Radio-Canada notes that next year’s Grand Prix will be held in May and asks whether this will be as effective as a launch to summer in Montreal.
Updates from June, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
TVA looks at some of the notable incidents described in the city ombudsman’s 2024 report. So does Le Devoir.
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Kate
Oscar-winning animator Co Hoedeman has died at age 84. He was a longtime Montrealer and worker at the NFB.
Major Annoyance
The NFB has his body of work online, including 1977’s The Sand Castle:
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Kate
A Substack transit writer critiques our metro, making some good points about accessibility and payment difficulties, but I’m not sure about his emphasis on the need for air conditioning, even to suggesting that station doors be removed. Makes me wonder if he’s ever been here in wintertime.
jeather
Maybe they could have discussed this with any Montrealers ever, because this is “I, a tourist, know what this city needs and the solutions and don’t need to discuss it with the actual regular users”.
Some are correct, eg access, but do not refer to any of the known reasons it is not being done; there are piles of explainers about why the doors are so hard to open (but often have a mobility button) and it’s just ignored entirely.
Nicholas
I’ve had my quibbles with Reece over the years (REM boosterism for one; he’s come around s”omewhat, as he says), and do here too, but he’s broadly right. We have a frequent, “It’s good enough, I survived it this way” attitude in the city, province and country. And we are only slightly more curious about international advances than the US is. There are lots of metros and trains in Scandinavia, Russia, northern Japan and China. Sapporo runs on rubber tires too. It is getting hotter in the world, and here, and we have more very hot summer days than decades ago. I honestly don’t mind the temperature variations that much, but I hear about it from people, and some have said they don’t want to take the metro because they’ll get sweaty going to work. And even if it’s not necessary, it’s a thing we could do to make the lives of the people who use transit better. He’s spot on when he says, “it’s very easy in technical fields like metro planning and engineering to come up with excuses as to why various things ‘aren’t possible’ when clearly it’s more of a matter of funding, but especially will.”
jeather, I agree about the mobility button, but I guarantee you Reece, who has worked in transit, has discussed this with many Montrealers who use transit regularly. He’s also discussed it with agency staff, both here and in many countries, and has visited here many times. The idea that someone who doesn’t live here can’t understand our issues or propose solutions is exactly why we’re stuck in this mindset where we don’t learn from the better systems in the rest of the world (and I love Montreal, but there are hundreds of better systems out there). If you only look to locals, you’ll mostly get people who helped create the system we currently have, and are unlikely to criticize it, especially when their careers depend on it. But if you look there are locals who do have lots of complaints and suggestions, but they’re not listened to: too much, “c’est impossible!” from people, and when you show that it’s done in dozens of cities, you get “c’est impossible ici.” Just yesterday someone told me, explaining why Lucien L’Allier was rebuilt with low, inaccessible platforms, that CN and CP do not allow trains with high doors on their network, and when I showed them a photo I took last month of two Vaudreuil trains at Vendome with high and low doors on them I didn’t get a response.
jeather
I am entirely sure people who don’t live here can understand our issues and, if there were political will (which there is not), help fix it.
I do not believe they can understand our issues by visiting as a tourist and opining, and if you say he’s spoken to people — fine, but it doesn’t show in that specific link.
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Kate
There’s been a slight drop in throughput at the Port of Montreal, but the origins and destinations of cargo are diversifying in the face of U.S. intransigence.
Trade with China in particular is booming. After all, they still make stuff we want.
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Kate
Quebec has found a developer that has come up with an ambitious plan to build residential towers around the abandoned Institut des Sourdes‑Muettes on St‑Denis.
DeWolf
I’ll bet there will be grumbling from people who prefer big parking lots (open space!) to buildings. But this seems like a success: a historic landmark that has been empty for years will be preserved and restored, and there will be 800 new apartments in a part of town that has incredibly high demand for housing. The big question is how many of those apartments will be social housing – according to the article the Quebec government is paying for a portion of them but it doesn’t say how many.
Architecturally the renderings aren’t very inspiring, but the same developer is responsible for the new building at Gilford/Saint-Denis (where the old chrome diner used to be) and it has turned out nicely. All we need from this particular project is something unassuming with good materials that doesn’t detract from the historic building that deserves all the attention.
Kate
I saw that building the other day. My only quibble is that it throws shade on the interesting bit of Gilford between St‑Denis and the metro station – but anything that size would do the same. If the units are inhabited and not only bought as investments, it should bring a little more street life to that corner of the Plateau.
Orr
Will this be the end of the ugly chain link fences that surround these parking lots (at Roy & Cherrier) and turn that little section of rue St-Denis into the street’s ugliest block?
Ephraim
We need housing. I see little to argue about, except, what did they say? Can you repeat that? What? 😀
CE
The renderings seem to be showing the massing of the buildings rather than what they might look like when built. I hope they turn out better than the building finished recently across the street at the corner of Roy and St-Denis. Why so many developers are using white brick in this climate I don’t understand. Just look at the white brick buildings in neighbourhoods built in the 50s and 60s or the façades on older buildings that were replaced around the same time. They’re not looking good.
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Kate
A three-year-old girl has been missing from Lasalle since Sunday morning, although she could be somewhere off‑island.
Monday evening, police have found the missing girl’s dog – dead beside autoroute 30.
MarcG
Here’s another horrible story about a 3 y/o and their 34 y/o mother drowning in a residential pool in Lasalle a few days ago (“A source told CTV News it seems the boy fell in first and his mother jumped in after him but could not swim.”)
Kate
Yes, I saw that, but didn’t blog it because it was just sad. Every summer there are drownings and there’s not a lot to be said about most of them.
MarcG
Quebec has a law that requires all in-ground pools to have a fence around them by end of September this year. Too late to save these lives but shows that it’s a good idea.
Kate
Has it taken this long? The only person I know with a back yard, in‑ground pool has a serious fence around the area and has mentioned that it was a legal requirement – but maybe that was a suburban municipal bylaw?
(And once again, only useful if inspected and enforced.)
Andrew
The CBC and CTV articles have been updated that it’s her mother who reported her missing and can’t remember what happened, which is very disturbing.
I’ve gotten used to the geographic vagueness of local media but it’s pretty frustrating when there’s a missing kid and the location is “near Newman”. That’s the entire width of LaSalle, from Ville Emard to the Mercier Bridge.
jeather
Backyards containing pools have had to be fenced in for as long as I know of. This new law prevents access from the house exits to the pool, via a fence between the two.
This law came into force around 2010, but existing pools were grandfathered in. They removed the grandfathering in maybe 2021, but with the pandemic and supply chain issues and, probably, arguments from pool owners, they kept pushing the date back.
Bert 09:54 on 2025-06-17 Permalink
One of the justifications given was so that the transport from the Miami GP, which is 3 weeks earlier, can be done by truck, of course using sustainable fuel. More and more, F1 are trying to group a few races in a given region.
One thing that the article misses is that weekend is Memorial Day in the USA, which means that it will be the weekend that the Indianapolis 500 will be run. Add to that they are basically being run in the same timezone, therefore the same time. The 500 will probably start earlier than the GP, but sill, there will be some overlap.
The biggest issue I can see with this are the ticket sales. I am sure that there are some people that did both the Indy 500 and the Canadian GP, which traditionally was a week or two later. I am not too worried about TV views, most any motorsports fan is well equipped to do multi-screen watching. I guess we will see.