Ensemble mayoral hopeful Soraya Martinez Ferrada says, if she were elected, she would abolish the city bylaw mandating social and affordable units in new construction. I wonder if she has France‑Elaine Duranceau’s number in her phone.
Updates from May, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
In recent weeks shots were fired on two occasions at a house on Nuns Island, and several businesses belonging to the same family have been set on fire. The owner, who’s from Italy, maintains that no one has asked him for protection money.
One of the suspects in the Old Montreal arson of a café belonging to the family is an 18‑year‑old who was arrested in hospital where he turned up with serious burns.
Daniel Renaud has a good story this weekend about extortions.
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Kate
Quebec is proposing a bill to let other provinces’ goods in, in accord with the overall plan to reduce trade barriers between provinces.
But what about French labels and so on? There’s nothing about that in this brief report, which says “goods from other provinces and territories may be ‘commercialized, used or consumed’ in Quebec without further requirements.”
CE
Products sold in Canada have to have labelling in both English and French so I don’t think it will be too much of a problem for all but the most artisanal of products.
Kevin
Such as musical instruments and accessories…
mare
Isn’t there a Quebec tariff on ice cream and cheese?
Kate
Quebec makes some terrific, if expensive, artisanal cheese these days. I wouldn’t like that to be undermined by industrial quantities of cheddar from Ontario.
Ian
Ontario has a very big artisanal cheese offering, too, which should come as no.surprise.
Nicholas
CE, not everything needs to be in both languages. For prepackaged non-food consumer products, “The product identity must be shown in English and French. Non-mandatory label information, such as directions for use and promotional statements, do not need to be bilingual; however, you are encouraged to include such information in both languages.” per the Competition Bureau. For food there are more stringent rules, where things have to be bilingual in most cases, but there are a few exceptions, and, “In general information on labels and in advertisements that is not part of mandatory information (such as recipes on a can of soup or games on a box of cereal) is not subject to bilingual requirements at the federal level, although manufacturers and importers are encouraged to present such information bilingually.” There are also different rules for some other categories, like drugs, and non-consumer products generally only need labelling in one language. That’s why Quebec has its own, stricter law.
Kate, Quebec does make some great artisanal cheeses, and I don’t think many people buying those would be switching to mass produced Ontario cheddar. We might get some good artisanal Ontario cheeses, but presumably Ontario will get some good Quebec artisanal cheeses too. More choice is great.
MarcG
More choice is great but it also means more emissions moving products around.
dwgs
AFAIK Saputo is the largest cheese / dairy producer in Canada so those artisanal cheeses already compete against the biggest of the big boys. Also, surely those are two different markets. We buy mozzarella from Super C but for real cheese we’ll go to Fromagerie Atwater, Hamel, or the little goat cheese people at Jean Talon market.
MarcG, I don’t think that having products from other provinces available means that people will consume more but might be more likely to choose Canadian products over American for example.MarcG
I wasn’t suggesting that people will consume more. Continuing with artisinal cheese as an example: if you currently buy 10 cheeses a month and they’re all made in Quebec, and after these changes you buy 5 Quebec cheeses and 5 Ontario cheeses, and somebody in Ontario does the exact same thing, we’ve now transported 5 cheeses out of province and 5 cheeses into the province that wouldn’t have happened before, despite consumption being the same. Does that make sense?
Orr
Besides being a giant industrial producer of mass-market cheese, Saputo also has a fine cheese division, made in their Plesisville factory. Several brands you might think of as artisanal in the grocery store are from here. Any cheese that, at the end of the aging process, is underweight by a few grams is sold in the factory store there at *incredible* prices.
That said, I also appreciate/adore/can’t get enough of Quebec’s many top-rated, world-class prize winning cheeses from small producers. There are a lot of them. #DeathByCheese is a risk I live with daily.
Anyhoo, breaking down the interprovincial trade barriers is a noble goal, but let’s not be fooled into thinking Quebec is removing it’s most popular non-tariff trade barrier aka language laws. Labour mobility into Quebec is severely restricted by these same laws. That isn’t changing anytime soon/ever.Nicholas
MarcG, there’s a photo that goes around every so often of a fruit cup of pears that were grown in Argentina, packaged in Thailand and sold in America (I think NYC). It turns out the carbon emissions from transport of that cup are less than driving two blocks in your car to the store. It could also replace cheese from France, which have larger emissions (yes, I know that’s not happening, which shows how much people care). I’m not saying this swap of cheese would have no effect, but it’s miniscule, and if we’re really worried about food transportation emissions we should look at fresh fruit transported by plane. And, of course, the emissions created by growing food are way, way, way higher than transportation.
dwgs
We can split that hair as finely as you want to. What if the artisanal cheese I buy from Ontario is made in Glengarry (https://glengarryfinecheese.com/collections/all)? That’s an hour’s less travel time than from the townships.
MarcG
Yeah I thought about that geographical point too, and don’t have any real numbers on emissions from transport, so fair nuff, I just thought it was worth mentioning. Not sure if any of this affects alcohol but if it does, craft beer nerds are going to rejoice not having to organize private imports through the SAQ just to get their hands on stuff brewed next door.
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Kate
American businesses near the border are offering exclusive deals for Canadians, but don’t they understand it isn’t about the deal, even if their Great Leader is the lord of the deal? It’s about people not wanting to visit a hostile regime.
jeather
A bucket of golf balls. Be still my heart.
Ephraim
Have you noticed the uptick of travel ads on US channels? VT and NY both advertising heavily to get Canadians to visit.
JaneyB
Cute, Canadian-themed golfballs…against the threat of detention in ICE facilities or Salvadoran prisons. So many Americans don’t value ‘habeas corpus’, the very foundation of democracy. It’s strange that they don’t see the danger. Then there’s the annexation issue, of course…grrr.
dhomas
I listen to the radio in the morning with the kids. They play a commercial constantly advertising for travel within the US from Plattsburgh airport, via Allegiant Air. Not sure who is paying for the advertisement: the airport, the city of Plattsburgh, or the airline. I’m not sure if I want them to stop so as to avoid convincing Canadians that it’s a good idea to travel to/via the US or if I want them to continue wasting their money supporting our local economy (in the hopes they convince no one).
Orr
A nice vacation vs an Ice “vacation”?
I know which I’d choose.jeather
Upstate NY is a pretty red area, too, so a lot of them did in fact vote for this exactly.
Ephraim
21st Congressional District…. Elise Stefanik who is a BIG orange supporter.
saintlaurent
> Upstate NY is a pretty red area, too, so a lot of them did in fact vote for this exactly.
Not quite as much as you think. Clinton County, where Plattsburgh is located? 48.9% Harris, 51.1% Trump.
Essex County, where Lake Placid and most of the Adirondack High Peaks are located? 50.3% Harris, 49.7% Trump.
Warren County, where Lake George is located? 47.9% Harris, 52.1% Trump.
So the three upstate New York counties that attract the most Quebecers as tourists? All three are pretty close to purple. When I wasn’t growing up in Montreal, I grew up in Essex County, and I’m still pretty surprised that it’s pretty much as purple as purple gets. Yeah, Lewis County may have gone 70+% for Trump, but I’d argue that very, very few Quebecers go there as tourists.
For the whole 21st Congressional District, which by east-of-the-Mississippi standards is a *huge* district and stretches all the way down to Saratoga Springs and almost as far west as Lake Ontario, yes, Trump won 60%. Stefanik is a big (if opportunistic) Trump supporter (don’t get me started on that; she used to be a *very* establishment Republican), and slightly outperformed Trump (62%). Her consistent re-elections since 2014 are partly due to the Democrats putting up a series of severely weak candidates over the last several election cycles. A Democrat represented that district as recently as 2014.
Now, myself? I find a couple of souvenir golf balls pretty chintzy. But I would gently suggest that you don’t dismiss these efforts as entirely insincere. Having known many of these people for my entire life, they think the bullshit annexation talk is exactly that – bullshit – and truly do value Quebecers as both neighbours and customers.
Uatu
F that. ICE is supposed to be raising it’s arrest quotas to 3000 a day which means that anyone is fair game for detention even if you did nothing wrong. Border agents aren’t necessarily bad people, but they believe that the system will prove your innocence…. eventually. In the meantime they fill their quota and the privately run detention center gets paid- which is what’s really important to the current administration.
Ephraim
Elise Stefanik got 62% of the vote. Clinton was 52%. Essex was the lowest with 51.7%. 55.6% in Franklin (the next county to Clinton) and 60.6% in St-Lawrence country, where the Akwesasne reserve is located. And as you move more west and more south they all get much worse. But not a single country went blue.
Kate
saintlaurent, that’s a mixed message if I’ve ever seen one.
saintlaurent
Ephraim, I was counting how each county voted for Trump or Harris, not Stefanik. The numbers are roughly similar, but Essex County went (very slightly) for Harris, and Clinton was only very slightly Trump.
Kate, I would argue the message isn’t that mixed. If about 50% of voters in Clinton County voted against Trump, it stands to reason that about half of all small business owners didn’t vote for Trump and are desperately trying to salvage whatever they can of that summer business from Quebec tourists. So it’s really a 50/50 shot if the guy with the golf balls is a Trump voter or not. If he isn’t, can you blame him for trying to promote his business? Again, I think the golf balls are pretty cheesy, but I don’t think it is logical to immediately jump to the conclusion that he’s obviously a Trump voter with buyer’s remorse. Although who knows, maybe he is?
Kate
You make it sound like we owe it to these people to bring them our business.
And you know? We really don’t.
saintlaurent
> And you know? We really don’t.
I agree with that, 100%.
You make it sound as if you want to punish any and all of them, because the barest majority of them happen to made a bad choice. I could see that if, for example, Montreal was a 45-minute drive from rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ ruby-red Texas or middle-of-nowhere ultra-Trump Wyoming. But those parts of upstate New York (e.g., Plattsburgh, Lake Placid, Keene Valley, Lake George) are not that.
Thought experiment: if this story had been about the efforts of business owners in Vermont to reach out to their Quebec customers, I imagine some readers’ reaction would have been rather different, since deep blue Vermont that voted nearly 2-1 against Trump is cool in a way that merely 50/50 purple upstate New York is not. Burlington is hip in that QS/NDP crunchy-granola way, whereas Plattsburgh is a little bit quétaine.
Ephraim
Honestly, we used to go to Plattsburgh, but haven’t visited in more than a decade and likely a lot longer. (I checked, last time we stayed in Plattsburgh overnight was 2011) New York State Troopers in that region target Quebec and Vermont plates for speeding tickets. The mall decided they were going to charge Canadians for Internet access, when it was expensive to roam. And of course, they have a Sam’s Club, not a Costco. And slowly there were less and less businesses. So, we started going to Vermont instead. The people are nicer, the businesses as well. There is a Costco. But it changes, too. I looked at our last overnight in 2020, before COVID. We paid C$88 for a night in January (tax-in). Now, a hotel below that is $169 tax-in (also January). And when we went to the US it wasn’t about price, it was about variety and different products. But we just stopped going. In fact, even vacations have moved from the US to elsewhere. We have on vacation planned with a friend in 2026 that starts in the US, but nothing else.
Kate
saintlaurent, you’re playing a range of tiny violins here but I can’t hear them.
I don’t want to punish anybody. I don’t want to spend my money in that country and I’m not going to lose any sleep over Canadians choosing to spend their money at home, or elsewhere. But it’s not chiefly about money and deals (it always comes down to money and deals). The U.S. isn’t a safe place right now. It’s better to stay away.
jeather
There is absolutely no reason to assume that business owners track the overall voting population.
But reliably blue NYC and southern Maine and California are trying to get Canadians, and they’re not working either. I’m not blaming the hotel and restaurant and etc etc owners for trying to get Canadians back, and I think they are sincere that they want Canadian tourists. I just don’t CARE, and I can’t see that people who are avoiding the US would be swayed by some golf balls. I’m sorry for (some of) the people getting caught up in this, but their problem is not Canada, it’s their own government.
saintlaurent
I’ll entirely concede the point that crossing the border can be viewed as a crap shoot. I have dual citizenship (and a NEXUS card), so for me there’s virtually zero apprehension. I certainly wouldn’t, though, advise someone who has PR status in Canada or has a Canadian passport that shows their place of birth as, say, Tehran or Port-au-Prince to have a jolly good Saturday day trip buying cheap groceries in P’Burgh. In fact, quite the contrary – I’d be right at the front of the line, telling them that is a Very Bad Idea.
But I do take issue with what I perceive to be a massive amount of shade you’re throwing at the folk, a significant number of whom, safe to assume, are anti-Trump voters, just trying to maintain their existing Quebec customer base and keep their own small businesses afloat. That casual dismissal of their efforts is, IMHO, kind of shitty.
And I’m sorry, the vibe I feel you’re throwing off really does smack of a desire for (or at a minimum, a schadenfreude attitude towards) collective punishment. As you said, no one owes these people any business, and I agree without hesitation. But you make it sound as if a U.S. business even attempting to market itself to Quebecers, in the current environment, is an affront to your sensibilities.
J’ai eu la bonne chance de passer environ la moitié de ma vie à Montréal et l’autre moitié dans le nord de l’État de New York (principalement, à Plattsburgh ainsi que Essex County). Je comprends parfaitement la colère des Canadiens, et ils ont raison, à mon avis. Je comprends aussi que les New Yorkers de Plattsburgh et des Adirondacks savent bien de quel côté leurs tartines est beurrée, et c’est pourquoi plusieurs d’entre eux essaient de sensibiliser les Québécois pour leur faire savoir qu’ils sont toujours les bienvenus, ainsi que leurs dollars touristiques, malgré les efforts du gouvernement américain actuel.
Margaret
I’m sure many of the American affected didn’t vote this regime in, but neither did the Canadian workers that are suffering as a result of its tariffs etc. My money and my consumer loyalty is going to Canadian enterprises and I don’t see how any offer of “a deal” changes that. “American deals” are never without fallout.
Kate
That casual dismissal of their efforts is, IMHO, kind of shitty.
Am I expected to express sympathy for a country that wants to take mine over and which, if it doesn’t assent to this, will be faced with a constant barrage of economic attacks and threats?
But you make it sound as if a U.S. business even attempting to market itself to Quebecers, in the current environment, is an affront to your sensibilities.
It is. The idea that all we need is a little “deal” and we’ll rush happily across the border to save their businesses would be funny if it didn’t smack, in a small way, of what Trump is already trying to do to us.
dwgs
Speaking as someone born and raised in a border community where there is a lot of back and forth (I have American and dual citizen relatives due to intermarriage) I get where saintlaurent is coming from and it’s a valid point, there are a lot of decent Americans doing their best to get by. I am also outraged by the insanity that has taken root down there and refuse to cross the border or give them any money until Trumplethinskin and the rest of his evil posse are sent packing. Decent people down there need to feel enough economic pain to get them demonstrating in the streets by the millions.
Orr
Once you’ve seen, as I have, a car at the border get surrounded by a heavily-armed swat team, see everyone get pulled out of the car and forced to lie face-down on the ground with weapons aimed at them, and after a few minutes they are told “it’s all good, you can proceed now,” you might think twice about if this is a place you really want to visit.
Bonus points if you enjoy the experience of ICE roadblock checkpoints 50 miles into the US to examine your papers.
Tl;dr: a police state is a state I don’t plan to visit.Ephraim
All I have to add is that the Munich pact was signed by Neville Chamberlain, who seems to have some things in common with Keir Starmer… inviting him to the UK for discussions…
jeather
I don’t really blame Americans who want to regain their Canadian clients for it. But “ok our president is threatening to take you over, he has fucked up the world economy, and if you’re unlucky you might get held by ICE for a few weeks” is not something that “here are some golf balls” can fix, and it feels patronizing.
Kate
Well put, jeather!
Joey
“Only half the population is MAGA” is hardly a consolation (let alone lone a marketing slogan) if you clock MAGA as a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, death cult. If the “folk” who want to retain their Canadian customer base mean it, they’ll leave the golf balls for now and revolt against their crooked government.
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Kate
Weekend notes from CityCrunch, La Presse, the Gazette, Le Devoir, CultMTL. Free or cheap weekend events in the Journal.
Most media include “warnings” about road closures for the Tour la Nuit on Friday, and the Tour de l’Île on Sunday.
Your road closures and construction sites.
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Kate
The OQLF wrote six times to the STM to pressure it to scrub ‘go’ off city buses. And finally it did, in a triumph for the French language.
Nicholas
Verville said there is a “huge difference” between using the word
“go”“God” in reference tothe Montreal soccer teamIslam as compared tothe Montreal CanadiensCatholicism.He said fans of
CF MontréalIslam typically chant“Allez Montréal”Allahu Akbar duringmatchesprayers, while“Go Habs Go”Le Seigneur soit avec vous has long been part of Quebec culture.Uatu
I should ask them for the translation of “bullshit job”. It’d be a learning experience for both of us.
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Kate
Closure of La Tulipe had sparked promises of a new noise policy in the Plateau and in the city as a whole, but it’s difficult to find a happy medium. Should developers be stopped from building residential spaces adjoining bars and venues? Or should people simply have the common sense not to move in close to lively streets if they don’t want to be woken by revellers in the night?
Tim S.
There probably should be an official “noisy” area status that real estate agents/landlords be required to disclose. Visiting a place at 11AM on a Sunday morning tells you nothing about how noisy it will be at midnight on Friday.
P
Still can’t believe what happened to La Tulipe. That neighbor who caused all this should have had his name and face plastered all over town and should have been made in a pariah until he stepped down and sold and moved away.
It shouldn’t take much more of a policy than “if you live near a music venue, there will be noise.”
Kate
La Tulipe should have had the same protected status that the Monument National has. The “mistake” that allowed someone to move into a space that should never have been zoned residential should be examined to figure out exactly what was going on there.
Joey
I’m not sure how it happened, but we seem to have tacitly decided that we’ll tolerate noise pretty much everywhere we shouldn’t (transit, movie theatres) and not where we should (clubs, theatres).
Kate
Joey, that’s an excellent point.
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