Atlas Obscura profiles the Laboratoire des rêves et des cauchemars at Sacré‑Cœur hospital.
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Kate
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Kate
A pair of CF‑18 fighter jets will be over town Saturday for the start of the Alouettes’ game at Molson Stadium at 3 pm.
Update to add that the Alouettes lost the game and are now out of the running for the Grey Cup.
MarcG
Thanks for the heads-up, I won’t think that we’re finally getting our dues.
According to this document from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Canada the CF-18 consumes “4,626 litres of fuel per flying hour… This is 3X more than what an average car consumes in a year”.
Uatu
Just heard them pass over on the south shore and they’re damned loud
Nicholas
MarcG, however, there are about 300,000 times more cars in Canada than CF-18s (and about 9,000 times more trucks), and that pollution is being created in my face, not thousands of feet up. Pilots also have to keep up their hours to stay certified, so they’d likely be flying in circles anyway if they didn’t do these events. It’s a fair question whether we should have these jets, or how many we should have, but the RCAF is small potatoes both in Canada overall and in military or even general aviation worldwide.
faiz imam
Saw them over the south shore while I was raking leaves. Recognised them as fighter jets but had no idea what event they were here for.
CE
Honestly, I think they’re pretty impressive machines and don’t mind getting a chance to see them every once in a while.
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Kate
The Jacques-Cartier bike route, closed last week after several cyclist crashes revealed a slippery surface treatment, has been reopened, although there’s no information here about what changes were made to make it safer.
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Kate
Media are leaping on this week’s report about trimming costs from already embattled transit corporations, La Presse leading with a headline about the iniquity of $120,000 for STM bus drivers.
But when considered against this piece about what landlords can charge now for a one‑bedroom apartment, is paying a bus driver $120K such a scandal?
walkerp
That’s a hard ass job. I don’t begrudge them 120k.
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Kate
24heures looks at the Cité-Jardin, one of the quirkier corners of town. The original layout was more ambitious and included a shopping centre, public pool, a church and more than 600 houses, but the eventual project only has 167 houses and no services at all, as pointed out by one resident – “Pour la bouffe, les épiceries de quartiers, les cafés, il y a fuck all.”
The journalist also found a design professor who says the area is completely without interest, a curious pose. One of the houses was the residence of Jean Drapeau, as noted – but the journalist doesn’t mention how it must have been rebuilt after being blown up by a bomb in 1969. (This last link may take some time – the BAnQ’s newspaper archive is very slow.)
Nicholas
Seems much of the land for the rest of the houses became the Olympic Village and a city-owned golf course. Unrelated, too bad there’s no space for housing near metro stations and parks.
Also, interesting that Montreal has a pair of those fancy Washington-style lamp posts for the mayor, in front of that house still owned by the Drapeau family (Michel). Apparently it was a tradition for 120 years, stopped by Doré because he lived in a condo. The current mayor of Westmount has similar lamp posts (with the Westmount logo) in front of the current mayor and her predecessor, and used to have ones in front of his predecessor’s home, all visible on street view. Pointe-Claire does this too.
Kate
I had no idea about that tradition – thanks!
Orr
The Cité Jardin area isn’t interesting for the houses, it is interesting for the trees.
Each street is named after and features a different tree species/family (pines, oaks, cedars, etc), and it is spectacular. Particularly now that so many of the trees have reached mature heights,
Talk about the story writer not seeing the forest for the trees.
A unique and special place, imo. I love it.Kate
The houses aren’t like anything in the surrounding city, Orr, and for that alone it’s worth a look. There’s a sort of hobbity cosiness about the area that’s not urban but isn’t quite like any of the city’s suburbs either. But the area has one serious suburb‑style flaw: no sidewalks. I can’t imagine what the planners were thinking when that was decided.
Orr
That is a good point about the sidewalk, designers forgot that people would still walk in the future!
The cozy dead-end street nature of it and the forest all contribute to a place like no other.
An excellent tree-walk locale to learn to identify tree types. I imagine the people on maple street envy the lack of leaves on cedar and pine streets at this time of year.
It is so cool that instead of just naming the streets after trees, they actually planted the streets with those tree species. Avenue des Plaines (actually there are silver maples here, and they are now giants), Avenue des Marronniers, Avenue des Cèdres, Avenue des Épinettes, Avenue des Chênes, Avenue des Sapins, Avenue des Saules, Avenue des Bouleaux, Avenue des TIlleuls, Avenue des Sorbiers, Avenue des Mélèzes. It’s like a tree encyclopedia.
Speaking of tree encyclopedia, if you want to know what trees are on your street, the “Arbres publics de Montréal” interactive tree-map website is a terrific resource. In English and french (to choose language you have to enter via the QueBio.ca parent website). Unfortunately the site’s revamp removed the advanced search features, but nonetheless, it is a resource like no other.CE
Sidewalks weren’t put on the street because it was designed so all the walking would be done in the paths behind the houses. The streets were for car access. It was a very popular approach to suburban town planning at the time where the streets were reserved just for cars so people walking wouldn’t have to interact them. People would go from house to house by foot from the back of the houses. Usually, the kitchens were placed at the backs of the house so the mothers could keep an eye on children and see when visitors were approaching the house. A fully developed example is . Radburn NJ. Not very many developments were made with this configuration and what we ended up with in most suburban areas was a half way approach where the houses were built without the sidewalks and without the paths so the streets were for cars but nowhere was for pedestrians.
Kate
Thank you, CE! I gather this was the “garden city” philosophy from the UK.
CE
Yes, very much so.
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Kate
The federal government is putting millions into electrifying the cruise ports of Montreal and Quebec City.
This rang a bell. More than four years ago, La Presse reported that although the Montreal cruise port had been electrified, almost no ship was using it.
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Kate
Lonely Planet lists what to eat in Montréal including Schwartz’s, Trump‑supporting Cheskie’s, and blithely sends people at Méli‑Melo to the back counter, when habitués know you need to order and pay at the cash first.
jeather
The writer is correct about the cheese crowns there, sadly. (Honestly, not surprising to me at all that they are pro Trump, but that was a little gross.)
Blork
Frigging Cheskies. They were already on my boycott list because during the height of the Omicron COVID wave they ignored protocols and even had a sign in the window asking people not to harass the staff for not wearing masks.
jeather
They also still give you your stuff in plastic bags. Not sure where they are getting them all from. I’m really going to miss the cheese crowns (my babka is as good as theirs). I assume they have some kind of in that they aren’t getting in trouble for a lot of things.
Uatu
I wouldn’t eat there. If they were too arrogant to be bothered to wear masks during a pandemic who knows what other food safety procedures they hand waved away.
walkerp
Can someone explain why Chezkie’s is pro-Trump and if their position reflects the politics of the Hasidic community in general?
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Kate
La Presse has a preachy but vapid op‑ed Friday morning from urbanist Sylvain Gariépy headlined Montréal mérite mieux. He says city hall has not achieved enough and hasn’t kept pace with Boston, New York, Chicago and Toronto, and implies we’re losing out compared to those cities. Likewise, the cliché about “Montréal ne saurait être encore longtemps une ville de seconde zone.”
It’s only in the heads of people like Gariépy that ratings like “second rate city” and comparisons with other (larger) cities have any importance. The relative status of cities is not important to the people living in them unless they’re in the business of writing tourism copy. What is important to city residents is the quality of life from day to day.
Likewise, Gariépy writes as if city hall management has totally free rein to do what it chooses and only needs a dynamic leader. But Montreal is almost entirely at the mercy of a provincial government that doesn’t like it much. The city will make significant progress on the dossiers he mentions – homelessness and housing are serious issues, I don’t deny – only when we hit a sweet spot where the mayor can get help from the Quebec government of the day, and that may be decades away, or never.
It’s a stupid piece and ticked me off.
Nicholas
There are certainly valid criticisms of Montreal’s lack of growth in housing (which is largely why housing has gotten so expensive), but Boston, NYC and Toronto have not done well on this front (Chicago area isn’t growing due to lack of demand, as vacancy rates are higher), and economic growth wise Montreal seems to be around the other metros on various metrics. Could the writer have done some analysis to back up his points, like showing housing starts or completions per 1,000 population in the core areas (a preferred metric I tried to find quickly, but failed, but this is a comment on a blog)? Or any other metric? Or is this just vibes?
Also, Kate, the French word urbaniste is the regulated term in Quebec for urban planner (it’s the equivalent to registered professional planner in other provinces, and you can’t call yourself an urbaniste without having a licence from the organization this guy used to lead, like professional engineer or registered nurse, or, in Montreal, tour guide). But in English urbanist is someone who cares about cities and wants to make them better and more livable, usually associated with people who like density and mixed-use and transit and bike lanes and stuff and hate suburban sprawl and car culture and so on. I know lots of urban planners who hate cities and love suburbs, and lots of urbanists who don’t work in the field but are activists, and lots of urbanist urban planners.
Robert H
Each of those cities cited by M. Gariépy have serious issues of its own. I lived in Boston for over two decades, and though I consider it to be one of the great American metropolises, its high cost of living and low availability of affordable housing is becoming a liability to quality of life. Its frequently antiquated and disfunctional public transport will have you longing for le métro. About one third of Chicago is booming while the other two thirds is struggling and decrepit. Chicago wishes it had Montreal’s crime rate. The Windy City has a horrific level of gun violence. New York is choking on its traffic clogged tunnels, streets, over-burdened infrastructure and outrageous rents. And we all know what a paradise Toronto is. Good thing for me I like all those cities.
DeWolf
I know op-eds are usually short, but this one is particularly vacuous. It makes me think of the vague “things are bad and they need to be better” rhetoric you see coming out of Ensemble.
Also particularly weird that he would hold up New York, Boston and Chicago as examples of cities getting things right. Unlike Montreal, which grew by more than 4% in 2023, New York, Chicago and Boston are actually seeing negative population growth. They’re also struggling with housing affordability and not enough new housing being built. (That’s true even in Chicago, because the parts of the city that aren’t crime-ridden are relatively expensive.) Their public transit is an absolute shit show – New York is struggling to improve the subway and Kathy Hochul’s last-minute decision to kill the congestion charge has left the MTA in a big financial hole. Boston and Chicago have a small fraction of the ridership that Montreal sees and it hasn’t been recovering well post-pandemic. Meanwhile, local services in all those cities have suffered significantly in the past few years. Eric Adams cut funding to NYC libraries, for example.
I’d love to hear what specifically Sylvain Gariépy thinks those cities are doing that Montreal can learn from, but I have a feeling he doesn’t actually have any specifics to offer.
Kate
Nicholas, are you saying I should not have used the word “urbanist” to describe Sylvain Gariépy? His byline says he was the “président de l’Ordre des urbanistes du Québec de 2019 à 2024”.
MarcG
I think he’s saying that the English translation of the French word “urbaniste” is “urban planner”.
Kate
But to my mind they are not the same thing. As Nicholas says, in English I feel anyone who expresses coherent views on urban life in the urban setting is an urbanist, at least up to a point. Whereas an urban planner sounds more functional, like someone who would participate in laying out new streets, or contributing to decisions on the revitalization of urban areas.
I realize I’m probably wrong about this.
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Kate
The CIUSSS du Centre‑Sud‑de‑l’Île‑de‑Montréal has cut more than 40 nursing and related positions at Notre‑Dame and Verdun hospitals.
Meezly
A direct result of the CAQ’s optimization measures.
walkerp
On target for the one health care professional for every person in Quebec by 2026 goal!
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Kate
Weekend notes from CityCrunch, La Presse, CultMTL.
Notes on weekend road warnings.
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Kate
Workers at the Port of Montreal have been handed a final offer backed with a threat of lockout.
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Kate
CBC has a podcast on the city’s many kilometres of alleys.
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Kate
The federal government is offering more than $50 million to Quebec for homelessness, but Quebec isn’t taking it although shelters are concerned to get the funds before winter sets in.
Update: The mayor is not happy and is telling Quebec and Ottawa to settle their differences.
Jonathan 05:40 on 2024-11-09 Permalink
Funny. I’ve actually been there as part of a sleep study