What La Presse calls a microforest has been planted in one of the parks along Notre‑Dame East, in between two homeless encampments. The borough spokesman of Mercier‑Hochelaga‑Maisonneuve says disingenuously that it’s because residents asked for more greenery in this space, which belongs to the transport ministry.
Updates from September, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
More than a thousand people attended the funeral of Nooran Rezayi on Thursday morning. (Video plays immediately on this link.)
This item also reports that a teenager has been arrested after posting an item threatening the police.
It’s mentioned here also, as it has been in earlier reports, that the head of the BEI, Brigitte Bishop, is asking people not to carry out their own investigations because this risks interfering with the official one. But people may be predisposed to wonder whether the BEI’s main function is to make the police shooting sound justifiable.
jeather
The CBC This is Montreal podcast had a brief episode about the BEI and what we know about the killing of Rezayi, which was interesting (and included that same request). But it doesn’t seem like they have much trust, especially from families of victims (why did it take 5 hours to inform his family?), and now they are in the sowing/finding out phase.
walkerp
Top priority, arrest the 15 year old whose friend was just murdered for making threats against the murderers and make that a big news item! These pigs are basically a criminal gang sanctioned by the government at this point.
Ian
ACAB includes BEI, one hand washes the other.
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Kate
24Heures explains what inclusive language is (as applies to French) following the Quebec government’s announcement that it won’t be using iel and so forth in official documents any more, as well as abandoning the dots in formulations like enseignant.e.s.
GC
I’m with Massé on this one.
MarcG
Pandering to the 10 people that showed up to our local memorial for Charlie Kirk?
Ian
It really does increasingly feel like they know they won’t be re-elected, so they’re just throwing everything they can into the stew while they still can.
MarcG
They’re cancelling the phase out of gas-powered vehicles too.
CE
Years ago, I worked for a consulting firm that did some work for the Quebec government. There were pretty strict rules about making language either gender neutral (try to use phrases that don’t require gendered language) or gender inclusive (such as the example above of “enseignant.e.s.”). This was before gender neutral pronouns like “iel” became mainstream but the progress that had been made around making government French inclusive was a point of pride at the time. Not so much with the current government I guess.
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Kate
Students at several universities are planning a day of protest for Palestine on October 7.
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Kate
The federal government has announced major changes to save Canada Post, the biggest being the end of home delivery everywhere. Three quarters of us are already served by community mailboxes, which I hadn’t realized, being a total urbanite, and within a few years so will we all.
And now the postal union is on strike.
La Presse has advice for coping with the postal strike.
Nicholas
I wish they chose my solution of delivering every other day to half the homes each day, but mail delivery is so slow nowadays, and I fail to get so much mail on the day the Canada Post MyMail applications say I will (and often don’t get it at all, especially admail), that if I check the box weekly it shouldn’t make much of a difference. I have a letter from the Mid Atlantic region of the US that was mailed September 9 and I have no idea when or if it will arrive. Thirty years ago we got similar mail within a week.
jeather
Still not sure why we couldn’t have done 2-3 day a week delivery instead. I’m super curious where they intend to put them in dense urban areas, and what will they do about businesses getting mail?
Kevin
Community boxes in urban areas make zero sense.
Ian
That the government considers mail service a for-profit business is one of the most neoliberal things ever.
Next up:
Hospitals
Schools
Libraries
etcIt should come as no surprise to anyone that this culmination of the neoliberal experiment falls under the watch of a professional banker whose main recommendations are:
A) not beng Justin Trudeau, and
B) scuttling Pierre Poilievre’s chances.We no longer have anything approximating a centrist let alone leftist voice in federal politics. This won’t be as bad as if PP got in, but expect more of this kind of thing.
Mark
Gonna pitch this suggestion here to see what others think..Canada post should be split up into two parts : part A services communities of (random number) 25000 people or less, far from urban centers and is considered a public service. No shipping company can make a profit reaching these smaller remote communities… Part B is servicing bigger communities and is run for profit. If it can’t work then too bad.
Ian
I am sharing this from a mutual on Mastodon:
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Dear [redacted]
I am writing to you once again dismayed and kinda outraged that you Liberals plan to cut $1.5 billion from Canada Post. I remember (that we recently) had $1 billion to offer Amazon in contracts during the Pandemic. Is it wise, I wonder, to dismantle our public services and depend more on private companies when those companies are based out of a powerful fascist nation to the south?
Cutting Canada Post is a mistake that maybe the bankers on Bay Street won’t notice, but *your constituents will*!
I am asking for my government to *increase* funding to our precious public institutions (which are NOT businesses meant to make profit: the profit is given to the citizenry in the form of reliable, trustworthy service done by decently-paid Canadians), to increase taxes to billionaire companies like Amazon, and to get the dazzle of foreign money out of your eyes. You have a nation to govern, not a quarterly profit goal to meet.
Shame,
[redacted]Bill
It’s a negotiating tactic, albeit with a mighty large and heavy sledge hammer. The negotiations between the government and the union has been going on for more than 18 months and going nowhere. So the government decided to use a nuclear option.
It will backfire on them.
Paul
Surprised to see the opposition to these cuts on this site.
-Physical mail delivery is dying. Mail volume has more than halved since 200 (5.5B letters > 2.2B letters).
-The company is on track to lose $1.5B this year, with no sign about becoming financially sustainable in the future. The union has fought every effort to adapt to changing demand.
-Of course public services cost money, but it is time for a conversation about how essential this service really is if over 70% of their product is advertisements and junk mail. There is a reason we don’t have a nationalized kerosene lamp service, or typewriter repair service.
-I think that an extremely bare-bones service would serve 90% of people adequately (e.g. 1x week delivery for residential mail, 3x week delivery for business, community boxes for all but multifamily buildings, increased offerings for package delivery on weekends, etc).Paul
@Bill – I disagree.
In this case, I believe the negotiations will backfire on the Postal workers.Denmark just ceased public mail delivery, and there were no cries from the public. The cost for mail delivery increased to reflect the true cost, and the private sector stepped in to address the gap. 2200 positions were lost in the public sector, and 500 were created in the private sector to provide the same service.
If the Canadian public really feels like throwing our money away, I could think of numerous more beneficial & impactful endeavors (e.g. public transit).
Ian
“There is a reason we don’t have a nationalized kerosene lamp service, or typewriter repair service.”
Nice straw man argument. We never had these. Postal service, though, we have had since before confederation.Nobody is arguing that there shouldn’t be attempts to improve the way Canada Post works, but making it profit-driven is not a solution unless you’re a typical neoliberal shill who thinks critical public infrastructure is a waste of money.
Kate
Paul, Denmark is tiny. Canada needs ways to knit such a huge and mostly empty country together and they’re never going to be profitable. Canada Post is one way, and the CBC is another.
jeather
Agreeing that Canada Post needs changes is not the same as “these are the correct changes to make”. And “how will this plan work in dense urban areas” is a reasonable question as well. Other places might have a lot of apartment buildings (which still will get regular mail to their mailrooms), but we have a zillion triplexes.
Tim S.
I’d like to see Canada Post get better. In both the US and the UK mail gets delivered within the same city within a day (at least, as of a decade-ish ago) and so people actually used it for routine things, like communicating with landlords, schools, medical appointments etc. There’s a discussion to be had about whether we still need so much paper, but I’d like to see it from a position of strength – this is Canada Post’s better alternative, not CP is awful so I have to pay 30$ to DHL.
For example, this may not save many union jobs, but I’d love a secure, public email provider.
And a consolidated system of delivering packages would reduce so much traffic on my street.
Ian
“And a consolidated system of delivering packages would reduce so much traffic on my street.”
Yes, a thousand times. Instead of one Canada Post truck once a day we have CP plus multiple DHL, UPS, FedEx, IntelCom…
Joey
The Government of Canada would have a more credible case if it had taken steps to make postal mail non-essential. But try to, say, settle an estate without waiting for random documents to show up in the mail.
@Tim S. be careful what you wish for – SAAQClic 2.0 is right around the corner.
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Kate
I’ve left the Journal headline here at the top of this blog entry because I don’t know how else to sum it up: Montréal, les élections et les anglos. This brief Normand Lester piece fascinates me. Is it only because I’m an anglo that he sounds crazed?
DeWolf
“Projet Montréal, Transition Montréal, Ensemble Montréal, leurs promesses électorales peuvent diverger, mais il n’en demeure pas moins que les trois partis sont sous la férule des anglo-ethniques, proches des Américains de Kahnawake.”
Wow.
Kevin
That read like a greatest hits of people who have been angry at Anglos since 1980.
But it’s not unusual for him. This is a guy who got fired from Rad-Can for being one-sided.azrhey
awww… monsieur Lester is gonna spend a bad moment when his bosses notice he didn’t manage to insert a rant against the Muslims and the wokes in his tirade….
Just the old anglos ( aka l’argent! ) and the indigenous ( aka le vote ethnique! ) … really sloppy work on his part….Nicholas
The CAQ and PQ will be fighting over him to be a star candidate.
Kate
Lester is 80. I think if he’d ever been a plausible candidate he’d’ve done it by now.
Nicholas
Kate, don’t be so cynical, you can get elected to the most powerful position on the world at that age nowadays.
Kate
True enough!
Ian
An utter lunatic, but impressive to see ‘outrecuidance’ used in a “newspaper” these days.
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Kate
Candidates have been called to order and reminded that they can’t campaign at city hall.
The Chamber of Commerce has presented its wishlist for the new administration. Mostly it wants more international business presence here. Local businesses don’t provide enough buzz to interest the Chamber.
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Kate
The YMCA language school, which has existed downtown for 65 years, is closing toward the end of this year. It offered courses in nine languages. One hundred people will lose their jobs.
walkerp
I also heard they are also shuttering their day camps. It’s really, really sad. One more big brick in Quebec’s social services culture pulled out.
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Kate
The opening of the western and northern branches of the REM has been delayed again, the Deux‑Montagnes line now promised for November and the Anse‑a‑l’Orme next spring.
REM honcho Jean-Marc Arbaud apologizes for recent outages and promises the system is ready to face winter.
dwgs
Isn’t anyone in charge of this thing capable of embarrassment?
anton
I like to bring up the quote from their first info session: “there will be no shutdowns, maybe a weekend or two” (https://www.cat-bus.com/2016/06/townhall-meeting-for-the-rem/ sorry for the messed up character encodings, the blog is really old).
Anton
… but in many ways, this is still the best Montreal transit project since the 80s. I just wish they had started off with a bit more expertise, then perhaps they could’ve avoided some of the more annoying mistakes. (Funny thing is, a few of my suggestions were actually implemented, like scrapping the peel basin tunnel)
Uatu
This morning the train stopped for 10 minutes right in front of the downtown station. Was afraid I’d be stuck on the tracks like earlier this week. Can’t wait for the rest of you to share the experience….
Kevin
@Uatu
I’ve only taken the REM once, because it failed before I could complete a round trip 😀Nicholas
We all laughed at Ottawa for building a train that couldn’t handle winter, and then, as La Presse reports: “Sous pression, CDPQ Infra avait annoncé en février que les aiguillages seraient « bonifiés ou remplacés, selon le cas ». La Caisse avait alors évoqué l’ajout d’autres équipements pour protéger le système de la neige.”
Ian
So serious question, is anyone really using the REM as an everyday transit solution except grudgingly?
It really does seem like a step backwards at this poiint that we are still struggling to get even basically functional.
Ian 08:16 on 2025-09-26 Permalink
Is this a problem that can be solved with cones?