A man was stabbed Sunday afternoon at the Tam‑Tams, and there’s been one arrest.
Why does CBC describe the location as “Avenue du Parc and Chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges in the Ville-Marie borough”? Sometimes it feels like the people writing our news are talking about another planet.
Monday morning: the victim has died.
Minimum wage in Quebec rises to $16.60 an hour this Friday – May Day. Does anyone have info about actions or marches that day?
The big unions march is on Saturday May 2nd. I’m sure other groups have more lively things planned for May day itself.
Doesn’t seem like a lot, given the exchange rate. In Germany it’s 14 Euro (22 CAD), even though overall I’d say people are poorer and costs are kind of lower.
Germany’s minimum wage is pretty high, and Germany has a more productive economy than Quebec. The minimum wage in Germany is the highest in the EU by purchasing power and around 60% of median hourly earnings (9th in EU when coneverted to monthly earnings), while Quebec’s median wage is roughly 50% the median. Most EU countries with a minimum wage (5 don’t have one) fall into the ~50-60% range.
How is it that Germany’s minimum wage has 37% more purchasing power than Québec’s when it’s only 10pp higher compared to their respective medians? Because German workers are about 34% more productive per hour worked. Quebecers close what would be a large gap in living standards by working about 20% more hours per year.
From my union:
MAY 1st at 3 p.m., leaving from Dawson, and another one at 6 p.m., leaving from Square-Victoria.
MAY 2nd: Large demo for International Workers’ Day: This intersyndical protest will depart from the Georges-Étienne-Cartier Statue in the Plateau at 1 pm.
Square Victoria will be hosting a fair of sorts starting at 4pm on May Day, with different groups hosting information stands and a free bike tune-up station. Then the speeches and march get going around 6pm.
@R T If Germans are 34% more productive, they are experiencing 34% more wage theft.
Productivity has gone up decade over decade way faster than wage growth.
When I worked corporate we had a target of 20% growth every year. After hitting it for 5 years straight I asked my manager if this meant we would see our wages doubled. He gave me a very dirty look.
Quebec politics was front and centre this week: Côté mixes the political colours and Godin implies that anglophones are pulling Charles Milliard’s strings. Meantime, PSPP is hampered by a certain weight and Christine Fréchette juggles her cabinet while Super Minister Drainville gets on with the job.
Canada’s new ambassador to the U.S. joins a class with Michael Rousseau and Mary Simon.
Playoff season is always a good hook so Ygreck gives us Fréchette’s starting lineup. Côté’s fan can’t see a problem (and this is from a Quebec City cartoonist!).
Of course, Trump never goes away. Godin shows him chomping down on a Mexican-Canadian sandwich, Côté finds him lost in a game of snakes and ladders and Ygreck sees him parting the Red Sea.
Sometimes a cartoonist will illustrate news I don’t see anywhere else. Godin notes Quebec’s abandonment of a system in place since 1970 for testing water safety at several beaches. (Story here on Radio‑Canada.)
And once again, Côté with good social observation, and a possible upside to the end of home postal delivery (although I’ve never seen one of those cartoon mailboxes in real life).
That’s the kind of mailbox I grew up with, living on an acreage in the countryside. The mailboxes were at the side of the road and the mail was delivered by a right hand drive jeep.
Same. One thing I wanted to point out though is that when you have mail, the postie moves the flag to the upright position so you know to check the mailbox, then you put it back to the horizontal position. It is left horizontal when there is no mail. 45 degrees isn’t a thing.
That is correct. For some reason ours didn’t have a flag though; instead the whole mailbox was rotated to show there was mail.
Also, you could lift the flag / rotate the mailbox yourself, in order to indicate you had left outgoing mail in the mailbox.
I had one of those mailboxes when I was a kid when I lived in the middle of nowhere. People could be quite creative with their boxes, I remember the most popular novelty boxes were plastic ones shaped like a corn on the cob. My favourites though were homemade boxes made to look like little replicas of the owners’ house.
Being able to put a letter in the box to mail it was a cool feature.
The Gazette ponders the future of French as automatic translation becomes ubiquitous. Recently I saw someone complain at seeing so much English in /r/quebec, then people told him Reddit had recently reset a lot of users to see auto translated postings by default. (I’d seen it myself but it was so weird seeing /r/quebec in English that I knew there was something up and switched it off.)
The article makes a point that sometimes auto translations can be inaccurate or misleading. I wouldn’t read Tolstoy or Murakami in auto translate, but if you just want the gist of a news story it’s fine.
Complying with the law is already a win, even when the translation is not perfect. Auto-translation has improved enormously in recent years, but like self-driving cars, it has flaws. In some cases, it can outperform humans; in others, a small error can have a big impact.
That said, human translators do not always fully understand the context either. The number one rule with AI-assisted work is still to double-check. AI can make the process faster, but whoever shares the final text remains responsible for it.
A rather big can of worms to unpack here…
The OQLF says websites for Quebec companies must have French versions. They also say machine translation is ok, & they don’t monitor quality (!). These are the same people that flip out when clerks say “bonjour-hi”?
If machine translation is sufficient and snce web browsers can be configured to translate everything, there is no obligation to provide French.
This slippery slope unveiled, when we all have earbuds that can simultaneoulsy translate for us, which is not that far off, what then?
… and yet, The OQLF claims that bilingualism poses an existential threat to Quebec culture. With this conflicting stance in the face of contemporary technology, the OQLF has clearly lost its raison d’être, point final.
@Ian the Pro and Max versions of Apple’s AirPods currently offer a live translation feature… “not that far off” is probably an understatement.
I meant more in terms of gen pop but yeah. Once that tech comes down in price and is more widely available, bonjour/hi isn’t going to even matter.
Myself, I rely on Google’s live video translate so much I’ve basically forgotten how to read Yiddish.
As if nationalist policy is about language.
A pedestrian was killed in a hit‑and‑run early Sunday in Côte‑des‑Neiges.
I still find it weird to think of Goyer and Darlington as CDN but yeah, it for sure is. There are lots of new condo developments down that way on Bates to the extent that I suspect there is way more foot traffic than the crosswalks/stop signs/ street lights/ stop lights side of infra supports. People still come barreling along Bates and up Darlington like it’s still an underpopulated light industrial zone.
Nicholas 23:10 on 2026-04-26 Permalink
Essentially all of Mount Royal Park (not counting the cemeteries, mostly) is technically in Ville Marie borough, with the northeast corner at Park and Mount Royal Aves. So half of the intersection of Cote-Ste-Catherine and Park is in VM, half is in the Plateau. So they did mess up the street name, but the borough is technically correct, even if literally zero people would ever call that anything but the Plateau (or Mile End), and if told it wasn’t the Plateau would guess it’s Outremont.
Joey 23:30 on 2026-04-26 Permalink
Yes, but the area where the Tam Tams are is completely Parc Ave.
Nicholas 00:06 on 2026-04-27 Permalink
Joey, I assume you mean completely west of Park Ave. Which would make it Ville-Marie. (I remember back in the day it was much bigger and stretched into Jeanne Mance Park, but last I went by it was all on the mountain side of Park Ave.
Blork 09:07 on 2026-04-27 Permalink
They must have updated the article because now it says “Parc Avenue and Côte-Sainte-Catherine Road.” (It says that’s where the police were called to.)
Kate 09:14 on 2026-04-27 Permalink
Freelance proofreading by Montreal City Weblog.
Joey 10:52 on 2026-04-27 Permalink
I actually meant to write “completely along Parc Ave.”… anyway, the question isn’t which borough the stabbing occurred in, it’s that it occurred along Parc Ave, not along “Avenue du Parc and Chemin de la Côte-Ste-Catherine,” which is not an actual place.
Blork 11:02 on 2026-04-27 Permalink
Joey, Ave. du Parc and Chemin de la Côte-Ste-Catherine is an actual place: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ESKHU2CiDwqGjzDW6
Joey 11:38 on 2026-04-27 Permalink
@Blork, yes it’s an intersection, but not a street (as the original article implied). Moreover, that place is not where the Tam Tams are. Now the article states, “On Sunday, police were called to a section of the park that is near the intersection of Parc and Duluth avenue,” which reads less like someone from ‘another planet’ wrote it, as Kate properly put it…