Putting this feature up a bit early, because this will not only be Grand Prix weekend, but will see the start of the Canadiens’ series against the Hurricanes.
Weekend notes from Le Devoir, CityCrunch, Journal de Montréal, CultMTL.
Parties held in tandem with the Grand Prix. Also, Crescent Street as the place to be.
CTV warns of traffic difficulties as does TVA.
A park in Griffintown has seen steps and sod put in, then almost immediately ripped out again and redone. Questions are asked.
As tax payers, we should be happy about this. The city refused to accept bad quality work and the contractor is re-doing it.
The article is pretty much rage bait, only if you read the story you’ll realize — as James said — that it’s not the city paying for the work to be redone. The contractor screwed up, the contractor eats the cost of redoing their own work.
If only the city was as consistent in enforcing quality across all of its projects. There are some whose finishing is excellent and others that are mind-bogglingly subpar.
The city admin could do themselves a huge favour by improving communications. A street near me was torn up all last summer – big project, very disruptive to mobility – and in the fall it seemed to be done, everything patched up and back to normal. I went by last week and it’s all dug up and fenced off again! Surely there’s a reasonable explanation but I have no idea what it is so I just assume it’s stupidity and/or corruption.
They could, but one of the traditional routes for conveying that kind of information – the local news weekly – hardly exists any more.
I was thinking of a flyer in the mailboxes around the work site or even a couple of big posters that scream “Hey, we know this looks horrible but here’s what happened…”
The mayor wants to see a parade for the victory of the Victoire.
A fire has been burning in a recycling facility in Montreal North.
CTV calls it an abandoned scrapyard.
Two chicks have hatched to the falcon pair nesting in the Université de Montréal’s tower box.
Later, it was announced that 3 eggs were laid and all have hatched. As of May 27, all three are alive and thriving.
Lyme disease has reached its highest rate in 20 years here, a trend blamed on climate change and the consequent presence of ticks.
It’s a shame that we had a vaccine against this decades ago, but it fell victim to antivaxxers in 2002
I was not aware that there were antivaxxers in 2002. I thought they got made from pure cloth in 2020 because of covid.
Or was that a typo?
Montreal vaccine skepticism goes back all the way to the Smallpox Vaccine Riot of 1885 (https://www.cmaj.ca/content/193/14/e490).
RFK Jr’s been in the game since at least 2005, and the retracted Wakefield paper about MMR vaccines and autism is from 1998. There’s a great book and podcast called Conspirituality that covers the overlap between conspiracy theories and the spirituality/wellness spheres, which is something I’ll admit to falling into for a bit as a 20-something stoner. Fun fact that the US “indefinitely paused research at one of the few institutes worldwide with the high-security facilities needed for studying Ebola” last year.
Good background, SMD and MarcG! I found out about the smallpox resistance here when researching the history of the smallpox hospital on Rachel, a few years ago. There’s also a book called Brève histoire des épidémies au Québec by Denis Goulet that outlines some of this stuff.
The current events of people setting fire to a hospital in DR Congo because they wanted to bury their relative probably killed by Ebola, and this American getting crabby about being quarantined for Hantavirus exposure, further illustrate this tension between emergency and the desire for ‘normal’.
Bringing this back to Lyme disease and Quebec, Amir Khadir recently had his license suspended for 6 months for using non-standard treatments on patients with Long Lyme (“Whether it be acute COVID-19 or acute Lyme disease, we know now that between 10 and 15 per cent of these patients will remain with long-lasting problems, which sometimes continue for years”).
I was thinking of Wakefield, because his anti-MMR was cited as a reason for Lyme anti-vaxxers at the time.
Wow, looking up that Amir Khadir suspension led me down quite an unexpected rabbit hole. The debate over the existence (or not) of chronic Lyme is a little above my pay grade, but apparently there’s many hours of the Dérives podcast to listen to for anyone interested.
>… the spirituality/wellness spheres
Indeed anti-vax was previously a left wing thing, with the grano wellness types. It’s only recently that it’s a right wing thing.
I think what differentiates the new ‘alt right’ from the old-school ‘conservative right’ is their performance of rebelliousness, which appeals to a lot of folks whose anti-government sentiments are shallowly based in fear rather than tied to politics or ethics.
La Presse has some views of the mighty Lisette boring machine and a discussion of what they might do with it after the blue line reaches Anjou.
With the REM station at Bois-Franc it makes so much sense now to extend the orange line to connect, but it’s impossible to predict what the government attitude to public transit will be like, when that day comes.
But now Laval wants a turn.
…Friday, I received an email from Sylvain Ouellet, a councillor in VSMPE, who’s agitating for a plan I hadn’t yet heard of: turn the eastern ends of the blue and green lines into a loop. He points out there’s only 2 km between Honoré‑Beaugrand and the future Anjou station, just as there’s only 2 km between Côte‑Vertu metro station and the REM station at Bois‑Franc.
But he also suggests extending that loop to scoop in more of the east end of the island.
A lot will depend on future governments, and some of this may only come about after another 30 years’ waffling.
Thefts of copper cable are becoming more common, and can put buildings at risk when it means removing the ground wire.
Too-strict laws about renovation of heritage buildings are actually threatening them, as they make it too difficult and expensive to do the work. So buildings are left empty until their state of deterioration makes it impossible to save them.
The problem is that they are allowed to remain empty and deteriorate without any cost to the owner.
The Plateau has uneven laws in place. We wanted to replace our staircase with an exact replica… not allowed, we had to go to what they THOUGHT that they were like at the time they were built. The house next door… brand new… replica of what was there before. So, who do you complain about uneven enforcement of the rules?
Get hold of Dinu Bumbaru and get him to speak for you?
That would probably be counterproductive…
I work in one of the oldest buildings at McGill… in winter we freeze because the windows are “dépoque” and they can’t change them for newer more insulating ones even if they would like exactly the same as the older ones… no double pane glass panels for us..just the flimsy thin panes en vogue in the 1920s. So in winter it’s like working close to an open fridge… we have a schedule to move the plants away from the windows in winter because they’d freeze… )
(OTOH if they let the university change the windows they’d have to deal with all the asbestos in the walls…so maybe that’s not a good idea either….)
We had to replace the exterior wooden window sills for our unit in a 100+ yo triplex because they were rotting away. The window company recommended concrete sills, which would’ve looked fine (neutral, innocuous) and more importantly, last a long time. Not allowed! Our only option was to replace the rotted wood with new wood and cover it with plastic-coated aluminum sheets. The metal sheets over wood look ugly as hell, but it’s needed to protect from the rain. The wood will likely rot again in several years. If we had been allowed to use concrete or stone, we wouldn’t have needed the ugly covering and probably never have to replace the sills ever.
They don’t build ’em like they used to because they used to build them like garbage.
I know from experience that every decision made by your local permit office is random, and subject to how much you can get the bureaucrat to like you.
@Meezly those covered window sills sound like they have been designed to trap water and rot. Do they have drainage holes?
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