A CityNews headline says residents of Chinatown are concerned about plans for Stella, the sex worker support organization, to move into the area but city hall is making the group wait and intending to consult potential neighbours.
Updates from February, 2026 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Projet Montréal handily outspent Ensemble in November’s election. Projet’s post‑election report says it spent $1.5 million while Ensemble’s outlay was around $1 million.
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Kate
The blue collar union chief says one reason for so many potholes is that workers are pushed to work too fast, so that they don’t have time to make lasting patches. They also mostly use cold asphalt, which doesn’t bind well and gets quickly gouged out by snow removal procedures.
In related news, the city is finally going to remove some old streetcar tracks that have been popping up through St‑Antoine Street for sixty years. They should sell pieces off as souvenirs.
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Kate
CBC reminds us Wednesday of the profound fiasco of the federal government’s Phoenix pay system, which dwarfs the SAAQClic mess in depth and time scale.
Some large IT systems work properly – Visa never seems to misplace a purchase or a payment, for example – but something has gone badly wrong with these government systems. I’m also put in mind of the British Post Office scandal, in which faulty software saw hundreds unfairly prosecuted, some driven to bankruptcy or suicide. (The UK post office also functions as a savings bank*, more money handled than by ours, but it was a similar situation of IT simply failing to work at a grand scale.)
I wonder where the failure points are, or if anyone knows.
The Phoenix pay system also has its own Wikipedia page, where we’re reminded that Phoenix was a Stephen Harper initiative.
*Reading British books, it used to puzzle me to read of people “putting money in the post office”.
Joey
The Conservative idea that we can just outsource the basic functions of government to largely automated systems keeps failing in part because governments begin by hollowing out their teams and relying on inadequate numbers of IT professionals to manage these insane projects (nothing is built from scratch, often many legacy systems that are ‘quirky’ at best must be integrated into some Frankenstein fork of either an off-the-shelf or bespoke ‘solution’) and so everyone gets taken for a ride. If step one of the next major government IT project isn’t hire dozens of engineers to work for the government – and not the consortium of contractors – failure is basically inevitable.
jeather
It still causes new problems, it’s not just historical ones. One of the issues was that it was in Miramichi, which — unsurprisingly — was a way to lose staff because people didn’t want to move there, so they left the public service instead. I understood that the pay system did need to be updated, but every part of Phoenix was flawed.
The Post Office scandal was a bit different because people at Fujitsu and, I think, high up in the Post Office, knew perfectly well there were problems in the software and just lied and lied about it, then prosecuted people on those lies.
bob
There is also a tendency to trust machines over people. People lie, but if the machine says it is so, it must be so. The future of AI is pretty much that: people knowing the machine is spewing nonsense, but who will go with it because it is the machine, and machines can’t lie. Plus, it’s a nice way to cover your ass when it all turns into a dumpster fire.
The other issue is that the people commissioning these systems have no clue how they work – neither the software, nore the business logic they implement, so they have no way of knowing what is actually going on. If the people supervising the implementation of an accounting system know nothing about programming or accountancy, the contractors can do as they please, and charge accordingly. The same goes for infrastructure, or whatever. Even where there is no direct financial corruption, the corruption is in the negligence.
We have moved away from where institutions are run by people with expertise in that institution’s area to where they are run by politically reliable functionaries. University presidents need not be academics, hospital directors need not be physicians, unions are lorded by people who haven’t worked in their field in decades, and so on. Less so for the lower level functionaries – “nurse managers” who have never practices nursing, and whose only function is to cut costs, patient welfare be damned, e.g. The people who have authority over and within these institutions don’t have a dog in the race. It’s just a gig. They burn down the village, then move on – fail up if they can The institutions themselves, the people who make them up, lose their sense of purpose, and they get hollowed out, psychologically and spiritually, like people whose companies are bought by corporate raiders only to be dismembered. It’s been completely normalized.
Kevin
The problem of the past 40 years is hiving IT into its own department and keeping them siloed. I have had meetings where people were expected to make decisions about new software, or major shifts in websites, and had managers look at me like I was crazy when I demanded that the IT and engineering departments be brought in to see if their ideas were feasible.
And then those managers got very upset when six months later nothing was working and IT said they couldn’t do anything because what the managers had bought was useless.
Mozai
I can tell you from the corporate world there’s a persistent and pervasive idea that “if I don’t already know it / understand it, then it must not be important” and that turns into cost-saving omissions that bites corporations on the ass within a year. I haven’t worked in civil service but this smells similar.
JP
I’d never heard of the British Post Office scandal…but that sounds awful. In prosecuting hundreds who insisted they were innocent…couldn’t they have at least explored the possibility it was the software.
Tim
@Joey: Outsourcing is not only a Conservative concept. The federal government, under Justin Trudeau, spent more on consultantancies that any other government in history ironically while also expanding the civil service by ~40%.
My perspective, based on what I have read, is that government requires software vendors to build custom business logic into their applications instead of adapting or adjusting their own processes/procedures. The functionaries demand that the software must work “my way” and the vendors and consultants are only too happy to charge the government for this additional work. Similar problems exist in military procurement: functionaries come up with unique requirements that lterally do not exist anywhere else in the world for Canadian submarines.
Joey
Bob, are there any university presidents in Canada who are not academics?
Joey
@Tim I meant conservative in the small-C sense, not the big-C partisan sense, and in many ways Liberal parties all over the country act pretty conservatively. Then again, under Francois Legault’s conservative government, the size of the Quebec public sector workforce grew by 20% – about 100,000 new employees.
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Kate
Interesting piece on Policy Alternatives setting out the idea that the housing shortage isn’t caused by a shortage of supply, but by the financialization of housing.
Nicholas
The “supply-shortage argument” is encapsulated by the CMHC’s claim that “increasing housing supply is the key to restoring affordability.” If the argument is correct, then we should expect to see evidence that increases in dwellings per capita lower prices over time.
The entire article is predicated on this false premise. It is only true if there is no population growth, and no people wanting more space at home. But if you build 100 housing units, and 500 people move into the area, housing prices should still go up. You need to build more than the increase in population, and also more to account for the fact that people want larger homes with fewer people in them (for work-from-home offices, because people are less willing to double bunk kids and less willing to have roommates, etc.). And people so want to move to Montreal that our governments have chosen to prevent much of that by cutting immigration. So you need even more housing to tamp that effect down.
I won’t go through a point by point, but one question the author should be asking is why are housing prices up much more in areas where more people want to live than areas where people don’t? The financialized credit market in the housing industry exists across the province, country and world; RBC will sell you a mortgage anywhere in the country, on basically the same terms and interest rates, so it should have an effect country-wide, allowing people to bid up prices in less desirable areas. But it mostly doesn’t, because you only need to bid up prices when lots of people are competing for limited housing. As someone trying to sell a family home in a depressed rural area and maybe buy one in a desirable urban one, I can tell you that both markets are financialized, but one’s prices keep falling as the other’s keeps rising.
Related, landlords are greedy all the time, everywhere; if that was the issue then we wouldn’t look at a chart of housing prices skyrocketing and think landlords all got greedy in 2014 or whatever. They always are, but they can only act on that when supply is tight, which it very much is, so people have few options. Landlords keep telling us in quarterly earnings calls and presentations that keeping supply constrained is the best thing for their bottom line, and we keep having a certain set of people who claim to hate landlords somehow agree with their tactics. Maybe landlords are all lying to their shareholders to fake us out, but it seems like a risky move.
Kevin
Neat piece but it has a major flaw.
The piece says “Over the past half-century, the number of housing units has risen substantially relative to population, and their average size has increased as well.”
It is entirely possible for houses to get bigger while apartments got smaller, without increasing the amount of family-suitable housing stock, and that is precisely what happened. We have more McMansions with fewer people in them, while simultaneously having more 1-,2-, and 3 1/2s that are too small for families.
While it claims there is no shortage of supply, there very much is a shortage of the supply of the multi-bedroom homes where people want to live.
vasi
I don’t really know how to interpret these figures. If housing-units-per-capita are up, we’d expect a high vacancy rate, but the CMHC reports extremely low vacancy rates. You could explain part of this with changing household size as families have fewer children, but household size hasn’t changed much since the 90s. Or you could claim that some units are not on the market and therefore not included in the vacancy rate, but BC has a vacancy tax targeted at such units, and found very few. Something doesn’t add up!
The thing that most convinces me this piece’s thesis is wrong is cross-municipal comparison. I don’t see any reason to imagine that Phoenix or Atlanta or Indianapolis would have low “financialization” rates, they’re not some kind of socialist paradises. But somehow they keep prices low, and coincidentally build a lot!
Joey
Agreed with all the comments. This piece reads like the author chose a conclusion and then cherry-picked metrics and evidence to support it.
Someone I know in his 90s just passed away. He grew up around the corner from me and as a child he and his two brothers shared a bed. Nowadays that dwelling is inhabited by one person living alone. To not account for the increase in expected square footage per person over the last few generations is egregious.
Kate
Joey, it’s so true about living space. When I lived in the Plateau it was in a small upper duplex in a row of 1880s worker housing. Some time around the turn of the millennium the doorbell rang. I opened the door to see a middle‑aged man, two giggly older women, and an embarrassed teenage boy.
They explained that the women were sisters who had lived in my flat when they were young, as had their parents, other siblings and relatives or boarders. They wanted to come in and now I wish I had let them, but I was alone and didn’t fancy having four strangers in after dark. Still, it would’ve been interesting to know how a family of five to eight people had managed to bunk down in a flat that felt to me like just enough space for myself, some books, my computer and my cat.
I did gather from them that, at the time, it had been considered a Jewish neighbourhood, but that had been a long time ago. As I say, I could have found out more from them, but I didn’t.
Also, where I live now in Villeray is a 1920s flat, and I doubt these places were intended either for single people or couples without kids, but that’s how they’re used now. Oddly, I once talked to someone who had lived in the flat next door to mine, decades ago, and was showing the building to someone else outside on the sidewalk. A man called Lachapelle had lived in my place, he worked as a security guard and had a gun, which had impressed this man when he was a kid. So kids had definitely once lived in this building.
(I knew about Lachapelle because I once used the Lovell directories to find out who’d lived here before; Lachapelle worked for the transit company before it was the STM, so his workplace was what’s now the Youville shops, just north of Cremazie – he could walk to work. But the Lovell listings only show one name, usually the man of the house. You can’t tell how many family members they had.)
MarcG
That’s definitely something you notice if you do a bit of family history research and look at census records. I traced a pair of great (great?) uncles who moved from the Charlevoix region to the big city of Montreal and were living in a Plateau flat as boarders of a full size family.
Nathaniel
It’s pretty much all about supply and demand. Increasing supply for a given amount of demand pushes prices down. One might want to discount this, because one doesn’t approve of developers or wants to pin the blame for the housing crunch on some other group or inherent viciousness of capitalism or something, but, alas, no.
Joey
Also if you hack away all the misleading jargon, the authors basically define “financialization” as… demand – the idea that banks are eager to issue mortgages and individuals are eager to invest in the housing market (why? Because supply constraints mean that prices/values continue to increase, and much to the dismay of the authors the bubble hasn’t burst yet). The authors imply that, say, a doubling in the number of houses would not lead to price drops, yet their “financialization” argument relies on the fact that demand continues to outstrip supply. What exactly are we supposed to learn from this? That the CCPA is economically illiterate?
Joey 10:55 on 2026-02-19 Permalink
This opposition is ridiculous; shame on the city for even acknowledging it – it’s literally going to be an office.
su 12:41 on 2026-02-19 Permalink
Would they rather the Lodeo return?
Kate 20:39 on 2026-02-20 Permalink
Photo by Ben Soo
Ian 20:55 on 2026-02-23 Permalink
What a great shot.