The Gazette looks over candidates for the mayoralty at the start of a year that’s going to include a lot of municipal politicking (as well as other kinds).
Projet already has six people vying to lead the party, while Ensemble has found no one eager for its equivalent position. I’m almost prepared to bet that, come November, Projet will be facing an entirely new party rather than squaring off against the remnants of Coderre’s old posse again.
There have been two more arrests in the May 2023 shooting of Claudia Iacono in the parking lot of the salon she owned in Côte‑des‑Neiges. That makes four people accused of involvement in her murder.
I’m sinning here, Kate. This post is in no way related to this item but I was so excited at seeing your favourite word featured on my favourite language-related mailing list that I just had to share. If you look up the A.Word.A.Day webpage you will see “cromulent” along with its pronunciation, definition, etymology and even a clip from the Simpsons episode where it originated in 1996. So I need wonder no longer.
Janet, that’s terrific. But I also notice that A Word A Day had Lower Slobbovia this week. I don’t remember reading Li’l Abner as a kid – its political satire would’ve escaped me anyway – but the weird thing about the entry is that the quote cited, from The Ottawa Citizen, is by a woman who was one of my high school teachers before she branched out into journalism.
Wonderful coincidence.
It’s odd to read a grim headline like Homicides au Québec: la sombre tendance se maintient against Fewer homicides in Montreal last year (this refers to 2023) and Homicides in Canada dropped in 2023.
If only humans had evolved to be excited by facts rather than dangers… or alternatively, capitalists found a way to profit from calm understanding rather than fear and rage.
You get your occasional Galileo…
They don’t mention that Quebec is the North American juridiction with the least homicides proportionnally to its population. Wouldn’t fit with their narrative I guess…
The narrative that police need more funding, Benoit? Or something else?
Likewise, is it truly news that January will be colder?
It hardly seems like news: Montrealers waiting hours to be seen in hospital ERs. Every year the holiday season is followed by headlines like Most Montreal ERs over capacity.
CBC has a brief video about the causes of smog days with nothing new, basically saying it’s mostly wood‑burning stoves and fireplaces, as usual.
I would be interested in seeing an actual study on this rather than an opinion. I find it hard to believe that wood smoke was the cause of the most recent episode in particular. The Environment Canada rep says it’s because people use wood when the temperature drops but it was quite warm when we had that last one. Also, anecdotally, I hardly ever smell wood smoke in the city anymore but we have more cars on the road than ever. Why is it that in these pieces no one ever mentions vehicle emissions? Logically it seems like the place to start.
I wonder too. Relatively speaking, how many residential units in town have wood‑burning stoves or fireplaces? But it’s totally the party line.
I half expect it to come out sometime in future that Big Oil is behind these purported studies.
Cars have much better pollution emissions than they used to, so while the number of cars are up, the total pollution from them is not (not even counting electric cars). I think the timing is instructive: while in the past we got smog days in summer and winter, now it’s almost exclusively winter. And this smog, specifically, came on Christmas Day. That’s a day when car use but especially diesel truck use, which is much worse than gasoline for particulate pollution, is down, because of the holidays. And this year it was not very cold, and has been colder on other days that didn’t have smog, so heating for warmth seems unlikely, especially as fireplaces don’t do much for warmth for a whole house. Oil heating is pretty uncommon in Quebec, unlike the Maritimes.
The most likely explanation is that people get together for the holidays, want the nostalgia of a wood fire, and figure what harm could one more fireplace do?
On a calm winter evening, my neighbourhood smells like a campfire. The cats come in and you can smell the smoke on their fur. Despite the bylaw (presumably not vigorously enforced), smoke is easily observed coming from various residences, and deliveries of firewood are only somewhat covert.
The particulate matter added to the air from these sources is considerable, and while it may not be identifiable by smoky smell in other neighbourhoods, it is definitely contributing to the smog that blankets the city during the winter. It used to be that a significant portion of Montreal’s summer smog came from coal-burning power plants in Ontario and Ohio, so it’s not any great leap to conceive that particulates from much closer sources of wood smoke could be significant factors in winter smog.
No doubt vehicles also produce particulates, not just from the tailpipe but also wearing down of tires and road salt and aggregate dust thrown into the air. There is perhaps an element of what is politically possible in focusing on wood stoves as vehicle owners are more numerous and prone to feelings of entitlement, but it is also undeniable that the smoke produced by wood stoves, especially in older models with less efficient combustion or when using insufficiently dried wood, produce high levels of both particulates and other noxious combustion byproducts, so the bylaw to control them has been a positive one, however incomplete the process.
Note that there is at least one study on the matter available in English through the city’s website.
I had to drive to my parents’ place to celebrate on Christmas Day. I was not alone. The met was like rush hour traffic. Maybe less diesel trucks, though.
About wood fires, I have a fireplace. I think the law banning wood burning heating was passed in 2015? That’s almost 10 years now. I haven’t even “ramoné” my chimney since then. I would expect I’m not alone in this regard. My parents used to love roasting chestnuts on the fire for Christmas. Even they have stopped since the law came into place.
All that said, I know I smelled wood burning in RDP in December (not around Christmas, though), when I was in the area. It was so unusual, though, that I noticed it. I don’t think it’s all that common anymore, though I’m open to be proven wrong.
Not denying there are some. I wonder how much attention is paid to all the mansions around Outremont and Westmount that almost certainly have fireplaces and use them. Imagine knocking on their doors and issuing them fines. Not likely!
You can use a fireplace, even in Montreal proper, as long as it is certified to be low emission. (You cannot use it during smog unless there is also a power failure I believe.) Westmount etc are very happy to issue fines if you are using an illegal fireplace, and I would bet they know who is certified because you have to get a permit to change it.
If the city actually enforced the no idling laws on commercial vehicles including large trucks & delivery vans I bet pollution would go down noticeably almost right away, but they don’t. Same with doiuble parking, bliocking intersections, etc. which they often do while also idling – but then again even the cops sit around idling in their cruisers.
Given that we know that the study that made the city decide to ban wood fireplaces was based on flawed data as one of their main monitoring stations was next to a wood burning pizza oven I too would like to see some real data explaining how smog downtown is from the small handful of fireplaces in well-off neighbourhoods, especially as jeather points out, they are heavily regulated.
The pizza oven is interesting because while on the one hand it clearly skewed the reading for that area’s overall air quality, the fact that one wood burning source could affect the reading that much makes it clear just how significant even a single source’s combustion emissions are.
According to the city’s report on air quality in 2023, emissions of particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (that is, the really small stuff that can get deep in your lungs) were 40% from transportation, 37% from wood heating, 18% industry and 5% commercial wood cooking. Presumably, people aren’t wood heating in the summer, while the other 3 are year-round activities, so we can infer that wood heating is the largest source in the winter.
I’m skeptical that the city enforces the wood stove bylaw any more vigorously than it enforces the idling bylaw (even though it should be easier), but in any case I’m equally in favour of stricter enforcement of both, and generally in favour of measures to reduce the use of personal motor vehicles in the city. It’s not a one or the other choice.
@Kate, in addition to Outremont and Westmount don’t forget TMR. My employer has a wood fireplace in TMR and uses it.
Hampstead also has fireplaces galore (their bylaw banned efficient stoves, not the fireplaces that are used on every chilly evening).
As for smog days, in Montreal they are most often the product of a temperature inversion caused by a slow-moving polar front, or from a mass of cold air coming up from the Great Lakes, in both cases without any precipitation.
The PPMs from transportation are mostly caused by marine engines and 18-wheeler brakes and tires, not passengers cars.
Even the smoggiest days today would have felt like a breath of fresh air around the turn of the century (19th to 20th). Imagine how the air looked like when every single triplex, house, and business was burning wood or coal not just for heating but also cooking. Add to that all the factories along the canal and waterfront spewing out smoke. Cars would have started to make an appearance adding to the pollution. Then add in the general miasma of horse shit, poorly ventilated sewerage, rotting animal corpses, tanneries, slaughter houses, incinerators etc. We don’t have to much to complain about these days.
CE, that’s a good point. My mother grew up in a Point St Charles flat in which the coal stove functioned, as you say, both for heating and cooking. Through winter it was crucial to keep the fire banked so it didn’t go out overnight. Coal deliveries were so important that it’s one of the main reasons the older parts of the city were built up with back alleys.
Checking the 1935 Lovell directory at random, there are almost 200 “coal dealers – retail” from Adams to Zelenko, all over town. I worked in an office in the Nordelec in the 1990s and, from curiosity, investigated how many coal dealers still existed. There was one, in the Point somewhere, as I expected. It’s almost certainly gone by now.
The 2025 incident map has lost its innocence with the torching of a car early Friday in eastern Ville‑Marie. Radio-Canada records the torching of two cars now. We’re off!
Nicholas 20:03 on 2025-01-03 Permalink
That’s a good bet, Kate. But the longer they wait, the harder it will be. A spring federal election would open up a few MPs.