The city has cut 90% of the funding for making public places more accessible for those with reduced mobility – places like libraries, pools and parks. The Projet administration dedicated $3 million a year to it over the last two years. This year it gets $354,000, and next year – nothing.
Updates from February, 2026 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The STM is taking contractors to court over cost overruns in the Bellechasse bus garage project.
I’m still puzzled why it came as a surprise to the STM that an underground structure would not be safe for recharging massive electric bus batteries. Should this not have been one of the first things discussed with the designers and engineers?
Joey
Good question, though that’s not the focus of the lawsuit (which is more classic ‘the contractors didn’t plan well enough which caused delays and unforeseen costs’).
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Kate
A man who raped numerous women in an east‑end park in the 1990s has pleaded guilty after DNA results identified him in 2023. Now the court has to decide whether he’ll be declared a dangerous offender. Jean Désormeaux is 61; La Presse hasn’t posted a photo.
Later edit: La Presse added a photo to their story after I first posted this.
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Kate
The REM is set to run all night for Nuit Blanche – all the way from February to March. But it won’t be free.
The metro will stay open a couple of hours later than usual, but not all night. Also not free.
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Kate
Mayor Martinez Ferrada is patting herself on the back after 100 days in office. La Presse looks at her progress on ten of her promises.
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Kate
Ted Rutland revealed on X that, although the SPVM had bought an American AI video surveillance package and refused to say what it was, Concordia students figured it out – it’s iMotion ROC, a system that can search by “age estimation, ethnicity, gender, expression/emotion [and] facial hair” as well as clothing description and vehicle type.
Joey
Doesn’t require much sleuthing to read public tender documents, but kudos to The Concordian’s journalists for doing actual reporting. That said, the assumption that the problematic features will be used despite on-the-record statements indicating otherwise is a little shaky.
Kate
Would police who could use that kind of search option refrain from doing so?
I can see how it could be used abusively. But if you go on the SPVM site and glance over the brief descriptions of missing persons, those elements are usually on the list – age, height, gender, clothing when last seen, vehicle they may be driving. They don’t usually hazard a guess at ethnicity but they give hair and eye colour.
Joey
If they haven’t paid for the functionality (why would you pay for something you don’t plan on using), I doubt random cops could just turn it on. Of course the quoted individuals could all be lying…
Ephraim
@Kate – We lack most checks and balances on the police using their systems abusively now. There have been numerous cases of them using it to search acquaintances, potential dates, or family members. A completely violation of ethics. Of course there are EASY ways to stop this. For example, a screen coming up asking them to input their police badge number, the associated dossier for the search and justification. Because if they do this and fake it, it’s clear that they knew they were violating their ethics. A complete audit of the trail once a week and a random pop-up on a superior’s screen to authorize the audit. So it is absolutely clear that there is a trace of everything they do on the systems.
I think police should have to scan an electronic badge in for everything they do. It would cut down on 99% of the abuse, if they have to scan it in, because it would remind them that it is auditted.
Blork
I find it fascinating that everyone assumes biometrics are always and only used for nefarious and racist purposes. How about something like this:
A white guy with blond hair and a moustache robs and assaults someone on the Metro and is seen leaving Peel station at 2:15PM. OK, AI surveillance: find that guy (based on him being white and moustachioed; filter out everyone else) so we can track his movements and locate him and arrest him.
Or this:
A black woman wearing a blue hoodie is having a mental health crisis and is at risk of self harm. She was seen ten minutes ago on St-Denis near Mont-Royal. OK, AI surveillance: find that person (filter out males, non-black, non-hoodie) so we can find her and help her.
That’s how these things are supposed to be used, and for the most part are used. You can save 100 people a week and arrest 100 criminals a week this way, but if one prompt is seen as “racist” then the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater.
(And FWIW I am not a fan of all this surveillance technology, but I acknowledge that some good can come from it.)
Blork
OK, that “bathwater” line is over the top, but I still think we need to see the full potential here and not just the risk of bad behaviour.
Kate
Blork, I did acknowledge above that the categories of description mentioned in the article were pretty much the same as the information disseminated by police when seeking a missing person. So, for that purpose, beneficial. But we can all see how such a system could be used to e.g. seek and point out all the Black persons on a street or a platform or in a crowd, because the police are known to be doing this already, with their eyes.
Joey
I think the bigger risk is that these systems can identify individuals and track them over long periods of time and across a large geographic area. If the only way we can adopt technology that can help us find a missing person is to deploy something that can reconstruct everyone’s movements – well, at the very least that’s what the discussion should focus on. Again from what’s been reported it sounds like the SPVM has not actually gone out and purchased this capability, at least not through this particular contract. But I’d have a hard time believing that there exists a single police department in all of North American that wouldn’t love to use this kind of tech to its fullest capacity.
Kevin
I think we have all read enough stories to be highly dubious of any claims of accuracy by surveillance video.
Chris
We (society/government) allow private companies (ex: Amazon ring) to install “an American AI video surveillance package” all around the city. If we’re going to let foreign multinationals do it, we should allow our own police to also. Neither would be nicer. But I have time getting upset about the police having it given who else already does.
Joey
Funny to read the most recent comments back to back. Is surveillance tech so useless as to be a total waste or is it so powerful that we are foolish for denying it to our cops?
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Kate
Hospitals in Montreal and in the regions will have to compete for badly needed infrastructure cash.
jeather 00:09 on 2026-02-20 Permalink
While we’re cutting costs for accessibility and public transit and cutting jobs, how much was the police budget increased by?
Tim 10:07 on 2026-02-20 Permalink
It’s really annoying when the most obvious question is unasked: what planned projects will have to be cancelled due to these cuts? Another obvious question: what work was completed with the funding under the Projet administration?
EmilyG 13:11 on 2026-02-20 Permalink
I don’t know if non-disabled people realize it, but Montreal is quite a disabled-unfriendly city, and I’m worried it’ll get worse, or at most, not improve.
Nicholas 14:50 on 2026-02-20 Permalink
Some of the participatory budget projects included ones that fit the bill: ramps to get into pools was a common one. One was put into the Benny Farm pool years ago (Tremblay era iirc) and is really nice, and I presume some of the projects proposed at other polls over the last few years happened.
Joey 15:04 on 2026-02-20 Permalink
There’s something really awful about taking a basically negligible part of the budget ($3M = 0.04% of the city’s $7.7 billion budget) to make basic city life a tiny bit more accessible to people who have no other possible source of any kind of systemic support… and choosing to spend it on debt reduction. Like, the inevitable ‘we can’t afford to improve the Rachel bike lane so we’re just gonna close it’ will be foolish and punitive and objectively terrible, but this is just morally reprehensible. Shame on the mayor.
Uatu 17:17 on 2026-02-20 Permalink
Thing is that eventually we all succumb to accessibility as we age so it’s also age discr as well
Meezly 17:44 on 2026-02-20 Permalink
Another to add to the list of nice things being taken away by Ensemble that was upheld by Project. How many here helped split that vote again…?
Kate 18:15 on 2026-02-20 Permalink
I feel, looking back, that Luc Rabouin, who had done a decent if low‑key job as mayor of Plateau borough, did not campaign hard enough or in the right way, last year. I think Rabouin felt that since Projet had had clear wins in the past, he could coast a bit, so he didn’t do enough work on understanding how Projet’s administration had annoyed some voters, and on showing how he intended to be different.
Of course vote splitting did happen. Some voters who had voted Projet in earlier elections must have decided to support Craig Sauvé’s party. I haven’t examined the numbers to see where the split for Sauvé meant Projet lost to Ensemble, but somebody should!
Ian 20:38 on 2026-02-20 Permalink
Considering how low Sauvé was polling I doubt vote splitting was much of an issue.
Besides, as has been pointed out befiore, it is not the duty of the electorate to game the system – it is the duty of the candidate to show that they are the best choice.
Joey 21:11 on 2026-02-20 Permalink
Fairly certain that Rabouin and Sauve had about as much (maybe slightly more) votes than SMF, though the assumption that all Sauve voters would switch to Rabouin strikes me as wrong. Surely some would’ve voted for SMF or someone else or stayed home.
Agreed that both as Plateau mayor and city mayoral candidate Rabouin failed to connect with voters. He seems like a smart and sensible guy, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what his ideas for the city were. If memory serves, Plante’s campaign took off after she unveiled the Pink Line – everybody knew it was unlikely to happen but there was some genuine appreciation for a bold vision for expanding the Metro. Compare and contrast with the way the REM was unveiled…