Handy list of what’s open and closed for Labour Day.
Updates from August, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Kate
-
Kate
A tram for Lachine is still being envisaged but it wouldn’t go downtown, but terminate at Angrignon.
jeather
I understand not duplicating the green line, but now you’re at 3 modes to get downtown: bus to tram to metro. That’s a lot, and if it’s not actually well synchronized (and it won’t be, in practice), it’s not going to be all that well received.
Blork
I agree. It’s ok (good even) to build redundancy into transit.
DeWolf
I’m not sure most people will be taking a bus to the tram. Based on the routing, nearly everyone in Lachine will be within a 10 minute walk of the tramway. The route along Dollard and Newman in LaSalle also catches a fairly significant number of people within a short walk, and those corridors are also slated for high-density development so there will many more residents in the future. I would be surprised if the STM cancels the routes that already feed into Angrignon from parts of LaSalle that wouldn’t be accessible by tram.
That said I also agree that the ARTM saying they don’t want to double up the green line is a very bad excuse. They have no foresight – before the pandemic we were talking about the metro reaching its saturation point, and just because ridership is down post-Covid doesn’t mean it won’t once again reach capacity in the future. (Especially if the population keeps growing the way it has.) By then we will have wasted several opportunities to build redundancy.
What really would have been perfect was a metro extension, especially with the blue line extension already underway. One of the reasons transit projects here are so expensive is because they’re so infrequent we don’t have any cost efficiencies that come from continual expansions the way they’re doing it in Paris (or the way Spain is able to build so much transit so cheaply).
Uatu
They can deal with it like the rest of the south shore did when the rem was added to our commute. Bus to rem to metro is daily for me. And knowing artm they’ll route busses to the tram just so it gets used more and they can show how successful it is.
-
Kate
Toula Drimonis interviewed the people who had been living in the building that collapsed in St‑Henri, describing the particular losses they face and including links where contributions can be made to help them.
-
Kate
The Société de développement Angus has been chosen to build 1,001 new housing units in Montreal and Rimouski. In Montreal, 352 units will be built in Technopôle Angus and 325 more in Écoquartier Louvain in Ahuntsic.
Item on the Angus part of the project in Est Média Montréal.
DeWolf
This is great news even if 677 housing units is just a drop in the bucket of what’s needed. The Écoquartier Angus block where this will be located has turned out to be very nice. It’s mostly non-market housing, there’s a nice pedestrian corridor through the block and there’s already some good businesses including a brewery, a dépanneur focuses on local products and a coffee roaster. The early phases of Angus in the 1980s and 90s were planned with a suburban mindset but the Écoquartier section is making up for that.
Louvain also looks interesting and has the same potential to really scale up the surrounding part of Ahuntsic. There’s a thread about it on Agora:
https://forum.agoramtl.com/t/ecoquartier-louvain-est-projet-global/1770
-
Kate
A man drowned off Verdun beach Friday and it took efforts by both police and firefighters to locate the body.
-
Kate
The inbound Victoria bridge was closed abruptly midday Friday for an emergency inspection.
Opened again around 4:30.
-
Kate
Many of the scooters banned in the recent law have vanished from our streets, leaving some owners puzzled what to do with the vehicles they can no longer legally use.
Tux
I got a couple years of use out of mine – now the batteries are dead and I have a $3400.00 unsellable motorcycle-shaped hunk of junk in my garage. Just subject them to the same laws as scooters!
-
Kate
Hotel employees are holding a surprise strike Friday in Montreal, Sherbrooke and Quebec City.
-
Kate
Aaron Derfel observes that this summer’s wave of Covid has been more lethal than last’s and that it has “killed 34 Quebecers in their 50s in the past 12 months, and nine in their 40s.”
Quebec has seen 117 Covid deaths this August (as of August 24) compared with 88 in all of August last year. In July, there were 109 deaths compared with 46 in July 2023.
Now where were my masks?
Joey
This anecdote from the NY Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/27/health/covid-19-tests-vaccines-masks.html) rings true:
Jason Moyer was days away from a family road trip to visit his parents when his 10-year-old son woke up with a fever and cough.
Covid?
The prospect threatened to upend the family’s plans.
“Six months ago, we would have tested for Covid,” Mr. Moyer, 41, of Ohio, said. This time they did not.
Instead, they checked to make sure the boy’s cough was improving and his fever was gone — and then set off for New Jersey, not bothering to tell the grandparents about the incident.
Chris
And if it’s flu (or whatever else) instead of covid? Should one act differently?
dhomas
I think what we (should have) learned from COVID is that if you’re sick (with COVID or anything else), stay the fuck home (and/or wear a mask). Nobody is going to care that you were being a hero and went into work despite being sick if they all get sick. Grandma and grandpa will not be able to reminisce about your visit from Ohio if they’re dead.
jeather
Yes, you should not go on a road trip to visit family when you are sick, at least not without confirming with the family that it’s ok. No, you should not go to the grocery store when you have a mystery respiratory illness but your spouse was diagnosed with covid. You should not go to a party with a bad cold EITHER. People don’t want your illnesses, and sometimes you don’t have a choice about work, but you can do grocery pickup outdoors and skip a party and confirm your parents still want you to visit with a mystery virus.
Kevin
We just need a catchy slogan like Be Kind, Rewind.
But all I can come up with is rather rude.
Chris
dhomas, jeather, agreed. So, therefore, no need for any covid test. Putting a name to it changes nothing.
Kate
Chris, people really do need to know whether they have it, because you will get considerations from your employer or appropriate treatment from your health professional only if your illness is identified and has a label.
Like, why bother diagnosing anything? Eventually an illness will kill you. Putting a name to it changes nothing.
maggie rose
Asymptomatic Covid can be transmitted to others. And it’s airbourne, can last in a room after people leave it. It’s true this isn’t 2020, and we don’t have those horrific hospital scenes any more. But…Long Covid can develop from a Covid infection that manifested mild or no symptoms. And LC is not a one-symptom illness, and if often difficult to diagnose. Easier to mask up than be housebound for years.
jeather
Covid is more dangerous than the cold or the flu so you should be more careful. The death rate is much lower, but there are a lot of long term complications that can affect any part of your body. I know the government and the media like to pretend it’s just like influenza, but it’s not.
EmilyG
I was furious when someone I know on social media said that their friend had travel plans, tested positive for Covid, and then decided to travel anyway. (It’s apparently allowed, after all.)
Earlier this month, I had (work-related) travel plans, got Covid, and cancelled my plans.
It seems to me that people deciding to just go around and do things while having Covid, is a large part of why this disease isn’t subsiding at the moment.MarcG
Some reasons to test for Covid if you’re already isolating and/or masking any time you have flu or cold symptoms: Certain groups can get Paxlovid treatment, you’ll know when to best time your next vaccine since it will have little benefit if you get it shortly after infection, if you end up disabled by Long Covid you’ll have an idea of when it happened and perhaps who is responsible.
-
Kate
Weekend notes from La Presse, CityCrunch, CultMTL.
And the usual road closures.
-
Kate
There’s general chitchat about how the Michelin Guide is coming to Quebec, and I find myself wondering how this has affected other places. Do restaurants split even more obviously between posh eateries for the upper crust and rough estaminets for the hoi polloi? Is Michelin good or bad for people working in the business, and for people running it? Does it make a damn bit of difference?
DeWolf
There are a lot of stories out there about how some (many?) chefs dread getting Michelin stars because it adds a lot of pressure and attracts the wrong type of clientele.
That’s especially true for some of the smaller and more local places that are recommended by the guide without necessarily earning a star. They can be easily overwhelmed by the sudden interest. It’s been a problem in Asia where there are a lot of very humble street food stalls or hole-in-the-wall restaurants that have earned a recommendation or even a star.
Montreal has a lot of great neighbourhood restaurants and buvette type places that are serving chef-driven, seasonal dishes but in a very low-key atmosphere. I can easily see some of those getting recommended, maybe even a star, and suddenly they’re tourist attractions that neighbourhood people can never go to anymore.
Ephraim
Well, now we know who paid… Quebec Tourism Industry Alliance. And if Destination Quebec City spent $100K, I wonder what Tourisme Montreal spent? The same people who collect 3.5% on every hotel room, but don’t represent hotels unless they pay them even more in fees! And who aren’t a real government body and of course once paid the retiring CEO almost 3/4 of a million dollars as a golden parachute (but they swear, they aren’t corrupt and they are non-profit.)
CE
According to an interview on CBC Daybreak this morning, Quebec City is much more keen on having their restaurants rated than Montreal.
DeWolf
@CE That makes sense. For its size Quebec City has a lot of good restaurants, but they probably wouldn’t survive without tourists.
Bert
One of my foodie podcasts has a recommendation, go to the restaurant next to the one with Michelin stars.
-
Kate
Bike theft continues to be rife. I would’ve thought the record‑setting popularity of Bixi would have the effect of keeping privately‑owned bikes safer, but evidently not so much.
Chris
Why would you think that? I don’t see the connection.
Kate
If two million trips were taken on Bixi in July, it’s a fair guess that some fraction of those riders were leaving their own bikes at home where they couldn’t be stolen, or didn’t own a bike at all.
Part of the magic of Bixi is that you never have to lock your own bike outside, you simply slot the Bixi in and forget about it.
Blork
Despite the success of Bixi there are still thousands of bikes in circulation every day. Also, some bike thefts happen from home; bikes stolen out of back yards or sheds, etc.
I wonder if Bixi has affected the QUALITY of bikes being stolen; perhaps people with particularly nice (expensive) bikes are more likely to use Bixi for daily commuting while people with plebe bikes don’t bother. So the pool of available (for stealing) bikes has dropped in quality, making it necessary to steal MORE bikes to achieve the same filthy lucre.
See? Economics!
dhomas
I’ve had my bike stolen from right in front of my garage, while I was IN the garage (with the door closed), doing some work. Some thieves are brazen.
Kate
Some of us keep our bicycles indoors when not using them : )
-
Kate
We’re definitely being softened up for higher Hydro‑Quebec bills, and I suspect sooner rather than later no matter what Pierre Fitzgibbon says.
Joey
HQ has also integrated its offshoot, Hilo, into its main business – Hilo offers ‘smart’ home electricity management. Ultimately this will mean more dynamic pricing and incentives to reduce electricity consumption during peak hours.
dhomas
Using domotics (smart home technology), I actually managed to get a 165$ credit using dynamic pricing last winter. I also managed to reduce my yearly energy bill by over 700$ overall. I did this using my own hardware, and not Hilo’s, though. And this despite using more energy for an electric vehicle. I guess I was more wasteful in the past.
That said, the line about the price of gas is disingenuous:
“When oil prices go up by 50 per cent, it’s life, and we have to deal with it. If it’s electricity, it’s bad and it’s the end of the world.” There’s a difference here. Oil is not produced in Quebec; electricity is. We control the price of electricity, no one else. For comparison, I’ve been to Iran, where lots of oil is (obviously) produced. Gas is less than 10 cents per litre there. For the citizens of Iran, gas is cheap.Also, making energy more expensive goes against the whole raison d’être of Hydro-Quebec. It was created specifically to keep electricity affordable FOR Quebec residents. For fuck’s sake, the “pacte social” of 1962 is still referenced on HQ’s own website:
https://nouvelles.hydroquebec.com/fr/communiques-de-presse/1268/hydro-quebec-et-la-responsabilite-sociale/
Excerpt:
“Le 30 août 1962, le principe de la nationalisation de l’électricité a été adopté et avec lui, l’idée d’un ” pacte social ” entre Hydro-Québec et la population qui fait allusion aux tarifs raisonnables.”The CAQ will 100% try to break this pact. Just like their predecessor, the ADQ, floated via Mario Dumont way back in 2008. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20081203093901/http://elections.radio-canada.ca/elections/quebec2008/2008/11/08/001-privatisation_hydro-quebec.shtml
HQ also already makes a profit of over 3 billion dollars per year, as-is.
Shameful that they want to exploit their own citizens. I hope we boot them out during the next elections in 2026. Electricity prices are frozen until 2026 already, so the timing would be perfect.
Tim S.
I’m curious about how you did it, dhomas. In general I really hate dynamic pricing, as it penalizes people who have to do things at a specific time because they work 9-5 or send kids to school, but it would be cool if there was a way to do things that was more fair.
dhomas
Disclaimer: I work in IT, specifically in Automation (though not home automation), so I’m a bit of a geek in this respect.
Heating is the main contributor to my energy costs. I got smart thermostats for every room in my house. I set a bunch of rules for the thermostats. When we sleep, automatically, the thermostats get set low in the rest of the house while the ones in each of our three bedrooms get set to a comfortable setting. Same thing for when we are home. We also have some presence detection, so when no one is home, thermostats get set low (lights also turn off, and the doors lock, etc.).
Peak events are mornings from 6h to 9h and afternoons from 16h to 20h. The most common peak events are the mornings, so I will use this as an example. I “preheat” the house from 3h30 to 6h, basically blasting the heat. Then I turn it off completely from 6h to 9h. The residual heat lasts us until 9h. Since we get notice usually over 12 hours in advance, I try to give the kids their baths the night prior and do the same for myself. I also schedule the dishwasher (basic timer, no smarts in it) to avoid the peak hours. I was toying with the idea of putting a smart switch on the water heater altogether, but I read up on Legionnaire’s disease being caused by insuficiently heated water heaters, so I decided against it.
Other things I did to reduce my energy costs: replaced all light bulbs with LEDs. I’m also a notorious recycler, so I would keep old computers powered on to perform some tasks for me. I consolidated many of those old, power-hungry PCs into less machines, sometimes even into very low-powered machines like Raspberry Pis. Being a bit of an opportunistic buyer, I usually add to my home automation network in bits and pieces, when there is a sale (for example, I got my smart thermostats for about 36$ apiece on sale at Amazon, which is cheaper than regular thermostat pricing).
Anywho, if you have any questions, let me know. I can talk about this for hours. Maybe I should start a blog. 😀Kate
Thanks for all this data, dhomas. I’ve been on HQ’s Winter Credit Option plan for ages, but I have no thermostat so have to tinker with it as I go along. Heaters are either on or off. HQ sends alerts, and on really cold days, I stay under the covers from 6 till 9 am, and if necessary, from 4 to 8 pm, and of course I don’t run my washing machine or cook anything between those hours when it’s required.
But I made a princely total of $16.08 doing this last winter (it wasn’t a very cold one – I’ve done better when we get some real deep freeze).
Also, while dhomas says below that he lives in a “pretty old home, built in 1969”, I live in a triplex that’s just over 100 years old. It can be a challenge in wintertime.
dhomas
Yes, I got really aggressive with my automations. I also live in a pretty large house with a wife, 3 kids, and a mother-in-law who lives with us part-time. It’s an old house, so it’s also not super well insulated. There was definitely waste before I got serious about saving energy. But basically, when you’re spending a lot, there is more opportunity to cut/save. I saved about 23% annually, but I was spending a ton in previous years.
walkerp
That’s good stuff, dhomas. Thanks.
So with your smart thermostats are they just one thermostat connected to a single baseboard heater or do you have some kind of more centralized system?Tim S.
Thanks dhomas, there are some useful ideas in there.
dhomas
@walkerp I have a pretty old home, built in 1969. My smart thermostats are each connected to a single heater. They are controlled like baseboard heaters, but are actually radiant ceiling heating panels (this was important for my automations, since the thermostats are mounted on the wall at eye height, so once the heat from the ceiling would hit them, they would turn off the heat. But that’s likely not the case for others). The centralisation is done by my home automation system. My devices, other than thermostats which are all the same, are a bit of a hodgepodge of whatever was on sale. So, to link them all together, I use HomeAssistant which runs on a Raspberry Pi. This is what does all the coordination and automation. Since I try to avoid any cloud connected devices, all the automations run locally, even if the internet is down. As a note, my devices run on two home automation standards called Z-Wave and Zigbee (if you’ve ever seen the Ikea or Philipps Hue devices, these also run on the Zigbee standard).
@Tim S: glad I could provide some insight. And I agree, it was difficult to get everything set up so as to not impact my family. With 3 kids, it was a bit difficult, but I managed to make it seamless. They don’t even know the peak events are occurring. My wife and mother-in-law were a little harder to work around. “What do you mean I shouldn’t take a shower in the morning?!”. 😀
JaneyB
@dhomas – yes, you should start a blog! This is really interesting and would help people trying to reduce their usage.
I think the CAQ is trying to create surplus hydro to sell to the US. Quebec would get a premium for that hydro, after all. Legault has gone on record saying that he wants HQ to power the whole Northeast US. It sounds green (compared to the current coal usage) but it’s not good for our local bills. The generational pact is an issue and I assume the PQ will soon start using changing rates as a political weapon. HQ is something we have to keep our eyes on; Legault is politically very canny and a sharp businessman.
dhomas
@JaneyB
A lot of what I’ve done was adapted from forums on HomeAssistant’s website and from the HomeAutomation subreddit.
That said, if I did start a blog, I would probably angle it towards how I affect these automations in the context of the particularities in Quebec: climate, Hydro-Quebec’s billing, etc. Maybe in French, too, since everything I’ve read is in English.Al
I would definitely be interested in a blog like that, I am interested how you automate the application of the rules during the winter event periods
walkerp
Much appreciated, dhomas. I will file this info for later when I have mustered up the courage to tackle the project. 🙂
Joey
Hilo does most of what dhomas described straight out of the box – the pitch to consumers was that they would get new smart thermostats – installed by a Hilo-contracted electrician – at a very steep discount; in exchange they had to participate in ~30 Hilo “challenges” throughout winter. A challenge consists of a four-hour period during peak hours (6-10 am or 5-9 pm, IIRC) whereby the baseboard heaters are turned way down, effectively off, following a period where they are jacked up; the idea is to pre-heat the house during a cold snap to reduce demand during the peak hours. Hilo would use energy consumption data to determine how much electricity was ‘saved’ during the challenge period and pay a corresponding reward. By the end of the winter, you could expect a couple of hundred bucks in rewards (all paid out in early spring), though some folks with very large houses would receive larger absolute amounts. Challenges usually occur when temperatures were below -10, I guess, and it’s not uncommon to have two in a day.
Hilo users were eager to share their tips for gaming the system on social media, whereby a not insignificant portion really jack up the heat, do laundry, or charge electric cars in the baseline periods (e.g., middle of the night) to inflate the reference consumption and therefore get bigger rewards.
A small group of DIYers, like dhomas, figured out how to automate the entire process themselves, via things like Home Assistant, though you could achieve most of that work via the Hilo app, which allows you to remotely adjust the thermostats (and any other smart devices, like light-switches, connected to the same hub) and schedule different scenes as you wish. (The Hilo app and devices integrate easily into Google Home and Amazon Alexa, so you can control them with your voice, but not Apple’s Home offering.)
Last week Hilo revised its standard contract, reducing the user’s obligation to participate in three years’ worth of challenges to one and increasing there number of ‘opt-outs’ to which users were entitled (failure to participate sufficiently in challenges – or too many ‘failed’ challenges whereby you don’t decrease consumption adequately – could lead to users having to repay the subsidy received for the cost of the smart thermometers). My sense is that Hydro-Quebec sees the value in this kind of thing and will more fully integrate it into their offering rather than consign it to a third-party ‘startup’… Interesting to see HQ put so much effort not just into reducing consumption but into managing consumption more evenly. I guess the marginal cost of importing electricity during peak periods is really high.
@walkerp typically one smart thermostat per baseboard heater, but that would depend on the existing configuration, so if you have one thermostat that controls all your baseboard heaters, you’d only need to replace it with one smart thermostat. Hilo also came up with a water heater switch that had it stop heating during peak periods (DIY folks would just flip their breaker) and I think incorporated an EV charger last year. I think there were rumours of a heat pump mechanism coming at some point. We only got ours because we moved into a new place that had smart themostats by a rival company that went out of business… because HQ chose Hilo. Unfortunately, unlike the Hilo thermostats, the old ones couldn’t even be controlled manually so we had to buy new ones anyway. I think we got five smart thermostats and two smart light switches (with dimmers) for about $150…
dhomas
As Joey has mentioned, I’ve made this unnecessarily complicated on myself. Hilo does all this automatically. The Hilo thermostats are also pretty cheap with a contract (about 40$ each).
The reason I didn’t go with Hilo is twofold: 1) I already had a Home Automation system that I wanted to plug into; 2) I don’t like being in anyone else’s ecosystem. As Joey mentioned, if the company goes belly up, you could be stuck with obsolete equipment. Even if they don’t cease to exist, they could simply no longer want to support what they consider “old” hardware leaving you in the lurch. Google bricked my fully functional network router last year, for example (this kind of thing should be illegal, but that’s another topic). Hydro-Quebec won’t ever disappear, but they could have discontinued the program and left customers in a bad spot (like Google did with my routers). It looks like the program is successful and continuing now, but I didn’t know that when I was considering my smart thermostats. It was sort of a beta at the time (~2020).
My thermostats are Z-Wave (I believe the Hilo ones are Zigbee), and made by the same local company, Stelpro. They cost me roughly the same thing as the Hilo ones. I am part of the same challenges as the Hilo customers and get the same benefits (credits at the end of winter). The additional cost is my time, but this is a bit of a hobby of mine.
If anyone is interested in these types of smart energy technologies, I would probably recommend the Hilo program. It’s a good starting point for anyone not yet into home automation and it seems to be well established now.
Joey
@dhomas +1 I think if I were starting over I would take more of a DIY approach. To be honest, I’m surprised Hilo allowed users as much control as they did; all they really care about is your overall consumption during peak periods, regardless of whether you’re using electricity to heat your house, wash dishes, charge a car, whatever. But they really position and market Hilo as being a heating-control system, focusing almost exclusively on baseboard heaters. In our case, we found that turning the heat pump off and postponing laundry/dishwashing + shortening bath time had a bigger effect. As always, ymmv.
-
Kate
A city manager in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough has been convicted of corruption, but the real lede has been buried here: the real estate developer with whom the manager had dealings was shot dead in Laval in April 2023.
-
Kate
The Montreal marathon takes place in late September, and fraudsters are busy selling fake bibs on social media.
Reply