Luc Rabouin has been voted the new leader of Projet Montréal.
Updates from March, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Saturday saw tear gas deployed and six arrests in the annual anti-police brutality demonstration. This year it took place in St‑Henri.
MarcG
What is irony? I passed by Lionel-Groulx around 1pm and the police presence was absurd. Imagine they put this much effort into public safety.
Kate
It’s been a predictable pitched battle for years. TVA isn’t exactly neutral but even they describe a scenario in which both sides act to provoke.
CE
At last, spring is here!
Ian
A fish gotta swim, a bird gotta fly, a pig gotta pig.
MarcG
Their yellow reflective vests were extra shiny, I wonder if they splashed out some of their $824 million on new ones or just some fancy dry cleaning.
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Kate
A fellow Montreal blogger goes in search of Montreal South, and also finds the lost garden of the Montreals of France.
Margaret
I had an elderly friend who worked for the city hall of Montreal South. She had an album of amazing pictures of the area where the Jaques Cartier Bridge reached the South Shore. I believe that it was because we were Montreal South that we had Montreal bus & metro fares until the RTL took over…
Montreal Transportation Commission (16 June 1951 – 31 December 1969)
metroBus service in Longueuil and Montreal South. Métro Longueuil to Montréal opened 1967.Commission de transport de la Communaute urbaine de Montréal (01 January 1970 – 31 December 1985)
metroService primarily in Longueuil. CTCUM successors STCUM and STM continue to operate the Metro line between Montréal and Longueuil. — https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~wyatt/alltime/montreal-rive-sud-qc.htmlKate
Thank you, Margaret!
Carle
Thanks for sharing!
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Kate
When Italians came to Montreal in the last century, despite being Catholics many of them were told to bring their kids to English schools. Now some of them, at least, want an apology from Quebec.
Meezly
Curious to find out how the CAQ will react to this petition, but also kinda know how they’re going to react.
Kate
There may already be a myth in place, via which the French-language schools were brainwashed to feel that any child not from a natively francophone family needed to be educated in English. I haven’t encountered the idea yet, but if this Italian petition has legs, I expect to see it crop up.
Ephraim
@Kate – The Irish and the Italians were kept out of the French system in Montreal… oddly enough, not outside of Montreal, where the Irish orphans were absorbed.
Ian
Perhaps without the metropolis and its tendency toward ghettoization integration was less problematic
Kate
You been watching Heritage Minutes again, Ephraim?
dhomas
My parents arrived here from Italy in the early 60s. They wanted to go to school in French, but were refused and sent to the English schools, instead. I don’t think they care for an apology. It allowed for their kids (and my kids) to have somewhat of a privilege: the right to be instructed in the English system.
Ephraim
@Kate – Discrimination was quite the thing in previous centuries. Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, Slavic and Greek immigrants weren’t considered to be white.
Ian
And that’s the distinction right there. Even being Roman Catholic wasn’t going to whitewash them enough to ever be considered Québécois. That their descendants are now faulted for not assimilating is the real insult worthy of an apology.
Ephraim
@Ian Adrien Arcand and the Parti national social chrétien still had meetings until 1965 and wasn’t officially dissolved until 2016.
Ian
And yet there are people of my age who mistakenly think the Jewish General was built “for” Jews on the taxpayer dime. But that’s the ethnonationalist “secular” narrative for you.
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Kate
Aéroports de Montréal plans to build over some of the scarce remaining wild land on the island, known to be a bird and butterfly sanctuary.
su
Sounds like the plan is to have the ballooning population of airline passengers replace threatened and endangered wildlife. “We reached about 9.5 billion passengers globally in 2024,” he said. “By 2030 that will be up to 12 billion. By 2042 we are estimating that the number of passengers travelling (by air) will double” to 19.5 billion per year.” !!
Kate
It’s almost as if a bigger airport should be constructed just outside of town to cope with the predicted increase in passengers…
Robert H
Yeah…somewhere off island…with plenty of open space and no adjacent suburbia to oppose it. That would be a huge success. There’s just no way it could possibly fail!
Kate
One of Mirabel’s failures was that it was premature. The population predictions for Montreal were huge and completely unrealistic for the time. We may be inching toward that population this century, and find we need a bigger airport not so close to where people (and animals, birds and bugs) need to live.
Robert H
True, Kate. My sarcasm was not aimed at the logic of your suggestion that a new airport is needed; Trudeau is approaching full capacity. It’s just frustrating to contemplate the planning and political incompetence that led to the situation that now exists: with three airports in the Montreal CMA of over 4.5 million, one could argue that the runways are already there and this remaining wilderness can be spared.
Why can’t Mirabel finally become what it was meant to be? Is it because of the expense of building transportation links that were never completed when it opened as common sense should have dictated? Or is it the human factor that prevents St. Hubert, AKA Aéroport métropolitain de Montréal, from expanding service even more than planned? That is, we all want to be able to fly cheaply to wherever we want and whenever, but we don’t want to live next to or near an airport.
CE
Mirabel tore down all the infrastructure needed for it to be a passenger airport over the last decade. It’s entirely set up to be a freight airport which is probably fine considering its location. The future is probably at YHU.
Ian
Considering Porter is already planning to fly out of YHU that’s a safe bet.
CE
With a good transit connection, YHU could be more convenient for many Montrealers than YUL. I’ve always thought the older parts of Longeueil have the density to support a couple yellow line stations with a terminus at the airport. One can dream.
Ian
It’s mostly CAQ territory out that way so it might be more politically expedient than trying to build lines in Montreal, you could be onto something there…
GC
It would be a bit closer for me, if there were decent transit options for getting there. Every time I go through Billy Bishop, I think how nice it would be to have something similar here. That is a pipe dream, of course.
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Kate
Stephan Probst, former head of nuclear medicine at the Jewish General, convicted of sexual assault, has been accused of ten additional sexual aggressions by seven other women. When arrested, Probst was not in jail, but is awaiting sentencing over the first conviction.
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Kate
La Presse has found that many illegal Airbnbs are still listed, including locations belonging to the Old Montreal landlord whose properties have caused the deaths of nine people in recent years.
jeather
I am shocked, shocked.
Ian
It’s almost as if maybe somebody is getting paid off to look the other way, but of course we know this administration and its inspectors aren’t corrupt, unlike all those that came before them.
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Kate
Hudson’s Bay is to liquidate the entire business.
PatrickC
I can’t say I’m surprised. A few months ago, I went into the downtown store for the first time in a long while to buy a simple item: a leather belt. I hoped they would have one of decent quality, and I can remember great sales on the Metro level there in pre-Covid days. The men’s department on that level was even more deserted than the fancy perfume counters on the street level (admittedly, it was a weekday). They had maybe two or three belts hanging in a corner that I found only after getting help from a listless salesperson, and the stock of other items was also minimal. What a contrast with bustling Simons when I went over there afterwards.
interesting detail in the article, though, about the Bay selling off Saks Fifth Avenue and other high-end stores in the US last year to protect those profitable divisions from going down with the Canadian stores.Uatu
Wow. Another department store gone. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens to the stores especially downtown and at Champlain Mall in Brossard. That’s another anchor store gone in that mall. Decathlon replaced the Sears and that was successful but I wonder if they shouldn’t just convert the Bay into apartments…
Robert H
At last, any pretense of reviving The Bay’s stores has been dropped, barring a last minute rescue from a gambling angel with hundreds of millions in liquidity to bestow. I don’t know enough about retail and real estate finance to see how Liz Rodbell can justify her hope that the business can be salvaged. I envision the Phillips Square flagship sitting empty, the windows papered over or boarded up, trash blowing into the entrance alcoves, another vacancy to join the old Holt Renfrew building on Sherbrooke still awaiting ground floor tenants . We have been told again and again that the department store is dead as a business model, but certain variants in certain locations around the world still seem to thrive. In Canada, Simons appears to have found a formula for viability as it opens new stores and refurbishes existing locations. If it finds its current location on Sainte-Catherine to be too cramped or outdated, there’ll probably be space available soon just up the street.
Meezly
The Time Out Market has really revitalized Eaton Centre, along with Playbox Arcade and thriving brands like Decathlon, Uniqlo, Sephora, etc. It would be interesting if Simon moved into the Bay building. Hoping the building won’t sit empty and boarded up.
Ian
It was Morgan’s before the Bay, something will move in.
bob
I think the department store is pretty much dead. Simons is not a department store, it is a clothing store. The kind of place where you can buy all kinds of different things is now geared toward the collapse of family incomes – Walmart, Costco. And because so many malls were planned on the basis of the concept of anchor stores, they are dying too.
What to do with that huge building (about the same floor space as the Hydro Quebec building)? We don’t need office space, and we don’t need more overpriced condos, and obviously retail is not doing so well. I’m pretty sure that some developer will try to make it into a mixed use thing with retail, offices, and condos. Assuming the various levels of government subsidize it.
Ian
Effectively, that was what they were trying to do with Cours-Mont-Royal.
Meezly
Although most of its space is devoted to clothing and accessories, and it may not sell appliances nor dining sets, Simons does have a housewares section and is actually considered a department store. I think they opened a store in the basement level by the food court that’s selling furnishings now? So it seems they could do with a bigger space.
I think if the HBC building is utilized strategically, you could do something similar to Eaton’s Centre, with a food court of local businesses. Escape rooms seem to be popular now, maybe they could take up a floor. Arcades seem to be trending again. A fitness centre? There is so much potential.
Mozai
“and we don’t need more overpriced condos” can’t do residential because it’s the law that a sleeping chamber must have a window to the outside. Same problem as converting office-buildings into residential: the floors are big flat blobs and you can only put residences on the outside ring.
jeather
Simon’s homewares are fantastic, fwiw.
The Bay was bought out by American venture capital and, inevitably, failed — though it held on a lot longer than usually happens.
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Kate
The east-end Institut universitaire en santé mentale has had a zootherapy department for 30 years and its presence has been found to be helpful to patients, but budget cuts mean it has to be discontinued. But the CAQ cuts are touching all aspects of health care, even the guinea pigs and cockatiels.
Ian 22:16 on 2025-03-15 Permalink
Serious question here, does anyone expect him to do anything new and/ or of specific interest, or is this just more of the same?
CE 07:09 on 2025-03-16 Permalink
Does he have to do something new? Projet’s platform has won them two elections in a row and there’s a good chance they’ll win the next one. Unless the electorate sours on their ideas, there’s not much reason to change course.
bob 07:47 on 2025-03-16 Permalink
The electorate largely does not care, going by voter participation.
Kate 09:11 on 2025-03-16 Permalink
Ian, what I heard from a few people was that the positions of all five candidates were so similar that people were voting more based on personal style. I think Rabouin may also have been regarded as the most realpolitik of the five candidates, and possibly also the most likely candidate to appeal to undecided voters in November.
That he was the only white male in the pack was undoubtedly a factor, too.
Ian 13:14 on 2025-03-16 Permalink
Well if they get in this time, that’s it for taking the bus from Beaver Lake back to the Plateau.. If that and Alex Norris being a jerk about it doesn’t sway the vote, it’s hard to imagine what would. Having been caught out lying about being powerless in the face of AirBnb already seems like a non-issue, for example, and that’s something we can already say Rabouin was involved with directly.
CE 16:21 on 2025-03-16 Permalink
I don’t think the mountain plan is as big of an issue as some people make it out to be and I suspect that the further you get from the east side of the mountain, the less people care. I also doubt that many people have any idea who Alex Norris is and even fewer have any opinion on him as a person (and some of those who do know him, like his style as a politician).
Ian 07:37 on 2025-03-17 Permalink
Well if that’s all easy enough to hand wave I guess the lying is, too.
Joey 10:08 on 2025-03-17 Permalink
I’m with Ian. Projet *could* become a real political party that isn’t a very elaborate organization controlled by a group of insiders, but not with the institutional candidate always winning the leadership. Then again, it’s a political party (and a successful one), maybe it can’t…
Kate 15:59 on 2025-03-17 Permalink
CE, on Monday, La Presse’s Maxime Bergeron finds that a surprising number of people are very agitated about the plans for Mount Royal.
Ian 22:13 on 2025-03-17 Permalink
Just look at the upper Westmount Belvedere – closed off to parking, adjacent to a nice park, no direct bus. Almost entirely abandoned except by hyperlocal dog-walkers. Unless you happen to live in Upper Westmoun or take a long walk from a distant bus stop it’s almost impossible to walk to. I will be very surprised if the same doesn’t happen to the Lower Belvedere at the very least.
Tim S. 09:04 on 2025-03-18 Permalink
Good comparison Ian.
Kate 12:29 on 2025-03-18 Permalink
On the other hand, Summit Woods are a protected zone (despite dogs) and a bird sanctuary. They’re one of the few spots around here that still have trilliums in early spring, too. It isn’t a bad thing that they’re not a tourist trap and not very accessible.