La Presse shows supporters of Spain’s soccer team celebrating the World Cup win while Argentina’s fans mourn.
Le Devoir also has the story as does the Gazette.
I heard some honking early in the evening. Honquing? (Google translate tells me it’s bocinazos.)
Students from the suspended Collège supérieur de Montréal held another protest Sunday over their abruptly truncated courses.
I noticed an odd report by Le Devoir:
“L’ouverture d’un nouveau collège privé à Sherbrooke soulève de «sérieuses questions»
“L’établissement a les mêmes propriétaires que deux écoles forcées de fermer leurs portes.”
“The Quebec education ministry did not provide details as to why it had not renewed the permits.”
Explained a few lines above:
“Her immigration status in Quebec is tied to her school, and her study permit is set to expire at the end of August.”
How does the second line answer the first? She has a study permit until the end of August and the school to which her visa is linked lost its permit to operate.
Wouldn’t it be that her permit is linked to the school which no longer is recognized as a school which can be linked to a permit.
But that doesn’t explain why the government did not renew the school’s permits. And obviously she didn’t expect to need hers renewed or changed, so she made no request yet, and i can’t imagine anyone thinks the government would proactively renew or change all of the permits for the affected students.
Oh my god. Seriously? They want these people gone. They want the mechanism that got them here gone.
The mechanism is not “close two random private colleges with a few hundred students each”. They fixed a lot of the “oh no we have international students” by changing the permanent residence pathway. There is a reason these two specific schools lost their permits — someone said faking their stage hours — and it has not yet been made public. Even if they’re looking for a reason, they actually need to find one before they close the schools.
@jeather “two specific schools” It seems it’s now four schools:
Oh now I’m even more curious — the first two schools were related, but the other two don’t seem to be. That said they both were very clearly at risk based on their last permit renewals (Herzing, Veritas). Odd that this year’s publication isn’t yet out.
It’s been a quiet week on the editorial cartoon front. Côté, and now Godin, are in summer reruns.
Chapleau wishes us a happy construction holiday, but he also shows us Pete Hegseth measuring the testosterone level of the American soldier. Godin shows us the biggest bandit of our time.
Ygreck finds the Quebec party leaders pestering him like wasps, and Godin brings flies around another party reference.
Finally we get a soccer joke, this one from Chapleau, and Godin nods back to the Olympics and our ubiquitous orange road barriers.
CBC talks to athletes who boycotted the Montreal Olympics – mostly from African countries which withdrew over the participation of New Zealand because its rugby team was doing a tour of apartheid South Africa.
Radio-Canada recalls a forgotten incident in which a Russian fencer was disqualified because his sword was equipped with a banned device.
They also tell the story of how the technology for testing sports doping was being developed at the time; the World Anti-Doping Agency is still headquartered in Montreal.
I spotted a piece about how Princess Anne competed in the equestrian event in the Games. It’s one of those trivia questions: who was the only woman athlete not gender‑tested that year? (It was already sufficiently established that Anne was a woman.)
The Journal looks at how the Games awoke interest in a variety of sports that hadn’t previously been much practised in Quebec.
La Presse is posting an Olympics archive story every day till August.
La Presse has a three-parter this weekend on the damage done by the presence of so many empty and abandoned storefronts on our commercial streets.
A census of Ste‑Catherine, St‑Laurent, St‑Denis, Mont‑Royal, Parc, Papineau, St‑Hubert and Notre‑Dame found 423 vacant storefronts over 35 km of street. Journalists spoke to ten merchants trying to keep their businesses alive while the neighbourhood falls moribund around them.
A HEC professor tries to explain why these buildings are left empty.
A factor not even mentioned is that most of these dead storefronts have apartments upstairs, which are presumably equally uninhabited and probably uninhabitable, which must add to the housing crisis.
Another point: is this happening to other cities? Has anyone found a solution?
A lot of it is speculation.
One thing these articles don’t address is that property managers with a very large portfolio treat losses as an opportunity for tax deductions. A tqx deductions also hides profit, which is sometimes a valuable thing in the property game. Everyone goes on “oh we nobody wants to let a property take a loss” well, yes they do if they are trying to offset profits. What’s more, it is totally worth their while to hold out for a chain store for a year or two instead of letting a bunch of local scenesters open a cafe or whatever.
Many cities have a reverse occupancy tax, ie, if you have a building that stands empty, you have to pay extra tax on top of the property tax. Montreal won’t do it because they are scared of property developer lawyers, or at least that’s what former PM people said.
For places that are empty simply because of absentee landlords, that is a whole other thing – but the majority of empty stores and apartments in Montreal are not because of an absentee landlord,
Downtown condos, now that’s another situation yet again… and foreign investment has totally been pumping up that Ponzi scheme for years.
How (the heck) can a tax deduction for an unused asset be greater than the income from using the asset? That sounds like an arithmetic error even city hall isnt dumb enough to make. On top of that, theres an expense in property tax that must be paid regardless of if the property is occupied. Not saying you’re wrong its that I’m confused.
Basically, property speculation is a waiting game where you hold out as long as you can for the best tenants or buyers you can possibly attract. Timing is important too but that’s another thing. Here are a few reasons why letting a property stand empty might be a good tactic , though there are more – and keep in mind I don’t agree with this cynical approach to property management. Keep in mind that all of these can backfire, but that’s why it’s called speculation.
1. Property tax is calculated on assessments not just sale price, so if you have a run-down abandoned building it will usually have a lower tax rate than an occupied building.
2.Minimum maintenance costs on an empty building are lower than on an occupied building.
3. Writeoffs reduce your taxable income, ie, it’s a deduction against your before-tax profits. An empty property only costs you basic maintenance and property tax, ideally it costs you less than you save in taxes on the profitable properties in your portfolio. Many businesses support charities for this same reason.
4. If you rent out your property to a low-rent tenant it makes it harder to rent adjacent or similar properties to “good” tenants. Hold out for the best tenant as long as you can. This is why Shiller-Lavy bought up as much of Saint Viateur as they could, for instance.
5, a) If you let an undesirable property stand empty long enough it will start to collapse so it is easier to get demolition permits – you see most often see this with old factories and apartment buildings, and b) an empty lot is more attractive to some kinds of commercial development than refurbishing an existing property. This is what happened with the Seville, for instance.
It’s basically the same idea as renoviction – yes, you lose all your tenants and have to put money into an empty building – but with the hope that your new tenants will pay way more. In the meantime you can write off your costs against your overall business, lowering your tax bill. If you time it right, you dramatically increase your overall income at he cost of a couple of years of lower profit. Screw it up, and well, you can wait for it to be an empty lot as property values go up over time, and resell the land to a developer.
To expand on Ian’s list, renting out a property and managing it takes time. If you value your time at say, $100/hour and managing an occupied property costs you an extra 10 hours of work a month, that’s $12,000 a year you’re out. if the tax (and other) savings are equal to the money you lose on rent, you’re going to lose $12,000 per year just in the time you spend managing the property.
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