The city is planning to offer grants to small venues, defined as theatres and concert halls with room for fewer than 1000 attendees.
I hope I’m not back here in a year’s time posting that nobody was able to get any of this cash because the bureaucratic requirements were too byzantine.
The city has merged three commissioners’ offices into one big one: the anti‑racism office, the office for relations with Indigenous people, and the office for homelessness. Bochra Manaï, who has headed the anti‑racism office, will run the merged offices.
At the same time, the city has created a French language office.
Passengers are complaining that the buses replacing the REM when it can’t cope with winter conditions are insufficient, and their arrival is random.
Yep. No signage or anything. You just have to figure out where to go by yourself. When you finally figure out where the stop is then there’s a guy there who will tell you that the REM is busted. Gee thanks.
The STM has signs at or near every metro station with a coloured by line stop for each direction for disruptions. But it doesn’t, now that I think of it, have signs to find that stop. Definitely should.
That reminds me of sometime last winter when I was at Beaubien metro and the orange line went down. Replacement buses were announced and everybody left the station to line up at the bus stop on de Châteaubriand… except nobody was there to tell anyone that in fact the metro replacement bus runs on St-Denis, two blocks to the east.
Haha classic.
Right up there with “stop moved” signs that when you go to the new location there’s another “stop moved” sign.
This snowstorm doesn’t seem quite the fierce beast we were told to expect, but TVA is promising us more accumulation throughout the day. Schools are closed (insert muttering about how this storm would never have closed schools in my day) and we’re being advised to stay home if we can.
I tend to agree with walkerp and DeWolf in comments below. Weather gets over‑hyped these days.
…OK, midafternoon, it’s piling up!
CBC Radio at 3:30 reports Environment Canada says 30 cm with another couple of cm that may fall Thursday and the wind is going to pick up.
[indistinct muttering]
From the forecast it’s not so much the overnight accumulation that was supposed to be the main snow, but that it’s going all day. It will get heavy again around 3 but we’ll be getting around 2 cm an hour all day.
https://merrysky.net/forecast/Montr%C3%A9al,%20Agglom%C3%A9ration%20de%20Montr%C3%A9al,%20Montr%C3%A9al%20(r%C3%A9gion%20administrative),%20Qu%C3%A9bec,%20Canada/ca
I’m in Gatineau and when I woke up at 6am, I would have agreed with the dismissal of the storm. But from 6-9am, we must of gotten another 10-15 cm easy, so it went from “meh” to “ok this is a lot of snow”. The streets here are pretty snowy and I could hear everyone complaining had school not been cancelled.
I might be misremembering, but I feel like school was NEVER closed for snow when I was young. If there was something like freezing rain expected, yes. And, even then the school was technically still open–it was just the buses that were cancelled. And we’d still call it a “snow day”, but I don’t remember it ever being because of a lot of snow was expected. (Granted, I grew up in Southern Ontario and not here, but still…)
This was before email, of course. There was barely electricity back then, in the 20th century. So, we’d get the news from the morning radio shows.
While private and some off-island schools closed when I was in school, the only time school every closed on me was the ice storm, when we all literally lost power. I remember once getting driven by another parent and we got stuck in snow in the middle of the street and had to get out a shovel, arrived a few minutes after the bell.
Is this a better system? I don’t know. But I think schools should be open for those who need a place to go and can make it there. Some parents have jobs they can’t miss.
I imagine if you’re a school admin, having kids stuck at school at the end of the day is probably an even bigger headache than them not making it in in the morning.
And growing up in the 80s and 90s, we had some snow days but certainly not every year. It takes a particular combination of accumulation, wind and timing for closures.
The hype for this one is looking to be justified. It’s not even noon and at least according to Apple weather, we’ve already gotten 36cm of snow with another 8-10cm to come this afternoon.
And this evening we’re forecast to have 50km/h winds with 80km/h gusts…
Snow days don’t really count these days since the teacher can pretty much email homework to the kids. And the REM ran this morning without any problems so it’s not that bad.
Yeah, definitely getting some accumulation now. I guess it just arrived late.
I think a lot of people heard 30-40 cm and thought it would all arrive overnight, not from 10 pm to whenever it ends…
I jinxed it! The rem broke down around 1pm lol
Tim, I get your point, but school admins would have the least headaches if children never showed up at all. Like the hospital with no patients or doctors, just administrators. Schools are there to provide education and, let’s face it, watch kids while their parents go to work. I understand if some kids can’t make it, if the buses can’t run, but the schools could open for the kids who want or need a place to go.
If they don’t use the snow days as snow days, they use them as ped days in the spring, so halfway through Feb you don’t need to save them.
@Nicholas the issue isn’t whether some kids won’t make it in, it’s whether enough teachers will. Anyway, don’t be a grouch, let the kids enjoy their unexpected day off. Truly a childhood highlight. We forget how little autonomy kids have from a day to day perspective. An unplanned free day is about as good as it gets.
Just be happy the teacher unions all agreed that teaching online on snow days was a violation of our collective agreements 😀
I did get my car stuck in a snow bank and two helpful neighbour’s helped to push me out but I stand by my statement that the media over dramaticized the storm. I don’t think it was necessary to close the schools. That REM seems too fragile, I imagine it’ll shut down eveytime there’s 10 cm of snow.
With that said, I am NOT looking forward to shoveling another 30cm again on Sunday.
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