The biggest news Tuesday was the federal budget, the Gazette analyzing the benefits to Quebec, Le Devoir asking who will be most affected and La Presse pointing out six salient points generally.
A Nova Scotia Tory MP has crossed the floor to join the Liberals, putting them two seats short of a majority.
Picking up on discontent about bike paths was a big part of SMF’s campaign, but now she says she isn’t going to order a new assessment of the city’s bike paths, as she had promised, but will rely on existing studies.
As at this time last year, the Atwater metro entrance on Ste‑Catherine will be closed till April because it tends to be used by homeless people and the STM says it can’t keep it clean and safe for transit users.
Can’t or won’t?
It depends where you draw the line. The STM can’t reasonably ask its maintenance workers to encounter the constant biohazards of cleaning a place where drug users congregate, and the item says the maintenance people won’t deal with the situation without security accompanying them. This is a level of service that goes well beyond normal maintenance for a metro entrance.
I’m not saying the Cabot Square habitués don’t deserve help, but the STM isn’t running a shelter, especially in a situation where regular passengers would avoid the entrance anyway because of the presence of people who are sometimes not at their best.
It’s also a fairly long distance between the exit and the turnstiles, much more than most other metro stations. I have a lot of issues with this, but given the current lack of funding I’m feeling more sympathetic than I was last year.
True. You have to slog through most of Alexis Nihon from that entrance.
Not surprisingly, the STM strike is affecting restaurants – neither workers nor customers able to travel to their location – users of food banks and people with medical appointments.
SMF was caught out in an error Tuesday when she said that the STM and the maintenance union were just beginning to negotiate. This is a dossier on which the new mayor should already be informed: these negotiations have been hanging around unresolved since March 2024.
More on the close election results in nine contests in Montreal, although none as close as the Montreal East seat which arrived at 81 votes each for the two candidates.
Air traffic is down, especially flights to and from the United States.
Now there’s an article that could have been written by AI. Or, I don’t know, just link to the press release. I get that when press releases weren’t accessible to the public you got stuff through the paper or on radio or TV, but what benefit is there to spending any limited journalist time publishing this? Is anyone checking CTVNews.ca for EBITDA on the airport authority?
Eh, I thought it was mildly interesting that the general resolution to boycott the U.S. was still having an effect.
CBC and CTV both have pieces asking what Projet Montréal will do next, but which actually get more into the question of how they lost. CTV’s analyst, who used to be a councillor, sums it up best: neither Ensemble nor Projet mounted a campaign that raised much enthusiasm, but Ensemble crystallized a desire for change.
TVA asks who’s likely to replace Luc Rabouin at the helm of Projet, now that he’s stepped down.
I find that nobody is mentioning the Covid pandemic and the damage it did to Projet’s time in office and its ability to deliver on promises – not only during the initial lockdowns but the surge of inflation that followed, and that made every piece of work twice as expensive as it would have been before March 2020. Nobody wants to remember Covid times, it seems.
it’s interesting to look at the results, and how support for Rabouin dropped off dramatically in areas outside of easy reach of fast and reliable active and/or public transport. It’s the St-Leonard, LaSalle, Pierrefonds etc. that caused the biggest swings towards Soraya. In most places you would expect PM to lead they did. It’s misleading to say it was the result of anglos or the urban sprawlers. It’s mid-density areas where it is hard to break the car-centric lifestyle because of lack of strong alternatives, a problem that requires significant investment from provincial and federal coffers. I’d love to see post-election surveys about voter reasoning – did people really vote based on the rise of homelessness, lack of affordable housing? Or were the passionate few enticed into voting based on incumbent fatigue and lack of relevance for people in those living a bit further out but still having to traverse these Projets strongholds perceived to be getting all their attention?
https://resultats.election-montreal.ca/mairie-ville-par-arrondissement.fr.html?dt=1762265834510
For what it’s worth, Ensemble are in an unenviable position, having taken the throne as the best alternative in an election where new parties did pretty well considering it was their first run. Having been conditioned into a reactionary voice over the 8 years of PM, Soraya represents a party that holds (in my opinion) no coherent vision of its own. If I was to look at this in a positive light, perhaps that is what our current moment needs, an adaptable, agile and reactive leadership that can address immediate and pressing issues that affect the whole city especially their voter base. And perhaps we need the less progressive voices to understand and relate to the complex nature of the problem of housing affordability and homelessness through how Ensemble tries and eventually fails to address it (because it is a product of economic forces outside of their control).
That’s a good analysis. Best case scenario: Soraya is much better than the party she leads and she turns out to be adaptable and open to progressive change. Worst case is that Ensemble’s reactionary tendencies prevail and we get four of years of stagnation on civic initiatives and total subservience to big developers and corporate players.
Projet will have a tough time rebuilding its citywide leadership. The only contender from the last leadership race who is still around is Ericka Alneus and she didn’t get that much support. The bright side is that it’s a real political party with legal processes, unlike Ensemble, so we won’t see some random political striver parachute into the leadership position. It will be a grassroots effort. With Rabouin out, maybe even Sauvé’s disciples will make their way back to the party.
Speaking of which, I expect we won’t be hearing about Transition again. They need a seat at the table but they spread their resources very thin on a citywide campaign. Given that most of its candidates were disaffected former Projet members, many will likely go back to their old party and try to assert their influence. Remember, Projet started as a party because it was drastically different to what was then on offer, and Bergeron was elected to council and able to use his position as a loudspeaker. Without a seat at the table, Sauvé has no influence.
Based on the preliminary results, 638 more votes for PM would have resulted in them having the most seats on council, though not a majority. (One district each in Ahuntsic, PAT and Ville-Marie, plus council and borough mayor in Lachine. Add in 2,374 more votes in three other districts and PM has a majority. And if you’re looking for swings, i.e. EM voters switching to vote for PM, it’s half those numbers.) Soraya ran up her total in the suburbs, but PM was close, ahead or behind, for mayor or council, in many of the middle boroughs (Ahuntsic, Lachine, Sud-Ouest, Verdun; less well in CDN-NDG, Outremont and MHM, where tides turned). I would love to see detailed results by district at all levels to see how much ticket splitting there was.
Considering how low voter turnout was, we can what if all the way to the next election – the fact is that voter engagement is super low, and that’s the real problem worth considering. The disenfranchisement evident in the youth vote in the last election was shocking, with even lower turnouts this time around I look forward to the detailed results as well, and imagine the youth vote is even worse as a percentage of the total vote.
My wife and I came up with the idea of full frontal nude photos on the ballots in order to encourage participation. The “centerfold” jokes write themselves.
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