Quebec has given its nod to the reconstruction of the St‑Pierre interchange, where autoroutes 138 and 20 cross and thousands of motorists pass through every day. A rebuild isn’t impending, but when it happens, will cause chaos.
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Kate
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Kate
Le Devoir accompanied the Office de consultation publique de Montréal as it did some vox pops downtown, and it’s no surprise that a fair number responded they were tired of the ongoing construction sites – 25 municipal digs downtown between now and December, plus transport ministry sites, sites run by utilities, as well as building construction work.
Although the story brings no surprises, two elements occur to me that aren’t mentioned.
Marco Fortier says the people most inconvenienced are drivers, delivery people and merchants, while cyclists and metro users are more “zen”. But I’d note that anyone who relies on a bus to get around can often find that their stop has disappeared or been moved blocks away from its usual corner, or, aboard the bus, they’re suddenly on an inconvenient detour they didn’t expect.
The other thing is this: is this downtown phenomenon not partly a consequence of Ville‑Marie not having its own mayor to look after its interests?
Nicholas
You’re absolutely right that bus users are the most inconvenienced: buses can’t use small streets and so may have to make large detours. And if there are multiple blockages you may have to zig zag back and forth to stay near the route so riders can get to it, while cars can go anywhere that’s open, even if the detour is 3 km.
As for Ville Marie I think it just has older infrastructure and is busier. Other neighbourhoods also have construction, but it affects fewer people.
bob
But Ville-Marie’s mayor is *the actual mayor*, so shouldn’t it’s interests be the best looked after? Maybe we need more mayors.
Kate
Being the actual mayor has to be a full‑time job. Ville‑Marie’s council is partly elected, partly nominated by the city mayor. It’s a kludge after that stupid spat between Gérald Tremblay and Benoit Labonté, but it leaves the most central borough of the city without proper leadership or democratic representation.
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Kate
The government has placed legal mortgages on 20 properties belonging to a professional poker player who was fined for operating them without permits, but didn’t pay up. Now the question is, who will flinch first, Karim Olivier Kamal or Revenu Québec?
Nicholas
I’m learning all kinds of words here. What they seemed to have put on the property is a lien, a claim on a property due to an unpaid debt, which everyone seems to translate as privilège. But it turns out liens are used in the common law and the term lien/privilège was abolished in Quebec in 1994. Now they use droit de rétention, priorité, créance prioritaire, charge réelle. You can also use hypothèque, a mortgage, or hypothèque légale, but those seem to be voluntary situations: either you borrow money so this is your collateral (which the article uses, placées en garantie) or you owe money so instead of a lien on everything you voluntarily put up property for a hypothèque légale while you fight the debt so that other property is not encumbered. Please don’t ask me to tell you the legal differences between all these terms, I am not so trained.
I also learned en mortaise. This is used in the initial caption to note that the guy is en mortaise in their graphic, namely that he’s in an inset of the photo of one of the houses. Mortaise means mortise, a cut out of a building or some such (you might cut out part of a wall to put in a window or wiring), or any cut out you make to insert something else, such as in a piece of wood to insert a transverse piece with glue, like a slot or groove. I could not find anywhere defining this term related to graphics or maps, nor could I find an appropriate French translation of inset. But thanks, JdeM, for letting me know the named is the human in the inset and not a building!
I’m curious to know if there are translations I’m missing for this, or the appropriate word for lien given they use two different terms that aren’t the term Quebec’s official dictionary recommends. Either way, all interesting, and also glad they’re going after someone.
Kate
I knew en mortaise because I’ve done page layout depuis belle lurette but the terminology of law and property is unfamiliar to me in either language as well.
I think the mortice probably comes down from the times when a page layout was an actual slab of lead.
H. John
@Nicholas Probably more info than you want, but there are four types of “hypothèque légale” in Quebec:
https://pierreroy.com/2024/06/hypotheque-legale-quebec-faillite-proposition/
The article linked to by Kate is about the second mentioned: “L’hypothèque légale de l’État”
More general info from Educaloi:
https://educaloi.qc.ca/en/capsules/hypothecs/
The translation for “hypothèque légale” in the Civil Code of Quebec is LEGAL HYPOTHECS
Chapter III
LEGAL HYPOTHECS
Art. 2724https://www.legisquebec.gouv.qc.ca/fr/document/lc/CCQ-1991/20200110?langCont=en#se:2724
bob
I think it amounts to the common understanding of a lien. The term here is a “hypothèque lègale”, when your property is held because you owe the someone (like the government) money. The creditor can dispose of the property pretty much as they wish to recover the debt (use it, lease it out, sell it, etc.). And it counts for most kinds of property, not only real estate.
Pro tip for anyone who wins a case against a landlord. I and my partner won one such case and the landlord was a dick. So we went to the court house and the lady at the wicket said “you can seize the landlord’s property until they pay”. We said “like, the building?”. She said “a bank account is also property.” And we said “we don’t know their bank accounts.” She said “they cash your rent cheques, yes? What’s the deposit account printed on the back of the returned cheques?” So we seized the account where all that landlord’s rent cheques were cashed. And a bailiff showed up the next day with some papers to sign and a cheque. It felt good to have the machinery of the state working for us for once.
Kate
H. John: thanks, as always, for the legal facts.
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Kate
La Presse profiles two sisters who are both oncological surgeons at the Royal Vic.
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Kate
After the attack on Berlin’s gay pride event on the weekend, Fierté Montréal is reassuring the public that nothing like that will happen here.
Ephraim
Really? How are they going to stop it? The article says concrete blocks… I assume they mean those 4-metre-long blocks and some bollards? So they are talking about stopping hate with concrete. But we aren’t addressing the biggest problem. A community that was based on the idea that there should be no discrimination, because so many discriminate against them, that last year had to be pressured to not be discriminatory. Irony is not lost sometimes, supporting anti-western ideas and not even realizing it. We have a lot of very anti-western groups, especially in Montreal. Of all things, we should be more worried than less worried.
Kate
CBC posted after that, with a piece on heightened security.
You can’t stop hate with physical means, no, but we don’t have the means of forcibly changing people’s attitudes either.
Chris
And this being the CBC they of course omit mentioning Islam entirely.
Ephraim
@Kate We call the way that you change people’s attitudes laws and education. For example, we need to educate the police that if a group is chanting “Khaybar Khaybar…” that this is an incitement to hate and a violation of Section 319(1), 391(2) and 319(2.1) of the criminal code. And we need to educate the community that it is not acceptable in Canada, at all, to even say it publicly and we will not tolerate it, at all. Don’t even THINK of chanting that in Canada, ever!
The only real intolerance we need to stick up for is the tolerance of intolerance. It’s part of our laws and constitution. All groups are protected. And if you can’t handle that, there are other countries you can go to. And we need to put money into teaching this. Doesn’t matter the group, in Canada, we are all entitled to be free of hate.
Kate
Chris, “Muslims” like Alexandre Bissonnette who shot up the Quebec City mosque (6 dead, many injured), Alek Minassian (2018 Toronto van attack, 11 dead), Kimveer Gill (attack on Dawson College, 1 shot dead, many injured), Steeve Gagnon (2023 Amqui vehicle attack, 3 dead, others injured), Nathaniel Veltman (vehicle attack on Muslim family in London, Ontario, June 2021 – 4 killed, kid seriously injured)? Shall I continue?
MarcG
Good timing of this “You Can’t Ask That” segment from ABC Australia that I watched last night.
Nicholas
I worry people will try to use laws to solve this, as Ephraim suggests, or self-deportation. You kill people, sure, jail, deportation, whatever. But there aren’t that many people who want to kill. What do you do if the majority of the population has hate? You can’t jail or deport a majority, not just because it is impractical but also because that majority would vote against it.
And because hate is such a difficult thing to define legally, what is going to happen here? We have people, including the last and current(?) premier who deny there is any systemic racism here. Both the racism and the denial is intolerant; is that hate? What about attitudes to minority religious groups, or linguistic groups, or ethnic groups, and so on? It goes on and on. I have had people describe to me feeling hate just seeing an expression of a minority group, and it certainly seems like many (though not all) of the people supporting laws banning that expression hold that in their hearts. I have had other people tell me they support such laws to keep the peace, as if they weren’t there you’d see way worse, such as violence or separation with even more drastic laws.
And of course what this all means is that if we have laws against hate speech they won’t be used against the majority. Governments will always use it against the disfavoured groups. That may be in protection of another disfavoured group, today, but then things may end up reversed later. Going down the road of policing speech always ends badly, and for all its faults (and there are many), this is one of the things the US does right, or at least better than most. Germany bans Nazis and yet a lot of people are voting for Nazis these days, and now it’s too big to stop by just jailing them all.
We absolutely need education to change people’s values. Studies show that people who move from authoritarian countries tend to be more likely to hold liberal democratic values (why they left!) and as they stay they and their kids hold even more democratic liberal values than before, as they see the new society more favourably. Even if they go back those values stay, and you see them advocating for changes where they came from. The problem is what if the values we’re teaching are also problematic?
The last thing I’ll say is again what I think we need is more shame. Shame can mix with education, but we need to call our bad behaviour. Shout down bad words with good words. Make people feel bad for their bad views, but also invite them to hold better views. But we’re all atomized on our niche Internet communities (hi!) and the people with the most retrograde views find each other and reinforce their bad views and inoculate them from shame..And solving that is probably the question of our generation.
Ian
If only there were some political position on the spectrum of tolerance other than Gazan Genocide or ISIS. CLEARLY it’s only one or the other.
Gazan genocide is ‘pro-western’ now?Ephraim
That’s an American view. In Canada, the right to free speech is tempered by an individual’s right to be free from hate and discrimination. It comes down to the old principle that your right to swing your arm ends where another person’s nose begins.
We have a constitutional right to equality, dignity, and physical security. These protections exist to safeguard minority groups from discrimination, and they apply equally to everyone, including members of the group chanting those slogans. Free speech never gives anyone the right to stomp on someone else’s basic rights.
Relying on social pressure just doesn’t work in the real world. Look at what happened with the people chanting Khaybar in Montreal. Nobody stood up to stop it or shout it down. This isn’t a flaw in our legal system, it’s a failure of law enforcement to understand what was actually being said and enforce the laws we already have. In Canada, we recognize that letting hate go unchecked corrodes the fabric of our society.
As I have said many times, the correlation isn’t between crime and punishment, it’s between crime and apprehension. We need to stop it immediately and not let people think it’s acceptable.
@Ian – The strawman argument? Really? It’s not either or. You can oppose the suffering of one population without resorting to being anti-semitic. It’s like saying that you can’t oppose priests abusing children without calling for the destruction of Quebec, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, Columbia, Poland, Argentina, Peru…
Ian
Being opposed to Israel’s foreign policy is not antisemitism.
You are grasping at straws.bob
@Kate – But in this case, it was an Islamist, and that is newsworthy, relevant because Islamist violence is a persistent international phenomenon. /@Kate
When the right wing media is at pains to say that some racist or incel shooter was just a case of mental illness, we dump on them. But if there is some religious or ethnic angle, we must demur, or sometimes go with the mental illness angle ourselves.
The single worst terrorist attack before 9/11 was Canadian – Air India, with 329 people killed, 268 of them Canadians. And to this day the government interpretation of that event, where 82 children were murdered, depends on Parliamentary seats in BC. The government response was conferences, publications and major research projects, and paying off families of victims to hopefully fuck off, because prosecuting the people we know were responsible is a non-starter.
And we see the same thing each time ethnicity is involved. We say how terrible this violence is, and ignore that these violent disputes far away are sometimes played out right here. We insist on naive ignorance of the internal divisions in these far off places (except for one) for fear of labelling a group by the actions of an offending subgroup within it.
You can make a list, but there are other lists. The list of Islamist attacks around the world in the last fifty years is around 65,000 incidents long, by far most of them in far off places of no importance to us, killing people of no importance to us. Abdelrahman El-Rashid (GM of Saudi state-owned news) once said “It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims.” Other than the being painful thing, I think he exaggerated, if only because he was not aware of how commonplace these incidents are, or the violent radicals who suborn and do them, who are an ecumenical rainbow of ethnicity, religion, ideology, and levels of sanity.
After the mosque in Ste-Foy was attacked, there was not enough discussion, and not enough action – after all, there is no systemic racism in Quebec. But it was kind of par for the course, as if by ignoring the wider context of these things, we can contain them within their own immediate context. Someone is murdered, we do not say who, or by whom, lest people draw conclusions. When some incident happens, we walk on eggshells, because no one wants to a finger pointed at them for pointing a finger. We don’t want to admit that the kinds of concerns and predilections that informed those murders bear a family resemblance to other things that inform more socially acceptable discourse. But, we recall, there is no systemic racism in Quebec.
In this case, it seems to me pretty straightforward. A radical Islamist, a self-styled Islamic State wannabe jihadi, decided that he was going to kill some gay people, because that is what the radical interpretation of Islam he learned demanded. And if someone says you are a bigot because you say that, they are stupid and wrong. Radical Islam is a problem – to us a very small problem compared to other problems, but to other countries a massive problem with millions of casualties, from Nigeria to Kenya to Indonesia. If we want to ignore that to let sleeping dogs lie, so be it. We enjoy that geographical and cultural privilege.
Ephraim
@Ian – Huh? Where did I say that at all? I think you missed that I agreed with you.
qatzelok
The shooter was killed before he could confirm anything regarding his motives.
He could easily be a patsy.
In fact, whenever the “shooter” is killed before he can make his own case, you should not assume any guilt.
False flags are a thing. Propaganda is made of false flags.
qatzelok
Car-rammer (shooter)
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Kate
Three people were stabbed in separate incidents in what TVA calls a weekend sanglant. No homicides in town, though.
Nicholas 23:42 on 2026-07-27 Permalink
I wonder if this will go west all the way under 1st Ave and to the bus/HOV lanes to the west. Less bus car interaction is good, but none is so much better than less.
Nicholas 23:44 on 2026-07-27 Permalink
Also I love how they say elevated highways will help reconnect Ville Saint Pierre with the surrounding neighbourhoods. Kate, do you feel the Met helped reconnect Villeray with Ahuntsic?
bob 02:47 on 2026-07-28 Permalink
What is the budget to replace this thing with a nearly identical thing?
Kate 08:07 on 2026-07-28 Permalink
There’s been no mention yet of budget.
Nicholas, my memories don’t reach back to the time before the Met was built, but if you walk along Crémazie you can see the scar it has made across the city.
su 09:47 on 2026-07-28 Permalink
Let’s hope the new design will make it easier for bikes and pedestrians to head north south without taking their life in their hands, or having to wait at numerous noisy ugly intersections to access lachine canal.
steph 12:42 on 2026-07-28 Permalink
The new design will surely include a fancy extra green bike path (that will later mysteriously, without statement, just disappear).
James 14:30 on 2026-07-28 Permalink
Just like steph, I fully expect to see lots of trees and other green objects in the official renderings of the project.
Kate 19:53 on 2026-07-28 Permalink
I see another Turcot dalle-parc in the crystal ball.
su 07:19 on 2026-07-29 Permalink
What a wasteland the expanse of hybrid grass insect free “greenspace” they placed in between the asphalt and concrete of the new Turcotte. No signs of life whatsoever. Back in the day, any grassland would be bobbing with bibites and butterflies, birds and toads. I guess St Pierre can expect the same. How bout some conifer mini forests? And a direct north south linear park passing through the shady way.
Kevin 08:32 on 2026-07-29 Permalink
@su
Are you referring to the little duck pond?
su 10:13 on 2026-07-29 Permalink
@kevin
No, I was referring to all that unfriendly savannah area in the middle of all the highways. I never saw the duck pond. I hope the ducks get some nice shady weeping willows for cooling shade protection
dwgs 11:00 on 2026-07-29 Permalink
Considering that a generation ago that savannah area would have been another expanse of concrete I’ll take the grass strip and be happy about it. Also, as part of the reconstruction they created the linear park at the base of the falaise St. Jacques which is very well done and chock full of a variety of plants, providing habitat for all manner of bugs, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals.
What is the duck pond you refer to? I haven’t seen anything but the retention basin surrounded by off ramps.