I didn’t make this graphic but it’s been circulating on social media:
Giasson’s now out, though.
Updates from October, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Quebec City mayor Bruno Marchand has stepped into the Montreal election campaign, pressing Soraya Martinez Ferrada to eject Alexandre Giasson as a candidate, after he called Éric Alan Caldwell – a Projet councillor and president of the STM – a “gros calice de tas de marde désuet” and launched other insults at opponents of Ensemble.
Update: Soraya has punted Giasson.
walkerp
While I’m in favour of any thing that further weakens these Ensemble car/landlord lobby proxies, didn’t he say these things before he was a candidate?
DeWolf
Yes, but it’s more about his long history of abusive behaviour. It wasn’t just social media comments — he and his supporters were known for going to council sessions and being aggressively belligerent and downright intimidating towards elected officials and other citizens.
Ensemble seems to have recruited a lot of toxic people as candidates. Another example is their candidate in my district, Saint-Édouard. He’s a pretty notorious slumlord who recently gave an interview to Metro boasting about how he never recycles and how he thinks Montreal has too much green space and some of those parks should be paved over for parking lots or sold to developers.
The clincher is that unlike Projet, Ensemble doesn’t have a vetting committee — every candidate was personally chosen by Soraya.
walkerp
Thanks, DeWolf. I should have known. I’m in favour of people being direct and even impolite on social media when dealing with so-called professionals, but it sounds like this guy was just doing another convoy bit, so I stand corrected.
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Kate
Another Longueuil story Monday, strange but not tragic: a newborn baby was left on the front steps of a house in Longueuil late Sunday evening. TVA says it was a premature baby boy.
Later, TVA spoke with the man who opened his door to see a newborn baby left on his steps. Cops must have questioned Mohamed Zerrouk to find out whether there could be a link between him and the baby, but that isn’t mentioned in the piece.
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Kate
CBC’s Benjamin Shingler has a good piece on the need for housing vs. the desire to save dwindling green space. But there’s no one solution that will work everywhere.
Shingler cites a case on Nuns Island where a project was blocked, and I was put in mind of another project in Rosemont earlier this year where a 50‑unit project was blocked, but the Rosemont resident quoted had reasonable points: the six‑storey development was out of sync with the surrounding buildings, would have cast a permanent shadow over some of them, and would have used up all the local parking. There will always be counter‑arguments, but which ones should have the most weight?
mare
That Rosemont project might still go ahead. At least Hydro Quebec has been putting all their electric cabling underground at that spot. It’s also next to both the CN rail tracks and the trench where Papineau goes underneath the CN tracks, and that trench is going to be renovated soon. So the arguments of those nimbies are not very strong. Every high building will change sun/shadow patterns and sight lines. If those are considered valid objections Montreal will forever be a 2-3 story city with low/medium density.
DeWolf
Six storeys is hardly a tower. And it’s not even six storeys on the residential street, it’s five storeys — a whopping two floors taller than the adjacent triplex. The neighbours were opposing it for purely selfish reasons: they want the street parking all to themselves.
The Nuns Island case is weird because the opposition is being driven by purely ideological reasons. It’s a commercial area, very few people live nearby (which is how they managed to get a referendum in the first place), so not many people would be directly affected by the project. Instead it’s about keeping Nuns Island suburban and exclusive. The whole argument that the island has a limited “capacité d’accueil” is bonkers when it’s served by an enormous high-capacity expressway and a light metro line.
Nicholas
Is green space dwindling? Plante recently said the thing she wants to be most remembered for is greening the city. The city created a bunch of new parks, expanded others, added bioswales, planted trees, protected a patch of grass next Berri. I think if you asked people that same question many would say the REVs and bike infrastructure, maybe pedestrian streets, but greening would be up there.
Ian
The Parc de l’Ouest is certainly an achievement.
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Kate
La Presse has a wild story Monday morning about a onetime doctoral student suing McGill for half a billion dollars. One element in the story is a disreputable academic publisher but it’s not the only one.
DeWolf 18:49 on 2025-10-06 Permalink
La Presse reported two hours ago that Giasson is going to be kicked out of the party. This just a few hours after Soraya defended him and said “everyone needs a second chance,” and very disingenuously compared Giasson to Sterling Downey.
We’re still in the early days of the campaign but all of this is giving me real Coderre 2.0 vibes. Remember he had a pretty big lead at the beginning of both the 2017 and 2021 elections…
MarcG 07:24 on 2025-10-07 Permalink
Wise move to distance yourself from that cursed graphic design
Ian 08:40 on 2025-10-07 Permalink
More emphasis on info than graphic in this infographic, yeah…
But pretty impressive to see such a clear taxonomy of this gang des cons.
CE 08:44 on 2025-10-07 Permalink
Who is M. Provolone? What am I missing here?
Kate 09:42 on 2025-10-07 Permalink
I sometimes find in cases like this that it’s a reference to something all francophones know about because it was on some TV show they all watched when they were kids, but it might just suggest that there are other Ensemble candidates who might “smell”…
MarcG 10:04 on 2025-10-07 Permalink
I assumed it was some reference to the Italian mob.