Does anyone here listen to Vermont Public Radio? A new station approved by the CRTC in Joliette would swamp the Montreal reception of the Vermont station.
You can comment to the CRTC, although the link they give in the item only goes to a CRTC page about privacy. It isn’t easy to make a direct link, but if you poke around to the “Open Notices of Consultation” you can find the link to the application of Radio Nord-Joli inc. and give the CRTC a piece of your mind.
Weekend pleasures from La Presse, CityCrunch, Sarah’s Weekend List, CultMTL.
It’s Go Vélo weekend, so there will be road closures for that on Friday and Sunday, the national funeral of Jean-Pierre Ferland on Saturday, and the usual roadworks all weekend.
The ARTM is about to propose an ambitious tram project for the east end: 31 stations costing $18.6 billion.
A tunnel or a new bridge are proposed to bring the tram to Lanaudière.
$18.6 billion spent on decent housing would end the housing deficit in Quebec. And that is if you gave the houses away for free.
Usaing what numbers?
The average selling price of a single-family home in Quebec was $540,800 for the month of April 2024.
18 600 000 000/ 540 800 = 34 393
Property owners study says Quebec needs 130,000 more homes by 2031
“The construction of 130,000 additional homes by 2031 would be necessary to stem the housing crisis, estimates the Corporation des propriétaires immobiliers du Québec (CORPIQ), which on Tuesday unveiled the results of a study on the state of the rental market in the province, deemed complacent by the Regroupement des Comités Logement et Associations de Tenants du Québec (RCLALQ).”
According to data from 2022, the cost of non-luxury multi-family residential construction in Quebec is $245 to $320 per square foot. Let’s assume that somehow you’re able to build at minimum cost and that on average new units would be 750 square feet. That would be at least $23.9 billion to provide 130,000 more homes at no profit to the developer. In the real world, you could easily double that number when you factor in land acquisition costs, decontamination, etc. And that’s still without making a single penny for whoever is building the housing.
Yeah I saw that figure too, which is why I went for average selling price. That said, if yiu were building high rise modular condo style the money would probably go further … but still not 130k homes.
It might be enough to take care of the subsidized housing backlog.
The fee to register a vehicle in greater Montreal will go from $59 to $150 next year, the new money going to public transit.
Update: Some suburban mayors don’t like it, the mayor of St‑Bruno‑de‑Montarville going so far as to say it will destroy the middle class.
Update: Transport minister Geneviève Guilbault is washing her hands frantically of any blame for the need for a fee hike to cover transit shortfalls. This is the woman who recently sneered when municipalities asked Quebec for more transit funding. So what, if I may put it this way, the fuck does she expect them to do?
And a bus pass is going up to a hundred bucks next month, too.
The average total cost of operating a car in Quebec is, depending on the source, something like $16,000. If something is destroying the middle class, it’s the need for a car, not an extra $91.
Um 16k? No. Not even close. That figure has to take depreciation into consideration and the assumption that you started with a new car.
@Nicholas
That’s a figure used under the assumption that you’re buying a brand new car for more than $60,000 and choosing a 7-year loan at 7 percent interest, somehow also needing new brakes and tires every four years (along with needing an oil change 3 times a year) along with the ‘hidden’ 4-figure cost of on-street parking, and also paying extra for depreciation.
There are some serious flaws with that assessment — nobody is actually paying out of pocket for parking on the street (unless they need a vignette) and you shouldn’t be calculating the opportunity cost of an investment as an actual expense. If I buy something and it loses value over its lifespan, I’m not actually spending money every month until its value is zero 🙂
The mayor of St-Bruno is the same guy who downzoned his entire downtown area so that no new housing can be built. If there’s anyone destroying the middle class, it’s politicians like him.
As for the registration fee, if Quebec stepped up to the plate and actually funded transit properly, this wouldn’t need to happen. But the money needs to come somewhere if we want to actually give people alternatives to driving.
@Kevin agreed, though I suspect a lot of people wind up paying in the four figures for metered parking. If you paid for six hours of meter parking per week, you’d owe in excess of $1,000 – not counting vignettes, parking lots, etc.
Anyway, according to CAA, the annual cost of owning a 2023 Volkswagen Tiguan (base model) and driving 10K km per year total $8500, with slightly more than half being depreciation and the rest being payments (five-year financing), gas, maintenance and fees.
Guilbeaut said for the municipalities to figure it out and they did. Just not to her liking. Well we’ll see her handle this like the PR flack/transport Minister that she is.
Nicholas, I read that it was on average $10,000 per year, but that was about 10 years ago, so you’re probably accurate. The poor are even more harmed by the high cost of driving.
As for the naysayers in this thread… do you guys know what “average” means?
Do you? It also means that half are lower… but given income spreads available from RQ statistics, it actually means the few that can afford luxury cars skew the average.
You’re also handwaving the false sssumption that everyone buys a new car on credit every 5 years so you can factor in depreciation and interest to support your inflated estimates.
Innumeracy is a helluva drug.
Montreal billionaire Robert Miller has been arrested and faces 21 charges of sex offences, many against minors.
The Supreme Court will not review a Quebec ruling that bars people here from suing the U.S. over its role in Cold War brainwashing experiments at the Allan Memorial.
There’s been an arrest in the triple stabbing that ended three lives last week. Cops say two of the victims were also responsible for some part of the killings.
The pro-Palestinian camp at UQAM is to be dismantled, a spokesman saying that students were satisfied with the university’s response to their demands. It’s been there since May 12.
CBC has an update on the McGill encampment. McGill’s a very different beast from UQAM, and the encampment stays for now.
Grim news bits from Wednesday evening:
A young man was shot dead on a basketball court in Lachine. TVA goes on to say that De‑Shong Keziah Paul was killed as his brother watched.
A man was stabbed in eastern Ville‑Marie, but not fatally.
And a woman was found stabbed to death in a wooded park in Laval.
Update on the Laval incident: the victim was 46-year-old Irina Draghicescu Iankulov. Police arrested 20-year-old Konstantinos Tsargoulis, and they think it was random.
The woman killed in Laval was my daughter’s friend’s mother.
There is a GoFundMe for the funeral expenses: https://www.gofundme.com/f/irina-draghicescu
Thank you for telling us, bob.
I’m trying to find something to say that isn’t “what a horrible thing to happen” but that’s about it. Every woman has had moments, walking around on their own, when they encounter a man who might be a threat. It’s every woman’s nightmare that this could happen. I am sorry that your daughter’s friend lost her mother in such a way.
PSA here: Hema-Quebec needs O+, O- and B- blood donations. Got any spare corpuscles?
I’d be happy to, if it were near me. (Please, do not explain to me how to check the map again. I know how to check the map.) There are a lot of gaps in where they are located, and though I’d prefer to walk, I’d be ok driving nearby, or if I get a bus pass next month maybe. There;s a big gap in the south west.
So jeather, can we offer you a nice map?
No, I agree. The distribution of blood drives is not optimal.
The mobile one nearest me is already fully booked for tomorrow!
I vaguely remember that older thread about this. @Kate, would you be able to link to it here.. I’m interested in reading it again..
Thanks Kate!
I saw one today at the old JFL headquarters on St-Laurent. I wish I could give blood, I’m type O- so am universal. The problem is that as soon as a needle goes into me, I almost always pass out.
You know they take the blood out for you, you don’t need to be conscious, right?
😀
No, but you do need to be sober : )
CE
The staff used to get very upset at me whenever I went into shock while giving blood. It didn’t bother me–I felt fine! Just looked like a sweaty mess–so I don’t give that often.
I was under the impression that they had to stop drawing the blood if you pass out.
I certainly don’t feel fine when I regain consciousness. It feels like I’ve had the worst, most dream/nightmare filled sleep and just woke up in a brightly lit room surrounded by people.
A well-known local landlord has been found guilty of contempt of court because he failed to obey an order to keep up services in a seniors’ home he had bought and was planning to empty out.
Hmm, “real estate bro” doesn’t have the same ring as “pharma bro”.
How about parasitic hamshanker?
The marks of several bullets were found in the façade of an Orthodox Jewish school in Côte‑des‑Neiges on Wednesday evening. It’s not clear when the shots were fired. Nobody was injured.
I’m not doubting the veracity of this in any way but how the heck did someone shoot a school in a mixed residential neighbourhood with nobody hearing the shots? A silencer seems awfully sophisticated for this kind of thing, but I guess it’s possible? I’d like to knwo also what calibre of bullet it might have been so there is a sense of how far it might have travelled, i.e., were these stray shots from somewhere else? A 9mm can travel almost 3k under ideal circumstances, even a .22 can travel 2k.
This is the second shooting at a Jewish school in Canada this week, the third shooting at a Jewish school in Montreal this year, and the fifth in Canada. It is only one element of a terrifying escalation of antisemitism in this city, but certainly the most frightening, and should be taken very seriously.
Also: “David Stein, who lives across the street from the school, said one of his neighbours told him they had been awoken by a loud noise around 3:30 a.m. on Tuesday but didn’t know what they had heard until later.”
Ah ok, thank you AMF. Reading the Gazette version makes more sense. I was wondering why a Hasidic school was targeted…
“Stein said he prays daily at the Young Israel synagogue, a modern Orthodox congregation that shares the building with members of the Belz Hasidic dynasty who use it as a school.”
The Gazette has reports Wednesday about the homeless shelter in St‑Henri making an unsettling neighbour to a school and a park, and also about homeless people continuing to cause difficulties in Chinatown. But if you read news from elsewhere you’ll see that many other cities have the same issues – the same social stresses, the same drugs, the same growing numbers of people unable to cope – and the same inability to find solutions.
Good news, everybody! The city’s power grid is deteriorating and it’s harder and harder to repair. We should all have more chances to try out our solar panels, camping lanterns and candles.
Dunno about now but back in the days of Great Whale, various environmental organizations opposed to the project, including the Sierra Club, claimed that if Hydro upgraded Montreal’s electric power distribution system, the efficiency gains would save more power than Great Whale would produce. AFAIK, Hydro never disproved those claims.
For politicians and executives, building dams in pristine remote areas is a lot sexier than upgrading the power grid in densely populated cities.
We live in a densely populated neighbourhood and our power suddenly went out without warning just after 1pm. It wasn’t related to weather as it was a nice day, so I did a bit of gardening. Thankfully it only lasted for about 20 minutes.
Mine went out yesterday in Mile End west of Parc for about 10 minutes around 1:20pm but I figured it was because of one of the many local construction/ roadwork projects. It happens pretty regularly.
Both TVA and CTV emphasize that a man who was shot Wednesday afternoon in NDG was hit near daycare centres (two in CTV’s account, three in TVA’s).
TVA at the top says within 50 metres of three daycares, but then lower down says a stone’s through from two adjacent daycares and 60 metres from a third. In the end it probably depends on the exact location, but also it doesn’t matter because bullets can travel more than 60 metres and as they say kids walk around the neighbourhood.
Yeah, most daycares take kids for walks around the neighborhood and to local parks daily. My niece’s daycare takes them for walks everyday and they spend most of the day outdoors when it’s good weather. If I were the daycare admin or a parent in one of those garderies I would have safety concerns.
CE 22:05 on 2024-05-31 Permalink
I occasionally listen to it but, for the most part, the CBC is better.
Nicholas 23:11 on 2024-05-31 Permalink
Steve Faguy covers the CRTC all the time and, as always for this issue, notes that US stations have no protection in Canada. By law/treaty, the CRTC is forbidden from considering interference by a Canadian station to a US station within Canada, only by a Canadian station to a US station within the US. So this station can interfere with VPM listeners in St Armand and Lacolle, but not Alburgh and Rouses Point. And vice versa for the other direction with the FCC.
Also, as Steve and you note, the station has already been approved, so comments are too late anyway. On the plus side, it’s much more likely to cause interference in the far east of Montreal than downtown or points west (see map in link).
Nicholas 23:15 on 2024-05-31 Permalink
It’s worth adding that in a way this is the best result. People have been trying to get a station on this frequency on the mountain for a while. Had that happened, VPM would have been unhearable for most of the region. Now that this station is in Joliette, it’ll be really hard to put a station on the island at this frequency; it would have to be low power and out of Kahnawake or Vaudreuil or something, or it would interfere with the Joliette station. So it sort of protects VPM for most indirectly.
dwgs 07:32 on 2024-06-01 Permalink
The VPR signal is already pretty weak so I usually listen through vermontpublic.org