERs sometimes 200+% over capacity, physicians going private right and left, a 5+ year wait to get a personal physician and the number of on-hold surgeries at an all-time high, considerably more than an year after the “end” of the pandemic they used to blame for the situation.
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2042515/record-chirurgies-attente-dube-caq
Dominic
Additionally, there is simply no quick-fix to the housing crisis and the inevitable service-crisis as a result. These problems will take an entire generation to fix, and that’s if everyone starts working on them today.
Kate
Canada managed to build a lot of new housing for returning members of the armed forces after WWII. A lot of these were small single‑family homes, although not all – I think the old Benny Farm buildings were also built around then. We’d do things differently now, but if we could focus the political will, we could get more housing built, and disused buildings renovated for use.
Everything now seems so slow. If you read about how quickly the initial parts of the metro were constructed, how fast things moved when Expo 67 was built, it’s hard to compare that time with – for example – the endless decades it’s taken to add a few stations to the blue line. What has happened to us?
qatzelok
Find out if your MLA is a landlord because landlords are getting rich on the housing crisis.
Michael
There is no more land in major cities to build. And labour and material costs have sky rocketed.
We will become like Toronto and Manhattan and Tokyo in our lifetime where if we move we have to pay 3000$ a month.
Kate
Michael, that is just not true. Montreal has a lot of brownfield locations that could be redeveloped. I live in a location that’s practically a central dot on the map of the island of Montreal, but there are still plenty of spots around here which, if properly cleaned up, could be built on.
And I know I’ve mentioned this before, something I noticed in 2021 when I worked for the Census, but there are also a startling number of empty residential buildings. The city is slowly beginning to work out ways of making it unattractive, from a tax perspective, to hold buildings empty, and I hope they continue in that direction.
There have also been news stories about intentions to clean up the vast amount of land in the east end where there used to be petroleum or chemical facilities. Yes, not cheap, but needed. It’s going to take awhile before it’s done, but this is why the importance of providing better transit to the east end has been floating around.
We need to densify, densify, densify. And we can do it, but we need not to give up, and not collapse as you just did.
qatzelok, we don’t have MLAs here, we have MNAs. Mine is a QS stalwart and is not listed in that database.
Ian
As qatzi points out, many MLAs are in on the “crisis”.
Many of our municipal politicians are landlords too, profiting from gentrification and the housing deficit.Heck, even the Minister of Housing, France-Élaine Duranceau, is in cahoots with real estate.
There are lots of vacant properties in Montreal. We have a landlord problem, not a housing problem.
Maybe this is a problem we can solve with clowns?
EmilyG
Both my MP and MNA are landlords, sadly.
carswell
Shouldn’t such MNAs, MLAs and MPs be required to recuse themselves from voting on legislation that is personally beneficial to them and detrimental to a significant chunk of their constituents?
Not holding my breath…
jeather
Looks like neither my MP nor my MNA are on the list. Not entirely shocking that Cliche-Rivard isn’t, I’m more surprised that Marc Miller isn’t.
Kevin
We have the homes, they’re just unequally distributed because the people who have the room want to stay in it as long as possible rather than go to a senior’s home where they’ll risk being treated horribly.
What we really lack are the skilled tradespeople, and the thoughtful designs to take advantage of the space to adequately house people, especially when you figure it’ll take just as much time to build a single-family detached home as it will a 6-unit condo.
We also want to avoid the corner-cutting that was done with the War Homes (like making sewer pipes out of cardboard).
dhomas
@Kevin I thought you were exaggerating when you mentioned sewer pipes out of cardboard. The truth is pretty darn close!
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/after-the-second-world-war-canada-thought-it-would-be-a-good-idea-to-install-cardboard-sewer-pipesI had no idea this was a thing!
Nicholas
Michael, Kate is right. There are lots of places to build. Whether it’s large sites like Blue Bonnet’s or brownfields, or small ones like surface parking lots downtown and the inner boroughs. Further, we have an aversion to tearing down almost anything, as it’s “historic”. Rosemont has protected “shoebox” homes (attached, one-floor buildings), all of which could be tripled easily. Montreal does 2-5 stories well, and also has some large towers, but we’re missing a lot of 5-10 storey buildings that could replace duplexes.
Also, Michael, Tokyo does not have this aversion to building. Japanese people love new construction, and they build a lot. And because of that, you can find a 4½ 2 br in all but the trendiest wards for $1,000-$1,500 a month, and studios and 1br 2½ for $500-$750. Especially if you’re willing to live in a building that’s 40 or 50 years old (still may have new furnishings). And they have these two storey buildings not that far out because they built higher closer in.
This is going to annoy some people, but there is too much historic preservation, and too much review and consultation, and it’s harming development. And there’s blame at all three levels of government. If we adapted to the building code of the average European country, allowed zoning by right to go up to, say, 8 storeys within 1 km of a metro, capped historic preservation at, say, 5% of structures and made building and rezoning approvals ministerial and not subject to referenda and endless consultation and review, we could build a lot, and fast. (There’s more, I’m not an expert on the details.) That we don’t is a choice, made by people at all levels of government, and the people who elect them. That’s why we don’t have enough housing. And I’m a renter here, my mom is a renter here, we don’t own any property here, I have no financial or professional interest in this, except that if we build a lot more my rents will go down, so I hope we do.
Michael
I don’t think we have enough lots around to accommodate the number of humans coming. Decontaminating land in the East is probably decades away.
Instead of being just a doom and gloomer there are ways where we can make the process faster:
Right now it takes 9-12 months to get through CCU for a new development. Then you have to apply for a permit to build and that process takes 6-9 months.
So red tape wise that’s 1.5 years of sitting around, then the time to build.
And don’t forget the army of NIMBYs that get to “consult” on your project and vote to turn it down because their sunlight is blocked.If we were really serious about building we would scrap that entire process down to less than 5 months. That’s how you get massive building spree like the 1920s and 1950s. No red tape, just build.
Blue bonnets has been in Montreal’s hands since 2017 and has there been a shovel in the ground since? It seems like the city of Montreal is more interested in slapping the hands of developers and forcing their vision instead of just getting things built.
Joey
I say we put Nicholas in charge.
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Kate
A plan is afoot to modernize the Montreal General Hospital.
What happened to the plan announced in 2018 for the hospital to build a new wing?
Kevin
In 2005 there was a $380 million plan to renovate the building and include a helipad. That took six years (!) to get approved, only to be killed in 2014 by Gaetan Barrette and Jean Charest.
The 2018 plan (announced by Barrette) was killed sometime between then and October 2020 (CAQ government), with the excuse that it couldn’t be done within budget.
Nicholas
I’ve heard from multiple people that medevacs are not great uses of funds except in special cases, such as the north (no roads), islands, combat zones, etc. Even if it was used, the studies that don’t show it’s not worth it show it’s best for acute trauma. Since you need ambulances even in rural areas for less severe things, and you only have the helicopters at one or two airports (and you can’t land anywhere, so the Quebec pilot project was for intra-hoapital transfers), it’s often just faster to drive fast to the big hospital than wait for dispatch of a helicopter and a transfer. But even if, Sacré-Cœur already has a helipad and a level 1 trauma centre, so I’m not sure if having the General have one too would be a good use of limited funds. No opinion on a new wing of the hospital, but we’d want to make sure we have staff for an expansion first, which, well, might be tough.
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