Mélanie Joly, currently federal foreign affairs minister and MP for Ahuntsic‑Cartierville, has announced she won’t be running for leadership of the federal Liberals. The vote for that role will take place March 9.
Updates from January, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Following from a recent story about Lachine tenants living in an apartment building with neither heat nor hot water, residents of a building in Côte St‑Luc are facing similar conditions. But will that town intervene as Lachine borough did?
DeWolf
Incidental to the story, but this apartment building is on the strip of Macdonald Avenue that is a weird little exclave of Côte-St-Luc. It is developed at quite a high density and stands out from the surrounding blocks, which are in CDN and Hampstead respectively. ProposMontréal has a post about its history:
https://proposmontreal.com/index.php/cote-saint-luc-enclave/
Kate
What a complicated yet somehow trivial bit of local history.
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Kate
A law firm wants to lodge a class action suit in favour of people evicted from a pro‑Palestinian camp at Square Victoria last June. They want $30,000 for each person removed from the square for the traumatic manner in which police displaced them.
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Kate
Housing co-ops, which used to mostly attract people of modest means, are becoming more attractive to people of middle class incomes, now that the rise in rents is unstoppable.
Chris
Alternately stated: the middle class is now poor too. 🙁
Aside: “people of modest means”, oh boy. Kate, have you ever seen George Carlin’s rant on soft, impersonal, sterile, inhuman, euphemisms?
Kate
Chris, if I use blunt language, some don’t like it, and if I use more gentle language, others don’t like it.
In any case, the only person I’ve known well who lived in a co‑op was working the whole time, he wasn’t poor. It was just a good living arrangement. I’ve looked into co‑ops as well, although never taken the leap, and I’ve always had work. So I don’t equate them with welfare recipients, etc., hence my more inclusive terminology – for what it’s worth.
There’s some distance and a lot of people between those who need social housing and those who can buy a single‑family home. Co‑ops fit in there somewhere.
CE
I have friends who live in a co-op in Centre Sud. It’s a nice apartment, pretty standard plex on a quiet side street. They have to put up with some drama on the board and do some work to keep the place going but their rent is $430/month so it’s more than worth it!
Ian
I know a few people in co-ops. Business owners and professionals, all very middle class. I supect the old co-ops are for the poors thing went the way of $350 for a 3 1/2.
Blork
I remember when I learned about the co-ops in Milton Parc, back in the late 80s. Wonderful large well-kept apartments that were very affordable, in a neighbourhood I knew and liked. And then I found out the waiting list was a minimum of five years. Five years! So I didn’t apply. That was like 35 years ago, so I’d probably be in by now if I had bothered with the paperwork.
It’s funny how when you’re in your 20s “five years” seems like an eternity. Now if someone tells me something will take five years I think “better start preparing now because that five years will pass in a blink.”
CE
I think my friends were on the list for about that long. They basically had to wait for someone to die. A friend of theirs has lived in the co-op for a couple decades so I think that helped get them in. They’re both teachers so not poor but far from rich.
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Kate
Weekend notes from CultMTL, CityCrunch, La Presse, more general suggestions from TimeOut.
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Kate
Half of a detailed mural by Michel Rabagliati on the side of a bookstore on Mont‑Royal has been obliterated by a large tag. Not everyone is pleased.
PatrickC
Disgusting. The mural may be a bit too sentimental for avant-garde tastes, but it is charming and enhances the area. I’d be interested to know how the graffiti can be removed without affecting the underlying artwork.
Joey
The article ends with an explanation that murals are covered in a particular varnish that makes tag removal fairly straightforward.
Ian
throwies are as valid a part of urban visual texture as murals.
Blork 11:43 on 2025-01-10 Permalink
Something tells me nobody wants that job. The writing is on the wall, and nobody wants to be seen as the person who was clobbered at the polls by PP.
Joey 11:54 on 2025-01-10 Permalink
Our next mairesse…
Joey 11:55 on 2025-01-10 Permalink
The Globe is reporting that Freeland and Carney are in, blork…
MarcG 11:58 on 2025-01-10 Permalink
This seems to me like an excellent oppourtunity for the Liberals to rebrand – isn’t most of the hate directed at Trudeau himself, a lot of projected Conservative votes just anti-Trudeau votes? Replace him with someone intelligent but down-to-earth, discuss strategies to strengthen public services and fix the housing crisis, while addressing common disinformation talking points, and the race is yours. Maybe it’s easier said than done to find that person.
CE 12:30 on 2025-01-10 Permalink
Even with Trudeau gone, the Liberals will take a beating (although maybe not as bad now that they’ll have a different leader). PP will hammer on about how Freeland or Carney or whoever is still Trudeau with a new face. He was saying just yesterday that no matter who they choose, he’ll be “running against Justin”. I’m sure that’s a talking point he’ll stick to if it seems to be working.
Whoever becomes leader will be PM for a couple weeks and then have to languish in opposition for a few years and hope the tide has turned against the Conservatives.
Blork 12:37 on 2025-01-10 Permalink
I’d like to think MarcG is right, but I’m not convinced. I think we are beyond the point where anything political can be based on the assumption that people have good judgment and are able to think and reason when it comes to politics. Forget the 24-hour news cycle. We’re now in the era of the one-second news cycle (scrolling speed). Too many people can’t think beyond the memes they absorb and share.
ottawaowl 14:06 on 2025-01-10 Permalink
Delusions of grandeur or crass backstabbing politics? Does proficiency in official languages matter any more? Does my backbench lacklustre MP in suburban Ottawa really think he has a snowball’s chance of becoming Leader?
nau 14:11 on 2025-01-10 Permalink
The results of the next election are hardly set in stone. Remember that PP has never led a campaign. He’s not well known and hardly the most likable chap. The Liberals have taken the crucial first step in axing Trudeau. Now they need to pick someone at least as likable as PP, preferably more. Then they have to pillory PP. Say, tie him to Trump and his talk of the US subsuming Canada. Appeal to Canadian nationalism. The sort of low info Lib/Con switch voters who fled Trudeau may well be amenable to that line. After all, even Ford is making a show of standing up to Trump. Plus a dusting of MarcG’s approach, some “vote for us to save you from the Conservatives” scare tactics to pull in the low info progressive voters who don’t understand that the Cons don’t have any chance in their Lib. or NDP riding, and some broadly appealing progressive promises that they have no intention of following through on. It wouldn’t take a huge percentage shift in the Toronto suburbs and Quebec for the Liberals to gain back a bunch of seats, getting us back to the no one gets a majority status quo. Can they pull it off? Who knows? Maybe they don’t have enough time to stop the Conservatives’ momentum, but voters’ minds can change fairly quickly in an actual campaign. Especially when it’s just a matter of going back to the comfort of voting for the Liberals again.
carswell 14:26 on 2025-01-10 Permalink
Then they have to pillory PP. Say, tie him to Trump and his talk of the US subsuming Canada. Appeal to Canadian nationalism.
This could indeed prove to be PP’s Achilles’ heel — probably not enough to keep him out of the PM’s office but maybe to ensure it’s as head of a minority government. The Cons have, in fact, already given their opponents a gift. Former Conservative leadership candidate Kevin O’Leary recently travelled to Mar a Lago to discuss a union, including making the US dollar Canada’s official currency (i.e. relinquishing control over our economy). It was, he claims, on his own initiative but it’s hard to imagine he didn’t clear it first with Harper’s Mini-me.
https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/172144/20250108/trump-oleary-lead-talks-canada-joining-51st-state-mar-lago.htm
Kate 20:21 on 2025-01-10 Permalink
That’s chilling, carswell.
Tim S. 00:12 on 2025-01-11 Permalink
Nothing I’ve seen of Kevin O’Leary makes me think he asks anyone for permission before engaging in his weird (but apparently lucrative) stunts.
SMD 13:11 on 2025-01-11 Permalink
In all seriousness, Le Devoir has a handy explainer of how to become leader of the Liberal Party of Canada in six easy steps.
bob 13:14 on 2025-01-11 Permalink
Any move by PP for any kind of political union will mean instant death for his party. Free Trade was one of the things that destroyed its predecessor.
A new Liberal leader will probably give them a large bump in the polls, which will then turn a whole lot of marginal and not-so-marginal seats that are leaning conservative back to the Liberals, so that the huge majority predicted will shrink, maybe even to the point of being a minority government. Conservative messaging, especially social media astroturfing, has been so Trudeau-centric that switching at this point might force them to discuss actual policies, which they so far don’t seem to have. Absent the character assassination, their messaging is amateurish and goofy – recall their propaganda video farce featuring PP as cowboy Mr. Clean, with the cheapest possible stock footage of Russian jets, an American suburb, cattle grazing in California, people drinking wine in Tuscany – the list goes on, because his communications team is probably a third-rate Chinese AI bot. (Here’s a takedown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyiEWJZ7FmQ )
There is a long standing rule in Canadian politics – unlike the US – negative campaigns don’t work. The Conservative campaign so far has depended entirely, absolutely on turning disappointment and frustration into resentment and anger, and in the end it can only go so far. They have a base of angry crackpots, but the expansion in their vote share has not been by making Canada into a nation of angry crackpots. Their success is owning to the total failure of the other major parties to offer anything of real substance. The Liberals will not give people what we want, which is prosperity and in lieu of personal prosperity an actual social net, and the NDP, as usual, focuses on vague generalities and irrelevant specifics without offering any vision.
Tim S. 22:58 on 2025-01-12 Permalink
OK, so Kevin O’Leary meeting Trump doesn’t scare me. Danielle Smith, Jordan Peterson AND Kevin O’Leary on the other hand has me looking up the Quisling entry on Wikipedia.