La Presse explores the story of Lantic Sugar and how sugar is refined in its factory. Interesting tidbit: Canadians consume 33% less sugar than our neighbours to the south.
Updates from October, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Reading that Quebec will pause immigration programs for permanent residents on one website, then on another that they may welcome 10,000 more immigrants next year than they originally planned, what are we meant to think? Does anyone in that government know what they’re doing?
Joey
It means that their pathway programs to permanent residency are too popular – at current rates, they will generate more immigrants than the current party in power would prefer (i.e., more than zero). One of the pieces mentions that even if they are turning off the tap, those currently in the system will have their applications processed, which is why the number of immigrants will grow in the short term.
Kate
CTV has a piece on replacing immigrant labour with robots and AI.
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Kate
John Little, who immortalized many Montreal street scenes in his paintings, died this week. He was 96.
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Kate
In August it was announced that temporary housing would be built to shelter the homeless, but the project is now on hold and they may appear next year sometime. Or not.
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Kate
Ville-Marie is turning to private security agents to patrol Chinatown, the Village and Old Montreal.
This does not bode well. Besides the fact that someone is skimming off profits, as with the private agencies providing healthcare workers, do these agents have to follow the same rules cops do, when interacting with the public? What kinds of devices are they allowed to carry? And who are they answerable to?
And what does the powerful Police Brotherhood make of this situation? They’re not even mentioned, but you’d expect them to have an opinion.
Chris
Food for thought: one of the arguments against ‘defund the police’ was always that if it happened, the rich would always just hire their own security, and the poor would be left with an eviscerated public police service. (This situation is different of course, but nevertheless reminded me of the argument.)
Kate
Not relevant to this situation at all.
But shouldn’t the mayor and some of her henchmen be able to sit down with the SPVM and draw up some plans for patrolling those areas without recourse to shelling out even more money to a private firm?
What’s the problem? Do the cops not want to do it? Do they not have the resources to do it properly? What do the private agencies offer that the police don’t, or won’t? Lots of questions.
In any case, it’s clear that the SPVM doesn’t fully answer to city hall. That’s a real problem.
bob
Maybe the police budget is still too small despite all of Plante’s increases.
Maybe the private security agents will be off-duty or former cops, and maybe they will be paid very well.
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Kate
A new dockworkers’ strike shut down two terminals at the port on Thursday, and this one is indefinite. CTV says the strike halts 40% of the port’s container capacity.
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Kate
With a 2 pm high of 23.7°C, Thursday has been the warmest Halloween since records began in 1871.
Or, as Nora Loreto tweeted, “I see that the weather has decided to go as Climate Change for Halloween.”
Lots of Halloween noise around here, plus Diwali fireworks from over in Park Ex. Been quite an evening!
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Kate
There was a shooter lockdown at a St‑Michel high school Friday morning, but it turned out to be caused by a Halloween costume.
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Kate
It will be two years before work is completed on the Louis‑Hippolyte‑La Fontaine tunnel.
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Kate
A survey by a local group found that two‑thirds of the people they questioned feel the Village is unsafe.
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Kate
jeather
Oh god I hate that. One night a year you can just let things be, part of the fun was that it was a weeknight.
You can just do your haunted house the weekend before or after, it isn’t like there aren’t Christmas parties for all of December, this is the same.
I do see many fewer older kids trick or treating solo now.
walkerp
This is the stupidest shit ever. Talk about if it ain’t broke…
Kate
I hate the corralling of little kids into the lockstep Monday‑to‑Friday nine‑to‑five mindset.
Kevin
Tell me you know nothing about history and culture without telling me you’re a xenophobe.
dhomas
I wouldn’t want to change the night. But I am quite happy my kids’ school started giving the day after Halloween as a ped day. They start quite early at 7h40, so not having to wake them up at 6h15 (we live a little far from school) is a definite plus.
Daisy
I don’t understand how a municipality can have a say in this anyway. Trick-or-treating is not a municipally organized event. It’s not organized by anybody; it’s just something people do.
DeWolf
It’s a bit weird to compare Senneterre (pop. 2782) with Montreal (pop. 2 million). Small towns can fuss about these kinds of things all they want but there are as many people who live on single blocks of Montreal as in the whole of these villages, so it’s a moot point. People will do what they want.
Meezly
It’s also dumb how they keep bringing up how the Great Halloween Cancellation of 2019 set a precedent just because “there was a little rain”. Wasn’t it an exceptional situation due to a forecast of torrential rains and strong winds? Maybe it didn’t turn into a very scary weather event, but I remember it being pretty miserable.
The even stupider thing is that it’s GORGEOUS today. For once, kids don’t have to cover up their costumes with a coat or rain jacket, or stop trick or treating early cuz they’re just too damn cold.
Kate
Meezly, you’re right. This was the forecast for Halloween 2019.
DeWolf
The way the media represented the 2019 Halloween recommendation was absurd. What the mayor said:
“I invite Montrealers to have Halloween on Friday because of the rain and strong winds announced tomorrow,” Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante said in a tweet.
How Global reported it:
The City of Montreal confirmed Wednesday that Halloween will be held on Friday and encouraged residents to follow suit.
There’s a big difference between “I invite you to celebrate Halloween on Friday” and “You must celebrate Halloween on Friday.” But nuance seems lost on a lot of local news media.
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Kate
Fifty years ago, with firefighters on strike, a section of what we now call Centre‑Sud caught fire and burned in the “weekend rouge”.
Twenty years ago, Mirabel ended passenger flights forever.
Robert H
Excellent article by Le Devoir reporter Jeanne Corriveau, but such a maddening, frustrating disaster of a project to recall, a shameful episode in Quebec’s history and a monument to bureaucratic obtuseness, political arrogance, waste of taxpayer dollars and fertile, rich land, and all around cement-headed stupidity. The article tries to end with a silver lining describing a zone of enterprise and new job creation, but that last photo of the demolition of the terminal reslly tells it all. By the time any lesson learned can be applied, all the original players will have passed on. Sigh…
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Kate
Quebec has ended its program of funding accessibility to metro stations in Montreal. A thirty‑first station’s elevators will be completed in 2026, and that will be that. A protest was held at Papineau station Wednesday evening.
EmilyG
Montreal can be such a disabled-unfriendly city. I don’t know if many non-disabled people realize it.
Annette
Most cities can be challenging – but in Montreal it’s a choice. The blue line was built elevator-free in the ’80s. The very designers/engineers would be quite elderly now, maybe have mobility issues. Their own stations are inaccessible to them.
Nicholas
Montreal will soon hold the distinction of having the only public transit in Canada inaccessible to people in wheelchairs or reduced mobility. Toronto has 13 subway stations left to do, with 9 planned to finish next year and three planned for 2026Q1, and one with an unknown date. Toronto also has three train stations left to do, all in various stages of progress. Montreal’s next step for the metro, which is now fully unfunded, was to do five stations through 2030. For $270 million, which is an extraordinary price. Only one train line is accessible, with very slow lifts, and that line, brand new, may be shut down completely. It’s absolutely disgraceful.
But every time I suggest that because no one else will pay for this we pay for it locally, and take our destiny into our own hands, I hear there are other priorities, no one wants higher taxes, etc. I sure hope my body continues to let me climb stairs, and can’t imagine what it’s like for those who can’t. How shameful, all around.
vasi
This is very disappointing, I had no idea this program had an end planned! But 31 stations won’t be all, nevertheless—whenever the blue line extension finishes, those stations will presumably be accessible. 2045, here we come!
MarcG
Disabled people are just another minority who are not welcome in a homogeneous ethnostate.
carswell
Suspecting we’ll be seeing a lot more of this retrograde thinking imposed by the CAQ as they head toward the exit. They know it’s probably their last chance to permanently reshape society. Chunks of the healthcare system that are privatized are unlikely to be renationalized; expressways they build aren’t going to be torn down.
Am also wondering if Legault isn’t counting on Poilievre to save his sorry ass in exchange for the CAQ’s open or tacit support of the Cons in the upcoming federal election. To ensure a Conservative victory and stay in power, Poilievre will gladly grant Quebec many of the powers it’s been clamouring for, as it fits with his provinces’ rights plan to dismantle much of the federal government and gut federal regulations, especially ones affecting big oil. With the Cons in power in Ottawa this year (and, yes, walkerp, it’s not a given but…), the CAQ will have a year or longer to say “Look at what we’ve accomplished — Quebec is in complete control of immigration, has a free hand to do what it wants to anglos and allos and has got the feds to butt out of most of our ‘national’ affairs. Vote for us.”
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Kate
Every five years a survey is made of how people are moving around in town, and the pandemic seems to be the cause of a dip in these trips the likes of which haven’t been seen in 35 years. A drop of more than 200,000 trips on a typical weekday has been seen despite the addition of 117,000 households in the greater metropolitan area. The survey is currently carried out by the ARTM, presumably picking up in 2017 when it took over from the AMT.
…Even so, half of CBC’s morning radio show consists of detailed traffic reports.
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Kate
The city has unveiled a new nightlife plan in an attempt to protect the existence of nightlife at all, but there’s no new noise policy that would protect small venues from having new neighbours move in and getting them closed down.
DeWolf
Meanwhile, some residents near Duluth Street have banded together to lobby the city to end the summertime concerts that take place during the pedestrianized period (if not to end the pedestrianization outright) because there is music… in the afternoon.
Kate
insert head clutch here
Joey
@DeWolf I happend to pass by the corner of St-Laurent and Duluth during one of those performances this summer (I’m pretty certain it was mid-afternoon on a weekday). There was a *very* amateur musician doing an impression of a decent performance; taste is relative, but I remember thinking I was glad I didn’t live nearby because the music was both really lousy and really loud. Kind of like what it must be like to live next to one of the public pianos.
MarcG 07:33 on 2024-11-01 Permalink
Now do salt
MarcG 07:36 on 2024-11-01 Permalink
Ok so we still consume less sodium overall. I thought maybe because our packaged foods contain more on average that it would get us a gold medal but no such luck.
Kate 07:42 on 2024-11-01 Permalink
Where did you find the data, MarcG?
MarcG 08:32 on 2024-11-01 Permalink
Canada 2760 mg/day, US 3300+ mg/day.
Canadian packaged foods averaged 291 milligrams of sodium per 100 grams of food or beverage, ahead of the U.S. at 279 milligrams per 100 grams.
CE 09:13 on 2024-11-01 Permalink
I spent a few months in the US last year (long enough that I had to buy groceries and fill a pantry) and, unless you’re able to pay a premium, packaged foods are much sweeter and saltier than in Canada. A good example is pasta sauce, the normal tomato sauce at a normal grocery store is almost inedible if you’re not used to the sweetness. You can get bottles that aren’t sweet but at high end grocery stores at a premium. It was like that with so many products, even brands that also exist in Canada.
Kate 09:21 on 2024-11-01 Permalink
Even our roads are full of the stuff.
Orr 16:53 on 2024-11-01 Permalink
Over-salting roads and sodium contamination of lakes is recognized as a problem and there are locations in Quebec around lakes and rivers where low-salt “eco-zones” exist where it is primarily abrasives that are spread, not salt. I believe this is also why we no longer dump snow cleaned off of city streets into the St-Lawrence river.
Ian 19:21 on 2024-11-02 Permalink
All I’m saying is nobody ever got turned into a pillar of delicious, healthy ginger
Kate 14:33 on 2024-11-03 Permalink
As a redhead, I dispute that statement.