While La Presse has been doing a series on Quebec’s rivers this summer, Le Devoir has countered with a series on city parks, this time looking at Baldwin Park, a gem in the eastern Plateau.
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Kate
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Kate
The city has a budget of $300,000 to thin the deer herd in two parks at the far eastern end of the island, 145 animals being in their sights.
Ian
$2068 per animal seems excessive, no?
dwgs
Clowns aren’t very good hunters and ammunition is expensive.
Blork
Presumably that $300K includes planning and logistics, possibly some construction of barriers or fences, signage warning local residents of what’s going on and when, pay for a dozen or so people, transportation of the carcasses to the abattoir, etc. Personally I thought it sounded low given that anything done on contract for the government is always so over the top expensive, like $300K just to pick up the phone.
And of course if this were a construction project it would end up costing $900K and would take a year to complete.
thomas
Have legal expenses for the inevitable court challenges been included in the budget?”
Ian
@dwgs well played, it’s important to remember the Montreal urge to Bring In the Clowns.
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Kate
The city’s social intervention squad, originally created to tackle homelessness in Ville‑Marie, Plateau Mont‑Royal, Mercier‑Hochelaga‑Maisonneuve, and Sud‑Ouest boroughs, then extended into the metro, will cover the whole city as of next year. The squads are composed of social workers, not police.
Ian
Now. THAT is good news! It should come out of Dagher’s random street harassment budget 😉
MarcG
My wife emailed them about an incident over a week ago and never got a response.
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Kate
Human adjustments have buried all the other rivers on the island of Montreal, but the rivière à l’Orme in the West Island is being protected, for the moment.
Is it the last, though, as the headline claims? The Ruisseau de Montigny, which drains from Anjou sur le Lac into the Back River, still exists at least partially as a surface brook. (I went and followed it along a few summers ago from curiosity, after realizing that Anjou wasn’t on any lake, so what the hell was that about.)
Nicholas
Maybe they’re only talking about rivières, not ruisseaux? There is also Ruisseau Bertrand, which flows from the Dorval Golf Course through Bois de Liesse. I recently kayaked to the mouth, and it was full enough of biodiversity that I did not approach close enough to discover that it was a mouth of a creek.
Kate
Is there any formal distinction between rivières and ruisseaux? The one shown in the story isn’t much more than a brook.
Nicholas
There’s actually a map of the waterways showing water quality tests: most recent annual report (2023), over the years and live map. Way more creeks than I thought!
Kate
Thank you, Nicholas.
Nicholas
I’ve seen a bunch of sites that say a rivière has more than 2 m^3 of flow per second, while a ruisseau has less, but also that a ruisseau may dry up temporarily and is very shallow. In common parlance I think sometimes the line is fuzzy, especially when the size and importance can change. I learned not too long ago from a person from France that a fleuve is any river that empties into a sea/ocean and it has nothing to do with its size or importance, so a creek can be a fleuve if it empties into an ocean (sometimes called fleuve côtier to distinguish it from the big fleuves). Some sources (pardon the pun) seem to suggest a fleuve can be so named if it is important and empties into another fleuve or to an endorheic basin (body of water with no outflows, like the Great Salt Lake). And all this changed in the 18th century, so it could be much of this is just to give people things to argue about.
walkerp
That’s really helpful, Nicholas, about the fleuve. Been wondering and debating about that since I first learned it was the fleuve here and riviere. Is there a direct english word for fleuve?
Kate
I don’t think English has distinct words for fleuve and rivière.
Ian
We do! An estuary leads to saltwater. A river can, but not necessarily. Also see brook, stream, creek, etc.
Kate
OK, but we don’t call our main river the Saint Lawrence estuary till it gets a lot closer to the sea. It’s a river, but so’s the Back River, the Ottawa River, and the Richelieu River.
Ian
Sure, and we call Mont Royal “the mountain” but we know that’s not correct. Common and historical usage isn’t always accurate.
Nicholas
walkerp, no, as Kate suggested.
Ian, an estuary doesn’t lead to salt water; it is salt water (partially). As per your link: “an estuary is typically the point where rivers meet the sea”. It is a zone (I’d say the point is the mouth; an estuary is larger), not an entire river. An estuary, as I’ve always heard (and just checked again in a few places) is the mouth of a river that is a tidal, brackish (saltwater and freshwater) mixing or transition zone. Wikipedia notes: “The word “estuary” is derived from the Latin word aestuarium meaning tidal inlet of the sea, which in itself is derived from the term aestus, meaning tide.” The fleuve St Laurent goes from Lake Ontario to the Gulf, and it becomes tidal around Quebec City, and has salt water around Ile d’Orléans. DFO says from there to Pointe-des-Monts, or maybe Tadoussac, is the estuary, but I can’t find a source that says that anything upriver of Quebec City is part of the estuary. However, we definitely call it the fleuve from Kingston on. The estuary is part of the fleuve (I guess part of every fleuve, even if only a few metres long), but they’re not the same, which is why estuary translates to estuaire.
I know this is all confusing and a lot of it is debatable, but I don’t think there is a term for the entire length of a river that empties into an ocean. The Amazon, the Nile, the Mississippi are all fleuves for their whole length, but we would not call the parts in Peru, Uganda or Minnesota estuaries.
Kate
Ian, next thing you know, you’ll be telling me Mount Royal is not a volcano.
Ian
I hear it’s the lair of a kaiju that will save us all in our moment of greatest need.
But yeah, water definitions are weird. Maybe htis is one of those things like how in French “faucon” or “pingouin” is used to describe a whole category of birds, but they have specific names for chouette, hibou, and harfang.
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Kate
It’s not the weekend but there are some road and tunnel closure notes.
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Kate
The New York Post and the BBC are reporting that bars will be allowed to remain open 24 hours in Montreal.
walkerp
Classic NY Post:
Headline reads “This popular weekend getaway from New York will soon allow bars to remain open 24 hours a day: ‘It’s like madness’Then scroll down and read to the end:
“In Montreal, we close at 3 a.m. People are drunk at 1 a.m. — and they’re super-drunk at 3 a.m.,” one bar owner explained to the BBC.“One of the problems we have is, at 3 a.m. it’s like madness. But if you expand the hours, there’s less problems, less demand for security,” L’ile Noire owner Michel Lavallée said.
DeWolf
Some people (probably the kind of people who read the NY Post and take it at face value) think that 24-hours means bars will actually be open all night. Maybe there will be one or two, but as the BBC article notes, this simply gives them the flexibility to close at a time that makes sense, rather than at some arbitrary hour.
There’s no last call in Hong Kong and Tokyo. All that means is you have a great variety of opening hours. There are some 24-hour places, some places that close at 5am, but the majority of bars and pubs actually close earlier than they do here. It depends on the clientele and what makes sense for the owners.
Kate
As reported in May, Sergio da Silva of Turbo Haüs: “By three in the morning, people have already done what they’re going to be doing. They’re either a little too high, or a little too drunk, and it’s just time to get everybody home and be done with it.”
thomas
If you would speak to someone from Stereo they would tell you that the headline dj doesn’t start until 3am and often continue for 12 or more hours.
DeWolf
Yeah, nothing against Sergio but maybe people don’t need a prescribed bedtime?
Kate
I don’t think Sergio was ordaining a bedtime, simply giving his observations as a longtime bar owner. Obviously there will be people just gearing up to dance beyond dawn at Stereo while he’s locking up for the night.
CE
Having no prescribed closing time will probably also have the effect of allowing some bars to feel like it’s ok to close at 1 or 2 where they might have stayed open until 3 just because that’s the “closing time” for bars.
Ian
“madness”? From the “city that never sleeps”? For shame.
To be fair even Manhattan is pretty quiet around 4 am these days, too.
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