It’s two years since seven people died in the fire on Place Youville, and no charges have yet been laid.
Updates from March, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Kate
-
Kate
CTV notes the road closures caused by the St Patrick’s parade, which begins at noon and goes along de Maisonneuve from Fort Street eastward toward St‑Urbain. Our new prime minister will be attending the parade although this piece doesn’t specify whether he’ll actually be walking in it.
MarcG
He’s gonna go for the Mook vote and get 10am drunk and rowdy
walkerp
If he’s pounding Labatt’s, hooting out the Bob & Doug theme song and putting an effigy of Uncle Sam in a headlock, then he’s got my vote.
Janet
I don’t have anything to add. I’m just enjoying this.
Kate
Mark Carney and a couple of ministers walked in the parade. Photos from La Presse and an aperçu of its history.
CBC also notes that Sunday is Carney’s 60th birthday.
Orr
One of them is my MP. Until I saw the picture I was quite concerned she was in fact some kind of a PR company AI creation.
walkerp
Is the unstructured jacket the new Liberal in-look? And is it possible that Carney is wearing a corduroy jacket?!
-
Kate
La Presse’s dossier Sunday has a headline that mentions homelessness, but the actual topic is the failure of public consultation to actually engage members of the public and hear from them, and somehow link up the need to help the homeless with the resistance of residents to having homeless facilities next door.
We’ve seen this over and over from the viewpoint of this blog: the city proposes a change, holds some consultations, the change is made and only then there’s the outcry, they built this bike path, they closed this street, and they never even asked us, the residents or merchants of the area, what we wanted!
But they did, and either you didn’t know about it, or you saw the notice and brushed it off as irrelevant at the time. Or the people holding the session are too academically detached, they can’t quite make themselves believe that you, the resident, would value street parking over a change that would materially improve the neighbourhood for everyone.
And, as a comment below to the brief item about the new Projet leader reminds us, only a minority of residents can even bring themselves to vote in city elections, let alone attend meetings and get involved in activism. It’s only when people are inconvenienced, after the fact, that the complaints begin.
I don’t know how to fix this, but surely the city needs to begin with better communication about the existence and purpose of consultations?
Kevin
I get emails from the OPCM on a regular basis and they are weighty infodumps.
And as an organization soliciting the public for ideas, it seems like they are better geared toward hearing from organizations that have prepared presentations.I think this is the permalink for all consulations.
https://ocpm.qc.ca/fr/depotKate
That’s specifically mentioned – that most of the time, the OCPM finds itself talking to other organizations rather than to individuals. They definitely need to work on their communications.
Joey
Some thoughts:
1. Most commentary I’ve read about public consultations, especially in the U.S. and especially about zoning/real estate development, discuss the opposite problem that we typically see here – a small group of reactionaries, often consisting of retired people who are available to attend town meetings in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, are the only ones who wind up participating in the process. As a result, the NIMBY perspective gets a huge leg up. My impression is that this is really not a problem in Montreal. So that’s good. Then again, please help me identify a political party that wants to be build in my backyard; I’d be happy to vote for them.
2. Consultations – and the OCPM – are only valuable if their recommendations are, if not binding (in some cases), at least taken seriously. We’ve seen in Quebec that governments of all political persuasions are extremely good at either rejecting recommendations out of hand (usually by taking on the kind of faux populist posture described here – “the consultations weren’t legitimate”) or picking and choosing which recommendations to implement. Think of the CAQ constantly ignoring or sidestepping results of environmental review processes or Projet Montreal abandoning the OCPM’s lead recommendation about Camillien Houde. My impression is that Projet in particular is unwilling to meaningfully adjust perspective following consultative processes, but that could be my personal bias showing. I would actually love some counterexamples if anyone has any…
3. Quebec has long had a corporatist model (i..e, policymaking via engagement of organized stakeholder groups, not policymaking by business interests), which means our processes and practices are oriented around policy dialogue happening through ‘official’ parties – considering point one, I think this is probably as good as it gets. It does, however, inevitably lead to those who are not part of the sausage-making framework – ordinary citizens – to feel sort of politically homeless. That, more than anything IMO, is why people get so mad when there are significant changes to their neighbouhoods that have all been consulted upon, vetted, adjusted, etc. Basically, unless you have a conservative government, there’s really no outlet for those voices (since they are almost always opposed to whatever change is being proposed). How you feel about this depends on the issue and where you stand on it, I suppose.
4. Given the first two points, it really seems like the formal consultative process – whereby the parameters are pre-determined by interested parties pushing a certain agenda/outcome – are little more than window dressing. Maybe we’d be better off with the kind of regular dialogue between governments and citizens/community groups so that less hinges on formal processes. I have a vague impression that Luc Rabouin is good at this stuff; I hope that this is the case.
5. As Kate and Luc Rabouin point out, the status quo will never change as long as electoral participation remains low. Then again, IMO the MAGA movement’s success is built in large part on conservatives on bringing low-information/low-engagement individuals into the political process, and using fear and vengeance as the way to do so. We can all see where that leads…
Reply