Planned cuts to drinking water and electricity loom larger and get into the news when it’s a heat wave.
Big cities are the deadliest during heat waves, and this may be related to having more renters. The homeless in particular are at risk.
Oh great. The kind of “influencers” who circulate lies online about vaccines are now claiming that sunscreen is bad for us. It isn’t.
A worker was killed on a construction site near Phillips Square on Wednesday morning. Radio‑Canada says a beam fell off a highrise under construction and hit the man on the ground, while CTV’s account says the man fell from a height and died. TVA has the grimmest details, saying a pile of tiles fell on the man, who was standing on the ground.
TVA changed it to “une poutre de métal de plusieurs centaines de livres” – looks like Radio-Canada had it right.
The English Montreal School Board has scored the highest graduation rate in Quebec, even beating the private schools.
Time for a new crackdown on English schools.
Obviously a function of overfunding.
I’ve been looking and can’t find where the numbers come from, anyone know?
Naw, you have to think more CAQ. OF COURSE education rates are down as the French system is unfairly forced to accomodate the EXCESS OF IMMIGRANTS. Only by defunding the English and transferring the funding to rural Quebec so REAL Quebecers will be able to truly benefit f… blah blah blah /s
The recent newsletter from the NDG-Montreal West EMSB school commissioner, Joseph Lalla, had different (though still very impressive) numbers and didn’t include the claim of besting private schools, although depending on how you read it, it might still be the case:
“According to the latest statistics from the Ministère de l’Éducation du Québec, in 2022, the board’s graduation rate stands at an impressive 92.7 percent, marking a slight increase from 91.6 percent in 2021. While the majority of students graduated within five years, it’s noteworthy that the Ministry allows for a two-year extension to ensure students have ample opportunities to earn their diplomas or obtain their initial qualifications. Currently, the EMSB’s six-year cohort boasts a remarkable success rate of 94.8 percent.
“The province-wide Success Rate, which includes both public and private school results, stands at 84.1 percent. Broken down further, the public system’s average is 81.6 percent while for private sector the number is 94 percent.”
I tried to look in that dashboard but gave up very quickly.
Heh school boards work better than service centres apparently
True, but EMSB rates were higher than CSDM anyhow.
There’s an 18th-century farmhouse in TMR which that municipality refuses to protect and whose owner wants to tear it down. Does it matter?
I’m curious, why wouldn’t it matter?
Well, it’s an old house, apparently quite decrepit. Nobody is living in it. If it’s demolished and a new house constructed on the lot, presumably people will be able to live there.
I’m not saying that I don’t think it’s kind of a charming old place, but clearly it’s not regarded as having any historic value or Quebec would’ve protected it, or TMR would. We can’t save every old building. Someone can go in with a camera and document the structure, and then bring in the wrecking balls.
Basically, someone owns it. Can they be forced to restore it? Can they be forbidden to take it down so they can use the lot for a new house? I don’t know. Clearly no one in authority thinks it matters.
It matters because there are only so many old buildings left, and replacing it with a ticky tacky McMansion.
Maybe Quebec hasn’t protected it because they don’t know it exists, or because it’s in an anglo(ish) neighbourhood. Maybe TMR wants the 2-300% increase in tax revenues from a couple of new ticky tacky McMansions on the lot rather than the current structure. Maybe a couple of $1.5 million houses are perceived as helping to alleviate the housing crisis.
I tend to think we have enough McMansions and not enough 18th century farm houses. One of those types keeps popping up like mushrooms after rain, the other type keeps disappearing for the sake of profit.
I must say I’m surprised to hear you say that. There are lots of reasons to preserve cultural heritage, especially old and rare buildings such as this one, I won’t list them here. For me this story is yet another example of a municipality deciding to disregard a lack of maintenance on a building that could have been (and probably still can be) renovated. Even if by doing that (or not doing anything) the municipality contravenes to the example it should set.
If inventories and assessments by experts had been done, and if the Quebec Governement was an example in safekeeping heritage, be it natural or cultural, maybe I would agree with you. But the reality is the MCCQ, and especially the ministry won’t enforce any of their laws, unless it makes the news. And even then.
OK, I’m kind of playing devil’s advocate here, I admit it. I like old houses and I’d like to see this one saved. But what can be done if it’s private property and not under heritage protection? We accord a huge amount of weight to private ownership in our society. I don’t think it’s likely to be offset by concerns for nebulous historic value in this case.
A big problem with this house is its position on its current property. It looks like the rear and side of the building abuts the property line and is obstructed by walls. This greatly limits it’s desirability.
I bet the property line was created well after the house was.
If I’m reading correctly, the demolition was denied several times for heritage reasons, so now the new owner is canvasing the neighbourhood trying to get community approval for the demo. I don’t think those refusals were for pure heritage reasons (meaning it isn’t officially protected, but might be unofficially protected).
It does seem like a pretty rare example of a farm house from the 1780s. Although the photos make it look like it’s off in some serene pastoral setting it’s actually right in the middle of TMR ‘burb-ville, a block from Autoroute 15/40.
And what if they preserve it? Nobody’s going to turn it into a museum. So the owner will have to resell it or rent it out, or leave it vacant. Does it have a future even if they preserve it?
And now for the comic/cynic part of our programming:
(1) Of course the government doesn’t see any heritage there. It’s on the corner of “Chemin Sunset” and “Ave. Glengarry” in a largely anglo suburb. Nothing to see here folks. No heritage. Move along.
(2) The owner wants to replace this single house with two houses (it’s a large lot). Therefore, DENSITY! All must crumble in the name of density! The only thing that matters is density! OMG DENSITY!
(Density jab is provoked by the occasional comment here and elsewhere from people who really do seem to think that density trumps everything, always and everywhere.)
Have a look at the house on Google Maps. It’s placed at the far edge of what looks like quite a big lot and, whatever’s said here, more residential units could easily be built there. A clever architect could even make the old house into part of a new structure, although I doubt that will ever happen.
This is the kind of building worth protecting. I usually complain when people try to protect anything older than 50 years or whatever. We can’t live in a city of amber, blocking change on half of buildings. But there aren’t many still around from the 18th century. It’s like a handful: imtl lists 25 homes before 1800 (but not this one, maybe because the city says it’s 1910, which seems wrong). It’s not hard to say we want to protect 0.0025% of homes. Even 100x or 1000x that many homes could make sense, adding slightly less old ones and some great architectural and historical ones.
Tearing down one home to build two, far from anything, is not a great way to do dense development. There are much better places to build more, and build some five storey apartments or whatever, not two detached single family homes. I don’t know many people who want more density who say “let’s build in northern TMR a block from the Met.”
The big issue, as elided everywhere, is that someone has to take care of this building. The owner doesn’t want to, and you can’t really make someone do it unless you give them some money. The city seems like a natural choice, but it seems not to want to. Maybe there’s an association that does. But if people want to save it, they can buy it. I’m not being flip: if a group wants to save it, I’d throw a few bucks in. (If we, collectively, want to save it, we, the government (local, regional, provincial, federal), should buy it.) But you need someone — personal, associational, governmental — with the funds and resources to care. Hard to do anything without that. I hope someone succeeds.
Boris Wyka, a real estate agent from Blainville, owns the house since September 2023. The house is listed as being built in 1910 because at some point a fire destroyed the records of many buildings’ construction dates and they were just “reset” to 1910 (this was the explanation given to be when I was looking to buy a house that seemed older than 1910 and I asked city officials). The property actually saw a reduction in tax revenue during the last revision going from a value of 1866200$ down to 1.7M$. TMR probably wants to pump those numbers up by allowing new builds.
“The city” likely can’t buy it to preserve it since it’s not in the city of Montreal, but in TMR. If TMR cared at all about anything other than tax revenue, I doubt we would have seen the Royalmount project come about.
In any case, it seems very likely that we will lose this building and one or two rich people will get new homes.
>All must crumble in the name of density!
If not density, then let’s stop letting in so many immigrants, or let’s destroy more farmland and countryside by sprawling the city out further and further. Pick your poison.
Chris, congratulations for pushing this discussion all the way to the corner where only the extremes are considered. Go team density!
Kate, it is a large lot, but not huge. You could squeeze one more smallish house onto the lot, but in doing so you’d essentially wall off the “preserved” house on all but one side (and it’s the short side), effectively condemning it. So what’s the point of preserving the old house if you can’t see it, and if you hem it into a small lot that makes it undesirable for anyone to buy it and live in it? It won’t become a museum, and nobody will want to live in it, so by adding the additional density of one house you end up with an abandoned heritage house.
Before: heritage house on a large lot.
After: small house on a small lot and abandoned heritage house hidden in a small lot.
Is that progress? Does that make any difference at all in terms of density?
It’s a shame it’s tucked in by the 40 like that, it wouldn’t be useful in the way the (also) 1787 building on Graham & Glengarry was. It was converted into a fancy little restaurant. It was Villa Armando, but will be opening under new owners soon.
That said, just because something is old doesn’t make it significant. You can buy obscure books from the mid 1700s for under 200 bucks. The antique roadshow is full of disappointed people that were hoping their stuff was priceless because it belonged to great-great-grandma.
All in all I wouldn’t particularly want to live in a Soviet apartment block by the highway like Chris desires, and I’m sure the neighbours wouldn’t like it either. It would probably fill up with immigrants anyhow, and we know Chris doesn’t want that.
Thanks Dhomas for the insight to construction date resetting – very interesting
Rents in Quebec have soared far beyond inflation, as has been obvious for a few years now. Landlords are also commonly demanding deposits, even though this is theoretically not legal in Quebec.
I rented a small 5 1/2 in the Plateau 2012-2014 for 1600$, it was a nice ground floor… It is currently on padmapper for 4900$ !
From the pictures, no renos or anything has been done to it….
Much of Lower Outremont is less expensive than Mile End now.
It is also illegal to raise rents more than the legally allowed amount, even when there is a new lessee – unless the new lessee consents. There is a spot where the last year’s rent has to be entered into the lease agreement, but of course landlords routinely omit that, because they know the new lessees usually don’t know the law – about that or deposits. The change to the law about lease assignments, which used to be a good way to make sure the transfer between lessees was fair, was made to reinforce this grift – before the landlord needed a reason to refuse it, now the reason is “because I can’t jack the rent up 30% for no reason if you pass an apartment along to a friend”.
The grift was the lease transfer market controlled by tenants. Now landlords have a say in who they are going to do business with. And yeah: it might not be your friend Bob. Maybe there is a better tenant out there than your friend.
Lease transfers were intended to keep tenants form being on the hook for a year long lease if they needed to leave for whatever reason. Making it so that landlords couldn’t refuse a transfer was becasue any would insist on the lease being paid in full then re-rent it, basically double dipping.
I can understand how some landlords feel that the law constrained them unfairly, but it only existed because landlords unfairly penalized tenants.
Tim, are you a landlord? You sure sound like one. If you don’t like it, go get a real job.
No, I am not (and have never been) a landlord. I have rented plenty and I guess that I have been lucky because all of my landlords have followed the rules and have been good people. Just because I think that this is a good rule change does not mean that I am “against” tenants; I also support a registry that protects tenants from abusive increases as well as other measures.
The problem is that, lacking such a registry, the change in rules in lease transfers makes abusive increases very difficult to track.
Now landlords have a say in who they are going to do business with.
It seems that many people think that a landlord couldn’t have refused a lease transfer, but I don’t think that was the case. They couldn’t refuse it without a good reason. If you wanted to pass your lease to someone with terrible credit, for example, I’m certain the landlord could refuse it.
I was under the impression that inability to pay the rent or criminality were the only reasons that could be used to refuse a lease transfer.
The Bar Social, on Wellington Street in Verdun, was firebombed for the third time this month early Tuesday.
Not saying this is necessarily the case here, but imagine being a normal person who likes to cook and your friends are family are like “hey you should open a restaurant that serves alcohol”, and you do. Is there someone who warns you of what that entails before you get too deep, like the commercial real estate agent or the liquor license bureaucrat?
Most bars and restaurants don’t get firebombed, MarcG. It’s not the cost of doing business in Montreal, it’s the cost of doing business with shady people.
Ok, so if not all bars are pressured into a protection racket scheme, what circumstances do you think are behind these incidents? I’m asking this as a naive person btw, there’s no hidden tone.
Never open a restaurant because you like to cook, because within a year you will hate cooking, and you will hate people. 🙂
As for firebombs, there are three main reasons in Montreal: forcing restaurateurs to use only certain suppliers; take out competition; and sending a message to the person who was already involved in shady business before deciding to open a restaurant or bar.
Those first 2 reasons sound like they could happen to my hypothetical normal person.
So the only anecdote I have is from someone who took over a bar. After a few weeks the vice squad showed up basically to plead with them not to sell drugs. And the message was, basically, we know you’re going to sell drugs, please don’t sell drugs. Now the “you” in that sentence is doing a lot of work (the cops were pretty much equating selling drugs with allowing drugs to be sold on the premises), but the gist of it, I guess, is that notwithstanding MarcG’s example, most people who get into the hospitality industry are probably not just there to cook on a whim because they love it… Protection rackets, etc., are just the cost of doing business and probably don’t come as a surprise.
The protection racket is not a myth, lol.
Blork 17:18 on 2024-06-19 Permalink
One of the saddest comments on contemporary society is that so many people are dumb enough to be influenced by influencers.
Kevin 20:09 on 2024-06-19 Permalink
Only simpletons seek simple solutions.
Ephraim 21:52 on 2024-06-19 Permalink
How many influencers does it take to change a lightbulb?
One. They just hold it up and wait for the world to revolve around them
qatzelok 22:31 on 2024-06-19 Permalink
The biggest creator of lies online… is advertising.
Remember this before condemning social media.
dwgs 07:43 on 2024-06-20 Permalink
I’m with you re advertising but have you looked at social media??
Kate 08:54 on 2024-06-20 Permalink
qatzelok, thanks for the patronizing advice. But I think we all know how to regard the claims of advertising, when we can see that it’s advertising. Social media is more devious. It comes in as help from friends or videos recommended by people we know. Surely you knew that SPF50 sunblock is a carcinogen? Haven’t you seen the statistics from Australia, where the government hands out sunblock to everyone? So much cancer! And people are putting this stuff on their children!
Ian 10:34 on 2024-06-20 Permalink
Just look at what the social media disnfo campaigns did with masking. It’s literally illegal in some States now. That wasn’t in the “news” for a long time, let alone advertisements. Heck, even the Pentagon admits sthey ran anti-vax disinfo campaigns in China. They didn’t do it by buying ad space in the South China Morning Post.