Reported first on reddit, parts of the Plateau and eastern Ville‑Marie are now in the dark.
Updates from January, 2026 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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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.
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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.
Nicholas 19:24 on 2026-01-30 Permalink
If it’s something at the Berri substation the discourse is going to be something to behold.
Kate 19:57 on 2026-01-30 Permalink
Seems now, near 7, most of it is back.
Kate 09:44 on 2026-01-31 Permalink
Saturday morning, Radio-Canada reports on the blackout with a photo of, yes, the Berri substation.
Nicholas 16:20 on 2026-01-31 Permalink
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 17:24 on 2026-01-31 Permalink
It sounded pretty clear that a new substation is needed in western NDG/Côte St-Luc, though.