The UPAC is investigating an attempted fraud against the STM in which a contractor is alleged to have made false financial claims in connection with the installation of a new communications system in the metro.
Updates from March, 2026 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Kate
-
Kate
Police are suspending the search for the teenager who fell through the ice on the Back River on Thursday.
-
Kate
Once again, after announcements of new homeless projects (link from December), comes news of funding cuts.
I’ve mentioned recently seeing a cycle of news repetition in the areas of healthcare access and police bias, but the oscillation between announcements of new money and services for the homeless and announcements of funding cuts goes more quickly. Can’t imagine the feelings of people working in that field: how can you make plans when, at any moment, you know the plug can be pulled?
Ian
I saw someone on social media make a witty observation, since our budgets for the police are apparently infinite and homelessness is an issue of funding, the solution is clear: declare all the homeless police officers and put them on salary.
-
Kate
A site called New Atlas waxes lyrical about the Place des Montréalaises.
DeWolf
It’s a very flawed space but just the fact that it exists is worth celebrating. It really does improve accessibility in what was a very disjointed area. And the views are cool.
Ian
Am I anti-park for seeing this as an ugly 100 miilion dollar concrete plaza?
Kate
I didn’t feel like it was a place I’d want to linger, which is more or less what a park is supposed to be. It’s a reasonable bridge from Notre‑Dame Street down to Champ‑de‑Mars metro station, but it was expensive for that purpose.
Ian
…and required almost immediate renovations to prevent people using it for precisely that purpose from injuring themselves.
Blork
I walked through there a few times last summer. It’s weird and interesting. A bit strange that it’s so open and unsheltered, but it’s sort of magical when you’re there an hour or so before sundown on a warm day. More than half of the site is set with vegetation, but much of it hasn’t grown up yet I think. (AFAIK there’s a section that will be full of trees but the trees were not there yet last summer.)
It entirely changes the connection between Viger and Old Montreal, which is fantastic. And it’s a very close to the CHUM, so it’s a nice open respite for anyone who needs to get out and get some air while waiting for all the things one waits for when at a hospital. I found it to be a nice calming space. Not necessarily the best place to linger if you’re looking for a quiet shaded place to read your book, but I found it to be a good place to linger if you’re working on thinking something through or whatever, if that makes any sense.
Ultimately it’s not intended to be a regular relaxing park in the traditional sense, and my understanding is that the challenges of the site wouldn’t really allow that anyway. But it’s fantastic as a transition between two urban areas, and also kind a cool as a space for contemplation.
Ian
In all honesty I suspect some of the aesthetic of a “regular relaxing park in the traditional sense” was quietly taken off the drawing board to prevent homeless encampments.
Kate
Nobody could put up a tent on that white surface with holes punched through it. Could it be described as hostile park design?
Blork
That concrete thing takes up less than half of the park, especially if you include nearby Place Marie-Josèphe-Angélique. The concrete thing was designed primarily to fascilitate passage (i.e., to make it nice to go from point A to point B). It’s not designed for lingering or camping.
Calling its design “hostile” is like saying Parc Lafontaine is hostile because you can’t camp in the pond.
-
Kate
Tenants of the building upstairs from the Monkland tavern are still out after an emergency evacuation in January, with no prospects of returning to their apartments soon. Some feel that the process has been effectively a renoviction.
Ian
We need to add a new term to our Montreal vocabulary for renoviction by weaponized neglect.
Lazyviction? Laissez-viction?
-
Kate
Michael Rousseau’s lapse of judgment in not providing a message in French to honour the pilots who died at LaGuardia provided ideas to Godin, Côté, Chapleau and Ygreck – a natural sweep.The conversion of onetime CAQ MNA Maïté Blanchette Vézina to a Quebec Conservative, with a seat in the house, gives Éric Duhaime permission to conduct pressers in the National Assembly building for the first time. Chapleau, Ygreck and Côté have their comments.
Excellent Godin piece on Quebec allowing more toxins from the Horne smelter in Rouyn‑Noranda, not a story this blog has followed.
Ygreck on the constantly changing maze of suggestions for fixing the healthcare system is good; for Côté the state of our infrastructure and our fast-changing weather are always good for a laugh; the plight of the destitute isn’t.
-
Kate
Spring floods may follow the seasonal melt.
-
Kate
The old plan to turn the old Lachine marina into a waterfront park has been put on hold. Video report from CBC.
DeWolf
This comes after the EM administration in Hochelaga cancelled the Square Dézéry sponge park plan, forfeiting a big chunk of federal money in the process. There’s a lot of federal funding for the Lachine park that they’d also have to give up if they outright cancelled the project.
I never thought we’d have a municipal government that was… anti-parks.
Ian
They can be opposed to specific projects without being “anti park”.
By the same logic you could say that PM’s failure to turn any of their properties into social housing was because they were “anti homeless”.People often forgive their own political “side” with statments like “they have to make decisions, you can’t fund everything” but view their opponents doing the same as being anti-whatever. It’s hypocritical.
DeWolf
They’re also opposed to expanding Père-Marquette. Once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence, three times is a trend.
I’m not sure how you can defend the return to a privatized waterfront in Lachine that can only be used by the boat-owning members of a marina?
Ian
By the same token, then, PM was anti-homeless.
I disagree with your logic, but if you insist.
Blork
I’ve never seen a good explanation for why anyoine needs this park or if anyone even wants it. It’s not like there isn’t already a gigantic (1.5 million square foot) park that is almost entirely waterfrontage literally a stone’s throw away. (You could literally stand in the former marina and play frisbee with someone in Parc René-Lévesque.)
My understanding is that it was expensive to maintain the marina. OK, so maybe charge people more to park their boats there? Otherwise it just comes off as hating on people who like boats.
And “pro-park” or “anti-park” doesn’t even clock here because like I said, there’s already a huge park right there. It’s like if someone said “lets dig up all those graves in the cemetery on Mont-Royal because we want to build a park!” If you object to that, does it make you “anti-park?”
steph
Not wanting to build social housing actually makes you pro homeless. If you house them, they’re not homeless anymore.
DeWolf
@Blork The justification was that the marina was decrepit and needed a lot of renovations, so the city decided that if it was going to spend millions to rebuild it, it should be investing that money into making the space as widely accessible as possible. Whether it’s a park or marina, it’s the city paying, so they made a political choice about who would benefit most from that land.
Toula Drimonis wrote about it back in 2020 and I agree with her take: https://cultmtl.com/2020/10/lachine-marina-montreal-taxpayers-pleasure-boats-boating-waterfront-park-public-land-should-be-accessible-to-the-public/
@Ian You get really stuck into people when they make a glib quip, which is surprising because that’s most of what you offer in your comments.
So fine, I take it back: EM isn’t anti-park. They’re just relentlessly pro-status-quo, even when that status quo is dysfunctional. They’ve postponed or cancelled so many vital infrastructure projects, they’re clearly just kicking the can down the road with no real vision for the future.
The marina project is not vital or essential, I’ll give you that. But there are so many other examples. They’ve delayed the reconstruction of Masson that was supposed to start this year, which means the sewers and water main will continue to decay, the merchants will continue to live in limbo for at least another year, and construction bills will increase due to inflation. They haven’t even bothered to explain why it’s being delayed.
The Dézéry sponge park was meant to respond to the fact that the surrounding area is in a cuvette and is therefore prone to flooding. The project was developed over several years through public workshops, the money was already budgeted, the feds were going to pay for a big chunk of it. And according to the borough mayor it’s being cancelled not so the city’s money can be reallocated to something else but simply to preserve some street parking.
Reply