Montreal City Weblog

Updates from September, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• Kate 13:47 on 2025-09-12 Permalink | Reply  

  Soraya Martinez Ferrada is promising to cut 1000 city jobs if she and her party win in November.

  We’ve seen this before – jobs are cut, expertise is lost, but work still has to be done so contractors are called in to make up for the losses and shortfalls in manpower – at a higher price than having the city’s own employees do the work – and with the contract bidding, the possibility of corruption sneaks back in because there’s nobody left at city hall to judge whether bids are fair or work is being done properly.

  It’s an easy promise to make. It’s also a stupid one.

  Ian and inside-traitor are discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • inside-traitor 19:08 on 2025-09-14 Permalink

    It’s a dumb promise to make UNLESS you have friends in the contracting business.

  • Ian 20:45 on 2025-09-14 Permalink

    What, a landlord that likes to cut corners has friends in contracting? Unthinkable.

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• Kate 13:42 on 2025-09-12 Permalink  

  A pro-Palestinian group protested peacefully Friday against the presence of the Israel-Premier Tech team at the Quebec City segment of the cycling Grand Prix. The tour comes to Montreal Sunday.

   

• Kate 09:44 on 2025-09-12 Permalink | Reply  

  

  Weekend notes from CultMTL, Le Devoir, La Presse, CTV, Montreal Secret.

  Some notes on the new season in visual art in Le Devoir.

  Weekend traffic notes.

   

• Kate 09:04 on 2025-09-12 Permalink | Reply  

  Prime Minister Carney has fast-tracked several projects including the Port of Montreal expansion at Contrecœur, which has been planned and worked on, on and off, for ten years. But there are arguments against it, both from an environmental perspective and from residents nearby who, as one spokesperson says, “never asked to live in such an industrial area.”

  Ian and Chris are discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • Chris 09:59 on 2025-09-12 Permalink

    >residents nearby who, as one spokesperson says, “never asked to live in such an industrial area.”

    It also says the Montreal Port Authority bought the land in the 1980s. Seems like a long heads up.

  • Ian 11:32 on 2025-09-13 Permalink

    I bet lots of people moved in without anyone mentioning that important detail. But yeah, caveat emptor I guess.

• Kate 08:48 on 2025-09-12 Permalink | Reply  

  The contract gunman convicted of shooting up the façade of the Old Montreal office of a certain well‑known landlord a year ago has been sentenced to 6½ years in prison – which seems a lot for a victimless crime.

  Ian, Tim S., Joey, and 1 other are discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • Ian 09:08 on 2025-09-12 Permalink

    Maybe he should have just let the place catch on fire, apparently there’s nothing to be done about that.

  • Chris 10:04 on 2025-09-12 Permalink

    After reading the details in the article, and considering his priors too, 6.5 years doesn’t seem like a lot, not at all.

  • Tim S. 11:20 on 2025-09-12 Permalink

    I wouldn’t say firing a gun anywhere in a city is a victimless crime.

  • Joey 11:45 on 2025-09-12 Permalink

    If someone shot your house or place of work – *because* it was *your* house or place of work – you would 100% be a victim!

  • Ian 11:32 on 2025-09-13 Permalink

    @Tim S

    “I wouldn’t say firing a gun anywhere in a city is a victimless crime.”

    How do you figure?

  • Tim S. 12:59 on 2025-09-13 Permalink

    Ian: because any one of us could be a victim. Just because you’re not purposefully aiming it at someone doesn’t mean someone isn’t there.

  • Ian 14:16 on 2025-09-13 Permalink

    What if I fired blanks straight up

• Kate 08:45 on 2025-09-12 Permalink | Reply  

  The latest projection by the Institut de la statistique du Québec says Montreal will lose 200,000 residents between now and 2030. The sharp drop in immigrants and temporary workers accounts for most of it, but the trend of people leaving the island for the suburbs or beyond also continues.

  Maxime Bergeron emphasizes that the numbers are a projection, not a certainty.

  Kate, DeWolf, Jonathan, and 4 others are discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • Nicholas 14:42 on 2025-09-12 Permalink

    A big reason that lots of people are leaving the island for the suburbs is that there’s more demand for housing than their is supply, so they go elsewhere where it’s cheaper. If the number of immigrants and students and TFW all drop, that relieves that pressure, prices will not rise as much or even drop, and people won’t feel as pressured to move off island.

    And this just doesn’t make logical sense: if there are two million people on the island, there is housing for two million people. If that get cut on net by ten percent, then there will be a ton of empty housing available. People will move back, students from all over the country will move here, etc. Obviously if we had a huge shock, like a huge loss of jobs or Quebec separation that could change things, but the fundamentals of Montreal is it’s a nice place to live and is the economic centre of the province, so people will still want to live here. I can imagine it’s the regions that will suffer, not because there are many of those immigrant groups there, but because people already resident will come to Montreal.

  • Ian 15:32 on 2025-09-12 Permalink

    There are already lots of properties standing empty in Montreal.
    The main reason rents are high is because of speculators hoarding housing so that they can artificially control rents, and other rent-seeking property hoarders playing along because they want to make money, too. Renovictions aren’t happening becasue there are too many immigrants. Gentrification isn’t happening because TFWs exist.

    https://breachmedia.ca/media-wrongly-blames-immigration-canada-home-prices/

    Then there’s the problem with new housing which has been discussed here and elsewhere many times, which is that profit-driven development has historically created way too many “starter” untis in multi-unit dwellings and not enough spaces for families, and thae vast discrepancy between “affordable” and “market rate” social housing – which in turn is hardly enforced becasue our political system gives homeowners a lot more power than they should have, in part becasue most of our politicians are homeowners and many are even landlords.

    Municipal politicians are loathe to mandate housing starts that lower their own property values. Then of course even at the provincial level there’s Duranceau whose conflict of interest is well documented.
    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/duranceau-ethics-probe-conclusion-1.7044889

    TL,DR: blaming immigration for housing shortages s a common racist trope.

  • Kevin 15:50 on 2025-09-12 Permalink

    Housing doesn’t automatically come back on the market when people leave.

    Units can be merged. Owners may decide to rent to a different market and focus on people who aren’t here long-term. Houses can sit empty while heirs wait for a death certificate.

    The pendulum may swing back at some point but timing that market is easier said than done.

  • Alex L 16:30 on 2025-09-12 Permalink

    Add to that units that the owners deliberately choose not to rent. We have three apartment buildings in front of our house where there are, according to a neighbor living there, about 60 empty units. The same owner has hundreds of empty units elsewhere in the city. I know, speculation. But I just don’t understand why that is allowed, especially now with the crisis we’re in.

  • Ian 17:40 on 2025-09-12 Permalink

    Many cities have an extra tax on any residential building you own that is not your primary residence, and yet another on any building you own that stands empty. It’s not a solution, but it’s a start.

  • Jonathan 07:02 on 2025-09-13 Permalink

    Without looking through the research, the ISQ has been predicting a drop in population for the last decade. But it so far hasn’t materialized. Why are we to believe this new prediction when they haven’t really proved their models as being accurate?

  • DeWolf 12:50 on 2025-09-13 Permalink

    As Jonathan said, the ISQ has been making extremely dubious projections for years. They also forecast a significant and ongoing drop in Montreal’s population back in 2021, but instead the opposite happened and the city grew faster than it had in decades.

    Demographic projects are often wrong, but unfortunately they shape public policy, which can have pretty bad consequences. Here’s an interesting paper that pokes holes in all of these projections that say the population will decline because of the cut to immigration levels:

    https://thoughtleadership.cibc.com/article/population-growth-projections-are-we-repeating-past-mistakes/

    From the paper: “The actual growth in the coming years is likely to be notably stronger than officially projected. In addition to distorting statistics such as GDP per capita or productivity growth, the undercounting of the Canadian population can potentially worsen the housing supply shortage that is the core reason for the country’s housing affordability crisis. In the past we asserted that the housing crisis of the last decade was in many ways a planning issue as undercounting of population growth (due largely to immigration policy changes) has resulted in a suboptimal increase in housing supply. We fear that we are in a process of repeating past mistakes.”

  • Kate 22:17 on 2025-09-13 Permalink

    On the other hand, I recall that the creation of Mirabel Airport was based on a projection that Montreal would have millions more residents by the new millennium. While it grew a bit, it was nothing on the scale of that prediction.

• Kate 08:35 on 2025-09-12 Permalink | Reply  

  1200 school buses are out of service Friday following the fire earlier this week, making the day confusing for many parents.

  Nicholas is discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • Nicholas 14:43 on 2025-09-12 Permalink

    “It could happen to any bus” turned out to have real consequences.