The big deal port expansion to Contrecœur will be a white elephant according to a report from an environmental group. There isn’t a growing demand and, more to the point, there’s a limit to the size of ship that can come this far upriver.
Updates from January, 2026 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Last month, a blue collar worker in St‑Laurent left his snowplow running to take a leak, when a person “en état d’ébriété” got aboard and drove it away. The gang of workers followed him and, again in the words of the article, the thief aurait reçu une correction before police arrived. The union maintains that the men were defending themselves from an aggressive drunk, but they face discipline, details so far undecided upon.
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Kate
The trial of Salim Touaibi and Aymane Bouadi for murder in the first degree has begun. Five years ago, Meriem Boundaoui, a teenager sitting in a car in St‑Léonard, was shot dead in what this article says was a feud over parking spaces between two households, both alike in dignity. The trial is expected to take 10 to 12 weeks.
Dominic
From ancient grudge, break to new mutiny…
Ian
I do not park my car at THEE, sir…
But I DO park my car.Kate
I love you guys.
MarcG
I knew I should have popped “both alike in dignity” into a search engine…
Ian
I come from one of the last generations of Ontario schoolkids that not only studied Shakespeare in English every year but actually got to watch the Zefferelli version of Romeo and Juliet in grade 9. I think a teacher would get fired for that nowadays haha
School has changed. My kids have never studied Shakespeare and because they don’t care about hockey, don’t know the national anthem. The past is a foreign country.
CE
Are they at least reading novels in full? I’ve heard some schools just give excerpts because administrators think students don’t have long enough attention spans to get through a whole book. I asked my niece and nephew over Christmas and they said they’re still assigned novels, but most kids just listen to the audio books.
Kate
Every year we did a Shakespeare play, but the teaching mostly involved sitting still while the teacher put the play into simple English, line by line. At one point I stopped going to class because it was so excruciating, then ran into the teacher by chance in the hallway. He asked where I’d been, I told him I already understood the play, he shot me with finger guns and nothing else was said about it.
CE
I had two English teachers who did an amazing job teaching Shakespeare. One would help us with the words and phrases that didn’t make sense in modern English without handholding us through what we would be able to understand. She would dive into the etymology of those old phrases and words and bring them back to how they relate to the English we speak now which was very interesting (at least it was for me). The other would get up in front of the class and recite the plays from memory with so much passion she once swore about one of the characters (she called him a bastard). I haven’t read Shakespeare since but still have an appreciation for him thanks to my teachers.
EmilyG
When I went to high school in the late 90s/early 2000s, we’d study a Shakespeare play each year in English class. In addition to novels and other writing.
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Kate
Le Devoir features how public safety is a major concern in the new city budget, but CBC has a video report on how the police bodycams are not going to be applied for a long time yet.
(Kvetch: Why does CBC show you a couple of seconds of their news video, then interrupt it with a commercial? It’s jolting. Show me the commercial first then cut cleanly to your report.)
Nicholas
I think it’s IT issues. I believe what happens is that the CBC video loads, and then the ad loads on top of it, but loads so much slower that CBC starts already and then is interrupted.
Kate
Presumably CBC could put a brief delay on the start of their own video?
Jim
CBC could improve a lot on their streaming. Just the apps on smart TVs, like tou.tv are not very smooth. They ask and re-ask for login information at random moments, the login process is painstaking. Commercials are repetitive, in the sense that they are repeated 2 or 3 times directly in sequence. I don’t think it has their focus. Personally, I’d prefer to read my news, as being directed to a video. Audio is not always an option depending the environment.
But I guess it’s not easy to please all audiences, and get the advertisement stream at the same time.
Kate
I also far prefer to read my news, which is why this blog is in text and points mostly to text. But for the last few months, English CBC has been defaulting to video reports without text, and if they’re on a topic I think is relevant, especially if no one else has it, I’ve been grudgingly linking them.
Joey
From time to time I am reminded that CBC Lite is still a very useful thing that exists. CBC Lite is 329 KB. CBC News standard is only a little bigger (1.12 MB) but still somewhat cluttered. The Globe and Mail website, by comparison, is 8.1MB…
Ian
I’d forgotten all about it. Thanks, Joey!
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Kate
Denis Coderre has declared bankruptcy, burdened as he is with so many debts.
SMD
I just don’t get it. He has not one but two excellent pensions, bringing in a cool $9,213 PER MONTH. Plus all his private consulting, for Publisac and the like. Where does all the money go? How does a former federal minister and mayor go bankrupt? Everybody I know earns a fraction and is still able to keep a roof over their heads. Is this related to his family’s troubles? It just doesn’t add up for me.
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