I don’t know what the February 4 blue collar strike will consist of, if the workers still have to deliver snow removal, road repairs, arena inspections, cleaning of public spaces, traffic sign and street light repairs, operations related to water mains and sewers, drinking water production and waste water treatment. Confusingly, this piece also says the union “represents some 5,5000 employees.”
Updates from January, 2026 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Le Devoir has a piece on the history of public art in Quebec and its evolution from religious and memorial statuary to the more abstract and decorative pieces we expect today. Quebec’s policy that construction budgets must include 1% for art has been a good one for the urban landscape, so the news that the culture ministry proposes an “update” this year doesn’t bode well.
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Kate
La Presse looked into the story of Nazi symbols worn at a gym with further discussion of the burden of proof needed to declare wearing hate symbols to be a hate crime.
The line “never lose your smile” was not recognized by anyone in the story as a Nazi slogan. You’ll find a lot of sites, including Amazon, selling patches with a skull and those words. But the Anti‑Defamation League lists it on this page as a Nazi slogan.
jeather
The point of a dogwhistle is that other people won’t recognize them, so when they get too popular new ones pop up. The skull is better known, though again I think it only really hit the big time when that Democratic politician was found to have it as a tattoo.
Kate
I was reminded of this, which would’ve been made between 2006 and 2010.
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Kate
Some passengers have reported waits of 20 minutes for the REM elevators at Édouard‑Montpetit, although Pulsar, which operates the REM, says waits are only about 2 minutes. Despite this minimization of the problem, Pulsar is talking about automating the elevator controls, but can the source of delays really be that passengers don’t press the button quickly enough? Isn’t it actually that there aren’t enough elevators to meet peak usage? The writers here note that many classes at UdeM start at 8:30 am, causing a crush at the elevators between 8 and 8:20 in the morning.
Maybe they could prevail on the university to stagger the start of morning classes?
Ephraim
What’s the point of buttons if there are no intermediate stops. Or are there?
I’ve seen, when there are banks of elevators that need to go to different floors, where you push a button and it will tell you to go to elevator A, B, C, or D. And then it only stops at the needed floors and skips the rest. Programmed for efficiency that way. With a special button for the handicapped, to make sure that it keeps room for their wheelchair.
But if there is only floor 0 and floor -1, just put in one button and assume.
Nicholas
A friend described the problem they saw one day. Let’s say that all 5 elevators are at the bottom, and you push the down button at the top. Then one elevator will come up. But that is true if there is one person waiting or 100. So in the latter case then one elevator arrives, 15 people get in, then the door closes, then someone pushes the button before it starts moving so the door opens again, then it closes and starts moving and then the button is pushed and again just one elevator comes. If there is no train coming then no one is going up, so it could be a while until the next elevator going up is brought by someone going up on it. If it takes 30 seconds to come up and load and close, then you only get two elevators per minute, or 30 people per minute. (My numbers could be way off, I haven’t used these yet, but the idea is right.)
In many big office buildings they are automated a bit, such that in the morning if an elevator has dropped off its last passenger it’ll go to the lobby even if it’s not needed or there’s already an elevator there, because they know there are a ton of people going up. In the afternoon they do the same, storing some elevators on 10, some on 20, etc. This is a much simpler operation, with two floors, but a long distance between them. Obviously if they could use a camera to look live at waiting passengers (and even looking at train arrival times, knowing that a rush will come 30 seconds after the REM or blue line come), they could dispatch elevators based on that, but even just having a human do counts for a week and then adjusting the algorithm based on averages should be good enough.
Kate
You just know they’re going to bring AI into it somehow.
Thanks for the explanations, Nicholas.
bob
Office building elevators are an entirely different problem because there are many stops. Here, there should be no buttons, and the elevators should just go up and down all day, full or not. Basically, a vertical metro with two stops.
mare
Unfortunately there *are* buttons and they are confusing af. They are H, SSR and SS. And then there’s a tiny explanation next to two of them saying, in a ridiculously small type, “Sortie | acces metro” and “REM”. It’s like they bought these elevators second hand in a fire sale.
What does the H stand for? Home? Haut? And SS? Sous sol? Even the highest point is far below ground.
It reminds me of the UI of the equally terrible STM ticket vending machines.At least one of the elevators has many more buttons (floors), probably because it’s the service elevator that stops at every platform of he emergency stairs. In case someone gets a heart attack when they take those.
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Kate
Reported first on reddit, parts of the Plateau and eastern Ville‑Marie are now in the dark.
Nicholas
If it’s something at the Berri substation the discourse is going to be something to behold.
Kate
Seems now, near 7, most of it is back.
Kate
Saturday morning, Radio-Canada reports on the blackout with a photo of, yes, the Berri substation.
Nicholas
Of course. Though if it was the case that a new substation would have prevented this then you’d expect Hydro would have said, or at least leaked, that.
Kate
It sounded pretty clear that a new substation is needed in western NDG/Côte St-Luc, though.
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Kate
The Journal has a brief resumé of an interview with one Kevin Paquette, a business consultant whose company, despite his plea for saving Quebec culture, is called Crestview Strategy. Paquette was interviewed on what he sees as a deep cultural and linguistic gap between Montreal and the rest of Quebec.
I don’t think that’s exactly a startling insight.
Paquette ends by saying Montreal must reconnect itself to the regions. I wonder what that would look like to someone like Paquette. He says “les gens ne vivent vraiment pas la même réalité quotidienne.” Well yeah. Montreal’s not a small town or a farming village. Our difference from our regions can be likened to the difference in lifestyle between city and rural life anywhere in the world.
Second thoughts after writing this: the reality in the regions is you drive everywhere because you have to. In the city, you can live comfortably without a car. Would I “reconnect to the regions” better if I drove a pickup truck?
MarcG
Anti-urbanism dovetails with the rise in fascism.
Ian
Do you mean urbanism as in urban design, or urbanism as in urban vs rural populism?
MarcG
Door #2
Ian
In that case yes, I suspect you are right. The “big city” is always a stand-in for “corrupting foreign influences”
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Kate
A class action suit has been proposed against Hydro‑Quebec over damage caused by the three‑day blackout of the Hampstead substation.
Ian
If it were allowed I think that 87 year old woman’s family should at the very least be allowed to pursue a civil suit… but IANAL.
Tim S.
The neighbourhood is full of truck-sized generators, I don’t think the substation itself is fixed.
Ephraim
At some point of time, if we don’t force HQ to accept responsibility for their actions, that they will do as the French School Boards did, just let everything deteriorate until the government has to throw money at them to fix it, because they spent the money elsewhere.
I still think that the best punishment for failure is the requirement to apologize in person. Get the president of HQ out on the streets, going from home to home, knocking on the doors and apologizing, in person. It’s a lesson he will never forget and never want to repeat. And it costs almost NOTHING
Meezly
If my home was damaged by burst pipes or if my mom died of hypothermia(!) and it was something that could’ve been preventable or mitigated by HQ and/or the government, then I’d damn well want compensation along with that face-to-face apology. I hope the plaintiffs have a good case.
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Kate
Five people were arrested and are accused of operating drones meant to bring phones and drugs into Bordeaux Jail.
bob
I was once told by a criminologist/activist that (1) the first thing that hits you entering the Bordeaux Jail is the thick smell of weed, and (2) guards are not allowed in the basement. I wonder about whether that was true, and if so if it is still the case.
Ephraim
Wonder what would happen if you set up a Faraday cage, so signals are blocked. I mean, they shouldn’t really need cell signal anyway… they aren’t supposed to have cell phones.
Kate
No, but I don’t think prisoners at Bordeaux are serving long sentences, for the most part, although some may be regular guests. In other words, they’re people who probably expect to get back to their families and friends, and – one would hope – to some form of paying work. It doesn’t benefit them, or society generally, to cut them off from communication just because you want to make them more miserable.
I’m not kidding myself. Certainly some of the texts and talk sent to and from the jail would consist of criminal plans and threats. But some must be personal and some has got to be people making plans where and how they will live after jail. If you deny them this, what else do they have but prison life and no prospects, and that creates desperate people with nothing to live for.
Nicholas
Jails traditionally record or listen to or read all calls and mail and visits, but this they obviously can’t. If we should allow more contact we can. I get wanting to have private conversations, and you can with your lawyer (who better not be relaying criminal orders), but I think few will be sympathetic to that.
CE
Considering how smoking weed makes time pass by slower, I think the last thing I’d want to do while in prison is get high and make the time until I get out seem longer.
Kate
That crossed my mind too, CE. But people might only be in search of something to change their state of mind, or even relieve physical pain.
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Kate
Starting Monday, more buses will be doubling the northbound route of the REM after multiple outages recently on that branch.
Alstom is blaming defective electronic components and promising to fix them.
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Kate
Friday morning was the coldest of the season so far, dipping down to –22°. (And yet I didn’t get a peak demand event notification from Hydro‑Quebec.)
jeather
I was freezing this morning, had no idea it was supposed to be so cold.
Nicholas
It is very odd we haven’t gotten a peak demand event since the two on Monday, which was basically tied for warmest day this week. HQ is buying the max power they can from New York and for some of that period was buying power from New England, which is rare because usually we’re selling them power, for which we built a whole new line that opened just two weeks ago. Since they can only do 30 peak demand events all winter maybe they’re saving them, but if not now then when?
mare
On Monday there is always a higher peak demand because factories are starting up, people don’t sleep in and for some reason many people think they should do laundry.
MarcG
People with ADHD who ran a wash on Sunday and then forgot about it
Ian
I do love Hydro’s notion that people somehow use power on a schedule as opposed to the power spikes being an emergent property of a bunch of other factors.
Kate
Hydro must see predictable spikes as a lot of people get up and get ready for work, and then again as they come home, make dinner and do household chores. It makes sense for Hydro to reward people for limiting their electricity usage or spreading the load out over the day, if they can.
I don’t remember why Monday is laundry day, but Google tells me it was not only a local thing.
Kevin
Lots of people have Sunday-Monday, or Monday-Tuesday, as their weekend.
Daisy
“They that wash on Monday have all the week to dry…”
Nicholas
You can see live power demand, and every day has a spike in the morning and late afternoon/early evening. Temperature is the second biggest factor, with workdays being the third. And because we can predict temperatures very well now, and the other two factors are stable, they can predict power needs a day out incredibly accurately.
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Kate
The wave of arson and shots fired into business frontages are the signs of a mob war, police told La Presse’s Daniel Renaud.
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Kate
Weekend notes from Le Devoir, La Presse, CultMTL, CityCrunch, Montréal Secret.Road closures of the weekend.
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Kate
24Hres looked into what happens to discarded Christmas trees. How many people buying expensive pine essential oil in remote places could guess that it’s extracted from Christmas trees hauled away by city workers in Montreal?
Joey
In our area the city decided not to do the planned pickup the week of Jan 12. Then it snowed a bunch, so most of the trees that had been put out by residents are now buried and will only emerge in the spring, presumably when a borough councillor will write another long Facebook post about how residents have to be better at managing trash.
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Kate
Mark Carney’s Plains of Abraham speech has been all over the local news and comment (and editorial cartoons). It takes Toula Drimonis to zero in on the accusations of rewriting history: “We should be wary of inflammatory reactions by those locked in perpetual victimhood, stoking outrage because it feeds their political agenda.”
Update: Carney put the cat among several kinds of pigeon. Now the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake is writing to remind him that it wasn’t just the French and English who have sustained the existence of Canada.
Blork
Yeah, I saw one guy on FB issue a long counter-argument, some of which made sense, but then he claimed that French is BANNED in the rest of Canada. Oh FFS. Scroll on. No point in engaging with that kind of stupid.
Chris
“those locked in perpetual victimhood”… pretty much describes the entire woke movement of the last decade or so. Interesting to see some favourable to the movement in general now seeing its folly it in this case.
EmilyG
This news story, as far as I can see, isn’t anything to do with the “woke movement” (whatever that even means), so I don’t know why you’d even mention that.
Ian
To a hammer,. everything looks like a nail
qatzelok
I agree with Chris. “Inflammatory reactions by those locked in perpetual victimhood” describes some of the most successful propaganda of the last century… and the current one.
Ian
Well you are the expert on victimhood here. Tell me, should we blame propaganda’s insidious spread on smoke trees, cars, Westmount Rhodesians, or the existance of suburbanites?
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Kate
Ensemble’s first city budget has been adopted. Projet didn’t support it, but since they no longer have the majority on council, it passed anyway.
Ian
Well I guess it’s their turn to bitterly and ineffectually snipe for a few years.
Kate
The best thing Projet could do over the next four years is review what they wanted to do, what they did get done and what they didn’t or couldn’t get done. Especially the things they hoped to do but couldn’t, and face the reasons why. And then, how they’d go about it differently given a new chance.
I think what frustrated me most about Projet was a tendency to keep trying to do things that had proven unpopular or impossible. They should have understood that their ideas about the Camillien‑Houde were deeply unpopular, and they should have realized that their plans for developing social housing projects were never going to get funding from Quebec. I can’t say what they should’ve done instead in the case of housing, because I’m not a politician with financial chops.
Ian
That’s a very good analysis, really, and regardless of your chops it is the best course of action for any kind of post-mortem. Without that going over the wins and losses and coming up with strategies for moving their goals forward, there’s no real opportunity for learning from their slow deflation over that las tterm and eventual defeat.
Ferrada will blow it after a while, everyone does. Projet can be poised to come back in swinging if they focus not just on what this administration does wrong, but also what they themselves did when in power and how to really fine tune that plan for the next election – not just to win, but also to govern more effectively as a progressive political movement. After all, that’s what everyone voted for back when they rose to power.
Chris 15:39 on 2026-02-01 Permalink
extra zero?
Kate 15:52 on 2026-02-01 Permalink
Or misplaced comma. 55,000 employees? 5,500 employees?
Ian 20:44 on 2026-02-01 Permalink
Maybe they mean the specific local going on strike?
It’s SCFPE 301 (CUPE en français) – CUPE has 143k members in Quebec according to their website.
This older article (2019) says 7500 members so yeah maybe 5500 is the actual number of unionized blue collar workers in Montreal belonging to the 301.