The city has apologized to Christopher DiRaddo, the writer who requested a library room for his book club but was initially turned down because he wasn’t offering simultaneous translation of any English discussion into French. But the city has turned to Quebec for more guidance, so there may be explicit policy on this matter soon.
Updates from January, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A man was found unconscious in Rosemont Friday morning, and seems to have been victim of an attack, but the incident is still under investigation.
Update: The man has died in hospital and there’s no homicide number yet.
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Kate
A train crashed into a truck hauling ethanol and gasoline in St‑Laurent Friday morning. Nobody was hurt, but TVA says 8000 litres of fuel got spilled.
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Kate
Nearly 900 affordable housing units are under construction or newly available, 570 being already occupied.
DeWolf
In this case they’re talking about non-profit social housing, not “affordable housing” which is usually still part of the private market 🙂
Kate
Are they? The headline does, but the opening ‘graph says “Ce nouvel immeuble fait partie des 27 projets de logements à loyer abordable…”
MarcG
It sucks that journalists can’t stick to the accepted terminology when discussing housing.
Kate
It may be their fault, or the PR people may be blurring the distinction whether deliberately or not.
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Kate
Weekend notes from CultMTL, CityCrunch, La Presse.
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Kate
A city blue collar worker died on the job Wednesday in Rosemont–La Petite‑Patrie, but no further information is given here. On the Facebook page mentioned, the union gives condolences but no details.
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Kate
Details here on the new immigrant integration bill which includes forcing ethnic festivals to include Quebec content. Multiculturalism is “vicious”, apparently.
Is it just me, or is anyone else having trouble coping with this Quebec identity weirdness at the same time as economic threats are aimed at Canada from south of the border? I’m trying to keep my focus collimated on local news for the blog, but every time I pop open my media tabs, a torrent of alarming bad news floods out.
GC
SIGH. He already lost me at “made huge damage to the Quebec society.” What damage? How does he measure it? Can he demonstrate that it was *caused* by the law and not other factors in the past fifty years? I’d love for a journalist to challenge him on that, but of course the major news sources are mostly held together with duct tape these days.
Chris
>I’m trying to keep my focus collimated on local news for the blog
Appreciated! Only every other channel everywhere is non stop Trump. He’s genius at that.
>but every time I pop open my media tabs, a torrent of alarming bad news floods out.
When has it ever been otherwise? 🙁
Tim S.
I just figure Quebec nationalism is our shield against US expansionism.
Kate
Chris, we’ve never had the United States turning against us, and although Quebec has been flirting with identity politics for awhile, we’ve never seen it frame a law to demand that newcomers participate in Quebec culture either. And that’s leaving out all the international crises. These are exceptionally weird times.
Tim S., Quebec will be part of Canada’s defence, but it won’t be enough on its own.
Joey
Agreed, Kate. In the context of a US president who is hellbent on global economic war, the things that have seen so absurd the last few years, like PP talking about only being aware of two genders last week, seem even more batshit. Anyway, La Presse had a piece yesterday about the financing religious schools. I thought this passage is basically MAGA-QC (the quote is from Jean-François Roberge):
Le projet de loi prévoit d’ailleurs une modification à la Charte des droits et libertés de la personne pour « y énoncer que les droits et libertés de la personne s’exercent dans le respect du modèle québécois d’intégration nationale ».
« C’est parce qu’on voulait justement être certains que des personnes n’invoquent pas notre charte, nos lois québécoises pour essayer de faire invalider certains principes de cette loi fondamentale », souligne-t-il.
jeather
The Beaverton covered the US including Quebec.
jeather
It also says Quebecers have a duty to collaborate in welcoming people from different backgrounds and foster integration.
Maybe they could start by sending their kids to the same schools, that would help in integration.
Tim S.
Thanks jeather. I’ve seen a few of those but that one was pretty good!
Chris
>These are exceptionally weird times.
On a very recent time scale, I suppose. But (no disrespect), you should read more history. Things are not so exceptional now really.
Nicholas
On the topic of manifest destiny and US expansionism, the most recent Paul Wells Show podcast has its second part interviewing a prof whose research focus is this. I learned a lot, worth a listen (in general too). (Paul cut his teeth at the Gazette years ago, and occasionally Montreal things come through, but it’s mainly national/international issues, plus jazz.)
Meezly
This kind of thinking only makes sense if you’re xenophobic and feeled threatened by “foreigners” who are not like yourself. By that thinking, indigenous culture is even more threatened and should be protected, and the people were here first. Therefore, all Quebecois festivals should include indigenous content. But that’s not gonna happen.
Kate
you should read more history
Chris, I thought it was obvious that I meant exceptionally weird times that readers of this blog have experienced. Yes, the Black Death and the World Wars and so many other crises have been exceptionally weird times, but a worldwide pandemic followed by a general slide into fascism and a huge economic attack from the U.S. is new and weird for us.
Blork
On the plus side, 200 years from now, as the children of tomorrow scrape and scratch through the radioactive scrub land searching for six legged rodents to munch on, all of this will be forgotten. Instead, they’ll gather around their sparse little fires and keep the past alive through their only medium – oral history – and they will be consumed with religious fever over the lost world of the 21st century when the Marvel Universe characters tried to save us and apparently failed.
Uatu
Yawn. Hydro rates are up, overcapacity protocol in the ER, no family doctors, punishing tariffs coming up…. Time to pull out the ol’ cultural threats/language distraction again because it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Kate
Food’s going to get more expensive again soon, too.
bob
Same old same old – the elites bleed the place dry by cutting social services to the bone, privatize everything they can (most notably education and health care) and then blame Anglos, immigrants, and the RoC. They are basically the pre-révolution-tranquille fascist-friendly Church, privatized. The exploitations of the Church-demagogue nexus passed through a period of semi-socilist étatisme through to a neo-liberal rump state held together by adolescent ressentiment and bigotry.
Anton
Well, Canada did once burn down the white house… but that was like 200 years ago.
Annette
It was Britain that did it. The East Essex Regiment of Foot, the Royal Marines, under British-born Generals, etc.
Re: that Beaverton sentiment – I bet a white supremacist USA and Quebec ethnonationalists would have a lot to talk about. They burn the same fuel to maintain power. But the continent might suffer a scapegoat shortage were they to team up.
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Kate
A dog walker found a teenager lying dead in a park in Dollard‑des‑Ormeaux Thursday morning, and cops found a gun nearby, but whether it was homicide or suicide has not yet been determined, nor has the young man been identified.
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Kate
CBC profiles a medical translation service used by doctors in Park Ex treating people who can’t yet communicate in French or English. But CBC didn’t consult Quebec over whether this is an acceptable practice.
DeWolf
My doctor told me he uses Google Translate for many of his patients, which he admits is not ideal.
Joey
There are companies, like Voyce, that provide access to live interpreters who can provide live medical interpretation for these scenarios – they are active in Quebec (their website lists the West Montreal CIUSS and Maimonides as customers).
Somewhat relatedly, I took my kid to a walk-in clinic in the fall for some respiratory issues; the doctor asked us to consent to her using an app that would record, transcribe and (here comes the AI) summarize the visit, which she said would form the basis of (or, ideally, the entirety of) her notes, pending her review.
Kate
Wow.
I tried out DeepSeek this week and it made mistakes. Randomly, I asked it about an ancestor of mine (1790-1874) who wasn’t notable, but has had some historical writing done about him that I know about. DeepSeek told me all about a professor in Victoria, BC with a similar, but not identical name, who died a few years ago, and who isn’t, as far as I could tell, related to me.
It also told me that Notre-Dame in Montreal has flying buttresses, which it does not.
For these and other reasons I’m not sure yet about trusting medical analysis to AIs. An AI might think I had an ailment in the flying buttress.
Joey
I certainly wouldn’t trust a ChatGPT/DeepSeek style large language model with any kind of diagnostic task; the doctor I saw was basically using a transcription/summary tool that, I suppose, had been trained on things like anatomy and medical jargon. Just to be clear, the tasks that were being automated were basically administrative – listen to a conversation, transcribe it, and summarize it. There was no expectation that it would provide any diagnostic value, and the doctor made sure to explain that she would immediately review the notes to make sure they were OK. I would imagine the end result is the doctor gets decent quality patient notes instantly and in a fraction of the time it would take her to prepare them – the kind of automation that could actually reduce wait times if it created enough free time in enough doctors’ schedules.
I suspect there already exist products that would adapt or augment these kinds of tools to help provide pre-visit support; you could imagine a tool that reads a patient’s file and guides the doctor on how to conduct the next appointment. Of course the major risk is that doctors will over-rely on their tools and lose their critical thinking instincts or some intrinsic knowledge of their patients if they are effectively outsourcing their documentation practice (I would love to learn more about the the relationship between a doctor’s memory abilities and their patient outcomes). Then again, maybe the AI would catch something the doctor wouldn’t – or maybe AI generally will be able to more effectively predict illnesses based on patterns that the typical human brain can’t analyze.
jeather
I would, probably, trust a transcription tool (as I don’t have a second language accent which reduces accuracy); I would not, at this time, trust anything that claimed to summarize.
MarcG
A pretty shocking study came out recently that compared accurate diagnosis by doctors with conventional resources vs doctors with conventional resources and AI vs AI by itself. Doctors with AI scored slightly higher than without (76% to 74%) but AI by itself won by a landslide (92%).
DeWolf
The AI transcription services I have used are remarkably good — light years better than automated transcription used to be — but it’s a very different beast to generative AI that creates “original” content.
Kevin
MarcG
That seems to me like it’s more of a study on how doctors with enough time to spend hours participating in a study did during simulated exams, which is still a fairly novel way of training medical students.It would also be easy for the AI to pick up on one particular key word said by the actor/subject, while a poorly-trained /guided actor could inadvertently hide their disease under assorted complaints.
In any case, one study is one study
MarcG
For sure it’s just one study and I’m not generally a big fan of AI, but it does seem like medicine is one realm that it could be put to good use. For example, machine learning is being leveraged to make the scoring system used to decide who gets a liver transplant more accurate and equitable.
MarcG
An op-ed published today on the subject of medical AI, and one of the author’s substacks that’s worth a follow, that references 6 studies that resulted in AI outperforming doctors w/ AI.
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Kate
The STM has removed a bus shelter on St‑Laurent near St‑Antoine – just south of Chinatown, and across from the Old Brewery Mission – because it was often occupied by the Mission’s habitués, and, reading between the lines, also used by them as a toilet.
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Kate
The story about infitrators scaling St Joseph’s Oratory is making the rounds, sparking warnings against the hazards.
Tux
Thanks for not calling then urban explorers. This new breed of thrill-seeking trespasser that posts videos on public social media, usually with toes right on the ledge of a 30 story building and set to awful music, are just not urban explorers as I’ve always understood them.
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Kate
The city is finally cracking down on short‑term rentals, providing for serious fines for renting at all outside the summer season, and for the hiring of more inspectors.
Joey
Were we not told for *years* that the city was powerless to do anything other than complain to Revenu Quebec since it had no tools at its disposal to deal with short-term rentals? So what’s changed? One day the executive committee can change the rules, introduce big fines and hire inspectors? WTF have they been waiting for?
Kate
Maybe the city’s lawyers found a way to get around existing laws?
Journalists ought to be reading this blog, and especially the comments, because it might give them better ideas what they should be asking the authorities!
walkerp
I’m hoping it’s because Plante has taken the gloves off now that she is no longer beholden to the corruption in the city service and the lobbying powers in the provincial government.
DeWolf
If that’s true it’s a pretty sad commentary on the state of municipal affairs in Montreal, but I’ve also noticed that since Plante announced she won’t run again her administration seems to be getting a lot more done.
thomas
This is a step in the right direction, but Airbnb itself should be held accountable for ensuring all listings comply with the law. For example, A $10,000 (or more) fine per illegal unit would incentivize them to take responsibility and actively prevent unauthorized rentals.
DeWolf
Would a foreign company like Airbnb even care about a municipal fine? They operate in countless municipalities around the world and if push comes to shove, they have an arsenal of lawyers and lobbyists to bat off things like that. My instinct tells me they’d ignore it like a tourist ignores a parking ticket.
I think targeting users is the right approach, because thousands of dollars in fines for a person or small business running an illegal Airbnb has a lot more impact than thousands in fines for a corporation worth US$82 billion.
Ian
@Joey very simply, they were lying.
@deWolf exactly, the problem is professional propert management companies that manage multiple units. Fine them into bankruptcy.
Joey
So if you currently own an apartment that you AirBnB (legally or illegally), it seems to me you have three options:
1. Stop doing short-term rentals and return your apartment to the normal rental stock
2. Keep it empty most of the year so you can cash in on short-term rentals between June 10 and September 10
3. Rent it out short-term year-round, with the period between Sept 10 and June 10 putting your at risk.The mayor is counting on most AirBnBers doing the first option. But if the potential revenue from summer AirBnB rentals is greater than the revenue from a long-term rental, these apartments will simply sit empty for nine months of the year (or will be rented out via AirBnB illegally outside of summer months).
Let’s play this out. Suppose you have an apartment you can rent for $2500 a month. In a year you’re getting $30K in revenue. Suppose you can rent it out via AirBnB for $400 a night during the summer months. If you can rent it out for 75 of the 92 days when it’s legal to do so, you’ll generate the exact same amount of revenue. You can see where this is going, right? Sure, there are other factors, such as higher marginal costs, like cleaning and marketing, with AirBnB. But the possiblity of getting stuck with a lousy tenant or being expected to follow rent control rules long-term has already been shown to be a deterrent to a lot of landlords. Plus if you show a loss it just helps you out with your taxes. Obviously this is just a thought experiment, but I’m not convinced this policy (which I want to support) is as going to work.
TLDR the economics of this proposal are such that it’s not obvious it will produce any meaningful change, besides provoking a fight with the provincial government.
thomas
Tempted to write a script that would automatically file a complaint with the OQLF for every Airbnb listing in Montreal. Since they seem to have plenty of inspectors, this could create a major hassle for the owners.
jeather
Using them as a force for good. I Like it.
Kate
Joey, I saw your challenge on this point to Alex Norris on Facebook. Which he sidestepped. The real question is why this wasn’t considered more seriously as a loophole before the law was passed.
Joey
Yeah, I was somewhat reassured to hear that at least they are aware that landlords may choose to keep their places vacant to benefit from summertime short-term rentals – I’m not as sanguine as he is, but that’s not a surprise. What did surprise me was the admission that the city has had considerable powers all along, and just chose not to use them. I was under the impression that there was a new provincial law that allows cities more freedom to establish both rules and consequences for violating them. In hindsight, basically everything Projet has done on this file – Richard Ryan removing lock boxes attached to city poles, haranguing Revenu Quebec, etc. – was a complete and utter failure. The idea that they could have banned short-term rentals all along and hire inspectors to issue significant fines – and that they juts chose not to – is absurd.
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Kate
This article promises to explain the invasion of wild turkeys but, like most alterations we’re seeing in the natural world, the answer is simple: climate change.
Blork
I saw a bald eagle in Longueuil a couple of days ago! (Not even kidding.)
steph
Pics or it didn’t happen. 🙂
Blork
I have one pic but by then it was too far away, and flying with its butt towards me, so you can’t tell what it was.
Kate
It’s fleeing Trump’s America.
CE
I’m in London right now and last night saw a fox walking down the street. Not sure if it’s a common sight in the city but it surprised me!
Kate
I listen to BBC stuff a bit, and references to urban foxes eating garbage and so on are pretty usual. They don’t have raccoons, so they have foxes.
CE
I kind of wondered if the fox were equivalent to seeing a racoon or skunk in Montreal.
Kate
I think yes, pretty much.
MarcG
My wife was walking by the river in Verdun a few days ago and saw 2 dogs playing together pretty far out on the ice. She looked around for their owners to suggest that maybe it was dangerous but before she knew it the “dogs” were coming straight towards her and they were foxes. One of them came kind of close and looked at her but then they both ran off. Scared the shit out of her. Lots of beavers down there again this year as well, but they’re fat and cute and only interested in eating wood.
DeWolf
@CE London is famous for its foxes! I think the first time I’d ever seen a fox was in a random part of London. They’re kind of weird.
DeWolf
Incidentally, all this talk of urban fauna reminds me of the first time an Australian friend of mine visited Montreal. He was very weirded out by the local wildlife, namely squirrels and raccoons. And he didn’t even see any turkeys.
(If you think about it objectively, many North American animals are just as strange as we imagine Australian animals to be.)
MarcG
It’s fun to visit Beaver Lake in the summer and watch tourists freaking out over squirrels.
Ian
@Blork I saw one in Ste-Anne in early winter flying over the McGill campus fields. I was driving though so no pix sadly. There’s lots of hawks but that’s the first eagle I saw.
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Kate
In decline since the pandemic, the Tohu
circus schoolfaces a deficit of $2 million.Orr
TOHU, the theatre and public space, is not part of the geographically adjacent L’École nationale de cirque.
They do host the graduating students’ professionally-produced year-end show at end of may, which is always a good event to go and see.Kate
Thank you, Orr. Since they’re contiguous I had taken them to be parts of the same installation.
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Kate
People involved in providing sheltering for the unhoused population are cited here as criticizing the city’s improvised warming centres as unsatisfactory offerings. One man is quoted saying “If you were to say that our hospitals could look like that, there would be an (outcry).”
I wonder what Sam Watts really said instead of “outcry” and whether the Gazette’s readership would clutch its pearls if his words were quoted directly.
jeather 17:46 on 2025-01-31 Permalink
As per Toula Drimonis:
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a City of Montreal librarian told me a similar story, this time involving Spanish-speaking parents wanting to organize a children’s story time in Spanish. “Bill 96 prevents us from conducting any public or administrative events that aren’t in French,” the librarian told me.
Imagine if it were in Arabic.
Kate 19:13 on 2025-01-31 Permalink
If Bill 96 doesn’t, the new Roberge law very well might.