Police witnessed one man shooting another, early Friday on Ste‑Catherine near Crescent. The victim is in hospital and the attacker was swiftly arrested.
A little later, but still very early, a man was found dead on the esplanade of Place des Arts near police headquarters, as Radio‑Canada emphasizes. He had injuries but no homicide number has been given out because the circumstances are unclear. (TVA suggests that it may be the 10th homicide of the year.)
To meet its responsibilities, the city has to raise an additional $215 million for the next budget.
Blaming collective agreements, metro costs, and a lack of provincial funding is always the go-to but it seems a bit weak…
For context, this artcile from 2020:
“Several questions have gone unanswered. The City informed us that it would be running a deficit of at least $105 million for the 2020 fiscal year. However, to date, it is refusing to cover this shortfall with the $251 million surplus. It’s inconceivable and unacceptable. It has some explaining to do,” said Stéphan Meloche, the administrator of the Syndicat des cols bleus regroupés de Montréal (CUPE 301).
How did we go from a 251 million surplus to a 215 million deficit in 5 years if not in part due to mismanagement? is this the whoel picture or liek 2020 a question of one pot not counted against another? Some transparency would be nice before making these big statements. Maybe we could cut the police budget (821 million 2024).
Well, there was Covid, too (the article is dated April 28, 2020)…
Ian, everything has become more expensive since 2020. I’m surprised the budget hole is as modest as $215 million, actually.
And although I’d love to see some of the police budget reduced, we both know this would result in immediate and loud claims that Projet doesn’t care about law and order.
There are just so many ways to make up for some of the shortfall. The city always goes to the same well, rather than look at other ways of bringing in funding.
Here are a few ideas:
Time -based permits: The longer the time you request on the permit, the higher the cost. You want a permit that uses the sidewalk for 30m for 30 days, it’s X on day 1, But on day two it’s X+10%, for example. So if it was $100 on day one, day two is $110… the longer you are on public property, the longer it will take.
Permit Abuse Fines: When you request a permit to use the street and you put up a no-parking sign, the sign must carry a permit number. That permit number is publicly available to be verified online. If a citizen checks and see you are violating the permit, you will be fined, double the amount of the permit. (I don’t know how many times people on my street have individually called the city to verify permits only to find that they got a permit for 100m on one side but put up their signs on BOTH sides for 200m or more.)
Process savings: Pay cities employees a bonus of 10% up to 25% of the savings to the city, in the first year if they can suggest a process that will increase the speed and costs of the city. They get paid, the city gets the work done faster and cheaper.
No Free Parking: Put a cost to every single parking spot in the city into the budget, including all the spaces used by the STM, the police, and the fire department. Every damn spot. Add the cost of those parking spaces to the budget of those departments, so that on year 0, there is no change in the overall budgets. If the space is worth $150, your budget gets a bonus of $150, but a bill of $150. But now, you have a value to each spot and if you want to ask for an extra spot, you know you need budget approval. And if you can audit your spots and not use as many, you can therefore keep the money and the city can put the spot back into the usage of citizens… which increase spots available for resident permits and/or parking meters and tickets, which would increase costs.
Electronic parking ticketing: Have a car/truck that runs up and down the streets and processes the licence plates of cars. It can track those who have tickets to pay (and send the boot people), cars that are abandoned or stolen, cars that violate the timed zones and finally print the tickets. It won’t allow the city employee to give preferential treatment to construction workers, for example. — Important — There is a button for the employee to hit to mark cars that are temporarily parked for loading/unloading, or have a handicapped placard etc. This will also keep people from being ticketed who do have a resident permit as it can access the database. Among the advantages, the city can track licence plate to handicapped placard and by looking at it, it may be able to adjust parking if the handicapped space is used all the time… or change to have loading/unloading zones, etc, from the data collected.
“(SPVM) received a $63 million budget increase for 2023, after overspending their budget by $50 million in 2022.” link
Worth noting, the police budget was already $679M in 2021 – which of course they went over, by about 30 million.
I can imagine where some of this budget shortfall might be coming from.
That said, yes, I realize everything is more expensive than in 2020… but have bookkeeping methods changed, too? Not counting the surplus against the deficit in 2020 as an excuse to not increase wages for city workers was a misdirection, an accounting shell game. Projet was in charge then, too. I’d like to see a fuller picture, I don’t trust these simple (or more appropriately, simplified) statements – nor should anyone. Fool me once, et cetera.
Ephraim
I just went through the process for a parking permit this week.
First off, the process is clear as mud and involves tracing a map on a city website about how much space you need, possibly including sidewalks. (There is no “I need a parking space” option.)
Second, once the borough has issued the permit, a person needs to hire a third party to get and set up the no-parking-you-will-be-towed signs.
Third, the permit holder must fill out a form and email the city 12-14 hours before the permit is in effect, and do this every single day.
Somewhere in this process you get a permit number that you have to print up and stick on the vehicle’s dashboard so you don’t get towed.
If your job finishes early, you need to email the city to say the job is done. The city tells you the cost upfront but only bills after the fact in case of changes.
There are way too many places for errors to creep in, too many unnecessary steps, and too many people and companies involved.
Kevin – Which is why it needs to be simplified but also searchable. They frequently film on my street. They frequently violate the permits. They frequently have the residents calling the city to complain because they take so much of the permit parking area. Which is why it needs to be an open database and the city needs to get a better system in gear. You are also supposed to use certain signs….
And we have all seen people put up chairs or signs trying to reserve spaces on the street… only to have them removed, because without a permit… they mean nothing.
The only chairs I ever see reserving space are when people are moving house, which is a rare enough occurrence that it seems to be generally agreed that it’s a reasonable exception. Do you see people doing it for other reasons, Ephraim?
@Kate – Yeah, mostly students who don’t realize we don’t do that in Montreal… like trying to reserve a parking space in the snow.
People definitely do the chair thing for moving and it’s very much respected. I’ve probably done it 15 times in my life (including just the other week when I needed a spot to make a large delivery).
When I was finding third parties to put up signs there were FOUR options: with and without permit. Putting up the signs themselves or DIY. SO MUCH WASTED EFFORT.
But the people putting up signs have to rely on trust because they don’t have access to the permits, only the permit number. It’s so stupid, so quebecois. Le sigh.
You can’t solve rules being poorly enforced by adding another layer of rules.
That said, it is clear that even borough-level coordination of permits is mostly non-existant.
I still say trimming the cop budget to finance other essential services is an easy win and important first step in getting the grotesquely inflated city budget in order.
Parking tickets are already almist double what they were 5 years ago, for example – there’s only so many ways for the city to raise new money.
A Superior Court judge struck down the tuition hike and francisation requirements for out‑of‑province university students on Thursday, a case brought by McGill and Concordia.
But it’s not all rainbows and roses. The tuition rules stand for nine months, during which the government has to come up with a new fee structure. But the requirement that 80% of the students at those universities have to learn French besides everything else they need to do is gone – until the government finds a way around this.
Pointing out that there is no data to support the CAQ’s insistence that outsiders don’t assimilate is a win all by itself. Uncle Frankie is still mad about growing up in Ste Anne hearing English, outsiders ruining Quebec is his hobbyhorse.
It also leaves open the question of what assimilation actually involves, and how a person can prove that they’ve been sufficiently assimilated.
Hence the obsession with hijabs.
The bill for the renovation of the La Fontaine tunnel has jumped by $250 million – rising to $3 billion. Announcements were made as the renovated section prepares to reopen, but the unrenovated section will take till 2027.
Of Montreal’s 68 metro stations, only 30 have elevator access. Advocates for people with reduced mobility want us to do better.
I’ve been sent this link to Lemay’s plans for the Black Rock memorial site. I find it all rather conceptual and colourless, rather like the kitchens in recent condo designs.
But how far are they moving the Rock? That isn’t even mentioned, and it’s the only question I want answered.
I was also curious about that. From https://montrealirishmonument.com/:
“Construction on the park will begin in 2027 once the Hydro-Quebec sub-station is completed (2024) and the Ville de Montreal redirects Bridge Street and repurposes la rue des Irlandais (2027).”
Does that mean the road is moving and the park will just be built around the existing location of the Rock?
Based on that overhead mockup it looks like they wouldn’t have to move it at all. My crappy visualization.
Thanks, Marc G.
It would be nice if the PR stuff could make that clear.
I don’t know that I have close relatives under the Rock and I don’t even know whether anyone has a list of those presumably buried there. But it’s likely. So I do feel something about not having the dead dug up a lot as they create this site.
I think MarcG is right; they won’t move the rock, they’ll relocated the road.
I like the design from what I can see of it. Those renderings always look a bit cold and spartan, but it has some interesting lines and the curved walls look both visually interesting and practical for cutting down on the traffic sounds.
At least there isn’t a breakfast bar.
It seemed unlikely that the train tracks would be moved, so it is kind of boxed in on one side.
I was waiting for you to say that, Kate 😛
Great if the rock stays put, but when/why did the wrought iron shamrock fence get removed? It was some quality metalwork, and marked the memorial off from its surroundings quite well.
Annette: Based on Google street view images it was removed between 2009 and 2012.
It’s amazing how much cities can change. The big empty lot east of the rock used to be the Goose Village neighbourhood, then the Autostade was there in the 60s and 70s (you can see the rock on the south side of the stadium in the photo). Fun rabbithole fact: the stadium was designed to be easily movable so most of it is still being used for amateur baseball in Thetford Mines.
Thanks, MarcG.
Maybe irrelevant to this conversation but I saw Pink Floyd there (Autostade) in 1975 – if I remember it, does it mean I wasn’t there – ?
STM buses have put the words “Go Habs Go” up on their buses on and off for years. But an OQLF complaint has put an end to that.
I had to check this wasn’t an April Fool. It isn’t.
The Gazette also reports this, but about “Go CF Montreal Go” which has also been sported from time to time on STM buses.
Update: Someone reminded me that buses never had “Go Habs Go” but in fact “Go Canadiens Go”.
Defund the OQLF
Are they going to shut off the lights and bring the game to a halt when people chant those three words at the Bell Centre?
We live in a parody.
Gross government being gross.
Something has gone wrong in society. Why do so many village idiots have power?
Kevin: because people want to feel that the people in charge are no smarter than they are.
I’ve seen a few buses with “Allez Canadiens Allez!” which doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well.
The buses didn’t say Go Habs Go, which would have been the obvious thing. Instead they said Go Canadiens Go (and also Go Alouettes Go), which was kinda dumb but OK. Allez Canadiens Allez is absurd. I can only imagine an anglo complained to make the OQLF look bad. Haven’t had a Pastagate in a while.
Between this and the CAQ refusing to budget on the alcohol limit – even after someone was killed by a driver who had been stopped with a blood alcohol level between 0.05 and 0.1 an hour before the incident – it’s seriously time to have a provincial election…
Kate
If the people in charge are taking these complaints at face face value then they are in fact missing the forest for the trees.
Nobody is making a complaint about “Go! CF MTL Go” because they’re offended by the language.
They’re making complaints because they’re desperate to interact with anyone in a meaningful fashion.
We should be treating these complaints as cries for help from desperate people.
They reported this on the CBC national news FFS. But I suppose that’s better than hearing more about tariffs. National comic relief courtesy of your friendly neighbourhood OQLF.
Also, I’m quite sure I’ve seen GO HABS GO on buses before. But that might have been 20 years ago, or it might have been an RTL bus, or it might have been a real-time AI manipulation beamed directly into my brain. (Sorry, spending too much time on FB.)
Well here’s a pie in the face for the OQLF… suits ’em, I dig the look.
https://www.montrealgazette.com/news/article894384.html
I saw a 55 bus this afternoon that had a sign in the front window of the bus that said “Go Canadiens Go.” It looked pretty official, it was hard to see from my bike but it looked like the STM logo was underneath the offending message.
Common les boys!
I wish we could learn to accept who and what we are; Quebec needs therapy.
Aweille le gang!
It doesn’t feel like new news that more and more people are turning to food banks when their rent leaves them with no money for food. But the food bank operator quoted here is right: this is an untenable situation. In essence, society is forced either to subsidize landlords, or let people starve.
The Hudson’s Bay Company is planning to liquidate its remaining stores, leaving open the question what will happen to the red sandstone landmark on Phillips Square.
Quick, somebody re-open Morgan’s!
My parents called it Morgan’s for years.
@Kate, It’s happened to me, too. They say long-term memory is the last to go…
Morgan’s was bought by HBC in 1960.
We used to keep christm ornaments in an old Morgan’s box
@Ephraim the very last Morgan’s lgo was a weird pastiche of the old Morgan’s logo and the Bay’s “mod” logo. The M was gloroious.
At one point not that long ago there was a Hudson Bay Company museum in the downtown Hudson’s Bay store. Then one day it was gone. Fun while it lasted tho.
The Go Vélo festival is marking the 40th anniversary of the Tour de l’Île, with the familiar trio of cycling challenges, May 25 to June 1.
Festival sur le Canal, which recently announced it would hold no event this summer, is after all planning a weekend festival which coincides with Grand Prix weekend, June 13‑15.
The Orchestre classique de Montréal plans a day of classical music at St Joseph’s Oratory, July 5.
And the Orchestre métropolitain is already announcing fall plans.
Shouldn`t that be Allez Vélo?
Good point!
François Legault says Quebecers who have a family doctor can keep them while the physicians’ federation (Fédération des médecins omnipraticiens du Québec – FMOQ) thinks he wants to remove them from 4.9 million Quebecers (that’s about half the population – how many of us have GPs anyway?).
The FMOQ is claiming that the CAQ wants to remove GPs from current patients even though the CAQ claim they don’t. It’s being used at the negociations table. The FMOQ is against this.
Yeah, the government is trying to have it both ways – it acknowledges that there aren’t enough family docs to go around, it wants to allocate access to family docs according to medical need (which would involve classifying all Quebeckers into four colour-coded categories), but it is reluctant to actually destroy-and-rebuild the system. In other words, the minister (and the premier) is unwilling to cause “healthy” Quebeckers to give up their family docs so that those in more need can have access to them. Instead, it will ‘simply’ instruct each family doc clinic (GMF/CLSC) to reserve appointments with physicians to patients who ‘really’ need them, and send ‘healthy’ patients to super-nurses or other professionals.
I am strongly in favour of enabling all healthcare practitioners to practice to the maximum potential of their professional scope – we’ve seen some really positive movement in this direction with pharmacists in the last decade, for example. But don’t tell me I get to keep my family doc if I can never see him.
All of this – Santé Québec, colour-coding patients, re-organizing clinics, creating patient roster minimums, etc. – is tinkering. The fundamental problem is that there are not enough family doctors (and lots of specialists, and nurses, and on and on) for our population, which is getting older and has more significant needs. I saw a headline the other day about the some positive news re: family doctor training, but the results of expanded med school capacity will only show themselves in several years, and only if there are corresponding increases to the number of resident spots, hospital physician spots, etc.
Took six weeks for me to book an appointment with my family doctor (GP). We only had fifteen minutes, and that wasn’t enough time, so before i left the building I booked another appointment as soon as possible. Another six week wait for fifteen minutes. If I see a different doctor sooner, I’ll have to show them my RAMQ card, and then my family doctor catches hell from the government; this discourages her from keeping me on her roll.
I guess if you changed it to fifteen minutes every twelve weeks (three months) that would mean she gets to meet with one more person. In the meantime, the clinic would (as it has in the past) tell me to go to the nearby hospital emergency room if I want to see someone sooner, no matter what it is. This ain’t great.
David S, I skipped two words in my initial edit. Thanks.
With the new egregious 15min situation, is it possible to book the 9h15 and 9h30 slot ahead of time?
Why wait when for a small amount you can get a medical consultation courtesy of Biron medical? /S
(I’m not kidding tho because I’ve actually seen that ad online.)
The city would like to fully pedestrianize rue de la Commune, but the Société du Vieux-Port de Montréal keeps coming up with new obstacles to the plan. There are details here but we shouldn’t be surprised that it boils down to the same old song: parking.
The federal government runs the Old Port like a low-rent theme park instead of the historically significant public space that it is. They have one objective — profit — and so they’ll never back down on access to their very lucrative parking lots, even though they have very negative external effects on the rest of Old Montreal (constant summer gridlock).
Why isn’t the Old Port like every old central area in every town of every size in Europe – totally pedestrianized on some streets, restricted parking/driving on others, and lots of parking lots on the margins? Thrown in delivery times (7-11 every day) as well… would make a lot of sense, at least from May to October.
The Old Port does have lots and lots of parking on its margins, not to mention *three* metro stations and a special bus line. The problem is the vast parking lots on prime waterfront land bring thousands of cars right into the heart of the neighbourhood and there’s nothing to stop them. It’s insane when you go on a summer weekend and all the streets are clogged by cars with out-of-province licence plates. I remember one afternoon when Notre-Dame was gridlocked from Place d’Armes to McGill and I could count the number of Quebec plates on one hand.
We need better messaging so tourists who insist on driving know that they can park around Victoria Square, the Palais des congrès, Complexe Desjardins, Gare Viger, etc., rather than all piling straight into the Old Port. And of course more pedestrian streets and streets restricted to local traffic.
It would be so much nicer for photo ops in Old Mtl if cars were banished, all else aside.
Exactly! The carrot isn’t working so it’s time for the stick. If you don’t have a car registered to an address in Old Montreal or are not making a delivery between 7 and 11 or are not an Uber/taxi, you should not be allowed to drive in Old Montreal in spring and summer.
Signs for parking lots in and around Old Montreal really need to be much more obvious, and love ’em or hate ’em, multi-level parking garages work well and tourists know to look for them.
I don’t really understand why Commune would need to be pedestrianized, when there is already lots and lots of walking space along the water, and wide sidewalks on Commune itself. It’s not that nice of a street either (the street itself, not the waterfront.)
St-Paul is the one that should be pedestrianized in my opinion. It is too narrow and crowded for sidewalks and cars, and is far more quaint.
“It’s not that nice of a street either.”
Exactly. Why should the street that runs right along the Old Port be anything but nice? It’s already lined by restaurant terraces, it’s the closest thing Montreal has to a corniche style promenade.
And the city’s plan isn’t actually to pedestrianize de la Commune. There would still be buses and some local traffic, and the mysterious gap in the bike path between St-Laurent and the clock tower road would be finally filled. But it would make de la Commune a much more pleasant place to be. I don’t see why this very prominent and beautiful street should be sacrificed just because St-Paul is a block away.
Get rid of all the people and photo ops would be even better. You should have seen how free of cars (and people) it was in the 80s.
If we’re going to get ride of something ugly that destroys the Old Montreal historic landscape, why can’t it be the giant ferris wheel?
In another of the ongoing theme of nongovernmental social services losing their premises, the downtown Catholic Community Services is dealing with a decrepit building that badly needs renovations.
The Quebec government has a toxic relationship with grassroots groups. It doesn’t want to support them – this kind of story is repeated over and over – but it can’t or won’t replace their services with direct government aid.
Quebec has stopped funding for new school buildings but the city badly needs schools downtown, in Griffintown and in the Triangle district. Downtown the three buildings proposed for grade school classes have been turned down by the CSSDM because they’re old and need expensive renovations before they can be used, and the other two locations are new residential districts that were conceived completely for profit without considering the need for social structures like schools.
I was thinking that these are French schools, what’s the problem, but of course they are French schools for immigrants.
The CAQ talks big about French, but its concern for education has always been meager.
I don’t know what we do about developers. We need residential spaces, but people are more than mortgage‑paying units. People need parks, social services of various kinds and schools. Why we’ve been doing urban zoning that excludes these things I do not know.
This was a big part of the conversation of Devimco’s plans for Griffintown, what, 15-20 years ago… the strong need for schools, services, etc. Alas…
The social infrastructure is indeed planned for these neighbourhoods, which is why sites in the Triangle and Griffintown have been reserved for schools. (They also have parks that are either built, under construction or planned.) But you can’t build schools if the province isn’t providing the funding.
François Legault doesn`t care about Montreal. Can we please seperate from this province, or at least have the transfer payments to manage it ourselves?
The Université de Montréal is hoping to benefit from the ill wind in the U.S. by attracting topnotch researchers, but it needs money to do that.
Isabelle Hachey ponders the American crackdown on science and also emphasizes how Canada can benefit from the inevitable brain drain that’s taking place.
If the program is a success will we read articles about how more must be done to discourage the use of English?
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