Most of the STM’s bendy buses are off the road because of a problem in the engine cooling system.
Updates from October, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Streets were busy this Halloween despite the rain. I helped friends hand out candy in Vieux St‑Laurent and was surprised at how many kids showed even with the buffeting from the wind and weather.
I’m told that a rough count of the purchased candy suggests nearly 300 kids visited their house.
walkerp
Them kids resilient!
Reminds me of the only real blemish of the Plante administration. A hardened generation.patatrio
When my youngest lost all feeling in their hands we called it a night. Kids were out in force still, a bit of rain can’t stop them.
JP
I think my neighborhood’s demographics are changing. In the past, I’d barely see anyone…home decorated or not. Last night, I saw more than I ever have in the past 23 years.
Ian
The year Hallowe’en was “cancelled” most kids in my neighbourhood at least went out BOTH nights, so as far as they were concerned it was a bonus not a blemish, haha
Kevin
First kids came at 5:05, last around 9:45. But i had about 60% of the normal count.
DeWolf
My wife and I (and a friend) sat outside on the front porch from about 5 to 7:45 and got maybe 100 kids. Definitely way less than in 2023 which was the last time we were around for Halloween.
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Kate
An elderly woman was hit by an STM bus Friday morning in Montreal North. It’s being called a hit‑and‑run, but it must be possible to narrow down the possibilities given the bus routes and schedules.
Ian
Technically a hit and run just means the driver didn’t stay on the scene, not that they didn’t figure out who they were.
Kate
I know, but most of the time that’s the case.
Saturday morning I don’t see any news saying they’ve identified the driver. I think it’s possible that the driver wasn’t aware they had clipped someone on the turn.
Nicholas
I had a STCUM bus driver hit me right in the winshield right in front of him while I was in high school. I then knocked on the door and he drove off. No cell phone but I got the bus number and called the cops at the metro station, but they told me to complain to a transit supervisor, and I didn’t know better so no criminal charges, sadly. I then got a call at 8:45 pm telling me they couldn’t tell me what happened to the driver but that he would not be on that route anymore. Still annoyed I didn’t press it. Today that guy would have at least appeared in court.
Ian
Pretty egregious that the cops wouldn’t press charges. To be fair the cops were even more useless (and open to brutality) in the 80s and 90s. Nowadays it would be the cop AND the bus driver that would see a court date.
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Kate
Weekend notes, including some Halloween suggestions, from Le Devoir, La Presse, CityCrunch, CultMTL. CultMTL also has a Halloween party guide.
Traffic warnings and of course, no public transit at all on Saturday.
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Kate
The Gazette has a strong open letter from an MUHC surgeon to health minister Christian Dubé about Bill 2.
Uatu
Doubt it’d make a difference. We had a health minister who was a doctor that worked in the system and he wasn’t any better.
Ian
We’ve tried all kinds of professional backgrounds but in the end, the master’s tools, etc.
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Kate
A pedestrian was killed on Decarie early Friday, and the driver has been arrested.
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Kate
Quebec has passed a law banning face coverings.
We’re all safe now!
Nicholas
I’m sure the police will be out in force, today, October 31.
steph
I was expecting a crossover joke about the surgeons. But Nic’s is much funnier. Bravo.
But instead of being flippant, is there SOMETHING constructive we can do in opposition to this?
EmilyG
The article seems to say it’s only people in schools (students, staff) who aren’t allowed to wear face coverings.
Still, this sucks.MarcG
It also says that it’s not just face coverings but any religious paraphernalia, so your gym teacher will have to remove their little gold capital-punishment-device necklace as well.
MarcG
Let the snitching and firing begin! It’s a good thing we don’t have a teacher shortage.
jeather
I wonder which Christian symbols count as not religious. Christmas trees, Santa, I assume everything Easter. Crosses on school buildings. Schools named after Jesus, or Mary, or a saint. Glad we’re saving everyone from religion here.
They also seem to be requiring all school employees (in French schools?) to speak to each other in French only.
Nicholas
Steph, surgeons is also a good joke!
EmilyG, yes, in schools, and I figured some teachers and students would dress up.
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Kate
Tabs have been piling up, so here’s a quick info dump:
Nora Loreto on the big crime lie. This segued from an Observer piece titled ‘Lawless London’ is safer than it’s been in decades and of course Trump’s fiction that American cities are so dangerous that he has to send in the National Guard.
Loreto:
Part of the reason for why the propaganda has worked is that the housing, affordability and drug crises are changing the face of our communities. People are sleeping outside, in tents. Shoplifting is rising as people are less able to afford food. There is more public drug use. We are taught to fear these people. We are taught that these people are crime and that crime needs to be stopped. And rather than putting the money into services that will actually help someone move from a bank doorway and into an apartment, we’ve been primed to accept that the solution is to divert money away from services, jam up the justice system even more and expand the security state.
Soraya MF and the two fringe mayoral candidates to her right want to expand police patrols and add more surveillance to the city.
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Taylor C. Noakes on why Montreal can’t afford landlords for mayors.
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The Gazette has a quiz helping you figure out which municipal party aligns closest to your own views. They also asked the three leading mayoral candidates what they do with their down time.
TVA looks at some of Action Montreal’s star candidates.
Policy Options assesses Quebec since 1995, an analysis by Luc Godbout of how Quebec’s doing vs projections at the time of the last referendum.
Doctors can now prescribe tickets to the orchestra.
Ian
Anyone looking for that Rover articel outing Rabouin as a landlord, here it is: https://therover.ca/can-luc-rabouin-and-projet-montreal-fix-the-housing-market/
Kate
To be fair, the article says Rabouin owns a duplex and has one tenant. He’s not a slumlord.
Joey
I was expecting a better editorial from Taylor – not even 200 words… It’s only convincing if you believe that all landlords, including Luc Rabouin who charges his neighbour tenant $905 a month and doesn’t raise the rent annually, are vile scum. I am certain Taylor could make a much stronger argument.
Anyway, it does raise an interesting question about where the responsibility of being an owner begins and ends. Obviously Rabouin is a landlord – he owns a duplex and rents out one of the units – but there’s a very good chance that a lot of us, certainly anyone who has broad retirement investment, also indirectly owns property. There are obvious differences, but fundamentally investors are property owners – I guess the logical end of the argument is that anyone who owns capital shouldn’t be mayor. Impracticable but it does have a certain elegance to it.
Last point, it’s looking pretty likely that as of next week Luc Rabouin will go back to merely being a landlord…
Ian
To be fair, just becasue Rabouin’s not a slumlord doesn’t nean he’s not inherently sympathetic to the landlord class. Let’s not foget his position as mayor of the Plateau was “PM but business friendly”, and he’s supposed to be an economic genius. It’s pretty clear where his sympathies lie.
It’s kind of like ACAB, even the good ones 😉
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Kate
There will be no public transit at all this Saturday. This is a one‑day strike by the union representing drivers, Metro operators and station agents.
Some Bixi stations which were going to be withdrawn for the season after November 15 will be left in place longer while the strike lasts.
EmilyG
I often take the 470 bus. I wondered why it had been running shorter, overcrowded buses on its route instead of the usual long articulated buses.
It turns out it`s a problem with the articulated buses, and not strike-related. https://www.stm.info/en/press/press-releases/2025/stm-temporarily-takes-out-of-service-181-articulated-buses-as-a-preventive-safety-measure
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Kate
CTV has a quick dissection of Quebec’s Bill 2, the CAQ’s attempt to strong‑arm doctors, and 24Hres has a list of three salient points about the new law.
There have been many articles about Quebec doctors planning to leave, including news that Lionel Carmant’s own daughter, a doctor, is considering doing so. Thursday morning, Carmant has stepped down as social services minister and left the CAQ to sit as an independent.
walkerp
Can someone please explain what is the actual strategic intent behind these moves by the CAQ?
Kate
It’s one of Metro’s AI pieces, but the suggestion from the very right‑wing Montreal Economic Institute is relevant: they want more private healthcare, claiming it would fix all the problems.
jeather
10% of their salary is based on how quickly people get their surgeries or are seen in ERs, something that depends entirely on having enough medical personnel to do this, so doctors get a pay cut because the government is cutting costs.
How did Carmant vote on this one? I could only find the numbers, not the names.
Chris
Kate, that may just be wishful thinking on MEI’s part (or an AI hallucination).
I think it’s actually pretty simple: the CAQ is trying to save money here. (But of course doing it all wrong.)
Kevin
I think the CAQ has three motives:
Distract from the SAAQCLIC/Northvolt/Third link shenaningans;
End public healthcare;
Keep all that tax money we’ve been spending on healthcare.Legault and Dubé consistently talk about how they want to make things better for patients, but then keep on bringing up things that are not in their actual legislation.
Either they don’t know what is in their legislation, or they do know and they count on nobody in the public actually bothering to figure it out.
And given their authoritian tendencies it’s obvious they want one of the distractions to be the upcoming court battles about the charter violations in the lawNicholas
Jeather, Carmant did not vote. He also didn’t vote at any of the other stages of the procedural motions to invoke clôture.
Joey
This is also part of a broader trend that, I think, accurately represents one of the few ideological positions the CAQ *actually* cares about – that bosses should have way more power than workers. In addition to the government’s other anti-union legislation, it’s pretty clear that the Legault government see doctors as highly paid members of the worker class, and resents that doctors are able to exert influence/control/power over the healthcare system (which, in their Trumpian worldview, should be steered entirely by the premier, his minister of health and the ‘top gun’ administrators at Sante Quebec created solely to transfer healthcare bureaucracy away from the ministry).
While there may be a legit case to make for linking a portion of physician compensation to performance, it’s critical to identify indicators that reflect activities principally controlled by the individual physicians, and to set targets that are reasonable given all the other potential variables at play (system funding, level of staffing, size of the population, new technology, etc.). I don’t think anyone could credibly argue that this is what the legislation does.
This being said, I am somewhat sympathetic to the notion that the physician lobby has too much influence on the orientation of our medical system – not that the political class is innocent here (everybody think it’s a great idea to have a doc as health minister until they hand out big raises for physicians and offer nothing to the rest of the healthcare workforce). Patrick Dery had a nice piece the other day questioning some of the rhetoric from physicians, who only publicly advocate for the healthcare system when it’s their salaries on the line. The physician lobby in Canada is excellent at gatekeeping – making it nearly impossible for governments to expand the pool of physicians, e.g., by stopping the expansion of medical schools or forcing foreign-trained physicians to jump through impossible hoops to actually practice in Canada. If we had more docs we could pay them each a little less and have a more robust system; it might mean we trade a little excellence for a lot of access – show me a poll of Canadians or Quebecers who wouldn’t take that deal.
In addition, physician remuneration is so complicated – it would have been a lot simpler if the government had basically decided to abandon fee-for-service and move to a salary model. Instead they decided to reduce salaries by creating unrealistic KPIs and to make it vaguely illegal for docs to resist.
It seems to me that in his waning days as premier, Legault is trying to settle old scores or win old battles, in this case dating back to his time as health minister for the PQ 20+ years ago. Perhaps the fool’s errand is looking for some kind of strategic vision for healthcare in the CAQ’s work here – it feels like there’s not much motivating them beyond petty bitterness. Increasingly it feels like the premier, inhabiting his inner spoiled child, is angry that everybody dislikes him and his CAQ project, and is merely acting out. (As some of us have noted here before, his whole vision of what ‘inclusivity’ means for Quebec hinges on how he was treated as a kid in St. Anne’s…)
Uatu
Yeah there’s a lot of gatekeeping and solipsism with doctors. When they were building the super hospital it was about attracting doctors, researchers etc. and very little about the patient experience. Even now basic wayfinding for patients around the building is almost an afterthought and it was like that at the old Vic as well. I even remember when Fatty Barrette was head of the specialists order and they used to run ads with him saying “it’s always good to see a specialist” – like duh, who the hell else are we supposed to see and how can we finally get an appointment with one? The disconnect with basic real life public access to the health system is mind boggling.
jeather
Oh god trying to find someone in the MUHC was a complete labyrinth. I’ve had a bunch of appointments at Verdun, too, and the only reason it’s not 10 times worse is because it’s smaller. I will say that I’ve been in a few patient rooms in the MUHC and they’re all very nice, though the giant room where ALL the babies with jaundice sleep was a bad choice (possibly fixed? that was a while back).
Meezly
There’s a citizen rally on Saturday in support of the Quebec City demonstration against Lio 106 and L2
https://www.facebook.com/events/1759308248105611/Kate
A friend has been having appointments at the Vic and I’ve gone down a couple of times to meet him afterwards. There’s an older man who sits inside the front door who directs people. I thought at first he was just a helpful NPC, but he’s been there the three times I’ve been there, so I assume it’s an actual job that’s needed because the signage is not very clear.
Ian
NPC haha, nice. Sidequest: Find a GP.
MarcG
I think that most hospitals have volunteers who help people figure stuff out.
Chris
>it’s pretty clear that the Legault government see doctors as highly paid members of the worker class
Well, they are.
>there may be a legit case to make for linking a portion of physician compensation to performance
OK, I can see that argument, but only if other workers are similarly linked. Doctors are just part of the team (nurses, PABs, techs, etc.) If targets aren’t met, it’s not only the doctors’ fault. Why only penalize them?
>[doctors] only publicly advocate for the healthcare system when it’s their salaries on the line
That’s just BS.
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There is a world-wide shortage of GPs (and healthcare workers in general). The law of supply and demand is higher than Law 2, and we know what happens to the price of something when it’s scarce, but the CAQ thinks the opposite. Already we are seeing a jump in physician license applications in New Brunswick and Ontario.
Apparently there’s another protest planned at Bell Centre November 9th.
SMD
@Chris, doctors are not like other members of the healthcare team because they are, overwhelmingly, independent contractors. They are not salaried. On the public side they only have one client, the RAMQ, and only one employee, themselves (although they are still allowed to incorporate and thus pay half the individual tax rate). It was this Faustian bargain that gave us Medicare. Anyway, just to say that they aren’t “just part of the team.”
walkerp
Thanks everybody. Collectively an A+ in responding to the assignment. I am better informed.
SMD
Chiming in with some final thoughts from Anne Plourde of the IRIS: https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/idees/930033/medico-centrisme-privatisation-sont-vrais-problemes-sante.
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Kate
Le Devoir’s doing a series on the perpetual issues in the municipal world. The latest is endless roadwork, previous ones having been residents’ sense of safety and housing.
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Kate
Mayoral candidates are promising more security. CBC asks whether their promises could result in mass surveillance.
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Kate
James Gould, convicted of murder in 2010, was arrested Tuesday in CDN‑NDG with a gun and a woman carrying nearly one million dollars in cash.
He was wanted for breaching parole conditions but now he’s in deeper trouble.
(I wish media could be more specific than saying CDN‑NDG, but maybe that’s all the police would tell them.)
Nicholas
I agree. Every article I could find lists the info found in the press release: CDN-NDG. Gone is the time when someone would have a police scanner on in the newsroom at all times and dispatch someone to the block in question.
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Kate
The STM maintenance union plans 28 days of strike throughout November, meaning services will be restricted to rush hour even on election day. Schedule is listed in the item.
Major Annoyance
And silly me forked out $104 for the November pass just yesterday. Went back to Pharmaprix today only to learn there is no such thing as a refund. Here’s hoping all the strike talk is just so much posturing.
SMD
Apparently you can get a refund, from the ARTM. They told Le Devoir the following:
« Un titre mensuel ou hebdomadaire du mois de novembre peut faire l’objet d’un remboursement ou d’un échange avant le premier jour de sa validité, ou au plus tard le sixième jour inclusif suivant l’achat, à la condition que celui-ci n’ait pas été utilisé. »
https://www.ledevoir.com/actualites/transports-urbanisme/929259/guide-greve-stm
EmilyG
I was wondering myself if I should get a monthly pass for November, or just a few fares for the times when I have to go places. (I usually get the monthly one.)
SMD
The Devoir does the math and finds that the monthly pass is worth it once you’ve done 28 single trips, or 15 round-trip journeys. That’s on the island of Montreal (zone A). For zone AB (Montréal + Longueuil + Laval), the break-even point is 33 single trips, or 17 round-trip journeys. Fewer than that, and you’re better off loading up ten tickets at a time.
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Kate
The Bellechasse bus garage is described here as le plus beau garage d’autobus des Amériques, et peut-être même au monde by none other than Richard Bergeron.
Having gone past it recently by night, I have to say it’s quite something – you could think it a glitzy arts centre if you didn’t know otherwise. But if residents didn’t want a three‑storey building, as stated here, they got something a lot more imposing, which ended up costing more than half a billion dollars.
Nicholas
At least, because we listened to the people who didn’t want a three-storey building, we now have an affordable, functional building that can absolutely handle the electric buses it was built for and has no water or HVAC issues, necessitating loud, 24/7 ventilation. And even better, because we built affordably we have more money for other things, so there were no tradeoffs involved. Good work all around!
Paul
Nicolas, why do you say it was built affordably? Nearly $600M, double the budget…doesn’t scream affordability to me.
The building is great, but lets not pretend that excess $300M couldn’t have gone somewhere else impactful.
DavidH
Nicholas is obviously being sarcastic. The garage can’t accommodate electric buses even though they will be the standard during its lifetime. The ground is sinking and it got flooded even before it opened. It looks good but it’s a mess on so many levels.
I wonder when the green spaces around it will be open to the public. They have put in grass and removed it a few times last year. This year they left in place what they had put down but it is still all fenced up. I predict the side facing Bellechasse will become a premium Krazy Karpet spot this winter.
Nicholas
“It looks good but it’s a mess on so many levels” is maybe the defining political maxim of our time.
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