The REM has had a rough start to the week, TVA blaming winter conditions.
Updates from February, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Resilience Montreal, which serves as many as a thousand meals a day to homeless people – many of them Indigenous – has three weeks of funding left. Where’s that $100 million for the homeless from two levels of government now?
matthew j.
I hope this doesn’t come across as too nimby. I can see Resilience’s construction from my back yard. We were invited to a meet and greet about the project about 4 years ago (still waiting for the next invite). I have no doubt at all that Mr. Chapman means well, that they have a good mission. But he was really dodgy that evening, not seeming to give a flying * about the people that live here. And they got a LOT of money to buy that antique store’s property. He described walking into a spectacular wall garden when it’s finished.
Jonathan
@Matthew he building you mention is a capital investment which i imagine has been provided specifically for acquiring and renovating the space. What i am understanding from the article is that there is no guaranteed operating expenses from the government coming from this expansion.
Orr
I have read recently that the gov’t likes to give social groups funding for a “project” and not give a consistent annual operation budget support. Mayor of Sherbrooke recently had a shitfit on exactly this project-funding model problem, as well as being offered peanuts over five years for social welfare projects.
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Kate
Following Amazon’s plan to close up shop in Quebec, the CSN is calling for a boycott and preparing a legal challenge.
dhomas
I cancelled my Prime membership shortly after they announced the closure of their Quebec-based operations. I also encourage my friends to do the same. It’s a hard habit to break, though.
Some alternatives to consider:
Electronics: Best Buy has done same-day delivery for me during the Christmas period
Small electronic accessories, cheap home goods: Shopper+ (aka Prime cables, 123ink,etc.) has decent quality USB & other cables, small home goods (I bought a cart for my wife’s Cricut that was cheaper than from Amazon)
I try to avoid Temu (their app is invasive and their marketing is extremely annoying/misleading), though I do sometimes do AliExpress to get the same things Amazon offers while eliminating the middle man (Amazon) at the expense of extra shipping time.
Check flyers (on apps like Flipp) and go to physical stores.
I’d love to hear other options, too.
As for the legal actions, I don’t think Amazon cares. They’ve accomplished their goal. Any Amazon employee who even thinks of the word “union” in the future will be shot down with two words: “Remember Quebec”. It’s a small cost to pay to ensure their union-business future.
roberto
Those amazon supply chains are being replaced by subcontractors (like intelcom). I`d encourage those employees to unionize.
MarcG
For books, I always check https://www.abebooks.com. Often the cheapest copy will be from the UK and the shipping can take a long time, but if you’re not in a rush who cares, and when the book shows up it’s like a surprise. Also had good experience with https://www.awesomebooks.com.
dwgs
Shout out to Encore Books in NDG if you want to go local. https://www.encorebooks.ca/shop
walkerp
I’d also add Argo books to the list. They’ll take your order and you can either pick it up at their pleasant store downtown or they’ll deliver it to you.
Kate
I never got Prime, but I’m struggling with the idea of getting rid of Amazon. For trivia like socks and LED bulbs and so on, you can’t beat the prices and the convenience. I could spend a day trudging through malls looking for items that I get delivered with one click of the mouse. And yes, I buy things at the local hardware store rather than Amazon when I can but they don’t always have them!
I wanted to get some grow lights for plants brought in after summer. Buying them from any Canadian hardware chain would’ve cost me at least 2X what I paid on Amazon. Maybe more.
Is Canadian Tire still Canadian?
As for books – I mostly acquire ebooks. I don’t buy or want physical books any more, with few exceptions. But where do we get new ebooks these days?
PatrickC
@MarcG, Amazon owns abebooks… though I agree you can find good deals there.
MarcG
Of course they do…
Meezly
Yes, sadly Abebooks is owned by Amazon, but specialized booksellers are thriving on that site and I’ve found some great hard to find books that would’ve been difficult otherwise.
You can also use the Amazon site to find third party vendors, then order from those vendors directly instead of via Amazon.
Daisy
I buy new ebooks via the Kobo store (another option would be leslibraires.ca, not sure how it is for non-French books) and secondhand print books from Biblio.com.
I used to like Book Depository but Amazon bought it and then later shut it down.
jeather
I’ve been happy with Prime Cables too. I still use Indigo for physical books — there are some I want, some I gift and, I will be honest: they almost always deliver a book a week or even two before release date and for some books I am impatient enough with a preorder. (Mysteriously I just ordered some books for a birthday gift and one shipped from Tennessee.)
Kobo is fine for ebooks except for the subset that are only available in Amazon. Many small presses sell their own ebooks, as well as self-pubbed authors.
Kate
Agree on Prime Cables. Before Covid, they had an arrangement where you could pick up parcels from them at any Chinese‑owned shop in the metro system. This was great when I was commuting through Lionel‑Groulx at the time. Anyone know if this is still a thing?
Although they will deliver normally too. And cables I bought from them years ago are still fine.
Joey
Indigo is problematic for other reasons, which we won’t get into here given the blog’s policy of keeping the temperature in check on certain topics. D&Q has an online storefront, but I can’t recall if they deliver. You can get a lot of English titles at Renaud Bray and Archambault too.
@Kate don’t sleep on the ebook selection at the Banq and Montreal libraries (plus the handful of US public libraries that non-residents can fairly easily join). I can’t imagine an author makes considerably more money from an amazon sale than an library ebook rental, but I am happy to be corrected!
Joey
Do authors get royalties from secondhand book sales?
Blork
Y’all should know that Goodreads is also an Amazon property.
Personally, I only buy books at Amazon if they are hard to find elsewhere, which is pretty rare but not unheard of. But like Kate, it’s hard to avoid Amazon for other practical things like cables and whatnot. Not only do they tend to be less expensive on Amazon, but the ability to comparison shop is fantastic.
Regarding delivery, Amazon does have many “drop off” points, and you can choose to have the package delivered to the drop off point of your choosing. They were promoting this fairly heavily about a year ago, as a way to avoid problems with package thieves. I haven’t tried it, but am considering it.
Blork
@Joey, no.
Blork
Trying to track such things for non-digital assets would be near impossible and would crush the used book and used record industries. Many of the authors and publishers are long gone, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg for the complications involved.
jeather
Small bookstores are pretty bad at getting backlist titles in, though.
I’m not sure how to comparison shop for, eg, cables on Amazon. Is INIU or etguuds or CLEEFUN or Rvxoziy better?
Kate
jeather, I know! I was bringing some plants in for winter and shopping for lighting stuff on Amazon. Brand names like Noibad, Toweboory, Qtittu, Garpsen and Wiaxulay came up, all apparently selling LED equipment from the same Shenzhen factories. It was hard to choose, but I eventually got some plain clamp‑on fixtures and full‑spectrum bulbs, and it’s great. My office looks like a conservatory now.
walkerp
For most major commercial stuff, like electronics, socks, etc. You can usually do your searching at Amazon (which does give them revenue via ad impressions but not much and you can have a blocker) and then look for the same thing at other big box stores in Canada (Target, Staples, Best Buy, Canadian Tire). It’s not ideal but I don’t accept the oh Amazon is just too easy and cheap I have no other choice decision.
jeather
Target?
walkerp
Tarjhay?
jeather
It left Canada a decade ago. Now, I’m not against a time machine to 2015 so if you have one, please share it.
EmilyG
I’ve heard good things about https://bookshop.org/ , though I haven’t tried it myself yet.
JP
For in-person, I’ve also enjoyed checking out Pulp books, https://pulpbooks.ca/, and Clio, https://store.librairieclio.ca/, though they don’t necessarily always have books in stock and might be out of the way for some.
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Kate
More than ten months after a fire, the Institut national du sport in the Olympic park is set to reopen later this month.
dhomas
Nitpick: They closed March 21st, 2024, and are reopening February 24th, 2025. That’s over 11 months. Not sure why the article says 10 months.
Also, for the general population, they are only reopening on March 31st, so a closure of over a year. My kids will be happy to have “their” pool back, though. 🙂
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Kate
The city is advising people not to move house if they can avoid it, because it always involves massive hikes in rent.
I didn’t think anyone was moving house for fun, although I’m old enough to remember a time when finding a new apartment wasn’t a traumatic event.
Blork
In my first ten years in Montreal I moved eight times. Always looking for that one extra thing or whatever. Rents were cheap, but cheap apartments always had flaws. Too cold in winter, too dark, too grim, no balcony, etc. I was finally shocked into the modern era when I gave up the lease of my $600 a month 5-1/2 in 1999 (not enough light, although I stayed there four years) and then realized I couldn’t find anything nice for under $1400 around the Plateau or Mile End. So I moved to Westmount ($800 for a 4-1/2) because I could no longer afford the Plateau.
Kate
One year, I lived in three different apartments, due to relationship issues and so on. But it was a long time ago.
Ian
It’s actually cheaper in the east end of Outremont than Mile End now.
Josh
Moving because you just… didn’t like the place you lived. What a wild throwback of an idea.
Josh
I had that same experience of three apartments in a year, Kate. Two places a block and a half apart on Wellington street in Verdun, and then a 1-1/2 in the Plateau.
Kate
Plateau apartments were up to $1400 in 1999?
Josh: I know. Moving house on a whim. But remembering how some streets would be full of moving trucks on July 1, people did.
DeWolf
I was apartment hunting in early 2003 and I remember seeing a 3 1/2 on St-Hubert for $900, but it was huge and newly renovated. And right on the beautiful part of St-Hubert, of course.
That year I ended up renting a 2 1/2 at Park and Fairmount for $300, and then a year later my girlfriend and I got a 4 1/2 at Park and Bernard for $495. It was run down but when you’re 19 years old you don’t really care. A few years later our ground floor neighbours transferred us their lease and we got a more well-maintained version of the same apartment, but with a backyard and a large basement with a cinder block wall on which some previous tenant had painted the album cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’.
MarcG
Blork, you might want to check your 1999 date, might off by a decade?
Robert H
“So I moved to Westmount ($800 for a 4-1/2) because I could no longer afford the Plateau.”
Wow. Though perhaps it was unremarkable at the time, I’m impressed you can say that. I was still living in Boston then, a city with even more severe housing issues than Montreal, then as now.
Blork
Remember that 1999 was pretty much peak madness for rentals on the Plateau. Vacancy was effectively 0%. So there were apartments “available” for $900 or so, but when you’d go there it would be an absolute dump. You’d occasionally see something that sounded reasonably nice and between $1000-$1200 but there would literally be 30 or 40 people lined up out front coming to make a bid on it, most of whom were carrying envelopes of cash to bribe the landlord. I did finally view a couple of places in the $1400 range that were quite nice, and had no lineups, but I couldn’t swallow a rent pill that big.
So I looked elsewhere. I found a nice 4-1/2 in a large charming building on Ste-Catherine O. in Westmount for $800. No lineups, no bribes. Laundry in the building. No problem.
Blork
Historical notes: 1999 was a feverish time. Y2K was almost upon us (not just the Y2K technical fears, but the crazy and euphoric fever-dream that comes from being at the end of a decade, a century, and a millennium all at the same time).
Combine that with Plateaumania, which was fuelled in part by the 1997 Utne Reader magazine that called out the Plateau as one of the 14 “hippest neighbourhoods in the world.” This was all happening at the dawn of the “hipster” age, when people were falling over themselves for MORE and BETTER and CONSPICUOUSLY SO as part of life in the magical new millennium. The Web and precursors to social media were still new and exciting. It was like a techno-utopian new age.
By 2002 it was over. Vacancy on the Plateau was still low, but “normal low,” so you didn’t get the landlord bribes and the lineups to view apartments from a couple of years earlier. The change of millennium was a bit of an anti-climax, with no one even thinking about it anymore by the end of 2000. Then 9/11 changed the mood everywhere. Culturally, we (metaphorically) went from cocaine to quaalude in the span of about three years. So yeah, by 2003 or 2004 it was no longer almost impossible to score an apartment on the Plateau, and the ones in the normal (rising) rent range were accessible, unlike just a few years before.
At least that’s how I remember it!
DeWolf
I remember the vacancy rate was still very low in early 2003. Many candidates for any apartment, landlords demanding illegal deposits, etc. I only found that $300 2 1/2 after failing to get a number of other apartments and it was a lease transfer.
Joey
In 2000 I rented a two-floor apartment with two roommates on Coloniale and Prince-Arthur. I think the rent was $960. I guess not everyone read the Utne Reader.
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Kate
The REM was down Monday morning and is slowed down again Tuesday, with buses running instead.
Uatu
The REM notification system is crap. Waiting outside for the bus and it kept on saying normal service.
dwgs 21:27 on 2025-02-04 Permalink
Who could have possibly foreseen that the system would have to function under such conditions???
dhomas 04:43 on 2025-02-05 Permalink
I wonder if anyone has ever considered building transit underground, so as to avoid the elements? /S
roberto 08:36 on 2025-02-05 Permalink
Maybe they read the scientific reports that said the underground tunnels could be used by the homeless for shelter – and they really didn’t want that.
Su 08:57 on 2025-02-05 Permalink
Sounds like Ottawa.
DeWolf 09:28 on 2025-02-05 Permalink
The blue line extension will cost $7.5 billion for 6 kilometres, so assuming similar expenses, building the REM underground would have needed at least… $80 billion.
saintlaurent 10:57 on 2025-02-05 Permalink
> building the REM underground would have needed at least… $80 billion.
And if the choice had been to build an REM tunnel from the South Shore *under* the river, one could plausibly imagine that figure spooling upwards pretty dramatically, like the numbers on an old-timey mechanical cash register display.
Nicholas 12:23 on 2025-02-05 Permalink
I didn’t take the Two Mountains line more than occasionally, but does anyone remember if it suffered problems like the REM? Are Vaudreuil and St Jerome having issues? I get the REM crossed the river, with open space for higher winds, but so do the St Hilaire and Vaudreuil and Candiac lines, and regular trains seem to have fewer disruptions in Sweden, Finland, Russia, Ukraine, Japan, etc. in winter. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone with a bespoke technology that’s most known for running in a Canadian city that shuts down at 2 cm of snow.
Taylor 14:04 on 2025-02-05 Permalink
@Nicholas
EXCELLENT QUESTION!
I took it every day for years, as did several members of my family.
The answer is no, I don’t think so. I can’t recall those trains going out of commission because of snowfall. I have vague memories of trudging through snowdrifts on the platforms.
They were ‘heavy’ rail and stood (relatively) high above the tracks.
The only service outtages I can recall were related to extreme cold, and I don’t think that happened more than a couple times.
DeWolf 14:17 on 2025-02-05 Permalink
You’re making the assumption that the REM is particularly prone to outages, but I’m not sure it is. It performs more reliably than the metro, and its performance has improved over the past year: there were 9 major outages in the first two months of 2025, compared to 20 in the first two months of 2024.
It also isn’t bespoke technology – it’s an off-the-shelf system used in many other cities. The Sydney metro is nearly identical, using the same trains and the same overhead power supply.
A quick Google search suggests that bad winter weather does disrupt train services in Sweden, Finland and other cold countries. Just for example:
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/swedish-public-transport-in-disarray-due-to-snow-chaos/2744877
Purely anecdotally, I was in Tokyo when it snowed 25cm and the rail system was in chaos. Every above-ground line shut down.
DeWolf 14:37 on 2025-02-05 Permalink
Just for perspective:
REM on-time rate in 2024: 98.96%
Deux-Montagnes on-time rate in 2016: 97%
TeeOwe 14:53 on 2025-02-05 Permalink
Thanks DeWolf – where do you find these percentages?
Comparing to Sydney doesn’t seem meaningful, never snows there, but Sweden and Finland OK
FWIW where I am now living (Denmark) tram service in many cities falls apart in (very) cold weather – happens every winter
TeeOwe 15:01 on 2025-02-05 Permalink
PS Very cold by local standards, nothing to Montreal
saintlaurent 15:28 on 2025-02-05 Permalink
> It performs more reliably than the metro
@ DeWolf – are you backing out issues caused by users? I would imagine that the REM suffers far fewer disruptions due to incidents such as track intrusions or discharges of pepper spray. If you looked solely at disruptions caused by mechanical/maintenance/electrical issues, how would the two systems compare?
DeWolf 18:36 on 2025-02-05 Permalink
The stats come from media reports. The REM one was fairly widely reported last year, the Deux-Montagnes one is from a 2018 article talking about how service had been steadily deteriorating year after year.
As for the cause of outages, this article doesn’t say what proportion is caused by equipment failure or maintenance issues, but it says those have increased by 133% over the past 10 years:
https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/grand-montreal/2024-11-14/degradation-du-metro/les-pannes-liees-aux-bris-d-equipement-grimpent-en-fleche.php
Anyway, I’m not setting out to say the REM is great or they’re managing things particularly well, but there’s a perception out there that it’s a dysfunctional system which just isn’t borne out by reality. And it’s also unreasonable to expect everything to work perfectly in the winter which is tough on every single mode of transport.
dhomas 05:47 on 2025-02-06 Permalink
@Roberto the fact that homeless folk use the metro as shelter is not a reason to not have metros. Maybe we should look at the root cause and try to determine WHY there are so many unhoused people and try to reduce that number by, I dunno, giving them places to stay that aren’t the metro? Otherwise, you’re basically saying “go be homeless somewhere else”.
To Dewolf’s point, the cost of the blue line extension is, I agree, ridiculous. I think it could and should be much cheaper. For reference, the initial 26 stations (including the yellow line to Longueuil) cost 213.7 million dollars to complete by 1967 . Again, this included a river crossing to Longueuil. Accounting for inflation, that is less than 2 billion in 2024 dollars. For 26 stations. And a river crossing.
I don’t really understand why the cost of construction projects has so outpaced inflation. I think we are getting fleeced with the blue line extension. In any other city, I’m quite certain the price tag would have been much less.
saintlaurent 09:28 on 2025-02-06 Permalink
> In any other city, I’m quite certain the price tag would have been much less.
Yes, and no. The Globe and Mail’s Decibel podcast covered this topic just yesterday. 21 minutes of your time, and it is quite illuminating. tl;dr: governments in the anglosphere (including Quebec) are just too damned risk-averse, project creep is indeed a thing, impacted residents and businesses get all uppity and try their hardest to gum up the works; and the cost of projects is oftentimes deliberately low-balled from the start because it’s convenient for the government of the day to do that.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/the-decibel/article-whats-stopping-canada-from-building-better-public-transit/
dhomas 10:26 on 2025-02-06 Permalink
Thanks, saintlaurent! I will give it a listen when I can. Sounds interesting!
DeWolf 12:53 on 2025-02-06 Permalink
One of the reasons countries like France and Spain are able to build new metro and tram lines at relatively low costs is because they are continuously building them. Because of our funding models, we’re stuck in a situation where we have a major transit expansion every 20 years or so, and when it’s done, all that expertise and equipment gets packed away until (maybe) there’s another project at some undetermined time in the future.
Meanwhile, Paris is building 6 new metro lines and 68 stations for €42 billion (!!) by setting up an autonomous infrastructure agency that has long-term, ongoing funding from the government, as well as the ability to raise extra funds by itself:
https://www.grandparisexpress.fr/sites/default/files/2023-01/Pr%C3%A9sentation-investisseurs_%20jan%202023_3.pdf
saintlaurent 13:32 on 2025-02-06 Permalink
@DeWolf – one of the topics covered in the G&M podcast I referenced above is that, since North American cities do big-ticket transit projects so infrequently, there are no opportunities to build-up of institutional knowledge. So, they then turn out outside engineering & consulting firms and hey, somebody’s got to pay for those cushy salaries. In cities like Paris or Hong Kong, they’re doing it all the time, so they can challenge the consultants with some degree of confidence.
Also, the podcast mentioned North American transit agency’s institutional reluctance to build commercially on top of transit stations and monetize those development possibilities, so they don’t get the revenue they otherwise could. On several trips I’ve taken to Hong Kong, it’s amazing how integrally the MTR is woven into the fabric of commercial life on top of transit stations.
DeWolf 19:00 on 2025-02-06 Permalink
Ironically we were doing that kind of thing before Hong Kong even had a metro: Alexis-Nihon opened in 1967 and was the first vertical shopping mall in North America.
(If you’re interested in the history of the MTR, here’s a bit of self-promotion – Google my name and MTR, and you’ll come across some recent articles I wrote about its early days.)
The STM has started a property development arm to build things on top of the new blue line stations. I hope it goes well because building shops and housing on top of rapid transit stations is the more surefire way to make sure lots and lots of people use transit. Just look at Vancouver, which has invested heavily in transit-oriented development and now has the only metro system in North American to fully recover its pre-pandemic ridership.