The Globe & Mail has a piece on a dead mall in Longueuil whose owner sits back and lets it rot while the urban area needs that kind of land for housing. But the sanctity of private ownership is paramount.
Updates from January, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Julien Poulin, known for his performance as Elvis Gratton, has died. He was 78.
Jim
I watched those Gratton movies when I first moved to Canada in 2008, while waiting for my paperwork. I have to admit that besides the fact that they were really funny, looking back they unconsciously taught me a lot about people in Quebec and Canada. Coming from Amsterdam, I even felt we had a lot in common.
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Kate
La Presse has an important dossier this weekend on the swing to the right we’re going to be experiencing this year and in years to come. In a not unrelated theme, Le Devoir looks at growing hostility to journalists as distrust of fact is stoked by the right.
qatzelok
Distrust of fact, or distrust of the mainstream media industry?
Kevin
As pointed out in the previous thread, we now live in a polycentric society, and that is especially true when it comes to news.
There are many smart, otherwise educated people who pay no attention to daily news, ever. And who think that getting all sides of a story, or think the idea that a story can develop over time, is somehow evil or heretical.
H. John
Abacus Data’s David Coletto did a piece looking at the issue:
Beyond Left and Right: The Ideological Dimensions of Canadians and What it Means for 2025
https://abacusdata.ca/abacus-data-voter-segmentation-consumers-profiles/
nau
That Abacus Data is interesting for a couple reasons.
First, the largest group is the one that is progressive both economically and culturally. AD presents the “mixed” group as the biggest but these are people who are spread all over the 2-dimensional space AD has created. No other group contains people with such widely disparate views, so I discount this aspect of their analysis. There’s no policy that’s going to be attractive to everyone in that group. In contrast to what one might think if one has ever consumed legacy media, the smallest group is the economically conservative but socially progressive one.
Second, given that the double progressives are the largest group, one might think that this should bode well for the NDP. But no. While the double conservatives intend to vote 77% for the Conservatives, double progressives only intend to vote 40% for the NDP and almost 20% intend to vote for the Conservatives! And while 50% of double progressives self-place themselves as left or centre-left, 40% self-place as centrists? I mean, sure, on the grand spectrum where the left end is the Soviet Union and the right is Fascist Italy, we’re all centrists but that’s hardly relevant to the Canadian political landscape. While to a certain extent, people of all stripes are confused about how their values actually place them vis a vis other Canadians (i.e. they like the comfort of thinking they’re more centrist than they actually are), this is most apparent among progressives.
The other obvious point is that culturally progressive views are much less popular than economically progressive ones. The inverse holding true for conservative views, it’s hardly surprising why the Conservative party loves hiding their economic agenda behind the culture wars.
Of course, this is all based on a survey of only 1,500 Canadians, so necessarily must be viewed as a crude sketch.
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Kate
Bars and other businesses in the Quartier Latin had a meager holiday season and are facing hard times. It seems fewer and fewer people think of the area as a convivial place to hang out.
It isn’t mentioned in the piece, but this is yet another argument for giving Ville‑Marie its own elected borough council, rather than the poor semblance it’s had since that stupid spat between Gérald Tremblay and Benoit Labonté.* Ville‑Marie needs a more active council with people on board who will look after the core of the city as if it matters.
*The origins of this situation are explained in this piece from Le Devoir.
Joey
If nobody already wants to hang out in the QL, I doubt the work of some city councillors will change that. So much commercial discourse in this city refuses to acknowledge that there’s a natural variability in how desirable certain areas are. The QL may be disproportionately affected by the homelessness and drug problems affecting the city, but that’s not something the city administration has any answers for in any case.
Kate
Agreed, there’s not much understanding of urban churn. I recently saw a lot of blame thrown at the Plante administration for the decline of Prince Arthur, which ignored several important elements, notably that the decline started when the Main was extensively excavated, long before Plante, that some people want to socialize where they can park more easily, and that there’s more competition from areas like Wellington Street (which was moribund during Prince Arthur’s heyday) and, God knows, Dix30, which didn’t exist yet. The city is decentralizing as it grows.
Still, one of the points in the article is that people feel the QL is dirty and that garbage pickup has been poor. Paying better attention to that side of civic tidiness is not the answer, but it helps – viz. broken windows theory.
DeWolf
You’re right, Kate, that there’s a natural ebb and flow to these things, and Montreal is definitely more polycentric than it used to be. 20 years ago there were three areas for mainstream nightlife: the Latin Quarter/Village, St-Laurent/Prince Arthur and Crescent/Bishop. Now there are bars and music venues all over the place. The centre of gravity hasn’t so much moved elsewhere
When I first moved to Montreal, I distinctly remember the area north of the CPR tracks was extremely quiet at night. You had old-school dive bars and that was about it. Now I’m living on St-Zotique and I just looked at the map and added up all the bars, clubs and venues within a 25 minute walk of me: at least 46. That includes dive bars, buvettes, craft breweries, party bars, cocktail bars, live music venues and nightclubs. It’s much more dispersed than a true nightlife district like the Latin Quarter, but I’ll bet a lot of the kinds of people who were taking the metro to Berri-UQAM on a Saturday night before are going to Beaubien station these days.
Incidentally, and I’m not sure if this would improve the Latin Quarter’s fortunes, but I’ve always found it a waste that avenue Joly was treated like an anonymous back alley:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/CwfRkMzAD5WRRRAw7
When Just for Laughs was still held in the Latin Quarter, they would put a stage and a bar in Joly and transformed it into a really nice space. If you built something in the parking lots and opened up the back of the Saint-Sulpice library, you could create a really nice, intimate environment that might draw more people to the neighbourhood.
DeWolf
*the centre of gravity hasn’t so much moved elsewhere as disappeared completely
(didn’t finish my thought!)
Ramsay
I wonder what impact the changing habits of millennials (UQAM students) has in the area. They are supposed to be drinking less and spending less in entertainment in general than past generations
steph
With rents takes up a bigger portion of your personal income, who’s surprised that there’s less left over for for bars and restaurants.
It seems like people are choosing to spend their extra money on luxuries like groceries. /s
Chris
Ramsay, Millennials are around 35 years old now. You mean Gen Z I think.
Kate
DeWolf: Avenue Joly is such an anomaly in the street grid it always feels like a diversion into a European village. I didn’t realize JFL used it in that way.
steph is right: stepping out requires disposable income, and most of us are finding that our income has already been disposed of before we put on our fancy threads.
Ian
Not to mention the cost of groceries has gone up about 20% since 2022; those groceries ain’t cheap either.
Orr
The era of cheap fun is over unless it’s some sort of homemade / DIY fun.
Also the sdc means you don’t have to go out to a bar or related location to resupply your recreational consumables. That has to have had some kind of impact on bars.
But the big picture is afaik young people simply drink less booze.
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Kate
A building on Boulevard St-
LaurentDenis at Crémazie was torched Saturday evening, but neither piece indicates whether it was the same building that someone tried to burn last May or in May 2023, although it’s described as in a similar location – right at the corner, as shown in the photo from Radio‑Canada.David S
I think you meant to say a building on Saint-Denis, not Saint-Laurent.
Kate
Indeed I did. Thank you.
Chris 23:40 on 2025-01-05 Permalink
Let us know when you come up with a better system than private ownership. Many have tried, many have failed. It’s not perfect of course, and for that we have expropriation rules, which could be used here perhaps (as the article says). Or, someone could just pay him an amount where he wouldn’t say no.
Nicholas 01:13 on 2025-01-06 Permalink
Land value tax would fix this (unironically).
steph 07:59 on 2025-01-06 Permalink
“thousands of dollars in fines for violations of urban-planning rules and fire safety bylaws, which the owner ignores “. You can just “ignore” those?
dhomas 09:28 on 2025-01-06 Permalink
@steph The article says that the fines are all being contested. It could take years for those fines to work their way through the courts. Since the owner does pay their property taxes, the city is quite powerless here. If they had defaulted on the property taxes, the city could auction off the land.
From the tax records, this particular property hasn’t increased in value all too much from 2009, when the current owner purchased it, until 2024. Only about 15% increase in value over 15 years. In 2025, it is set to increase to 15.5M, which would be a 40% increase since the purchase. It might be a good time for the owner to sell now as it would likely be difficult to leverage the equity in a dead mall. Hindsight is 20/20, but the city should have probably purchased the land themselves back in 2009, if they wanted to develop it.
Ian 18:19 on 2025-01-06 Permalink
I’m with Nicholas on this, speculators are parasites. Punitive taxes are a win-win.
Chris 23:57 on 2025-01-06 Permalink
Sure, LVT is great and all, but it’s still atop of private ownership.
Ian 00:08 on 2025-01-07 Permalink
Unless you’re suggesting collective ownership at scale I’m not sure what the alternative would be. What are you proposing?
MarcG 12:03 on 2025-01-07 Permalink
I smell a strawman. Kate didn’t suggest the abolishment of private property she simply stated that we value it too highly and that it leads to problems.
Ian 18:44 on 2025-01-07 Permalink
To clarify, I was talking specifically to Chris’s point.
That said, I agree that this is one of those “if you don’t like this law I guess you want chaos” debate scenarios. Not so much a straw man as a false equivalncy, but still a bad faith argument.
There are lots of property reform approaches that are more equitable than doing, say, literally nothing. Ownership should and does incur responsibilities. Private ownership is not some kind of anti-society armour for property holders.
Orr 23:05 on 2025-01-07 Permalink
The fetishization of private property and relatedly, trespassing laws, has more than a whiff of the feudal era when property owners have rights the rest of us don’t have and we are subject to their rule more than they are subject to democratic rule. See also: we are “subjects” under a monarchy, not citizens in a republic.
Chris 00:29 on 2025-01-08 Permalink
>What are you proposing?
Not sure who you’re asking what exactly, but if that was to me, I’m not proposing anything. I’m basically asking Kate that very question, in response to her oft-repeated denigration of private property: what is she proposing that’s better than private property? Of course people have tried for centuries to answer this.
>Ownership should and does incur responsibilities. Private ownership is not some kind of anti-society armour for property holders.
Which of course is why the article discusses fines and expropriation, which our system has.