Superior Court has extended the period of toleration for the homeless camp on Notre‑Dame.
Updates from April, 2026 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The mayor wants everyone to clean up garbage around where they live.
Updating to add: I took a full-size garbage bag out just now and walked around my block, house fronts and the corresponding back alley. I hadn’t thought it was too bad, although I’d noticed some litter recently, mostly shiny bits of snack packaging among the lingering heaps of dead leaves. Got back with a full bag.
Chris
She’s right. The filthy mess out there is our collective fault, we should collectively fix it.
Kate
People do seem to have the notion that it’s somebody else’s problem.
Joey
I don’t disagree, but I would add that the city has missed half the recycling pickups on our street since February/March. It’s hard to keep things tidy when there’s a bunch of garbage blowing around.
MarcG
The reason for trash in the street isn’t littering, it’s poor management/containment and extreme weather. The last big windy evening was on a garbage night here in Verdun and it spread loose junk absolutely everywhere.
SMF’s idea that businesses in South Korea just spontaneously and non-selfishly collect people’s garbage is misinformation. Like deps with bottle returns, they only take garbage from items you purchased from their store. They are charged for their waste by volume (you pay for special govt bags) and there are no street garbage bins. This idea of “oh people should just act better without me, a politician with power of regulations, needing to do anything more than ask nice slash guilt trip them like a lazy parent” is the real garbage.
Chris
> The last big windy evening was on a garbage night here in Verdun and it spread loose junk absolutely everywhere.
Here too the fault is (partly) everyone’s. Why don’t we properly bag/tie/bin our recycling? Why don’t we keep it home one week longer when the forecast is windy?
Meezly
Our alley has an apartment building on each end, and the garbage behind those buildings are out of control. Tenants move out and leave a pile of junk, or they don’t even bother to bag their trash properly. It’d be great if there was a way to publicly shame these people.
A neighbour posted photos on a Mile End FB page and someone responded saying he’s a tenant in one of the buildings and they have a rat problem as a result of the unmanaged trash. Mile End residents piped in to say it’s an ongoing problem. They’d frequently call 311 to report it, then they get an email that it’s been resolved and when they look outside, the garbage is still there.
I can’t imagine the city would send workers to actually clean it up the mess. I’m guessing an “inspector” would visit the site and issue a fine to the building’s owner? Maybe the fines aren’t high enough? Would anyone know how the process works?
Unfortunately, the most efficient way to deal with the unsightly and disgusting strewn garbage is to organize neighbouhood cleanups.
MarcG
I’m interested to hear your answers to those questions.
Ian
I agree that people could put more effort into being tidy, but would also like to note that not everyone has the space in their apartments to store their garbage for an extra week.
Joey
There’s a huge pile of garbage behind that building right now. The fines should go to the landlord and should increase exponentially.
Chris, we put our recycling and increasingly garbage out at the last possible minute (like when we hear the truck). Otherwise the bags are opened immediately by folks looking for cans and left untied. IOW our problems are interrelated and structural. A shitty economy means everything is worse. SMF’s attitude is basically, it’s your own damn fault.
JP
And if its not a person opening it up for cans, it’s a squirrel or a crow…..or whatever else.
I know someone who lives in parc ex close to the metropolitan…there’s an alley there that really doesn’t feel comfortable or healthy to be in….but with so many apartments in such close proximity….I honestly don’t know how they fix the rat/mice issues.
jeather
I’ve had good results complaining about garbage not being picked up on the app.
Ian
@JP last year a squirrel got hit by a car and some enterprising crows hid it in a pothole so they could eat it when the traffic was gone. Eventually city workers just filled in the pothole squirrel and all.
@Joey on my block we have an alley, with the garbage pickup there instead of the street. The city recently decided that we should have our recycling and compost picked up in the alley, too. The problem is that the map they distributed was so confusing (I called 311 three times and got three different sets of instructions) that basically everyone started putting everything in the garbage. Last week, we got a notification that recycling will now be on the street, but compost and garbage will still be in the alley. We’ll see how that goes since people have only just now started consistently putting all their materials for pickup in the alley instead of just leaving it on the street, wondering what was going on, until it snowed …and the snowplows effectively carted all the recycling away with the snow.
Joey
@Ian somebody should have told Cathy Wong that if it ain’t terribly broke, don’t fix it. I don’t know how many times Mile End councillors have had to post these incomprehensible messages about this issue (especially what you’re describing), and always implying that it’s the citizens who are at fault.
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Kate
As noises are made about postponing Santé Québec’s digital platform, the visits of a onetime SAAQClic official to hospitals has become controversial.
Is it that these sprawling computer systems run up against technical limitations? Or is it that dysfunctional digital structures reflect flawed human and social relationships? Are the broken networks us?
bob
1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. And how!R T
I (somehow, as it’s not my normal job) worked on the post-mortem for a government IT project that is like SAAQclic (but not SAAQclic itself), and in addition to the answer to all three questions being yes, government IT projects often have a “Christmas tree” nature. Functionaries realize it’s their one chance to include x, so they propose that it includes x; everyone has their own x, and it’s no one’s job to say no, so you end up with a proposal that’s extremely prescriptive about what it has to be able do. Layer on top of that the fact that government departments are, to put it mildly, generally averse to changing or updating their processes, so they demand x be done in a certain way, and operate in an extremely narrow regulatory environment, so x may be legally required to be done in certain way. (These certain ways are often often, to put it charitably, outdated and inefficient or, less charitably, illogical or downright stupid.)
Contracts that demand thousands of things be included and be done in a certain way, things and ways that may not even be feasible, somehow tend to go off the rails.
(Phoenix is a good example of this. “You must include all the Government of Canada existing pay rules and processes.” It turns out many of these processes are based on business practices that were abandoned in the private sector years ago and moreover vary by department; two departments may have exactly opposite requirements. Then, within the department, there are rules that differ for each work group, some of which may be union contract requirements and some of which may be mistakenly believed to be union contract requirements. Of course, there is no central repository of all these processes and requirements, and the purpose and origin of these rules may not be written down anywhere at all!)
Kate
Mission creep. It afflicts big projects, especially government ones. I wrote about the phenomenon in a different context awhile back.
Nicholas
There’s a lot of fiasco going on, but I’m not immediately opposed to high ups getting their hands dirty to see how things actually work in the field. Often things don’t filter up to the top (see, e.g., SAAQClic), and having worked at the bottom I’ve seen pronouncements come from the capital that make zero sense on the ground, as if these people have never spent any time seeing how their department actually works. When a visit in the field is arranged in advance you’ll have minders that ensure you only talk to the right people, and no one gives an opinion outside the company line. You are liable to get different biases from an unannounced trip, but they can really be useful.
There’s a famous photo from 1989 of Boris Yeltsin in a grocery store in Houston. He was on a tour of the US and decided to go on a whim to check out how the capitalists did groceries. He was incredibly surprised to see the massive selection, and knew it couldn’t be faked because they only reached out to the store 15 minutes before arrival. He spoke to customers about their salaries compared to food prices, and during his next flight an aide said “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed inside” him, with him saying if the Soviet people knew how different life was there would be a revolt. Sometimes it’s not just the public who’s unaware of things, but leaders themselves, and going around the official channels can sometimes help
Kevin
Nicholas
Life imitating Art — specifically Moscow on the Hudson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHIcmoY3_lE
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Kate
A hardware store that’s been in the same location in the Plateau for 110 years is closing for good. The owner can’t find anyone to take it over from him. Couple of nice historical photos of the façade on Mont‑Royal Avenue.
Nicholas
As the article notes there are three more RONA-affiliated quincailleries within 1 km. The numbers for his business are also rough: $900,000 in revenues (not profits, which are probably 5 digits), and he was selling for $700,000, which would have 5 digits in interest payments (or lost revenue if you have that money lying around and instead stuck it in the stock market). So you’re buying a business that nets you a regular salary but you have to work 50 hours a week and there’s high risk due to online shopping and 3 competitors within 1 km. Who would get into that business?
Kate
A small hardware store has to offer something extra. Quincaillerie Liège, in my neighbourhood, is small, but they somehow stock everything a big store does, plus they’ll give solid advice on what you need and how to use it. I dread the day it finally hits the wall of online shopping and stiff competition.
Nicholas
A friend recommended Quincaillerie Azores as they have an uncanny ability to immediately figure out how much you know about the topic and give you advice without making you feel stupid. I went there and boy did they succeed at that!
Kevin
Just because a store is part of a big chain doesn’t mean that it is a cookie cutter store.
The RONA on Notre Dame used to be a mom and pop and it is still run that way. You can walk into the basement with a random plumbing question and the staff will go out of their way to help, hauling out the boxes of old bits and bobs to offer replacements for things that were first installed decades ago.CE
I walk by that Rona often and just noticed that it was shutting down. It’s sad to lose these types of stores because they’re really needed for a good walkable city to function. If you have to walk 20 minutes to your nearest hardware shop when you need some sandpaper or a gallon of paint, it’s not convenient. There’s a Rona near my house, they don’t always have what I need and the prices are a bit higher than the big-box stores, but it would be very annoying if it closed down.
I know the Rona on Notre-Dame, it’s incredible. I used to work near the massive Home Depot on Beaubien and my job required lots of specialized tools and parts. The Home Depot almost never had what I needed so I would go all the way down to that Rona (which is probably about the 10th of the size) and they always had what I needed. I once showed up needing a very particular attachment for a pump. They passed my broken part around to three or four different employees until one guy took me to another section where he found the part in a little closet after about five minutes of rummaging. It’s an amazing store!
MarcG
Here’s another vouch for the Rona on Notre-Dame, amazing customer service and wild adventures to be had in the basement. The location on St-Patrick nearby is great too if you need anything wood-related.
dwgs
I work in a related field and can say that Quincaillerie Notre Dame is the best hardware store in the city IMO. Le Renovateur on St. Patrick is owned by the same guy and is also excellent, including a wood yard / construction materials. Villanova on St. Laurent is very good as is Rona DG on St. Jacques.
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Kate
CTV looks at the Clown Festival – and I don’t mean the CAQ vote for a new party leader.
GC
Thanks for the laugh!
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Kate
Women are still under‑represented in local toponymy despite declarations of an intention to attach more women’s names to things.
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Kate
A building on Somerled in NDG was set on fire overnight. Neither of these items mentions that there was a criminal fire set at the same intersection in January – was it the same business? – and the item from January mentions another previous arson attack last year.
Nicholas
It really is a failure of journalism when a local blog has a better memory and write-up in two sentences than two huge media conglomerates. And that’s the charitable interpretation!
Ian 19:38 on 2026-04-12 Permalink
tolerance?
Kate 20:24 on 2026-04-12 Permalink
Hmmm…