More than 20 phones were pickpocketed on Friday during the first weekend of Igloofest. There have been no arrests, and three weekends of Igloofest to come.
Updates from January, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Lachine mayor Maja Vodanovic, recently mentioned as a possible candidate for the leadership of Projet, has decided to drop out of the race and support Luc Rabouin instead.
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Kate
Business Insider has a travel piece calling this town a worthy dupe for Paris – a slice of Europe in Canada – and of course calls it Montréal throughout.
CE
A lot of Americans come to Montréal for a trip to Paris on the cheap and most of them aren’t disappointed. It’s easy to forget how “un-European” most cities in the US are.
Kate
Oh I know. These are just a type of cliché that mildly amuses me. Kind of like “the mighty St Lawrence”…
Nicholas
My friend and I have an ongoing saga of laughing at these click bait travel journals from Business Insider, and one author in particular, who can’t go more than a few sentences without an error. This one too: for example, she says flights from Orlando to Montreal are cheap, and then we find out she flew to Plattsburgh on Breeze. She then says, “I also could’ve flown directly from Orlando to Montréal on discount carriers, such as Breeze and Allegiant Air, or a major airline like Air Canada,” except Breeze and Allegiant don’t operate in Canada; the closest you can get to Montreal directly from Orlando on Allegiant is to Allentown, PA. Or “It has many French influences, and I especially liked its easily identifiable signs that matched the iconic ones seen throughout Paris.” There is one such sign, at Square Victoria, and one of the biggest complaints about the Parisian signs are they aren’t easily identifiable.
Blork
Hey! The St. Lawrence is mighty AF!
Orr
If you want to see what a mighty river looks like, a visit to Parc des Rapides gives you a front row view on what 11,000 cubic metres per second looks like.
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Kate
The TAL confirmed the predicted 5.9% rent hike guideline for this year on Tuesday. No explanation is given here why a hike in excess of inflation is meant to be acceptable.
DeWolf
Last year’s guideline was 4.6%, my landlord asked for 3.5%. We’ll see what happens this year but if they ask for anything close to 5.9%, I’ll be taking them to the TAL and we’ll see how it goes – I’m willing to see how a TAL judge justifies this outrageous recommendation.
DeWolf
With Duranceau in charge it’s pretty clear she leaned heavily on the TAL, but I guess with a makeshift rental board invented by the CAQ there are no real protocols in place for political interference.
Kate
The sheer cynicism of making a real estate agent minister of housing never ceases to outrage me. I mean, it’s the kind of thing if you put it in a satirical novel, they’d say it was too heavy‑handed.
steph
Everyone facing a rent increase should ask the landlord for the justifying documents to complete the calculation themselves. https://www.tal.gouv.qc.ca/sites/default/files/CSAL_2025_A.pdf
Tax rates are decreasing as property values go up, for a net tax increase that should result in a payment amount increase that is below inflation. Property insurance costs, on the other hand, is increasing well beyond the rate of inflation. With property values being nuts, they need to cover replacement values.
Jonathan
My understanding is that the 5.9% is what the TAL expects rent hikes to be based on all the expenses that landlords would have made over the last year and all the increases in related expenses (insurance, taxes, etc). The actual calculations remain the same.
Confusion around this percentage is exactly why they decided a few years back to stop publishing this figure. People understood it as a percentage that landlords can claim without justification.
yasymbologist
I rent out the other half of my small duplex to help cover part of the mortgage expense. I never followed those rent increase guides. Since the pandemic (2020 to 2024), I raised the rent by 3% in total. If the municipal tax hadn’t had a 25% increase from 2021 to 2024, I wouldn’t even bother to raise the rent.
Yes I have to spend a lot on the maintenance and repairing, but I don’t like using these as excuses for rent raising.Blork
DeWolf, I’m curious as to what your grounds would be for taking your landlord to the TAL if they ask for 5.9% given the TAL has authorized up to 5.9%. Asking sincerely.
DeWolf
I’d ask for the calculations first, of course. But property taxes in my area are going up by less than 2% this year, a fraction of previous years’ increases, and there have been no renovations and barely any basic maintenance on my apartment. The one wild card is insurance,
The last time I refused an increase, they sent me the calculations and negotiated the increase down from 3% to 2.4%. The most recent increase, they asked for 3.5% and I didn’t contest it because I knew taxes had gone up by 8% that year alone and inflation was still high. But there doesn’t seem to be anything that justifies a 5.9% this year.
(Note that I’m on a Feb 1 lease, which puts me at an advantage because I’m several months behind all of my neighbours, so I know what the landlord asked from them before I get my notice of increase. So any hypothetical rent increase will be in Feb 2026.)
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Kate
Cuts by the CAQ are threatening to cut off access to sport and leisure facilities on evenings and weekends all over Montreal.
Later story: City access to school leisure facilities is likely to end by February 1st.
Nicholas
This is such typical government ridiculousness. There are three levels of government here, and none of them want to pay for the staff member to be on site, so these facilities will remain unused. Maybe the cost should be passed on to the kids, because we don’t value subsidizing these sports and leisure activities, and only the rich kids can afford it, but we’d probably pay for it in the end with increased health care costs. And, as usual, because there are so many levels of government involved, the public is unsure who to blame, so there’s no accountability.
Kate
I hadn’t linked to a story from a few days ago about how CAQ cuts are also closing CEGEP programs without much warning, but it seems to fit into the same frame.
Are we so hard up that we have to curtail education and physical training like this?
Joey
Given the apparent current-year budget crunch, and the fact that Quebec has lots of expertise redirecting federal money, I kind of wish the CAQ had temporarily raised the QST to capture the foregone revenue from the temporary GST cut. No individual would have been worse off than just prior to the tax holiday (which was so sudden that nobody was planning for it or saving up for a big purchase) and the province could have netted hundreds of millions of badly needed dollars. Instead we get death by a thousand paper cuts…
dwgs
Evenings and weekends would be when most people use sport and leisure facilities, no? So the staff will oversee empty rinks and gyms from 9 to 5 then go home like everyone else? SMDH
steph
Dumping students mid program might be grounds for a lawsuit. How many of those people have taken on debt, sacrificed working hours for “half a program” of completed courses – a worthless scatter of credits. I consider these cuts to education an unacceptable attack on our society.
nau
dwgs: It’s not quite that. These are school gyms that are used outside school hours for municipal programs.
Nicholas
steph, are there courses? The article made it seem like this was rec badminton and chess. Not that that isn’t bad to have it cut, but I don’t think there are credits here. And given the extension through Feb 1, they may have been able to finish all sessions.
dwgs, nay is correct. Most of these schools would have no staff on the weekends, and when they do it’s likely random days for a school event where gyms might be in use, not weekly.
jeather
The courses was related to a comment Kate made about suddenly cancelling cégep programs while students are partway through.
steph
Yes, my comment was about the cégep cuts. We should have a whole thread about this, it`s kind of a big deal.
Ian
Yeah Cont Ed AEC programs were a lifeline for a lot of people that just wanted retraining, to upgrade skills, didn’t have time for a DEC, wanted to get a certificate to gain entry to another program, etc. Entire programs have been cut, but also night classes have been cancelled at a lot of CEGEPs, cutting off working students form options in that regard, too.
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admin
A chunk of central-northern Montreal is in the dark on Tuesday morning, including Blog HQ. It’s a little chilly here, but the devices are charged up. Not going to break out the emergency coffee procedure quite yet.
Update: Power was out from 6:15 or so till just past 9. Nearly 100,000 residences were affected. At noon I still see areas of darkness nearby, so I feel fortunate.
walkerp
good luck, Kate! I hope you get your power back soon.
Kate
It did come back around 9:15 but it’s still a bit chilly in here. Main thing is I can now make coffee.
jeather
As long as your priorities are straight.
Nicholas
That’s one way to reduce your power usage during HQ peak demand events. What a day for it to happen!
Kate
It did strike me that it happened to be down almost exactly for the 6 to 9 am block when Hydro declares a peak demand request.
Chris
Don’t forget to add some delicious (but expensive) oat milk to your coffee. 😉
Kate
If you’ll go out to the oat barn for me and milk the oats, I’ll gladly do so.
DavidH
We were out until around noon here around the Plaza. Had to rely on Vieux Vélo for our coffee (and breakfast potatoes) fix. Not a bad alternative but I wish it had been on a warmer day!
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