Emergency rooms are filling up. CBC offers some advice on not going to the ER. I hadn’t realized that there are some who overdo food and drink over Christmas so excessively that they need to drag themselves to the ER for help. Imagine the shame of having “surfeit of turkey” written in your medical record.
Shelters are also said to be over capacity.
Notes on New Year festivities from Radio‑Canada, from CTV and from La Presse, and notes on watching fireworks.
I wish the best for all readers of this blog as we lurch into a year of political uncertainty and weirdness. May the year nonetheless be favourable and fruitful for us all.
Happy New Year, everyone. I hope you all have a good year ahead.
Happy New Year! Wishing you all good health.
Happy New Year to all – thanks Kate!
All the best in the new year, Kate. (And others!)
Happy New Year, Kate, as well as everyone else!
Take care folks!
Happy new year to you Kate and to the community here!
Happy new year one and all!
Happy New Year Kate, all!
Happy New Year to all!
Happy New Year, Kate and all. May we all have the wit and wisdom to contribute to the good in 2025!
Happy New Year! May it be memorable, but only for good reasons.
May we live in boring times.
CBC has photos from 2024; La Presse with arts photos and drone photos of the year; Le Devoir has Marie-France Coallier’s photos of the year.
La Presse on the top 10 athletic achievements in Quebec.
The Gazette’s Paul Cherry lists the 32 homicides of the year with names and details about arrests if applicable.
Tastet’s 50 restaurants of the year.
It looks like there will be a party at the Old Port again this year with music, a countdown, and fireworks. Igloofest is putting it on.
Yes, and it will be mild out too, not dipping below freezing all night.
I think the fireworks were done very late. I could hear them from my house and they seem to have only started at 1AM!
Reports on reddit confirm that, dhomas. People were unhappy that there was no public countdown at the Old Port and then only a few fireworks at midnight. At least some of the crowd must have left after that, but then a full firework display started at 1 am, from over on the islands. I’ve not yet seen any explanation why it was delayed like that, and whether it was a mistake or a choice.
Maybe someone forgot to set their clocks back in the fall? (Not sure if that even makes sense, time change confuses my brain)
I don’t know why it’s so hard to think about, MarcG, but it is.
I had to think it out: if they hadn’t set their clock back, it would’ve read as midnight when it was really 11 pm, and the fireworks would’ve gone off an hour early, rather than an hour too late.
Nice to know it’s not just me! Your description makes sense.
What’s open and closed over the New Year holiday.
The house of Charles Daudelin in Kirkland burned down on Sunday night. It was also the studio of the sculptor, who died in 2001, and whose works can be seen in various places around town. The building was empty and the CBC says it isn’t thought to have been arson.
I have been past that lot countless times without ever knowing there was a building there.
The photo down the page on the CBC link shows a very low‑key sort of structure in unpainted weathered wood. It probably looked like an old shed if you happened to notice it, not a dwelling.
It’s a very large lot off Ste Marie, and from that street it looks like an undevelopped wood
Quebec’s culture minister, Mathieu Lacombe – and isn’t it a tribute to the CAQ that I’ve never seen his name in the news before – assures us that the Grande Bibliothèque will be able to enlarge even as it sells land to Hydro‑Quebec. This is even though the cash being transferred from Hydro is going to be used for the conversion of the old Bibliothèque Saint‑Sulpice into the Maison de la chanson et de la musique du Québec and not for general library purposes at all. This whole piece drips with convenient political bullshit justifying plunking an electrical substation down next to the library.
I keep seeing complaints about this substation, but don’t see any alternatives. The substation is nearing its end of life, and needs to be expanded to provide for increased power consumption from more downtown buildings and electric vehicles. It needs to be in the centre of the electrical zone (I’m sure it could go slightly outside this circle, but too far and the power losses are too high), and they looked at all the potential sites and this, to them and me, seems like the best choice. They didn’t want to expropriate buildings, and the other identified sites had other issues (technical, historical, planned other uses (housing)). There is also a green space diagonally across the street from the library, and others nearby.
I’m open to other locations, but I think it’s incumbent on people opposing this location to suggest an alternative. This is not a nice to have, but an essential piece of infrastructure for our future downtown. Sometimes there are no good options, just less bad ones.
Also, given that the Berri substation has been there for decades, in a way they plunked a library down basically next to the substation.
Is there no church inside that whole perimeter that could be taken down, the substation built, then the church envelope and steeples reconstructed around it to disguise it?
Surprisingly, no! There is the Spanish church at Roy and Berri that is about ¼ in that circle, and then there’s also a church in the 13 storey building at de Maisonneuve and St Timothée where the vaccination centre is. If you wanted to expand the circle slightly more you could tear down the UQAM chapel. If we’re willing to tear down some triplexes we could put it there, but given the complaints about tearing down one in Rosemont for the STM, I don’t think that would be more popular. Even giving a subsidized apartment to a woman in a derelict building took years. It turns out that downtown has a lot of stuff already!
Build it elevated over top of the Berri street on the hill between Ontario and Sherbrooke streets.
Just when we need a disused church, we can’t find one.
The southern part of ilot Voyageur just across the street had been proposed many times. The City has gone ahead and greenlit another type of development there recently. I wonder if they were keeping it in on ice with hopes of Hydro accepting it for this project and finally gave up.
To be fair, the issue with the triplex in Rosemont being torn down for the STM is not about tearing down the building. It is an issue of compensation. The amount they offered that family for their plex was laughable. They would never be able to buy anything in that area with the amount they were offered. The STM has limited funds and likely cannot afford appropriate compensation. Hydro-Quebec, on the other hand, made over 3 billion dollars last year…
DavidH, if you click on my second link you’ll see a brief description of the sites they looked at and why they didn’t choose the others (second page on right). It says they talked to the city about using Ilot Voyageur, but the city preferred to use it for housing.
There are many things wrong with the STM project in Rosemont. The triplex was not even the preferred site, that was the front lawn of the provincial juvenile court. The citizen group on facebook has uncovered lots of really telling documents about the STM’s faulty proceedings. They have been doing stellar journalistic work (and activism). Basically, STM were told by Quebec that since they are the main landowner in the area and have lots of unused land that seem more appropriate, they had to show they had properly considered the land they already own before building on land owned by the province. They never followed suit and produced an internal report saying the triplex was a better choice because it was cheaper and turned to forcing a family to give up real estate instead of the provincial government. It’s cheaper because they have to dig a few meters less but mostly because they offer 530 000$ to buy the land and building when comparables nearby go for literally a million $ more.
It seems very clear that they never expected public scrutiny on that project. Every new documents unveiled reeks of amateur hour and bad faith. They have to redo many of these ventilation structures in the coming years because of changing standards. It’s good that this will force them to do better diligence onwards (hopefully).
Nicholas, I know. But if that was really the only thing they were considering, why wait so many years before doing it? It really seems like they waited on the Hydro thing being finalized before launching the public proceedings for housing projects. Otherwise, why not include it in UTILE’s project on the north side or offer it to other developers as they finally did. Those after the facts documents never tell the whole story as we know. It’s a summary skewed to justify the final position.
Kate, I don’t know if your own comments qualify for the calendar but that last one gets a vote from me.
Thank you, MarcG!
Le Devoir challenged readers to tell them why they love Montreal and summarizes some of the answers here.
Thanks, thiis is a really nice piece, a welcome change. If there’s anything that unites the readers (and writer) of this blog, it’s probably our love for this city.
According to Montreal Weather Records, Monday is the warmest December 30 since records began in 1871.
Tents are beginning to reappear along Notre‑Dame East, where encampments were evicted a month ago.
La Presse tracked down the history and fate of a legendary Rolls‑Royce from its purchase by local magnate J.W. McConnell, to its eventual home in Switzerland. And was it used to ferry King George VI around town during his 1939 visit?
Shelters for the unhoused have been billed thousands for calling in false alarms to the fire department, a practice which is coming to an end – the billing, that is.
As noted in comments below, and because we’re not getting much other news on a Sunday between holidays, it’s a foggy Sunday morning.
Environment Canada now saying it’s smog…
It was foggy like that in the very early hours of Thursday and Friday morning. Like pea-soup fog at 4:00AM. (At least that’s how it was chez moi.)
Joey, the Environment Canada weather page has both a smog warning and a fog advisory up, at just past noon.
…It’s unusual for a fog/smog to last this long into the day. I’ve just been wandering around a very wet Jarry Park, enjoying the foggy soggy atmosphere, but the rain began to pick up towards 3, so I came home.
by definition in the city can’t any fog be considered smog? The same atmospheric conditions that trap fog trap everything in the air, no?
I was under the impression that it used to be that smog was more of an issue to report when there was no fog, since what you were seeing was not in fact fog, but JUST pollutants.
It feels like about a decade ago every time we got fog there was an alarmist report in the weather of a smog warning. and that new approach never stopped. Did the definition change or was it just that people weren’t realizing that there was fog and smog at the same time? Or is there some other reason?
TBH I think there is value in reporting smog and fog as separate phenomena as smog is an air quality issue and fog is a visiblity issue, but what do I know.
You can have smog without fog and fog without smog, so they’re two completely different phenomena. Sometimes you end up with both like yesterday and today.
I was in Beijing in 2015 when it still had very bad air quality issues (apparently things have massively improved) and a new weather front moved in, bringing a huge cloud of pollution with it. The haze was so thick you couldn’t see to the end of the street – but it was bone-dry out with virtually no humidity. Definitely not fog.
A nice series of before‑and‑after photos of city scenes from La Presse photographer Hugo‑Sébastien Aubert.
Wondering about the caption on the last one: “Un autobus de feu la Commission de transport de la Communauté urbaine de Montréal (CTCUM), ancêtre de la STM, se dirige vers l’ouest, rue Craig, devenue depuis Saint‑Antoine.” No year is given for the photo, but the Communauté urbaine de Montréal (and thus the CTCUM name) began in 1970, and I’m certain that photo’s from an earlier date. Earlier names for the transit commission are listed on this Wikipedia page.
Kate, I think you’re right this couldn’t have been CTCUM, but MTC or CTM, probably the latter.
The two buses in the photo were put into service in 1946, based on the serial numbers and the incredible resource of the CPTDB Wiki, which was the Montreal Tramways Company era, surely continuing onto CTM. Unfortunately it doesn’t have an end date for either, but 24 years is a long time, though not impossible.
Second, the bus stop signs suggest earlier as well. This STM history page has a number of photos with bus stop signs. The kind in the La Presse photo, a hollow circle with a cross in the middle, are found in a 1953 STM photo, but by 1956 they have replaced the signs with a solid disk. (Obviously it may have taken some time to replace all the signs, but for such a prime location downtown, you’d think it’d have been done quickly, not a decade and a half.) Go back to 1943 and you can find a photo almost identical to the La Presse one (same location, same St Hubert line, same sign), just a few years earlier.
I’m also reliably told the clothes look early ’50s.
You can just make out “Tramway” on the sign in this better version of the photo, so ti was the time of the Montreal Tramway Company. And the image name seems to indicate it was taken in 1943.
https://www.stm.info/sites/default/files/histoire/hb2_1943_3-943-002_bus_acf_ligne_saint-hubert.jpg
And here’s the color scheme:
https://www.stm.info/sites/default/files/histoire/hb2_1947_s5-10.3_bus_twin_coach.jpg
Wonderful research from both of you. Thanks!
Were the CTCUM and the MUCTC the longest French-English mirror-image acronyms ever in common use in Montreal?
They definitely beat MUHC and CHUM.
MUHC and CHUM are two different places.
It gets even more confusing if your doctor tells you to come to MUCC (Medical Urgent Care Clinic).
Kevin: true, but they are a kind of mirror image, conceptually.
I tried to work out if CIUSSS has a reverse version, but it doesn’t. Is CIUSSS the longest acronym in common usage here?
Tied with CNESST.
Ah yes, the TSSENC!
A warning of freezing rain is in effect till Sunday. There’s a thin precipitation and a nasty greasy feeling on the sidewalks Saturday afternoon, not quite icy yet, but not a great walking surface either.
I found walking very difficult and slipped a bit and wrenched my knee. But not as bad as they said it would be, and I guess it will all melt away.
It’s foggy on Sunday morning but I don’t see the ice we’ve been warned about. I hope your knee isn’t seriously injured!
lt twinges but I am not concerned, thank you.
Air quality is pretty trash for anyone thinking of going for a jog with their crampons.
Super foggy around here at 10 am Sunday, and it rarely gets like that here because this is practically dead centre on the island.
Despite the air quality I saw a bunch of boneheads jogging up the middle of Hutchison this morning, which struck me as a terrible idea given the poor visibility.
Nick Rizzuto Jr was gunned down exactly 15 years ago on Upper Lachine Road. TVA’s investigators claim that Frederick Silva, the gun‑for‑hire that’s been singing like a canary, has admitted he was involved in the murder of Ducarme Joseph to avenge the death of Rizzuto Jr. They don’t say exactly what “le rôle qu’il a joué” was, but there are only so many ways you can be present when a gangster ends up dead.
Mozai 13:32 on 2025-01-01 Permalink
If there were alternatives to the Emergency Room to get help, I’m certain the overindulgent would use them first. Alas, the ER seems (and I am told by clinic staff) to be the only option if you are ill outside normal business hours.
jeather 00:32 on 2025-01-02 Permalink
I just read the Defector roundup for “what did we do to our penises” and last week “what did we put in our orifices” so “I ate too much turkey” would be much preferable.
carswell 05:24 on 2025-01-02 Permalink
A friend who’s an ER physician at the Glen reports they’re seeing a surge in bad cases of pneumonia.
Kate 09:43 on 2025-01-02 Permalink
jeather, thank you for introducing me to Defector. I am once again glad I do not have vulnerable organs dangling outside my body.
MarcG 09:46 on 2025-01-02 Permalink
The word ‘pneumonia’ is difficult. We tend to think of it as something unto itself like Covid or Influenza but it’s really a description of lung inflammation symptoms that can be caused by an assortment of bacteria, viruses, or fungi. Influenza started late this year and is really surging right now, RSV is worse than last year, and Covid’s baseline is always high, and all 3 of those are common causes. What’s worse, having a viral infection can increase your risk of a bacterial infection. Unfortunately we don’t track the Mycoplasma pneumoniae bacteria (AKA walking pneumonia) in Canada but there’s been a huge increase in the US and UK recently so most likely the same thing is happening here.
Joey 12:44 on 2025-01-02 Permalink
@MarcG that’s precisely it. Our household was sick from early November to Christmas, with multiple people having multiple peaks to their various respiratory illnesses. Fortunately we seem to have avoided full-blown pneumonia, but not by much. I gather this kind of thing has been pretty common.
GC 13:36 on 2025-01-02 Permalink
I can speak from experience, unfortunately. I was pretty sick in mid-October, with what I assumed was a cold or Covid. After two painful weeks, I was mostly better. Except the cough never went away completely and got worse again mid-December. So, I went to my doctor and found out I had pneumonia. Was it Covid that turned into pneumonia or pneumonia the whole time? Hard to say, but it sure was a frustrating two months. It was bacterial, so I was able to take antibiotics. And…I think it’s gone now?
Tee Owe 14:45 on 2025-01-02 Permalink
@GC – how did they determine that it was pneumonia? I ask because a family member has had similar symptoms, was tested negative (in October) for mycoplasma and Covid – would be nice to see it gone
CE 15:17 on 2025-01-02 Permalink
My girlfriend and I came down with some classic mild colds between Christmas and new years. Our symptoms felt kind of quaint.
GC 15:49 on 2025-01-02 Permalink
Tee Owe, after listening to me breathe, my doctor was pretty sure that was what it was. But, we did an x-ray to be sure. In retrospect, I’m not sure how we knew it was bacterial rather than viral. Maybe it looks different on the x-ray?
MarcG 16:43 on 2025-01-02 Permalink
I have an old friend who I chat with every couple of weeks, and he, like most people, stopped taking any disease prevention measures after getting the Covid vaccine, and, also like most people, he and his family have been sick with a variety of ailments basically all of the time since. Around the start of 2023 he caught something that left him with a nasty cough. Some months later I mentioned to him that it was still hanging around. He and his family and friends and workmates had gotten used to it so no longer noticed and he was thankful to me for pointing it out. His doctor diagnosed walking pneumonia and prescribed antibiotics. Since it started two years ago, we’ve had one phone call where he didn’t cough at all. When we spoke today it seemed worse than last time. I don’t have the heart to say anything.