France-Elaine Duranceau, real estate agent and Quebec housing minister, knew perfectly well that a 5.9% rental increase would hit the most vulnerable tenants hardest, but she didn’t give a shit, cranking out some PR about how collecting higher rents would encourage landlords to make more repairs.
Updates from May, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Canadian Tire has acquired the rights to the Hudson’s Bay Company logo and its emblematic stripes for $30 million.
Ian
Since CanadianTire nolonger makes the paper money maybe they can bring back Hudson Bay scrip – the first paper money in Canada, if I recall correctly.
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Kate
October 2021, a young woman named Romane Bonnier was stabbed to death in the McGill Ghetto in broad daylight. A man she shared an apartment with, and may briefly have had a liaison with, is currently on trial for her murder.
I can’t make out from the story whether she was still sharing a place with him at the time, because it’s hard to entirely block a person you’re going to run into in the kitchen.
Adding later: it’s made clear in this piece that François Pelletier was Bonnier’s housemate for only a few months and had ceased to share a place with her in August 2021.
Taylor C. Noakes
“Quartier McGill Ghetto” is pretty grating on the ears… and it does have a French name, Quartier Sainte-Famille, no?
Joey
Always thought it was Milton-Parc… though that’s typically only used when in stories where the principal actors are not McGill students, in which case it tends to be referred to as the McGill ghetto.
Taylor C. Noakes
Milton-Parc was the name used by the Milton-Parc Citizens Committee when they were protesting/organizing against the Cite Concordia project in the late-1960s, early-1970s, but I always thought that was what local anglos called what was previously called Quartier Sainte-Famille – unless the latter was a post Bill-101 creation
In any event, irrespective of how commonplace it might be, the idea of calling one of the higher-rent and more privileged neighbourhoods of our city a ghetto rubs me the wrong way.
I feel there’s this weird trend in our city to rename places that already have well-documented place names, as though to give the city some edge, or perhaps they’re all just the inventions of realtors and property development companies.
Is Concordia Ghetto really a better name than Shaughnessy Village?
Or is the issue that the Bill 101 effort to rename historically English places – an artificial francization – led to names that didn’t stick and then there was general rebranding that erased the communities that existed before 1977?
Paper Hill has more residents today than it had for the latter half of the 20th century, but no one knows that that is. Little Dublin’s gone too. And Griffintown will soon be associated with Bernard Landry, a man who had no connection to the area.
It’s odd because so often the realtors and dvelopment projects themselves pitch their connections to the area with ‘authentic’ sounding names that are supposed to recall the area’s history and heritage, and yet…
DeWolf
McGill Ghetto is an older name than Milton-Parc. I’ve never heard of Quartier Sainte-Famille but the city’s website has an interesting article about how the area was historically called le mont Sainte-Famille and la côte à Baron, but those don’t seem to have carried through to the area’s urbanization in the 19th century.
I tend to be sanguine about toponymy because it changes over time. It’s a reflection of culture. There’s no need to be rigid about it; places can have several names at once, which has been true of any complex city in history.
The west end of downtown is a good example. Concordia Ghetto is pretty colloquial and isn’t widely used outside of a younger student demographic. Shaughnessy Village is a relic of 1980s gentrification and doesn’t really reflect most of the area. Le Quartier des grands jardins is another more official name for the area, but one I’ve never actually heard anyone use in real life, and certainly one that doesn’t reflect any contemporary reality.
Incidentally, ghetto is derived from ghèto, the Venetian word for foundry, which was a landmark in the first (enforced) Jewish quarter in Europe, located in the northwestern corner of Venice — which is today known as Cannaregio, a name whose origin is unclear.
Ian
Ghetto doesn’t necessarily mean “poor”, its connotation is often the same as “Chinatown” or “Little Portugal” – an ethnic enclave. The McGill Ghetto is meant as a tongue-in-cheek counterpoint to the Latin Quarter.
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Kate
Nine restaurants in Quebec have received Michelin stars, with three in Montreal: Europea, Mastard and Sabayon. There are more lists and nods at the Michelin page and on a page from CultMTL.
PatrickC
Why so many more starred restos (proportionally to population) in Quebec City than in Montreal? Not that my budget allows me to test Michelin’s judgments at the stratospheric level.
Kate
Quebec City is more intensely focused on tourism – they get cruise ships that can’t get upriver to us, among other things.
Maybe also all the politicians need classy places they can bring people to schmooze.
Ephraim
From my understanding, Quebec City Tourism PAID to have the Michelin inspectors come. Montreal didn’t.
CE
That’s what I heard when the Michelin people were coming. Since the economy of Quebec City relies much more on tourism than Montreal, having some stars gives the city some extra caché that a bigger city like Montreal doesn’t really need.
maggie rose
Oh joy. More pretentious mini meals that cover 1/10 of the plate.
DavidH
It’s a bit of a cliché but when you visit those restaurants, you see a lot of political staff and politicians. Part of the local lobbying culture is built around these high-end places. You can’t set the proper mood to convince a politician by taking them out for steamés apparently.
DeWolf
Ignoring the stars (even the Michelin boss told La Presse that its critics prefer the Bib Gourmand places, if they are going to choose a restaurant to eat at themselves), Quebec City has a very good restaurant scene for a city its size. It has always seemed a bit cheaper than an equivalent meal in Montreal, too.
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Kate
The family of Ariel Kouakou unveiled a small billboard Thursday. It’s more than seven years since the ten‑year‑old went missing on a short daytime walk in Ahuntsic. The billboard shows an impression of how he might look as a teenager.
The family continues to hope that Ariel was abducted and is still alive; police have always thought he took a detour through a riverside park and fell into the Back River, but say they’re still checking out possible leads.
Vazken
I see this poster every day and hopefully the family gets closure on this, no matter what happens.
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Kate
UNESCO has recognized the Notman studio archives as part of the Memory of the World International Register.
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Kate
A man who didn’t have a permit to drive a truck, and had relevant mental and physical problems keeping him from that kind of work, piled the truck he was driving directly into a traffic jam on the 440 in August 2019. Four people died and more were injured. Jagmeet Grewal was sentenced to ten years Thursday.
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Kate
The coroner’s report is in on the death of Innu man Raphaël André in a portable toilet on a frigid day in January 2021.
André’s severe alcohol intoxication dovetailed with the Covid closure of the nearest shelter, meaning that he had nowhere to go. The coroner, Stéphanie Gamache, called the conditions of André’s death inhumane.
Gamache provided a list of recommendations to help the homeless in general, and avoid such deaths in future. Of course, whether any of them is followed will depend on politics.
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Kate
Some Hochelaga-Maisonneuve residents are blaming biweekly garbage collection for the growing numbers of rats in their borough.
Nicholas
I’m going to blame people putting food/organic material, which you are not legally allowed to put in your garbage, into their garbage, collected biweekly in bags, rather than their compost, which is collected weekly in locking bins.
Also the pest control specialist blames restaurants, which do not get biweekly garbage pickup but pay for commercial pickup, so are unaffected by any changes in residential pickup.
DeWolf
I have neighbours who absolutely refuse to compost and who pile all their food waste into big black bags that invariably get ripped open by rodents. Then they have the gall to blame the resulting mess on the compost bins.
Joey
I suspect you are both right about what’s happening in Hochelaga – plus the fact that garbage put out whenever by people who ignore the garbage pickup windows (who, presumably, are more likely to be tossing organic material given their general disregard for the rules) winds up sitting on the sidewalk a lot longer. That being said, it’s really, really unfair to the rule-abiding citizens of MHM to have to put up with a rat infestation that they are in no way responsible for. It seems pretty evident that this problem only arose after the change in garbage pickup schedule, even if lots of people weren’t disposing of their waste properly beforehand. Isn’t it wrong to allow this kind of vermin infestation to affect everyone in a neighbourhood because some people don’t know follow the rules? Presumably at some point public health officials will force the borough to change back…
(Note also that for most of the borough the new schedule was only implemented last November – things are not looking promising now that it’s hot out.)
(@DeWolf, it would be a shame if their garbage was returned to them, wouldn’t it?)
MarcG
When I see poorly done ‘garbaging’ I chalk it up to mental illness. I don’t think punishment/reward is going to be very effective here (if it ever is), and education seems an unlikely cure as well.
jeather
I don’t know what restaurants are supposed to do, but lots of cheap ones have piles of trash outside for more than enough time to get rats. Overflowing, opened dumpsters, or just piles in an alleyway.
Nicholas
There are lots of solutions, all around, cities all over the world have solved this problem, and regardless of frequency of pickup the solution is not to do what NYC does and pile bags of kitchen waste on the sidewalk.
For restaurants, you can lock your dumpster. You can form a tight enough seal, not just to prevent humans from getting in or opening the lid, but rats too. You can also get your garbage picked up more frequently. You can join together with other businesses near you to get enough garbage and kitchen waste in a block to have daily pickup of the latter. The business associations, the SDCs, can help with all this, getting businesses to work together, which also improves the commercial corridor.
For homes, I’m sorry, but it’s time to take the kid gloves off. I remember having our garbage day change to kitchen waste over a decade and a half ago, and we had no rat problem. All boroughs have it now, with some not implemented for nine or more units, and most Montrealers have had it for years. Why is the rat problem so localized in this borough? We’ve had education, we’ve had news reports, you can’t not see the bins. It just takes a bit of habit changing, and some people need to be nudged into it. The great thing about the kitchen waste bin, unlike garbage bags, is it locks, keeping rats out, so you can put your waste in the bin literally at any time, any temperature, it’s fine, and then you set it out the right day.
I know it’s an election year so we won’t likely have sticks, but I hope next year, when every single residence on the island will be required to compost kitchen waste, that they do a final campaign to teach people what to do and alert people that fines are coming, and then they start fining people. We don’t expect people to leave dog or human shit on the street, and this is similarly dangerous to public health. We live in a society, we have these laws for good reasons, if people don’t want to follow the social contract and keep our city clean, we should fine them, and we should feel no compunction encouraging our neighbours in this way with carrots, and eventually with sticks.
MarcG
“The great thing about the kitchen waste bin, unlike garbage bags, is it locks, keeping rats out” – this is great in theory but if you walk down my block you’ll see that less than half of the brown bins still have their plastic orange locking mechanism on them.
CE
Also, after the contents of the bins have been dumped into the truck, they’re usually thrown back onto the sidewalk, often with the covers open with residue left in the bins. If I were a rat, I’d be going around to those open bins after pickup to enjoy the feast inside.
Vazken 23:27 on 2025-05-15 Permalink
Disgusting, is all I can say.