Not an April Fool: now you’re moving your car for street cleaning rather than snow removal. Otherwise you can be ticketed.
Updates from March, 2026 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Canada Post plans to proceed to end home delivery to save money.
MarcG
“Modernizing”. I don’t understand how this is going to work in a city of triplexes like Montreal, won’t they need to install community boxes at the end of every block?
jeather
I assume areas with triplexes will be delayed the longest, and eventually they will just reduce it to once or twice weekly instead.
roberto
As Canada Post continues to shift away from home delivery, it highlights a growing gap. It’s easy to assume everyone is connected these days, but a significant number of people still don’t have reliable access to computers or the internet. Moving services online has clear benefits, but it also risks leaving behind those who simply can’t afford the added cost of staying connected—especially as the cost of living continues to rise. For many, losing home mail delivery isn’t just an inconvenience; it removes a critical, accessible way to receive important information and stay connected to essential services.
Kevin
MarcG
I did the math when this was proposed during the Harper era, and worked out that NDG would need about 20 metres of boxes every block, which is enough to cover the front of 3 buildings.The people who propose community boxes think Canada only has two types of housing: detached houses and apartment buildings.
jeather
Roberto, was that edited with AI?
Even in places with no home service, they have an accommodation for weekly lettermail/daily packages if you require it, though I do not know what proof they request.
Mark
I still think a way forward with this is to split CP in two. Urban Canada Post that has to modernize and try to stat afloat, and rural/remote Canada Post that is seen as an essential service for smaller communities. No one will ever make any money sending packages to Pond Inlet, Blanc Sablon, etc.
My suggestion doesn’t address the important point that Roberto raises above, and I am aware that “modernize” in this context means competing against gig-economy low wage couriers, dragging the working conditions of thousands of carriers down. But it seems like we’ve decided that postal delivery has to be profitable. Maybe some of it can, but we’re still the second largest and least densely populated countries in the world. I don’t know what percentage of CP’s losses can be attributed to the fact that we need to reach those smaller communities, but shifting the narrative from ” a business losing money ” to “providing an essential service” could help.
SMD
@Mark, and once you make that essential shift in perspective you can realize that postal banking would be an excellent essential service for Canada’s many remote communities, that aren’t served by financial institutions but all have a post office.
Ricardo
It almost inhumane to still have home delivery and I say this from mail carrier perspective. Have you seen how hard these people work for what, 24$/hr? FREEZING cold, insane heat, lugging giant bags of mostly useless material? I spoke with my carrier and asked her how many kms she does in day. That day 29! as they were short staffed, normally 20kms. Pretty sure 98% of us can walk to the box. Let’s find solution for that 2%.
Nicholas
100% of Quebec households have access to high-speed Internet, and over 96% of Canadians do, and 9 in 10 of those who don’t are in rural areas (which have already lost home delivery). The goal is 100% by 2030. There is also still dial up, cell-phone based Internet and satellite. There are programs for low income people, and libraries, and so on. Not that zero people are affected, but it is such a small problem that we can focus on subsidies rather than design our postal system around it.
Nevertheless I do think home delivery may still make sense for very dense areas where space is at a premium. Maybe delivery should just be on the ground floor of plexes. But another way to do this is reduce delivery to a few times a week.
Kate
I live in a classic row triplex on a block of duplexes and triplexes, and there’s no room around these streets to install community boxes. I’d be fine with getting mail twice or even once a week instead.
Joey
Think of every baby boomer you know, now imagine how their cognitive ability might change in the next few years, now imagine that the only way to access all of their important documentation (tax forms, healthcare paperwork, insurance documents) is via some online account for which they were never particularly good at safeguarding. Suddenly home delivery of important documents doesn’t seem so easily replaceable.
Chris
>100% of Quebec households have access to high-speed Internet
lol, only if you consider 50 Mbit/s “high speed”. Not.
jeather
Yeah, I just don’t see how areas where each street is a row of triplexes will work. No one wants to give up their parks for community boxes, the sidewalks are too narrow to put anything on, there’s not a lot of space in front of buildings, and surely staffing enough Canada Post locations would cost more than home delivery. Apartments are fine, they get delivery to the mail room, and areas with a lot of single family homes might be ok depending on lot size, but I can’t see how they can compromise in urban areas except by doing less frequent deliveries.
azrhey
I’d also vote for delivery once or twice a week. As is I barely check my mail once a week. and I am trying to figure a situation when someone really needs their mail every day of the week. Specially lately where a letter from Hopital Notre Dame can take up to two weeks to arrive in VSL as it did for me last month. ( WHY they insist on sending me paper mail for my appointments when they already sent an SMS is a question for another post )
Chris
I’d also vote for delivery once a week in dense neighbourhoods. But jeather: there is place to put those community boxes if they insist: we can remove on-street car parking spaces.
jeather
If you think losing park space would be unpopular . . .
But also, wouldn’t that block most first floor windows?
jeather
Ok I know this is on p2 and therefore gone but according to the Toronto Star:
While there’s an upfront cost to buying and installing community mailboxes, it costs $157 a year per household to deliver to them, according to Canada Post. For the 24 per cent of Canadian households still receiving home delivery, the cost is $279 per household.This is — a lot less than I imagined.
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Kate
An 18-year-old woman was strangled to death Tuesday afternoon in St‑Michel, and a 20‑year‑old man was arrested and has been charged with murder.
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Kate
Stephen Lewis has died at 88, two days after his son Avi Lewis became leader of the NDP.
maggie rose
Charlie Angus wrote movingly about his memories of Stephen and had me shedding a few tears in a short tribute on CBC. https://bsky.app/profile/charlieangus104.bsky.social/post/3mieryci3lk2c
Ian
It makes the timing of Mulcair’s sniping article in the Gazette seem rather petty.
Chris
That timing is almost certainly coincidental. Mulcair wrote something about the NDP election, and it’s only reasonable to expect it to take a day or so to write and release and come out when it did.
Ian Rogers
That he acknowledged the death of Stephen Lewis in the same article makes me say that no, he knew precisely what he was doing.
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Kate
A woman was killed Tuesday when she was hit by a train on the tracks under the Van Horne overpass. The item recalls a similar fatality in 2022. A lot of people cross the tracks in that area.
As I wrote last time, I find it odd that someone can be killed at that location because the trains on those tracks are hauling freight, the view in both directions is unimpeded, and someone with full senses can hear and even feel the train approaching. But I must be wrong on some of these points if two young women can be killed by trains on that section of track.
Adding later: the Mon Mile End mailing list says the train was backing up. I didn’t see that information anywhere else.
Blork
Very sad news.
I’ve read numerous accounts of people getting hit by trains over the years (for a while it was a topic of discussion on photography web sites after some photographers in the U.S. were killed and injured that way a decade or so ago). I’ve read about cases where people were photographing the tracks or doing selfies, or even “glamour” shots, etc. and boom, hit by a train. It defies logic, but it happens frequently.
Aside from photographers, apparently one of the problems is people walking while wearing headphones or earbuds and not paying attention to their surroundings. People often underestimate the risk of walking over train tracks, especially if it’s something they do frequently.
Another thing that happens is when there are two tracks and a train is going one way on one track and aother train is approaching going the other way on the other track. The pedestrian waits for the train closest to them to pass and then darts across, right into the path of the train coming from the other direction. It sounds like a one-in-a-million but apparently it happens more often than you’d think.
I’ve also read some accounts of how an approaching train can be less noisy than you’d imagine. I read that a few years ago and I don’t have a link, but it was a real eye opener.
In the case of the trains going under the VH viaduct, they go awfully slow, so you’d think none of the above applies, but I suppose that’s not the case.
Chris
Another ghastly possibility is suicide. RIP regardless.
roberto
A major issue is that people tend to underestimate a train’s distance and speed due to poor depth perception. Trains are much larger than most people realize, which can seriously distort our instinctive judgment of how fast they’re moving and how far away they are. Really sad news.
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Kate
Quebec and Ottawa cannot agree on the financing of public transit. Ottawa is prepared to hand out billions of dollars, but Quebec is sulking and not accepting any of it.
Also Tuesday, Le Devoir reports that a federal initiative to build more housing – offering cities plans for pre‑designed dense residential buildings – is being ignored by Quebec.
jeather
Historically it’s because the federal government asks for some oversight and Quebec refuses.
Joey
Big word count for a piece that doesn’t even try to explain what the specific issue might be…
Kate
jeather, I know, but it’s so frustrating to watch this happening over and over. Of course if the feds hand over $2 billion they’re going to want some accounts back, and they’re going to want to make sure that it is spent on public transit, not on whatever random things the CAQ thinks could save some of its National Assembly seats in the election later this year.
Joey
This isn’t like, say, childcare or pharmacare or student aid, where Quebec can credibly tell Ottawa that it already has a comprehensive program in place and so an opt-out-with-compensation makes both political and technocratic sense – if Ottawa is developing a new prescription drug coverage program and Quebec already has a very mature one, it makes no sense for Quebec to shoehorn its existing program into an emerging federal model, it should just get the money and, hopefully, make some commitment to augment its program. Cases like this one, though, are really just about funding and not about some citizen-facing program. The crux here seems to be that Quebec won’t access ‘its share’ of this program unless that amount covers a much larger share of Quebec priority projects, like the QC City tramway. I get that Quebec can usually (legitimately) tell Ottawa to take a hike when the feds start stepping on Quebec’s toes, but this is a case where they could pull a Mr. Plow and tell the feds they’ll take the money but won’t plow the driveway. I miss the old Quebec leaders of all political stripes who never forgot that getting something from Ottawa in exchange for nothing is better than getting nothing in exchange for getting to throw a hissy fit.
Kate
Joey, your final sentence there is going on the calendar quotations list for next year.
Chris
It’s a nice quote, but the “in exchange for nothing” part is probably wrong; like jeather was saying, Ottawa usually wants something in return. (Don’t get the wrong, the CAQ is still being stupid here.)
Joey
@Chris in many cases, the expectations from Ottawa can be burdensome (especially when the federal initiative is a new program). But in this case we’re literally talking about a fund – submit project details and get money for it. What exactly is Quebec expected to give up here in exchange other than the phone possibility of Ottawa having offered more money to begin with?
Chris
They give up the freedom to not have to submit details to anyone, to be fully free to spend it how they want, without any signoff from above. (From their perspective, not my personal one.)
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Kate
Superior Court has ordained that Gilbert Rozon must pay $880,000 divided among eight women who accuse him of sexual assault and misconduct. A ninth woman who also accused him is excluded.
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Kate
It’s freezing rain again as March grinds out its last gloomy day.
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Kate
A video from last year – posted by the driver himself – shows him showering a policewoman with insults at a traffic stop. We have no laws against insulting police (although most people wouldn’t do it because of consequences) and it’s now being asked if we should.
I see why people might think it a good idea, considering the video, but do we really want to make it an arrestable offence to call a cop an asshole?
Tim S.
I think it should be a minor offence to call anyone the things that were said in the video. Jail? Not the first time, but fine or community service, sure. I’ve said before, we really lack a level of enforcement for sub-criminal disruptive behaviour. I have a theory about the decline in religion, but don’t want to trigger people.
Also, I think police should have the powers to suspend a licence for 24 hours for anyone not in a fit state to drive. Yes, it could be misused, but it’s crazy that that guy was free to drive away and take out his frustrations on the next driver/cyclist/pedestrian.
Blork
My first reflex is to say no. But then I’m thinking… what would the feeling be if, instead of a cop, it were a nurse or a shop clerk at the recieving end of that tirade? We’d all be outraged at the perp and would be gunning for him.
But still…
Maybe there’s a line that can be drawn between simply insulting the person (cop, nurse, whatever) and being actually combative, if only verbally. The former is just a person speaking their mind, while the latter could easily tip into assault.
But where is that line? And you can be sure that some cops would see that line as very flexible and could potentially tackle and arrest someone for simply issuing a heavy sigh, which the cop could then legitimately say was a verbal threat.
Kate
Would the response to the video be different if the cop had been male? But then, would the driver have felt safe to unleash a tirade like that if the cop had been a man?
I have no answers. I wish people had better manners.
Nicholas
A few things. First, a law that you can’t say mean things to cops is perhaps one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard. I invite everyone to think through the obvious natural consequences of this.
Second, I’m dismayed by the continual push to punish people with the power of the state for things they say. Again, it’s worth thinking through where this always leads.
Third, the way to deal with disgusting people like this is public shame, and one way to facilitate that is for the journalist to name this asshole. The person posted it on Facebook because they thought it made him look good, so disabuse him of that notion: go to his work, go to his neighbours, make this story the top hit whenever someone googled him; make him suffer the social consequences of his words. That will hurt him way more than a fine, and stop this kind of behaviour.
Fourth, listening to the video it certainly sounds like without this tirade many people would be asking why cops are pulling over a black guy for something so minor as window tinting, how it could escalate into a shooting and we might see a discrimination lawsuit.
Fifth, good on the cop for not reacting, and it’s nice to see they are stopping people for illegally tinted windows. But it sounds they let the guy drive off? If your car is not street legal then it should be impounded and towed away until fixed.
Lastly, we have a strong culture of no verbal abuse to customer service workers here, and generally the punishment is to no longer let the customer interact with them (kick them out of the building or off the phone and make them do everything in writing, and cite them for tresspass if they come back). Ot course that’s not applicable here, the man wants to leave. But sometimes when you have the monopoly on violence people will say hurtful things to you, but that’s the tradeoff, and this cop handled it well: finish the detention, serve the penalty, don’t retaliate against them for their speech and get out of there.
Ephraim
If the police want respect, they need to earn respect by doing their job in a respectful way. That means that unless absolutely necessary, they don’t violate the law… not even crossing a street against the light or putting their lights on to go through a red light.
j2
We should not, it would be weaponized immediately. But I’m okay with the hate crime being examined as a possibility as long as they are independent and aware of the slipper slope involved. If the officer had a bodycam at least we could hear the other side of the invective.
And I’m so sick of illegal tinting. I couldn’t tell you whether the car in question was legal or not, but driver visibility (ie seeing the driver) is a safety issue and should be fined as much as possible. Either rip it off in place or require an inspection afterwards. And maybe a re-inspection periodically.
Chris
Canada already has too many limits on free speech, thumbs down on this idea.
Tim S.
That the community has a responsibility to curb public insults is not a radical notion. Calling someone a whore is slander, and historically has been punished, sometimes by enforcing a public apology. There are other options here than a heavy-handed state intervention.
Ephraim 14:14 on 2026-04-01 Permalink
They came by to clean today right on time.
Kate 10:02 on 2026-04-02 Permalink
So did mine on Thursday morning. Street’s beginning to look a lot better – now all they have to do is vacuum up all the gravel left on the sidewalk.
Ian 12:04 on 2026-04-02 Permalink
In my neighbourhood they usually just let the gravel wash into the drain then vacuum out the drains
CE 21:33 on 2026-04-02 Permalink
On my street it usually sits around on the sidewalk until about June then a machine comes by to shoot the gravel off with water. Last year is sped by so quickly that almost all the gravel was left behind.