The city hasn’t got enough tools to fight the proliferation of Airbnb and the mayor is hoping Quebec will help her out with some way of determining whether any given location is someone’s home address, a fundamental distinction that needs to be made clear.
Updates from February, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Kate
-
Kate
Coroner Gehane Kamel has turned in her final report on Abdulla Shaikh, who shot dead three random victims over two days in August 2022. Shaikh had received some mental health care, but little followup, and she has some notions for a specialized tribunal to monitor such patients flagged by professionals as needing more attention.
Kamel included her observations on the decrepit condition of the premises of the police tactical intervention group, who shot Shaikh dead at a motel in St‑Laurent on August 4, 2022.
-
Kate
The Quebec Court of Appeal has upheld the secularism law in its entirety.
H. John
The decision, 277 pages long, is written by Chief Justice Manon Savard, and two judges who are former law professors: Marie-France Bich who taught at the University of Montreal, and Yves-Marie Morissette who taught at McGill (as well as serving as Associate Dean, and Dean).
https://www.canlii.org/fr/qc/qcca/doc/2024/2024canlii15135/2024canlii15135.html
Kate
Thank you, H. John
Ian
They did strike down the rule taht elected officials are subject to bill 21 – but they also decided it should apply to English school boards after all.
Off to the Supreme Court!
That said, invoking the notwithstanding clause was a smart move becasue there’s no way the Supreme Court wants tofiddle with that constitutional flapdoodle.PatrickC
Isn’t there some proviso that gender equality issues are not subject to the notwithstanding clause? I thought I saw somewhere that the disproportionate effect of bill 21 on Muslim women could fall under that category.
Meezly
False secularism upholding a “threatened” monoculture. Meanwhile, if I complain that my kid is going to a supposedly secular elementary school named after baby Jesus, they’ll say “but it’s part of our culture and history.”
These distinguished and highly educated judges, still treating the Sikh turban as a purely religious symbol. The ignorance and hypocrisy is strong in Quebec.
There is a powerful case that Loi 21 is intended to be exclusionary to religious minorities. QC has set a precedent for other provinces to wield the notwithstanding clause to diminish the rights and freedoms of “others”. Alberta just pulled the same damn stunt on the trans community.
The Supreme Court needs to nip this in the bud because otherwise our charter will mean jack shit and this country ain’t gonna be no different than some states in the US.
Joey
Are there any judicial grounds for ‘nipping this in the bud’?
Poutine Pundit
The notwithstanding clause does not apply to section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, so English language school boards can take this to the Supreme court.
Chris
>False secularism upholding a “threatened” monoculture.
The “threatened” culture is Quebec?
Usually the argument goes ‘Quebec is a small lake of French in an ocean of English in North America, it needs protecting’ but the counterargument goes ‘yeah, but French is the #5 spoken language on the planet, it’s fine’.
Seems the parallel is ‘Islam is a small lake in an ocean of Christianity in North America, it needs protecting’ but then wouldn’t the counterargument be ‘yeah, but Islam is the #2 religion on the planet, it’s fine’?
>…still treating the Sikh turban as a purely religious symbol…
I mean, it’s right there in the name: “Sikh turban”. Sikhism is a religion. How can a ‘Sikh turban’ be anything but a religious symbol? Perhaps you meant ‘turban’ alone without the Sikh adjective? Because, yeah, turbans exist outside Sikhism too.
Is the baby Jesus a ‘purely religious symbol’? Or can it degrade into “just cultural” too? You seem against that idea for the baby Jesus, but for it for the turban. Or perhaps I’ve misunderstood you.
Meezly
You absolutely did misunderstand me.
Ian
Chris : “catholaïcité” is the issue.
Meezly
I’m in the midst of reading the court’s decision. The CBC’s use of uphold, in that the Appeal Court upholds Law 21 is completely wrong. “Uphold” implies supporting or defending something when in fact, the judges clearly state that they cannot make a ruling because of the notwithstanding clause. They simply did their jobs in a neutral and objective manner.
-
Kate
CBC radio just explained that the REM’s power didn’t just go down on Wednesday evening – the backup system also failed. It took almost two hours to get everyone off the stalled trains.
In related news, despite mitigation efforts, some Griffintown residents still find the REM too noisy.
Uatu
There’s only so much they can do. It’s a train after all. One way I can see to reduce noise is to get windows with double panes with a vacuum spacing in between. I’ve seen those on YouTube in Brooklyn apartments facing NYC trains tracks and they’re pretty effective. Expensive as hell most likely. On another note I noticed that most of the apartments facing the tracks close to central station are almost all empty. I guess they need those windows.
Nicholas
Double-paned/glazed windows are not expensive at all. They’re a mature technology that a decade ago I got custom cut and framed for $100 a window in today’s money (not including installation). The problem is that developers are cheap, and buyers are cheap, and so most windows sold are not them so the market for them is small. (Also sometimes you can’t install them because they’re not historic looking.) Go to much of Europe and East Asia, among other places, and they’re standard, and places without them (and especially with double hung windows) are thought of as cheap and low-end. Also besides being quieter, they’re much more energy efficient and so save money overall. The government should mandate them.
Tim F
As I write these lines I lay in a bed in a shabby hundred year old building overlooking the rail yards to Gare du Nord, Paris, not 50 metres away. With the windows closed I can only sometimes hear a muffled railway announcement or the quiet rumble of the RER beneath my feet. I wonder if this reinforces Nicholas’s point.
Where I do feel bad for these Griffintown residents is they’ve been promised a REM station that, near as I can tell, there are no concrete plans to materialize. So they get the inconvenience without any of the benefit of the service.
Kate
Are you re-enacting Down and Out in Paris and London, Tim F?
thomas
Interesting to note that developers are required to pay a tax to the REM for projects valued at over $10 million. This tax is applicable to any project located within a 1 kilometer radius of any proposed station and amounts to 10% of the project’s value. This tax applies to the Griffintown-Bernard-Landry Station.
Tim F
@Kate By no means. This humble apartment is the lap of luxury compared to the makeshift shanties people have built into the grates around the station, or the tents set up along the flooding banks of the Seine. It’s a reminder of how fortunate I am and how giving I need to be.
@thomas I’d be livid in the case of those residents then.
-
Kate
Le Panier Bleu, a website meant to make Quebec products available for sale, is shutting down, refunding buyers and sellers. This followed the announcement that Amazon had agreed to label Quebec products on its site.
“In the spring of 2023, it was revealed that a mere 600 out of 100,000 available products were actually from Quebec” says the CBC report. Le Panier Bleu also soaked up several million government dollars. Seems like it’s the smaller sellers that will be stung by this decision.
Uatu
Surprised that the JDM hasn’t classified this as passive aggressive Quebec bashing lol.
-
Kate
A workshop in Montreal is preparing to ship a massive organ to Virginia, where I suppose they must still have enough churchgoers to pay for an instrument of this size.
Lots of photos in this Radio‑Canada piece, but it’s the one where you can see the relative size of the whole thing vs. the keyboard and controls that you realize it’s the size of a building.
…Note that all the stops are labelled in French, as of course they should be.
Blork
Many people: “Wow, what an impressive organ! What an achievement of human engineering and craftsmanship.”
Many other people: “Why don’t they just make a “church organ” playlist on Spotify?”
Nicholas
Thanks for the article! The cathedral in Richmond getting this organ houses the bishop and diocese for most of Virginia, comprising about 5 million people, with about a quarter million Catholics through 142 parishes. Catholics are uncommon but not rare in Richmond, but their population is shrinking, even with the continual arrival of Latin Americans. It is by far the biggest, most ornate and most important Catholic religious building in the region (its only Catholic cathedral), and one of the most important buildings of any kind in the city. I doubt that it is due to huge numbers of Catholics, but more that this is an important building. It’s not Quebec, so this is no Mary, Queen of the World, but they are going to find the money for this regardless of the size of their diocese.
-
Kate
The city made a classic engineering mistake, confusing imperial for metric, and ordered the wrong size for a huge iron trap door for repairs on Notre‑Dame East. So the street will remain partly closed until a new, properly specced door can be delivered.
Oh well. At least it wasn’t a space shuttle.
Some potato puns from the Sac de Chips.
BobR
No joke, but you know of course that in 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost, because of such a mis-match in the calculation of the force needed for its orbital insertion procedure (the result was given imperial units by ground software, and it was interpreted as metric units). The mission cost $327M.
Blork
And don’t forget the Gimli Glider! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
walkerp
Shades of Spinal Tap
-
Kate
An entire family is living in tents under the Met, unable to find a place to live that they can afford while staying together. Both the daughters have intellectual disabilities and one is pregnant.
DeWolf
This seems like a very… particular case. To me, it’s more the story of the long-term failure of social services than it is about the housing crisis. Every member of the family was in care at some point and none of them finished school except for one of the daughters. They say they were forced out of their previous apartment because of a “conflict” with the landlord but legal records show they didn’t pay their rent for six months and were evicted as a result. The TAL ordered them to pay $7,500 in rent back to the landlord. (None of this is mentioned in La Presse.) Finally, they were given space in a shelter but were kicked out after a “quarrel” that isn’t explained in detail.
On top of that the entire family (mom, mom’s boyfriend, father, two daughters, daughter’s boyfriend) insists on living together. No landlord is going to rent to a family of six adults who have a track record of not paying rent. There is precisely one five-bedroom apartment in the entire HLM system, and only 47 four-bedroom apartments.
How do you resolve this kind of situation? I feel bad for the social worker dealing with this case.
-
Kate
A lot of people are still without power after the windstorm overnight, although I don’t see any evidence of the ice we’d been warned about. The sidewalk outside my place is still dry.
Joey
Massive windstorm + recycling day = garbage paradise.
MarcG
Where the heck did all that water go?
Kate
Joey, my street is a shambles today. I may actually go out with a garbage bag and do an ad hoc cleanup soon if nobody else does.
MarcG, good question. It was bucketing down last night for a bit, no sign of it this morning.
Blork
Power was out Chez moi (as usual) from about 8:00PM to midnight. I was surprised that it came back when it did, given the number of outages around, and the app said they hadn’t even assessed the problem in my sector yet.
Fun sidenote: at midnight, before the power came back, I decided to recharge my watch by plugging the charger into my laptop. The second I plugged the USB cable into the laptop the power came back, with all the lights coming on, machines beeping and buzzing, etc. For about two seconds my brain associated the plugging in of the cable with all the visual and audio stuff that immediately happened, so now I have a brief view of what it’s like to be insane.
-
Kate
Will the city be able to save money, given that there have only been two storms needing snow clearance since the start of this winter?
In 2022-2023 a record 255 cm of snow fell on the city, while only 122 cm have fallen so far this season. You win some, you lose some.
But the item doesn’t get into whether the city has made any minimum guarantees to contractors.Nicholas
“Le montant dépensé lors de cette «mégatempête» dépasse déjà le minimum garanti aux entrepreneurs, a indiqué l’élue de Projet Montréal, sans s’avancer sur un montant précis.”
Kate
The minimum must be pretty minimal then. Thanks. My eye glided over that.
Mozai
I’m reminded of when Toronto got the brilliant idea of selling off their snow plows because they were underused after a mild winter. The following winter was normal, and the cost-savings measure resulted in the municipality begging the provincial government for assistance. The province deferred to the feds, the feds sent the Canadian Army, and that winter it was common to see armoured personnel carriers rumbling down the street, and uniformed soldiers with shovels.
-
Kate
TVA says the REM is down because of a power failure, and listening to the wind buffeting everything outside, I’m not surprised.
Some power is out mostly outside of town although I see a few disparate blobs on the island, on the pannes map. Do you know where your storm lantern is?
Nicholas
Trains were stopped with people in them on the bridge and just outside of a station. Lots of wind. I guess it’s safe to stay there, but not pleasant. Cars were moving.
Uatu
I’ve made it a rule to always be dressed for the weather and never have a full bladder when using the REM because you never know….
-
Kate
Piece on this site I’ve never linked before, ConstructConnect, examines what it calls the evisceration of the Black-Anglo Little Burgundy enclave in the 1960s, mostly for the construction of the Ville‑Marie expressway.
DeWolf
Historically, Canadian cities never had many large Black communities, but the people in charge sure found ways to screw them over regardless. Vancouver razed Hogan’s Alley for an expressway, Toronto tore down its historically Black enclave (and also its original Chinatown) for City Hall, Halifax razed Africville for a bridge approach and of course here we had the Ville-Marie Expressway that was conveniently routed through the only Black neighbourhood in the city at the time.
Robert H
Regarding DeWolf’s point, the article suggests that in the case of the decimation of Little Burgundy, home to a Black enclave, the racial dynamic was incidental to the even greater factors of technological change, The Quiet Revolution and the post war boom in automobiles and suburban growth. The district wasn’t as explicitly, racially targeted as Aftricville in Halifax. But I agree that its racial makeup contributed to its convenience as a location to transform the cityscape. The author quotes Steven High, the Concordia professor who wrote about Montreal’s black-anglo heritage, who acknowledges that this utter disregard for the community there by civic leaders was itself a form of racism, a total devaluing of what existed and what would be lost.
Also, as DeWolf noted, Canadian cities never had the large, red-lined Black “ghettos” found in many major cities in the United States. There was no Canadian equivalent to south-side Chicago, or Harlem in New York City. For a while, the absence of this racial factor and ensuing social strife gave Canada an enlightened image relative to the tensions found in The States. Alas, demographic change has depressingly revealed that society under the maple leaf and the fleur-de-lys is just as subject to ignorance and thoughtlessness as any place south of the border.
What happened to Little Burgundy is as well an example of the scorched earth “urban renewal” (also known in U.S. as “Black removal”) that I cited in my previous post on Windsor Station. This method of civic rejuvenation was the product of a post war mindset that replicated itself in cities across North America. Its examples can be found in Boston, New York, Atlanta, Saint Louis, Toronto, Los Angeles, Houston and almost any sizeable town. Of course it transcended race to include other factors such as politics or class as in the case of the Faubourg à m’lasse here in Montreal. I sometimes regret the amount of conflict that develops around what to me seems the most benign or logical proposal, for say new housing or public transport, etc. But so much of the suspicion and hostility to anything proposed we are seeing now is the result of years of abuses, errors, and lost heritage inflicted on communities in the past. Once bitten…
bob
That’s a mischaracterization. The powers that be at the time, much more so than now, were super racist, but it isn’t like they looked at a map of where black people lived so they could gin up some project to wreck just those neighbourhoods. The projects just follow the path of least resistance, which in a racist culture may well be a racist path, convolved with the path that leads to poor people being screwed generally. In the Montreal case, Drapeau had it in for any poor neighbourhood, and Burgundy at the time was full of poor people, black and white. What eviscerated the neighbourhood was a collection of interrelated economic and social factors which then made it and the communities in it ripe for destruction. A highway coming downtown from the west wasn’t going to go through Westmount. And there was plenty more destruction owing to”urban renewal” than to the highway alone.
bob
Sorry – that was in reply to DeWolf.
But I think Robert H is also downplaying the racism, as Montrealers are wont to do. There was definitely red lining, and part of the reason that Burgundy was a black neighbourhood was because it was almost impossible to find housing elsewhere.
Here’s a quote from a journal article with a lacuna you can use your imagination to fill in:
“When asked what the area on the east side of Guy was called historically, Mary Wand laughed nervously and asked, ‘Well, can I say it?’ Dorothy Williams, a black historian, invited her to proceed. Only then did Wand reply hesitantly, ‘It was called “[*cough*] Town”, And it was predominantly black’ in the 1920s and 1930s.'” (https://doi.org/10.7202/1059112ar )
Kate
I’ve read that one reason Little Burgundy became a Black enclave was that it was close to the train stations, and a lot of Black men had jobs on the trains so it was convenient to them. But, like Chinatown at the time, it also became self‑perpetuating in that it became a place where people of a certain group were tolerated by landlords.
bob
Until the 1960’s the only job a black man could get with the railways was porter, and getting a job elsewhere was not easy, and likely menial. Porters has a low salary, but could do well with tips (like a bartender today). Until rail travel collapsed after WWII the railroads employed many hundreds of porters (as well as waiters, cooks, etc.) on numerous trains. They settled near the train stations – Bonaventure, Windsor, and Central. Around the 1910’s there was white flight, especially of middle-class Anglo Protestants, which I suppose left housing inventory where there was demand, so that it was a self-reinforcing trend.
DeWolf
@bob I wrote that “here we had the Ville-Marie Expressway that was conveniently routed through the only Black in the city at the time.” I’m not sure how you understood that to mean it was deliberately targeted because it was Black. The implication is exactly as you described: the expressway took the path of least resistance.
When you look at the fact that a large majority of historic Black neighbourhoods in Canadian cities were demolished, it’s hard to ignore that the race of their inhabitants played a large factor in why they were destroyed. That doesn’t mean there was a deliberate effort to target Black neighbourhoods, rather that they were seen as particularly expendable because they were full of people who didn’t have political power, and they tended to be located in strategic yet marginal locations because of housing discrimination.
DeWolf
This is going on a bit of a tangent but a significant number of historic Black communities in Canada were rural, not urban. And their treatment by white neighbours really puts the lie to any notion that Canada was uniquely accepting or tolerant. Here’s the situation in Dresden, Ontario, which for most of the 20th century was a little under 10% Black:
// By the 1940s, few places in Canada were as bitterly divided along racial lines as Dresden, Ontario. A small city with a substantial black population, Dresden was notorious for racial discrimination. Blacks could not eat in its three restaurants or get a haircut at its four barbershops and its beauty parlour. They were banned from all but one of its pool halls, were denied entry to the Canadian Legion except at stag parties, and did not attend the white church. Sidney Katz, who visited Dresden in October 1949 for Maclean’s magazine, later wrote that “the chances of a trained young Negro getting a good nonmanual job are almost nil. I did not find a single Negro in Dresden working in an office or waiting on customers.” Ironically, Dresden’s primary tourist attraction was Uncle Tom’s grave, as the city had once served as a terminus for an underground railway that helped black slaves escape the United States. In a 1949 municipal referendum, local citizens voted by a margin of five to one against a proposed bylaw banning discrimination (the only vote of its kind in Canadian history). The referendum question read, “Do you approve of the Council passing a by-law licensing restaurants in Dresden and restraining the owner or owners from refusing service regardless of race, color or creed?” //
https://historyofrights.ca/encyclopaedia/main-events/dresden-racial-discrimination/
-
Kate
Bixi’s ridership hit a record last year, and now the rates are also set to rise.
DeWolf
The rise in membership fees is reasonable, especially given there is a nice early-bird discount for people getting the seasonal membership.
But the surcharge for electric Bixis is going up from 13 cents to 17 cents per minute. That’s quite the hike, especially considering it already went up from 10 to 13 cents last year.
-
Kate
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Tuesday’s high broke a record and Wednesday looks likely to do the same. After that, the temperature will plunge fast on Wednesday evening, but it will only stay chilly for Leap Day.
-
Kate
Two teenagers have been arrested and are facing many charges after a series of muggings in the metro. Their victims were also teenagers. Item doesn’t say which stations they were infesting.
Tux
Teens mugging teens? If I had to guess, Villa Maria
Ephraim 22:42 on 2024-02-29 Permalink
All you need to do is find a few and hit them with the fine. I’d show up, based on the calendar of when the place isn’t for rent… at 7AM and leave an envelope on the door asking the occupant to call. Then you ask them to send a copy of their driver’s licence, their household insurance, their hydro bill, their phone bill, etc to prove that they live there. Make them really sweat it. Then after that maybe ask to see a travel schedule, tickets, hotel bills or even their AirBnB account to see where they travelled…. or face the fines. The fines are REALLY high… high enough to make you wish to show them anything to get them to go away.
mare 01:50 on 2024-03-01 Permalink
@Ephraim what are you talking about? You can’t fine users; there’s no way for them to know that the Airbnb they stay in is legal or not. Most of them don’t even know what the laws are.
The distinction is if the property is the *owner*’s primary residence. The tourism board apparently doesn’t check that when they issue the permit. And the city has no access to the information that was submitted. There are people on Airbnb with more than one, and sometimes even dozens of apartments. They can’t be all their primary residence, can they?
walkerp 09:18 on 2024-03-01 Permalink
Can’t you just go on to AirBnB, check all the places that are available in the disallowed zone and then cross-check them against the property tax database? I bet we could crowdsource it.
Ephraim 11:21 on 2024-03-01 Permalink
@mare – The owner. The person listed on the licence as living there. You are trying to see if the person licenced really lives there. 7AM is a great time on a Sunday to knock on the door to do a verification to see if they really live there. (The same way that CSIS shows up for a visit… 7AM in the morning.
There is a special licence for “Principal Residence Establishments”. One of the main conditions is that you regularly live there. And the fines start from $2500. But you need to actually live there. So you should have bills in your name that come to that address, like your bank credit card bill, your insurance, etc. You should also have clothing there… it’s your residence that you are renting out. These are the licences that are being abused.
When the government had the CITQ do inspections, part of the classifications had a requirement that someone lived there. (Still do, but they don’t do the inspections anymore) And they actually verified that you had a bedroom and checked closets, drawers and even the fridge to make sure you really did live there. The same can be done for these residences.
jeather 12:06 on 2024-03-01 Permalink
So who do you complain to about an illegal Airbnb? As far as I can tell there’s no way to verity the CITQ number on the website.
MarcG 12:15 on 2024-03-01 Permalink
Punch the number into the search on this site: https://www.bonjourquebec.com/fr-ca. When the information of the listing doesn’t match that of the AirBNB listing, write to info@citq.qc.ca telling them as much and then have them not respond to your email. True story.
Ephraim 20:39 on 2024-03-01 Permalink
Officially, all responsibility is supposed to lie in Revenu Quebec to inspect and verify. As I have said before, there is NO transparency. They should be required to publish the number of complaints received, the number of complaints verified, the number of complaints dismissed and the number of complaints that received action and what action. You don’t have to disclose WHO, that might violate privacy. But that you are doing your job as the authority… that you should be required to report.
Ian 21:02 on 2024-03-01 Permalink
To be fair using metal epoxy on the lockboxes is pretty effective too…