Let’s keep an eye out for conflicting campaign promises.
Soraya Martinez Ferrada is promising to improve water infrastructure, but somehow, while reducing cones. Luc Rabouin is also making cone reduction promises.
We should also be alert to the usual campaign promise conflicts on the “I will do more” and “I will tax you less” theme.
Also let’s not forget that aspiring mairesse du logement Martinez Ferrada was caught illegally demanding a security deposit from a tenant.
Residents around Devonshire Park in the western Plateau are planning to sue the CHUM, the local health authority, the Old Brewery Mission and the city of Montreal over the presence of a homeless shelter in the old Hôtel‑Dieu which they say has turned their neighbourhood nasty.
I do try not to have an anglo’s kneejerk reaction not to want the PQ government back, but when I read that Paul St‑Pierre Plamondon is cosying up to Alberta’s Danielle Smith I feel free to abandon that well‑meaning impulse completely.
What the hell does it mean to “stand up to Ottawa”? The federal government are not evil overlords. Like any government, we pay them taxes and they provide services, and sometimes they do things we want them to, and sometimes they don’t. They don’t have to be seen as competing for the “powers” of the provinces.
There are things this country needs to look after. Surely they’re better seen to if the provinces can get on the same page with Ottawa rather than making it their chief point of pride that they want to butt heads with them. All my life I’ve seen endless effort spent on this from Quebec, endless millions spent in duplicating federal services to show it’s possible – please stop, and look after the environment, and work on housing and education and health care instead of fighting about it.
I don’t want them slightly less than I don’t want the CAQ back.
That said, there isn’t a party I actually want in power in the province.
I see the competing powers as “I want the fed money to spend it ALL of the fed money on me”. Sure it comes off foolish and childish sometimes, but I can’t blame a provincial party for fighting for the biggest piece of the pie. Historically it seems like Quebec has fared well as the squeaky wheel. I don’t expect the provincial politicians to stop their squeaking.
Are we getting less or more than we pay for? – well that’s where the separatists come in and I think that’s a different debate.
I used to go to Alberta quite a bit for work. Every time I would return to Quebec after one of those trips, I would come back a little more separatist than when I left. I am NOT like them, and I suspect most people living in Quebec are not either. And the folks I used to deal with hate-hate-hated Quebec. Being an Anglo, they would somewhat feel comfortable being open with me. Something a customer once told me stuck with me:
“The Bloc Québécois should not be allowed to exist as a party”
Like, that is NOT how democracy works!
Quebec at the very least has some claim to independence through language and culture. What is Alberta’s culture? “I ♥️ oil & gas”?
(https://www.thestar.com/edmonton/was-jason-kenney-booed-at-the-grey-cup/article_9ca2a75f-be90-56d3-b991-8ddb129982c6.html)
It’s all kind of funny as the one group most oilpatch nationalists hate even more than Ottawa is QC nationalists.
TBH we’re sort of screwed no matter who gets in as QS has been openly ethnonationalist since Nadeau-Dubois flipped the inclusivity script, and Anglade showed that the only real thing the Liberals care about is getting more votes and since they already assume Anglios are in their pocket the only way to rise in the ranks is to curry favour with the ethnonationalists.
As a Quebecer I want our provincial political leaders to get us the biggest piece of the pie. As a Canadian I know that we’re stronger united. As a North-American, I’ll fight at the front lines and die to not be one country with our crazy neighbours down south. As a Montrealer, I’m VERY tiered of Montreal getting shafted by the province and would gladly vote to separate Montreal from Quebec. With all that said, I feel absurd in the arbitrary lines I want to keep or change.
Two thoughts:
1. I had a boss in the 2000s who had previously done a lot of Canadian opinion polling research. He said that the non-directly political (“what do you think of unions?”) attitudes in rural Alberta were extremely similar to those in Quebec, and there was occasional political overlap, e.g., the hatred of the federal government.
2. For my entire life, the government in Ottawa, especially the Liberals and especially when supported by the NDP, has had no qualms about making sweeping policy changes in areas of direct provincial jurisdiction, usually without bothering to learn even the basics of existing provincial policy. As a leftie, I am constantly frustrated by the constant drone from our side of the spectrum of the need for Ottawa to act/lead/disrupt in education, healthcare, etc., without giving two shits about the constitution or provincial policy. Much like the provincial government looks down its nose at Montreal, Ottawa is constantly trying to force its (usually poorly thought out) vision on the provinces.
Anyway, in the grand scheme of things, we’re probably better off with the premiers acting as the opposition than PP…
La Presse has more details on the schedule of the impending STM strike.
Anyone who bought bread at a Loblaw store, or one of its subsidiaries, between 2001 and 2021, can apply for a refund because of price-fixing. No need to present proof of purchase.
Claim website is here.
A gift card… Which one then needs to use to shop at one of the stores that was guilty in the first place? Doesn’t really feel like justice.
The refund isn’t a gift card; it’s a direct deposit into your bank account.
Thanks, Blork. I got confused with the earlier program that was a gift card. Glad to hear it’s a bit more sensible this time.
@GC fair enough, though I think most of us would’ve preferred $25 at a Loblaw affiliated chain than, say, $18 in cash; I imagine a direct cash settlement would’ve been smaller given that the ‘true’ cost to Loblaw would’ve been higher. This was a bigger issue recently, I think, with a class action settlement against a few dozen Quebec car dealers – claimants were basically given a coupon at the dealer that had ripped them off. Same pretext but the sting was a little stronger since many customers had no interest in patronizing ripoff dealers, even at a discount.
As I recall there was a social media campaign to donate the gift cards to food banks.
Class action claims filings seem indiscernible from data harvesting.
Patrick Lagacé is not keen on the names for the new blue line stations.
But he’s wrong on one point. Lionel‑Groulx station was not named after rue Lionel‑Groulx. If anything, it was the other way around. That street in St‑Henri was called rue Albert before the station existed.
He’s also somewhat handwaving the issue of Sherbrooke station, which is not actually on Sherbrooke, and could be anywhere along that very long street. And he doesn’t even mention other toponymic oddities we all know, like Lasalle station being in Verdun, or there being streets called “du Collège” in different parts of town, but a station named after only one of them.
It’s a rare day when the Journal de Montreal has one writer being more progressive on the topic and saying we need a station named after other prominent minorities and women https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2025/09/11/vertieres-two-axe-earley-et-toujours-pas-de-oscar-peterson
Yeah, the Lionel-Groux error really undermines the only logical part of his argument (much of the rest is just sensitive middle-aged man feelings on display, which, sadly, is more and more how Lagace has been deploying his really good column-writing skills).
I don’t think it should be a stretch for ordinary people to get behind the idea that we can name things like Metro stations after people who have gone unacknowledged, especially when the alternative would be naming yet another thing after, say, Lacordaire. But ideally there should be some semblance of a geographical connection to the place, no? So Station Césira Parisotto works but Station Mary Two-Axe Earley doesn’t, since the former was active in Saint-Leonard but the latter lived in Kahnawake. Same for Madeleine Parent, I gather.
Anyway, Lionel-Groulx should still be renamed after Oscar Peterson.
The solution for the Two Axe problem is clearly to extend the metro to Kahnawake. Watch the white guy tears flow then!
MarcG, we could actually build an Exo station in Kahnwake fairly easily, something the community has asked for, with the last movement around 2015, per these archives. But Exo has expressed interest in killing this line all together, so who knows.
Bullshit performative hypocrisy, but what else is new?
At least it’s making MBC lose his shit haha
OK. Qui peut me dire où est la station Namur? Qui connaissait la rue Namur avant la station de métro?
Je suis arrivé à Montréal il y a plus de dix ans et j’étais capable d’utiliser le métro même si je ne connaissais aucune rue à Montréal.
Il y a une station St-Laurent, est-ce que ça vous aide à comprendre où est cette station? St-Laurent traverse tout Montréal.
On dirait que beaucoup trop de gens sont devenus stupides parce qu’on parlait de femmes et d’Haïti.
Réveillez-vous! Vous avez été capable de comprendre où était la station Namur alors que c’est un nom de ville en Belgique et une miniscule rue près d’une station qui est sur Jean-Talon.
Il y a une station qui s’appelle Place St-Henri qui est au coin St-Jacques et St-Ferdinand.
Je ne fais que mentionner les stations que j’utilise. Il y en a sûrement d’autres comme ça.
Je passe par la station Vendôme presqu’à tous les jours et je n’ai appris qu’aujourd’hui qu’il y avait une rue appelée comme ça près de la station.
Ben oui, c’est comme ça, on apprend les noms de stations bien avant les noms des rues autour.
Les gens qui chiâlent sont-ils sexistes ou racistes?
The REM stopped running Wednesday evening around 6, blamed on a technical problem, but has resumed Thursday morning.
“We understand that this moment has been a difficult one but these circumstances are exceptional,” and yet shutdowns seem so unexceptional that they’re not all even in the news. I understand systems break, but usually they break more the older the system gets. What’s it going to be like in a decade?
Well it’s only a matter of time until the rest of the island gets to experience this wonderful system. I’m interested to see how that goes.
Andy Riga’s final instalment about the city’s approach to enforcing the language law isn’t a dramatic finish, but it’s a sly rundown of ways that the city, and its representatives, can loophole their way out of the CAQ’s requirements. For example, elected officials are not obliged to address the public only in French.
Maybe when we elect a PQ majority next year they’ll close up these loopholes, but for now, the city says “favour consensus or maintain the status quo.”
La Presse now covers the story about downtown workers feeling unsafe but let’s not get carried away.
As DeWolf pointed out here earlier, this was the result of a police‑led survey. Cops obviously benefit from emphasizing the need for more money for policing. Questions in a survey like that can easily be written so that the bias is not glaringly obvious but is inherent in the assumptions.
It’s also important to remember that if people are encouraged to feel downtown is bad, it’s bad for downtown. If you can get people to stay away, it makes more room for crime and violence in streets which have been emptied by workers fleeing at the end of the day. Many cities have been hollowed out by this tendency and Glenn Castanheira and his posse would be wise to keep this in mind.
Many years ago an old friend said Bay Area Rapid Transit needed money for earthquake proofing. So they needed to scare leaders into giving them money, but not scare too much such that the public stops taking their trains.
Also, some, a lot, of people seem to conflate uncomfortable and unsafe. I have had this conversation with some people in the edges of my social group. Walking downtown, taking the metro, seeing unhoused persons or persons with one or other mental issues. Or people smelling particularly bad because they ahae soiled themselves. Several times I have been asked if I didn’t feel unsafe walking by them. And the answer has always been no. Now I know it might be my privilege talking, but I lived over 6 months in Chicago in the early 00s . I felt unsafe several times. I remember wondering if I’d make it home some “youths'” were casually waving guns at each other on the L. I was in Greektown, which is NOT a bad part of town at all, but I sitll saw 3 people in 6 months getting stabbed. _that_ was unsafe.
SO I am not dismissing people in Montreal who have been mugged or robbed and what not, But there is a difference between feeling uncomfortable with the sight of a unhoused person camping across the street from the terrace of restaurant while I am trying to to decide if I am having the shrimp cocktail or the truffle bruschetta, or feeling annoyed at the drying pool of urine on the bench of a metro station, and feeling my physical safety and integrity is at risk.
IS there crime? sure, everywhere, since the dawn of time.
Can society do something about it ? Sure, more education, more money for (mental) health. and for housing
Can more money for cops help? Only to sell more front page news and keep the populace in constant made up fear.
Except for the typos, perfect post azrhey.
Yeah, well said, azrhey. In addition, there’s a feeling of being directly confronted with major societal failures that’s really depressing – especially if it triggers the kind of response that you describe (feeling uncomfortable around people in crisis), which might reveal some things about ourselves that we aren’t wild about.
Agree with Walkerp perfect post, except, c’mon, I only see one typo – lighten up
I could not write in my third language anything like as well as azrhey does.
I make typos like it’s. my job and yeah whatever, great post 🙂
I moved to Montreal from Hamilton in the early 90s and I have never felt unsafe here, even at the height of the biker wars, in the way that I felt unsafe almost everywhere there. Complaining about how “unsafe” downtown Montreal just reeks of privilege and provincialism.
I spent four days in Chicago this spring and felt unsafe more times on the L than I ever have in the nearly two decades I’ve lived in Montreal.
I rode the LA metro a few times last winter and it’s an absolute madhouse, I was very sure I was going to get stabbed at one point. Anyone who feels unsafe in Montreal definitely needs to get out more.
I should correct myself there. Of course there are times when people will feel unsafe in the city, dangerous things can and do happen. What I should have said is that anyone who thinks Montreal is a dangerous city needs to get out more. We’re very lucky to live in a place that is both very safe and not incredibly boring.
bob 04:30 on 2025-09-12 Permalink
*Reduce* cones? Traffic cones are the bedrock of Quebec’s economy, and, dare I say, urban culture. Anyone anti-cone is anti-Montreal, and should be tied to a log and floated down the river.
Ian 09:09 on 2025-09-12 Permalink
Ferrada is just another two-faced rent seeker, clearly not to be trusted at all in that regard!
Joey 12:30 on 2025-09-12 Permalink
Didn’t Mayor Plante also make reducing cones a priority? I guess the orange cone racket wasn’t going to stand for it. Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to study up on racketeering laws in Canada – it feels like the equivalent of things like the Charbonneau commission in other countries led to diminished corruption in public sector serving industries (Rudy Giuliani has a political career because he used RICO to take down the NY mob in the 80s, right?). Doesn’t feel like we got even close to that in Quebec, but this is really just a vague sense more than anything.
Ian 21:46 on 2025-09-13 Permalink
Anyone who doesn’t recognize that the mafia still totally controls construction in Montreal is ignorant or dreaming in technicolour. It is an open secret.
That said, holding up Giuliani as an example of anything positive is kind of hilarious nowadays.