A pro-Palestinian encampment has been set up in Victoria Square.
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Kate
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Kate
What’s open and closed for St-Jean.
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Kate
Radio-Canada has quite a long piece this weekend about the power struggles between mayors and police in the Red Light era that was ended by Jean Drapeau and Pax Plante toward the end of the 1950s.
It’s written by the granddaughter of Albert Langlois, chief of police at the time, who was accused of corruption, although she says it’s still not clear whether he can be blamed. She’s pretty sure Camillien Houde wasn’t innocent, though.
The piece is also meant as an introduction to a new podcast, linked at the bottom.
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Kate
Neighbourhood resistance to homeless shelters is not acceptable, says the man who leads the Old Brewery Mission. La Presse spells his name as James Hugues throughout this piece but it’s actually Hughes.
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Kate
Last month the Guardian profiled Montrealer Maxwell Smart, who survived the Holocaust as a boy and whose story has recently been made into a movie. La Presse has a dossier about Smart this weekend.
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Kate
Exo unveiled its new trains from China this week on the St‑Jérôme line. Delivery of these trains was held up for years by the pandemic.
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Kate
The residential sector intended to replace Place Versailles will have few of the social or affordable housing units mandated by municipal law. The developer explicitly plans to buy the city off.
Nicholas
But they’re not mandated by municipal law. The law explicitly gives developers a choice, to provide units or money to a trust fund for similar units. Last year the fund had $25 million and hadn’t done anything. Maybe the city could do something with it. If they really want to mandate it, they could remove the money in lieu option, but they haven’t.
Also, if you build a house it requires zero units. Maybe people could be forced to give money in this case, too.
Kate
So essentially, a bribe put on an official and explicit footing.
Nicholas
It’s not a bribe, it’s a legal option the city has provided when developing. If I had an event and said “Please bring food to feed the needy, or bring money so we can buy food for the needy,” you wouldn’t say those giving money instead of food are bribing me to avoid helping feed the needy. If I collected all this money for the needy and then just kept it in my bank account, you would rightly blame me for not spending it, not blame the people who gave me money for the feeding the needy instead of cans of corn.
Personally I think it’s better that the city has money to build what is actually needed, rather than trust the developers to build apartments with the right number of bedrooms, support services, whatever. But as the city is getting a lot of money through this program and doing nothing with it, if they are too disorganized or incompetent or uncaring to build housing with the money they collected for this purpose they should remove the money option. Until they do, this is 100% the city’s fault. (And yes, I feel dirty defending developers, but this was entirely predictable.)
Kate
It sounds like we all have to have a word with the mayor, or with our city councillors, about acting on this matter.
bob
@Nicholas – It’s more like instead of bringing ten extra large pizzas, you put a nickel in the jar.
$25 million is not enough to build 100 units, when tens of thousands are needed.
This is a classic dodge. The problem is not only developers developing with greed as their only guide, it is landlords lording. The grocery chains can bullshit us with bugaboos from supply chains and oil prices. What is the excuse for charging 50% or 100% more for something that has only degraded in the last few years? What is the excuse for letting units sit idle because they can extort more profit out of the ones made available?
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices” – Smith
@Kate – The city government has no juice. They have been hobbled by the province, and they have no power against a variety of entities that need to be reined in. Plante wages a war on cars while the city remains rich loamy soil for the mediocrities of white collar crime.
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