A stoppage on the REM on Friday night, between McGill and Édouard‑Montpetit, forced passengers to walk for a kilometre to get out of the tunnel. And then no emergency shuttles were provided to resume the route.
Pulsar, the company that runs the REM, says four trains were affected by the outage. La Presse also notes another outage happened Saturday night.
Christine Fréchette has been elected head of the CAQ and, as such, is now premier of Quebec.
La Presse lists her promises.
I’m conflicted in that I was hoping it would be the more progressive Frechette instead of Drainville, but I still don’t want a CAQ government.
Hopefully this means the demise of the Québec Constitution Act.
I agree with both of you.
I think the only question at the moment is whether the CAQ will continue to exist after the next election. The latest seat projections have them winning zero seats. That would be poetic justice for what has been the worst government in a long list of bad governments.
Predictions say that Québec solidaire is on its way out, too. Doesn’t make me happy to go back to having two monolithic parties as the only choices.
A missed opportunity for a bunch of “down the Drainville” jokes.
@Kate The latest 338Canada projection has QS winning 2–8 seats, unfortunately behind the Conservatives who are projected to win 5–14 seats.
I can see QS holding onto its core seats. Things may have been different if the PQ hadn’t drifted so far to the right under PSPP, but at the moment I have a hard time seeing ridings like Gouin and Mercier swing away from QS.
@Ian I see where you’re coming from but the Frechette era will be basically an empty vessel – there’s a ton of legislative work to do in a short timeframe this spring before we are in a months-long election campaign (e.g., pass the budget). Though I would concede that the Constitution Act would have much stronger prospects under Drainville.
Frechette as leader probably strengthens the PQ’s position and weakens the Liberals – there is now a viable, non-crazy (CPQ), business-first option besides the LPQ. Drainville would likely have chipped support away from the PQ, presumably trying to outflank PSSP from the nationalist right, which probably would have helped the Liberal candidates in ridings three-way races. Hard to imagine Drainville stays with the CAQ through the election. I’m sure Duhaime will roll out the red carpet, and I get the sense Bernard has little interest sitting in the backseat, especially with a woman at the wheel. Or he might go back to TV. Regardless, the LPQ now has competition from a business-oriented party (the Frechette CAQ) and already had an inefficient/concentrated vote. PSSP is probably feeling good today.
Maybe, but I also hear on CBC this morning that the PLC are now polling ahead of the PQ.
I know it’s way too early to make serious bets, but QC voters are nothing if not fickle.
The PLQ (PLC is the federal Liberal party) did pull slightly ahead of the PQ in the latest poll, but the PQ is still headed for way more seats, perhaps enough for a majority, given how concentrated the Liberal vote is. The path to victory for Charlie Billions involves winning a plurality (unlikely a majority) of seats thanks to a bunch of three-way races involving the PQ, the PLQ and the CAQ/Conservative Party.
All good points.
A driver who tried to flee a violent car crash early Sunday in Villeray was caught and arrested. His two passengers were injured, one seriously.
Wow, it looks like the crash knocked the engine block right out of the car! You can see it in the photos sitting about 10 metres from the car.
Took that big streetlight down, too, they must have been really flying. Reminds me of the recent accident on McDougall where the road curved but the driver kept going straight.
The Artemis mission gave our artists a hook this week.
Côté’s joke was a reference to On a marché sur la lune, a Tintin album.
Ygreck imagines the reaction of lunar denizens to the arrival of Trump while Godin sees the astronauts coming home to a planet dominated by one man. Both Chloé and Côté made predictable, if legit points about craters.
World affairs were also represented, Godin doing a particularly good one. Côté has some bad news for Trump.
Ygreck is back to gasoline prices (twice) and a laudatory drawing for Cole Caufield.
Côté does some of his signature social observations, with kids playing sports on their phones and a couple having a budget debate.
Godin with thoughts on the number of homeless people.
Both Ygreck and Côté have thoughts on the departure of François Legault from the premiership.
Chapleau must be on holiday as we haven’t seen anything new from him this week.
Sammy Forcillo, city councillor for three decades, has died at 75. Note the Gazette’s observation that Forcillo was “closely associated with Frank Zampino” but no explicit shade thrown. Forcillo left politics in 2013.
The Gazette also notes that Forcillo was councillor for Peter‑McGill, but not – as his Wikipedia entry claims – that he was mayor of Ville-Marie borough, back when it had its own mayor.
…Odd that I can’t find out who was Ville‑Marie’s mayor before 2009, when Gérald Tremblay pulled a fast one on Benoit Labonté and clawed back the Ville‑Marie mayoralty for himself. Someone must have been in that role between the institution of the borough system in 2002, and 2009. French Wikipedia only summarizes the borough’s political history since 2009 in a table; English Wikipedia says blandly “This governing structure is due to the unique status of Ville-Marie as the centre of Montreal” and doesn’t dig into the petty but relevant spat that created it.
ChatGPT says the borough mayor throughout that time was Labonté. He’s been effectively erased from history.
It’s a little confusing, but you may be wrong on two points. Going back and forth between the French and English Wikipedia, it seems the only election for mayor of Ville-Marie was 2005. On the English page for that election it says the incumbent was Martin Lemay, though he was also the incumbent for the Sainte-Marie district on city council; he didn’t run, running for the PQ the next spring. In Lemay’s bio in English it was he became borough president in 2000 (but there wasn’t a borough), while in French it says he was president (chair of the borough council) then mayor of the borough in 2001 until 2005. Though the borough was only created on Jan 1, 2002, nowadays people take their seats in November so maybe 2001 is accurate, but there were no borough mayors in the 2001 election. Another site notes that borough presidents were replaced by borough mayors on 18 December 2003, and Lemay was leader of the city official opposition for half of that year, and borough president during that time.
So it seems Lemay was chosen as borough council president (either by the borough council or the city mayor?) after the merger elections, and then became borough mayor when the designation was changed. Labonté then took over after the 2005 election.
But it is also unclear how long Labonté served. A few weeks before the 2009 election connections between him and Tony Accurso came out. Labonté had been running for city mayor before he stepped aside for Harel, and then ran for city council because borough mayor was being abolished after the feud you mentioned. So when the Accurso news came out right before the election, Harel made him resign from the party and withdraw from the election. That’s noted in a few articles I found. A few days later some blowback articles refer to him as the former borough mayor, so it seemed he resigned that too. And though council couldn’t sit regularly during the election, it’s possible that Forcillo, a councillor in Ville-Marie, became the acting or actual borough mayor for a month. During a search Google’s AI told me that’s what happened, but none of its links it cites or any I could find say this, and the links AI cite didn’t even say Labonté resigned, as some of them were from before that time. But La Presse and another source do say he resigned, but not if he was replaced during this lame duck, by Forcillo or anyone else. But it is possible Forcillo was borough mayor, even if he never got to chair a borough council meeting.
It’s odd that there’s no clearer account of such recent history. But thanks for writing all that up, Nicholas.
Ian 19:37 on 2026-04-12 Permalink
lucky they didn’t have to walk up the E-M stairs, I guess.