The Plaza Theatre on St-Hubert has been restored. La Presse’s Émilie Côté visits the building’s owner.
Updates from January, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The wind is knocking out power to many households Monday evening.
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Kate
Since the Quebec government has nothing else on its plate, it’s announcing a new model of integration for immigrants, meant to hammer home the importance of secularism and French.
Noting a parallel report that Quebec is ceasing to fund support for immigrant and Indigenous students.
jeather
That’s great, as long as you don’t want to learn French. The best way to protect French is to bang the drum about how endangered it is while cancelling funding for classes.
Uatu
Meanwhile yet another over capacity protocol announcement at work this morning. Well it’s a good opportunity to work on French swear words I guess lol
Robert H
Merveilleux! Putain de politique!
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Kate
Mayor Plante criticized the Legault government Monday for turning their backs on the humanitarian crisis of homelessness in Montreal. She also revealed that the funds which had been announced for services to the homeless by the federal government, and matched by Quebec (in theory) to the total of $100 million, have not yet been handed out.
Taylor
The city can’t borrow money to spend on this problem given the promised funds?
They can’t take that promise to literally any of the major banks in our city?
Would anyone be *that* upset if Plante increased the debt/deficit by addressing homelessness in more constructive ways?
Kate
Can a city borrow on that basis? Political promises are subject to change, sometimes unpredictably. Quebec was never keen on accepting Ottawa’s $50M for the homeless, and even though a deal was finally reached, there must still be obstacles. Would a canny banker accept this promise as collateral?
Taylor
Fair, but even still – I can’t quite figure what’s stopping Plante from going to the banks and saying “we need money to start solving a problem that’s negatively impacting everyone’s quality of life.’
You’d figure the banks would jump on board just because so many unhoused people sleep in bank vestibules, or because the real cost of homelessness is so much higher than the cost of the solutions to fix it.
It’s the city of Montreal, it’s not going anywhere, you’d think the city’s credit would be effectively unlimited.
saintlaurent
>They can’t take that promise to literally any of the major banks in our city?
So you’re saying that even though it is generally accepted that the public at large doesn’t trust elected officials to keep their promises, a banker can comfortably be credulous enough to fork over a few tens of millions of dollars? (“I swear to God, my rich uncle has promised me he’s going to give me a bunch of money next Tuesday!”)
> It’s the city of Montreal, it’s not going anywhere, you’d think the city’s credit would be effectively unlimited.
This only works, to the degree you are implying, when a government can print its own money, and even then, there is an upper bound (that upper bound is defined by factors including, but not limited to, existing debt levels, size of the economy, capacity for additional growth in tax revenue, etc.).
Joey
I was under the impression Quebec municipalities were required to balance budgets. So they can’t just borrow to add an expense without a corresponding budgeted increase in revenue to match the operating and borrowing costs, right? Moreover, if the city could and did borrow to deal with this particular funding gap, it would absolve the feds and the province of their commitment to deliver $100M to Montreal for homelessness. I think you can imagine how that kind of decision would be perceived by the province the next time the city came asking for money.
But also, why would a banker accept that the province would eventually come through with the money when it hasn’t so far – even though it has received the first $50M from Ottawa? Why would a bank believe a promise the province has already broken? And the city isn’t ‘going anywhere’ so it can have unlimited credit? WTF?
Taylor
Then how does Montreal, or any city, overspend? Do we not have a debt and a deficit?
And yes, @joey – not exactly unlimited but I can’t think of any more certain investment than a major city with a stable population of nearly 2 million that’s also steadily growing, a stable middle/upper-middle class tax base, and an economy so diversified we’re borderline recession proof.
My point here is that you would think banks and credit unions – above all others – would be the most inclined to support a city’s efforts to eradicate homelessness as much as extend credit to do so, given how much of their bottom line is potentially impacted by the add-on effects of homelessness (i.e. negative impacts on property values).
saintlaurent
> negative impacts on property values
This presumes that banks are the actual owners of the properties in which their branches are located. I would suggest this is not the case; the owners are commercial landlords from whom the banks lease space via long-term lease agreements. There could be a few notable exceptions; for example, the bank branch at the base of Tour CIBC is probably owned by that bank. But I would wager that the Scotiabank and BMO branches at University and Robert-Bourassa are almost certainly not owned by their respective banks.
Jonathan
Cities in Quebec can borrow for capital expenditures (in their PTIs and PDIs) but not for operating expenses.
Joey
You lost me at banks give a shit about homelessness.
Taylor
@jonathan – so would that mean that city of Montreal would be free to borrow money to immediately begin building new housing for the homeless? Or expropriating an abandoned property and coverting it into housing? No?
@saintlaurent – no, not the branches, I’m thinking of the mortgages held by their customers and their residential property values. Let a homelessness problem get bad enough and properties start losing value. Wouldn’t that increase risk for banks if suddenly people can’t recoup their property investments?
@joey – see above. I’m not saying they have any social responsibility, but they do have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders as much as some basic responsibilities to their employees. There are four major financial institutions headquartered in the city in the bankiung sector, all of whom have major downtown real estate (as do all the other banks). You gotta figure homelessness is sapping interest of ‘return to the office’, so all their properties are liabilities. National Bank just built a new tower, they gotta be thinking about how homelessness would lower the quality of life of their commuting workforce, as much as the negative impact on their employees holding mortages on urban properties. It all adds up.
saintlaurent
> would be free to borrow money to immediately begin building new housing for the homeless? Or expropriating an abandoned property and coverting it into housing? No?
Again, this assumes that there isn’t *already* outstanding debt, and that some lender (or prospective bondholder) would breezily just hand over some large sum of money at a rate of interest that is also financially prudent for the city government to accept. I imagine the city could easily go find some lender to give them millions of dollars at 14% interest, but that would almost certainly be a breach of the city officials’ statutory and moral obligations to be good stewards of the public fisc.
Of course, the city could just pledge some collateral, right? I mean, you yourself said the city isn’t going anywhere. Would you want to be the mayor who pledged Parc Lafontaine, or the water purification plant in RDP-PAT as collateral for a loan from RBC or BMO? Or pledged future property tax revenues (which, of course, would be a larger amount than the loan itself, because, interest). And then to maintain existing services and also service that debt, you have to hike tax rates. I can imagine the electorate, in the current climate, would find that prospect somewhat unpalatable.
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Kate
The city has finally signed a deal with Mondev and UTILE to construct 1030 residential units on the southern section of Îlot Voyageur.
A project at the far eastern end of the island was also announced Monday, although the photos look like construction is well under way.
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Kate
Interruptions of metro service rose in 2024 as more people returned to their work commute. Half the problems are caused by passengers, which explains why the statistics are linked.
24heures looks into why Berri-UQÀM station is always under repairs.
Taylor
Having recently visited Japan, I think we’d likely save a lot of money, have cleaner stations, and have far fewer service interruptions, if only we had uniformed transit employees – not police – on the platforms, keeping an eye on things
Treat people like trash, they’ll treat their environment like trash. And STM pigs treat everyone like trash.
Kate
I wonder if that system would work here. Do we have the same quiet respect for authority as the Japanese?
GC
When I was in Japan, someone told me that basically no one jay walks–except in Osaka. I did not actually get to visit Osaka, but I was amazed at how people respected traffic signals everywhere that I did visit.
Taylor
I’ve wondered if it’s purely a matter of cultural difference. The way people talk about ‘the old days’ I think North Americans, Canadians in particular, were fairly deferential to authority.
I think there’s a relationship to neoliberal economic policies that severely underfunded the social welfare state and ultimately stripped cities of much of the money they needed to provide basic big city services. If the gov’t constantly underfunds or defunds its cities, it sends a consistent message it doesn’t value cities or their citizens. How are people supposed to react to that?
It occurred to me, riding the Tokyo subway, and then thinking about the New York subway, that it was the Americans who won the war… and yet in the richest and most powerful city on Earth, in all of history, their subway is grim, grimy, an embarassment. Tokyo’s subway stations not only have washrooms, they’re spotless too. There aren’t any refuse bins, and yet there’s no trash anywhere because people carry it out with them. Montreal’s Metro is unfrotunately inching closer to NYC than Tokyo, and that’s movement in the wrong direction.
Also – how is it that they spent $6 billion on the REM and none of the REM stations have toilets? How backwards are we?
Nicholas
Taylor, employing a person to stand on each platform for every hour a station is open at $20/hr (including benefits, which is way too low) comes to $20 million a year. Platform screen doors, which the STM cancelled due to lack of funds, would cost around $1 billion. So for 50x the yearly cost you vastly reduce train delays due to blocked doors, eliminate them from people on the tracks, stop about 16 people a year from jumping in front of trains and speed up trains as they can enter the station faster. You don’t do anything for trash on the platforms, but vastly reduce it on the tracks (plus accidentally dropped items). You could of course reduce the hours or coverage, but PSDs are just going to be a much better deal. In fact, if you just took the value of the lives saved you’d pay for the doors in half a decade; add the value in better train service it’s a no-brainer.
Kate
There are public bathrooms on the platform at Parc Jean‑Drapeau station, left over from its early days during Expo 67. They’ve been locked up since that time. A public transit bathroom would inevitably become a drug dealing and ingesting hotspot, and probably used for practices even less salubrious. You couldn’t pay anyone enough to keep a public transit bathroom clean.
Daisy
They could be paid washrooms like in some places in Europe.
walkerp
The new york subway is “grim, grimy, an embarrasment”?! Have you ever actually used it in the 21st century or is this characterization based on a viewing of The Warriors?
Meezly
I WFH and commute to work a few times a year. The ONE time I had to go to the office last Friday, the metro service was temporarily halted due to a “medical emergency” going home during rush hour. Fortunately I only had one stop so I got out and walked to my bus stop (if the downtown bus routes weren’t so fragmented, I wouldn’t need to connect but that’s another story).
I had wondered how often these interruptions occur, and now I know… too frequently!
CE
I have ridden the NYC subway many times in the last few years and I would absolutely describe it as grim, grimy, an embarrassment. Especially when comparing it to almost any other large public transit system in the world.
DeWolf
Yeah, the New York subway is gross. It works insofar as it has a huge reach and it generally gets you where you want to go, but the frequency is not great (the metro runs more often than most NYC lines), the stations are dirty and it’s generally not a very pleasant experience.
The brilliance of Tokyo’s trains has a lot to do with the simple fact that Japan has always invested heavily in rail transit, even while being a major auto manufacturer with no shortage of car-oriented infrastructure. But there’s also land use, which means that even if most of Tokyo consists of single-family houses and small-scale apartment buildings, the built environment is very dense and oriented around the railways, many of which are run by private companies that have built an entire infrastructure around them, including department stores, shopping centres and housing developments.
Public washrooms are standard in most Asian metro systems and their ubiquity and cleanliness really comes down to the willingness to invest in them as a public resource. The washrooms at Eaton Centre, Place Ville-Marie and the Complexe Desjardins aren’t disgusting or used for drug dealing. The only reason metro station washrooms would be is because the STM couldn’t afford to pay enough people to monitor and clean them.
Taylor
I agree 100% with DeWolf.
I think the issue here isn’t about how “different” Asian society is from our own, but how different our (apparent) values are from the global norm. Because it’s not just Asian cities that have clean and orderly subways and public washrooms. From what I’ve seen, the European average is higher than our own as well in these regards.
Their mentality seems to be oriented on what is an acceptable minimum for basic human dignity, and that minimum seems to be “clean, efficient public transit for all, at an affordable cost, with ample services and staff, as well as clean public restrooms you’re not terrified of using.”
Our North American mentality seems to be “how dare you ask for anything more than the absolute minimum for what is required for our society to function.”
And to Nicholas’ point, I would say paying for platform level STM employees to prevent suicides and, more often, simply keeping things running smoothly, would be worth literally whatever cost.
What we seem to not comprehend is that minimal investments in improving the quality of the experience result in increases in usership, which in turn pay for the increased operating costs. The avg Tokyo metro car seemed much older than the avg Montreal metro car, but they were spotless, and the train conductors and platform staff made sure they ran on time and without incident. I’d trade the new trains for that level of service any day of the week.
Joey
The hot new open-source Chinese AI says that Tokyo’s population density is 2,773 people/km². Ours is ~934 people/km². If our density tripled, we would have no choice but to massively expand our transit options. This isn’t the whole story, but it’s a pretty necessary factor, no?
Joey
@Taylor all that may be true, but a more apt comparison would be to a city of similar size and density as Montreal (Nagoya? Kobe? Osaka). Comparing us to global megacities like Tokyo, New York, Mexico City, etc., is less instructive than comparing us to cities that have similar demographics and geography, no?
I don’t disagree that values, priorities and the political economy context in Japan is very different from Montreal – but if you tried to imagine a Montreal-style approach to urban transit in Tokyo, i.e., one whereby there are way more cars and way fewer public transit options, you would quit before you started because the notion is just absurd. What our civic leaders failed to grasp decades ago is that you can’t rely on a big population to demand a high-capacity transit system; you need a robust transit offering to enable population growth (or, as in the parts of the US that are currently growing, you need to embrace sprawl at all costs). The end-result is that every mode of getting around, whether it’s driving, cycling, walking or riding transit, is almost good enough but not really good (though parts of Montreal are getting close with cycling), which breeds annoyance among citizens, which makes the kind of collective action needed to cultivate better communal transit development (which Japan seems to have in spades) impossible.
Put it another way: if Berri-Uqam had public bathrooms, would you use them?
Taylor
@Joey
A few things:
1. I recently visited Kyoto as well, which has a population closer to that of Montreal (albeit, just within the city limits – the tax base supporting the STM is larger than the city’s population but I digress). In any event, transit in Kyoto was definitely on par with Tokyo in terms of quality, service level, cleanliness, etc. Ditto the public washrooms, parks, public spaces etc., just on a smaller scale.
2. To your earlier point, no, population density does not have to be the deciding factor in public transit quality, let alone reach, service level, clenliness, (etc). There are plenty of cities and countries all over the world with lower populations and population densities that provide better levels of service than is typical for North American public transit.
3. Size has nothing to do with a city’s pride and what it decides is the minimum standard quality of life it hopes to offer its citizens. The city of Paris is only about 100,000 people more populous than the city of Montreal, occupies about a quarter of the land, is essnetially one gigantic heritage/archeological site, and still manages to have a vastly superior public transit system that costs then far less to build, maintain, and operate. They’re simply making choices we’re not and won’t tolerate what we do. These are learned behaviours, nothing more.
4. Montreal should *absolutely* be constantly aiming to make sure it is in the same league as the global supercities, even if we never even appraoch the same population. Never listen to anyone who says “don’t aim so high”. If a city’s administration isn’t constantly seeking to improve, expand, and enhance it doesn’t belong in office. Cities elsewhere aren’t aiming for the floor, that’s a profoundly North American defect, likely the consequence of 50+ years of structural disinvestment. North American cities were not like this before the mid-1970s, for the most part.
5. I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make in your big paragrpah, but a few notes: a) our political leaders were absolutely counting on contrinued population growth in Montreal to fuel the need for an ever-expanding Metro system; b) the switch from building Metro to acquiring and developing the commuter rail network was an appropriate adaptation to the realities of suburbanization in the region of Greater Montreal (and the REM should never have been designed to replace Exo, that was a mistake that will haunt us); c) for economic and environmental reasons, sprawl absolutely cannot be embraced at all costs, moreover, the global majority of cities do not embrace sprawl, but instead, densification; d) not at all, some modes are not only vastly superior to others, their benefits are routinely studied and validated. No urban planner aiming to improve the fortunes of an urban commercial thoroughfare would encourage more cars or parking, and the reason why is because, simply, drivers are shite shoppers; f) the vast majority of world cities are making major investments in pedestrianization and public transit. Paris is an excellent exmaple. It’s a foolish municipal govt that listens to the whining of a priviledged minority, yet this appears to be the North American standard.
6. If said WCs were maintained at a level that respects basic human dignity, were cleaned regularly, and it was a point of pride for the STM to show its users clean WCs as a symbol of their commitment to the public, yes, why not?
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Kate
Quebec must be making plans to fix or replace 11 km of the crumbling Met, but it isn’t sharing them with the city.
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Kate
Big weather is expected Monday night.
…Is Environment Canada over-hyping the weather lately? Didn’t even need the shovel for the front steps, a broom was enough.
Poutine Pundit 01:29 on 2025-01-28 Permalink
It’s not quite done: the marquee is going up this summer, the store signage is still “temporary” and the architectural drawings show that the “A UNITED THEATRE 1922” painted sign needs to be repainted.
Kate 11:02 on 2025-01-28 Permalink
Thanks, Pundit.
I also notice that work’s being done on the façade of the old theatre on St‑Denis at Bélanger/Mozart that’s been a Pharmaprix for years, but I haven’t seen any story on that.
DeWolf 18:43 on 2025-01-29 Permalink
I’m surprised the old Rivoli (the Pharmaprix) is being redone only 15 years after its last renovation. I wonder if they’re going to reinstall the original windows like what has been done at the Plaza.
It’s also surprising to learn in the La Presse article that the Plaza has no heritage status whatsoever. Good thing its owner seems to care about its value. Incidentally, he has also been a vocal supporter of the summertime pedestrianization of St-Hubert, Mont-Royal, Wellington and Ontario, all of which he has shops on.
EmilyG 21:39 on 2025-01-30 Permalink
I know of a couple theatre groups from McGill who are performing shows there.