Valérie Plante claims that Craig Sauvé asked to rejoin Projet in July; Sauvé denies this, and says that after his unsuccessful campaign with the NDP he did talk with Projet, but it was they who wanted him back, and he turned them down.
Updates from September, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Another legendary hockey goalie of the past has left the crease: Bernie Parent, born in Montreal, helped the Flyers to the first Stanley Cup won by an expansion team, in 1974.
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Kate
Ensemble really loves to talk this place up, doesn’t it? Montreal is a chaotic mess after eight years of Valérie Plante at the helm, they say. As usual, I want to grab somebody by the collar and ask what they think they would have made of Covid, inflation, intransigence by Quebec, pressures from south of the border and all the rest. It’s easy to solve everything by magic when all you’ve got to do is talk.
walkerp
I don’t get this strategy of talking shit about the city they are supposed to love and want to represent. It plays well in the suburbs and regions but most of those people aren’t voting.
It’s also just basically the Conservative party line now for almost a decade and we are all pretty sick of it. They might as well support the convoy.
Kate
It is odd. A year ago, a comment here made me think about that. We were discussing road improvements in one corner of Little Italy, and marko commented:
I always wonder why a business like a restaurant would go on a nightly news program and say, basically, that they won’t be in business much longer and don’t even attempt to come to them because it’s a living hell where they are. You’ll be stuck in traffic and you’ll never find parking. Is that going to bring the customers in?
Comes to the same thing with a whole city.
bob
“All the revolutionary parties that have perished so far, perished because they grew conceited, failed to see where their strength lay, and feared to speak of their weaknesses.” – V.I. Lenin, to the Eleventh Congress Of The R.C.P.(B.).
Ian
Well to be fair many of them perished because Lenin had them murdered lol
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Kate
La Presse’s Émilie Côté interviews Roger Latour, who helped found the Champ des Possibles and who thinks a lot about trees.
DeWolf
The kind of work that has gone into the Champ des possibles is easy to take for granted. But go look at the 2007 imagery on Google Street View and it will remind you that it used to be a mostly empty field. Now it’s a well-maintained and well-loved forest.
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Kate
Thirty homeless people can now be given shelter in construction trailers on Blue Bonnets land.
The chosen 30 are expected to stay between three and six months, and social workers will be available to help them figure out the next step back into regular employment and places to live. But six months from now, I’d be curious to know how many are ready to leave. On the one hand, the site looks bleak, not a neighbourhood yet, far away from ordinary streets – on the other, a regular, safe place to sleep is not to be sneezed at in these times, jobs are hard to get, and rents for even small neglected apartments are high.
Kevin
The Gazette buried the lede here: this was delayed by six months because the city issued a tender without any details about what they wanted built, claiming it was an emergency, and so the Inspector General stepped in.
https://www.montrealgazette.com/news/article1188500.htmlWhat a bunch of bozos.
Kate
Here’s an accessible link to that Gazette story.
Annette
[just a note that archive.ph is blocked by ISPs in many countries (including mine – and including the Philippines!) and same goes for archive.md, archive.today, etc. Cloudflare DNS sometimes interferes in connections to those sites, too. all that to say: not universally accessible.]
Kate
Thank you for letting me know, Annette. Do you have any alternative suggestions?
MarcG
I seem to be able to read Gazette articles with a clean browser now, perhaps they removed their paywall?
Annette
Me too, MarcG – for a while now. Maybe we haven’t hit the monthly limit.
Sorry Kate, bit.ly is similarly restricted, 12ft.io was taken down recently. I’ll watch for stable, safe alternatives. archive.ph has been null here for over a year, but seems to not impact your local readers? So didn’t seem worth mentioning.
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Kate
After reading the vague reports on CBC and CTV, which tell with kid gloves about a “person” being shot dead by police somewhere in Longueuil, it was a shift of gears to read on TVA that they shot a 15‑year‑old dead on Sunday midafternoon for reasons that have yet to be elucidated. TVA also specifies the location, while CTV includes “The BEI is asking anyone who may have witnessed the incident to reach out online” without saying where or when it happened.
Blork
CTV has updated to include the location. Also, the photo that CBC uses is not from the scene; it’s a stock image showing a BEI truck but the location is completely different. (The actual location is entirely residential and new.)
Strange timing aspect; one of the pieces says it took police 10 minutes to arrive after the call went in that there was a “group of armed people” on the street, yet when the cops arrived they apparently took no time at all to draw and shoot.
Ian
Early reports might just be copaganda, ie, simply repeating the news release from the police.
“During the intervention, one person was hit by a shot fired by police” is a master work of passive voice.And yeah, I think we all knew that kid wasn’t white even before CTV talked to the family.
I am sure the BEI will find the officers innocent of any wrongdoing and certianly no indication of racially motivated escalation in this police murder of a 15 year old.steph
Is this sad story Montreal’s first swatting death?
Kate
Steph, have you seen something that makes you think so?
The report that a lot of heavily armed young people were out in a residential Longueuil street does kind of reek…
MarcG
The TVA article has been updated. It sounds like a large group of young boys were hanging around the wooded area doing something sketchy and the neighbours got spooked and called the cops – maybe their fear lead them to “see” weapons or make the suggestion that they might be armed. Although the boy who got shot wasn’t very dark-skinned, it seems like most of his friends are.
Kate
Has it come to a point where seeing teenage boys goofing around outside rather than sitting home passively staring at screens seems dangerous to us?
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Kate
Transition Montreal launched its campaign Sunday with an event at McLean’s pub.
MarcG
Can someone explain this to me: “un sondage Léger réalisé en août dernier pour la Fraternité des policiers”? The Police Brotherhood paid for a survey to be done on municipal voter intention?
Kate
Are you surprised? The Police Brotherhood has a stake in the election result.
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Kate
A new fund should boost the offer of social housing over the next few years.
Nicholas
The amount of money here is minuscule compared to the claimed number of units to be added. It is noted that this is for capacity building for the non-profits doing the construction, but if half a million dollar grant can really ensure the building of 1,000 units (to use one of the grants as an example), which would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to construct or to acquire and renovate, I feel like you could just save $500 a unit and roll the admin cost into the project. The math means this $2 million will spur private housing investment of around $1,000 million that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, and let’s just say I’m skeptical.
Also any news on the $25 million and counting from developers in the affordable housing trust fund that was just sitting in a bank account? They said it wasn’t enough money to do even a single project, and now a tenth of that is enough to do thousands of units? If these numbers are to be believed, that money could spur 50,000 units. Is anything happening with that?
Ian
I’m sure it’s collecting interest if it hasn’t already been funneled into something else.
Kate
I agree – the numbers seem rather soft. But I know no more than is in the article.
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Kate
Valérie Plante admits she has been a lightning rod for all kinds of anger and dissatisfactions with city progress and services.
She also spoke to CTV about her time in office and what she feels to be her legacy.
Tim S.
I may have posted this before, but somewhere else someone wrote that Toronto feels like a city where you’re supposed to stay home most of the time, whereas Montreal is a city that wants you to go out. Leaving aside whether or not this is fair to Toronto, it seems to me the best encapsulation of Projet’s accomplishments: creating public spaces we can all enjoy, which will hopefully create a better sense of community, less loneliness and isolation and be an overall antidote to the way online life atomizes and radicalizes people. That’s the perspective in which I view her legacy.
jeather
The thing about Plante was that she really wants this city to be a livable city for residents and she has very clear opinions about what that means and is uninterested in compromising on it. This has its pluses and minuses, and obviously most people disagree on some aspects of what it means, but I always appreciated that she cared about how the city worked for Montrealers, not tourists or her legacy.
MarcG 08:37 on 2025-09-23 Permalink
I would love to see Projet get dragged publicly for their very un-progressive homeless camp raiding and police budget boosting. It seems like Sauvé is running a ‘positive’ campaign so probably won’t come from them.
Kate 10:21 on 2025-09-23 Permalink
I’m of two minds about the camps. There are probably parts of town where they would not disturb others, but for example, all along Notre‑Dame East, camps have been set up in those linear parks on the north side of the street, not far from the river. North of the parks are mostly residential streets, so that the folks living there are only a few yards from camps in some cases – camps which, by their nature, don’t have toilet facilities and are prone to collect junk and have fires. The camps bring an unsanitary and chaotic note into the lives of people nearby.
As with the metro, where it’s not fair to expect maintenance people to have to clean up biohazards from the homeless, you can’t reasonably expect residents to welcome the presence of people who may, in some cases, be mentally unwell, using drugs, or otherwise prone to trouble.
I don’t have a solution here that’s fair to everybody.
Nicholas 13:18 on 2025-09-23 Permalink
The camps are a no-win issue, and the police mostly too. People really don’t like homeless people near them. Like a lot. People also don’t like homes for homeless, as the Welcome Hall Mission story recently showed. Like a lot. They don’t like safe injection sites. They don’t like giving money directly to people. And they absolutely don’t like raising taxes to pay for any of this, nor cutting other services. And people actually mostly do like it that when something bad is happening you can call 911 and someone will show up.
I would love it if they just spent the money needed to build homes for people (people also hate building homes, in general). It would cost a lot (let’s not beat around the bush, it would cost A LOT). But over time we would save money. Yet while some people living on the street just need a home to get back on track, many also have severe issues, whether mental health, drugs, alcohol, etc. We’d need those wrap around services, which are usually paid for by the province, so the city would be out of pocket, while the eventual savings would go to the province. It shouldn’t be the city paying for it, it’s a provincial and national problem, but everyone blames local government, because homeless tend to gravitate towards cities.
And many of the problems with the police budget could be solved, but not at the local level. Get police completely out of all traffic enforcement and you would save lives and save money. But the city is prevented from installing more traffic cameras, having private security guard barriers for events like the marathon, or even just have a civilian control traffic lights (the cops are really bad at it too). Many, many of the changes require changing provincial or federal law. And many of these changes would result in a police strike (not an official one, just them not doing their jobs in ways that frustrated the average voter), and as happens wherever that occurs, people absolutely hate that. I would very much enjoy trying to take the brotherhood on, but it’s a high risk measure, especially when most of the best ideas are banned by the province.
This issue will come up again and again for decades and nothing will change, because the province wants to use the city as a scapegoat (helped by the JdM etc etc), and no one wants to risk a police strike. And most importantly, voters who don’t want to deal with the negative results of these problems are very loud. And they’re not all right wing: centrist and centre-left people also don’t like being hassled by people with mental health and drug abuse issues as they walk along the sidewalk, as multiple such women have casually mentioned to me (I doubt it’s a coincidence they were all women). I wish it weren’t so, but those who can solve this don’t want to, and they are the majority.
Kate 19:41 on 2025-09-23 Permalink
I think taxpayers would rather have homes for the homeless like the ones opened recently on the Blue Bonnets land, and planned for Ahuntsic, because they’re supposed to have social workers around, presumably to help the denizens cope and – among other things – not become too unruly.
I am not confident these plans will work out, on several points:
1. The housing is temporary. Nobody wants to give the homeless a permanent place to live. Psychologically, these are often people who’ve repeatedly had the rug pulled out from under them, so it will be just another jolt when they’re told their time’s up, so get out. (There may also be conditions, like if you’re caught drinking or doing drugs, you’ll be evicted. I don’t know how draconian they’ll be.)
2. The housing is deliberately placed far away not only from ordinary residential streets but from the downtown core, where they would find places to hang out, people to mix with (…and probably buy drugs from). There may be some homeless people who have the inner resources to manage alone and sober in a box on an empty piece of land. They are probably not in the majority.
3. They’re construction trailers. Better than nothing, on a cold night, but not exactly gezellig.
4. As I mentioned earlier, people are expected to stay from three to six months. Then what? They can buy a nice condo with the income from their new full‑time six‑figure job?
In a way, we’re starting to corral people into camps. I can’t be the only person who’s seen this coming.
Ian 18:48 on 2025-09-24 Permalink
Agreed 100%. It is extremely reminiscent of an internment camp.
It’s interesting seeing Plante trying to undermine Sauvé. I guess PM sees him as a threat.
DeWolf 09:19 on 2025-09-25 Permalink
Internment camps imply people are being placed and held their against their will.
From the CBC: “The 27 rooms are for those waiting for social housing and are designed for people who don’t have substance abuse issues or behavioural issues related to mental health. … The Old Brewery Mission will be managing care and helping residents get help with welfare, ID cards and looking for permanent housing. … there will be three meals a day, around-the-clock support and the turnaround is expected to be about three to six months.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-first-modular-housing-units-1.7640576
That answers a lot of Kate’s questions.
Joey 10:34 on 2025-09-25 Permalink
Thanks, DeWolf. Definitely seems like this is intended as transitional housing for people who are not likely to be unhoused long-term, but need relatively short-term support. Most of us don’t like to think about how we are a short string of bad luck away from winding up in really dire circumstances – job loss, sudden illness, etc. Single parent gets renovated and loses her job – what are your options? Couch surf? Shelter? This kind of support would provide enough breathing room to get back on your feet, preventing you from becoming more permanently unhoused.
Kate 10:51 on 2025-09-25 Permalink
I was thinking more in terms of what’s being said now, when these projects are being launched, versus how it’s likely to work out in practice.
I hope it helps the people Joey describes, who need a helping hand at a critical life moment to keep them afloat. Probably that will depend on the Mission choosing the subjects carefully, because once you’ve been in the social work business for awhile you probably develop a strong sense of who can be helped in that way. But all it takes is for a new administration to cancel funding and you’ve got ready-made little shack dwelling towns.