The pink baubles are to return to the Gay Village, but it’s in an effort to offset the troubles caused by necessary work on the sewers and water mains under Ste‑Catherine Street. Preliminary work starts this fall, but the real dig begins autumn 2027 and continues till 2030.
Updates from August, 2026 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The city is trying to make a recalcitrant landlord allow inspections of a property in eastern Mercier‑Hochelaga‑Maisonneuve where there are signs he’s created illegal dwellings with neither exits nor windows.
Ricardo
that is one helluva a big word which I had to go look up.
Kate
I initially used a rather more inflammatory word then backtracked and chose something more diplomatic.
Joey
So the City needs an injunction to allow inspectors into this property even though bureaucrats visited the property in the spring and noted all the illegal things that needed to be noted. How many city visits are needed before something can actually be done here?
steph
Call the fire dept.
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Kate
James Hughes, often in the news as head of the Old Brewery Mission, will be running for the Quebec Liberals in Vaudreuil this fall. CTV has some of his history, including an unsuccessful run for the NDP in NDG in 2015.
Joey
James Hughes is an admirable guy who could contribute a lot to a decent government. That said, it’s hard to square how you could go from running for the federal NDP (in a an unintentionally comical aggressive battle for the nomination only to get easily crushed by the Liberal) in 2015 to running for the provincial Liberal Party a decade later.
R T
Joey, I think the answer would have to be that if you want to run and want to see the CAQ out of power but you have irreconcilable differences with QS (ie, you’re a federalist).
It’s not as weird as Thomas Mulcair going from PLQ cabinet minister to NDP leader to LPC cheerleader. But if sovereignty/separtism is a deal-breaker for you and you’re not right-wing, then there’s really no other spot for you provincially. (And Mulcair himself was still on the left of the PLQ, stepping down from cabinet over a private development on parkland or whatever.)
H. John
@Joey I’m not sure political affiliation easily crosses federal/provincial lines. I also think, at both levels, it’s a mix of why you’re voting in a given election: for the candidate, for the party, or for a specific issue.
Russell Copeman, who was the Liberal MNA for NDG from 1994 to 2008, told me that most of the people who were members of his NDG riding association (i.e., members of the LPQ) voted NDP at the federal level.
A long-time supporter of Liberal Marlene Jennings, I happily voted for James Hughes when he ran.
Tim S.
The surprise for me is less that he’s running for the PLQ than that it’s in Vaudreuil. Westmount is represented by someone parachuted in from Laval, now someone from NDG is being sent out off-island. Obviously there aren’t many Liberal vacancies in western Montreal, but this doesn’t feel like a party committed to establishing roots in communities.
And I don’t know what the appeal of someone known for homeless advocacy will be to the voters in the exurbs.
Kate
Item said it wasn’t definite yet that he’d run in Vaudreuil, but I doubt they’d have made this announcement if it wasn’t in the plans.
Have you ever felt that your MP cared much about the local community? Mind you, my MP for ten years was Justin Trudeau, and he obviously had other fish to fry.
Nicholas
The incumbent Vaudreuil MNA, the former mayor of Notre Dame de l’île Perrot, announced in a surprise earlier this week she wasn’t running again. So the party had a month to decide: find someone local or parachute a star in.
And for the most part it seems people in large cities don’t know or care where exactly people live. Westmount and downtown were represented federally for years by an MP who lived on the South Shore, and downtown currently has a mayor who was recently living on the South Shore. I mean, look at the 2011 federal election, when a bunch of NDP candidates won even though they had never stepped foot in the riding (and probably couldn’t have identified the part of Quebec they were in on a map) and many of them couldn’t speak the majority language of the riding. The important thing seems to be does the person then show up and respond to local concerns once elected, and often they do.
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Kate
A class-action lawsuit against McGill University alleging that it permitted antisemitism during the protests following October 2023 has been authorized. I don’t envy the judge who will have to rule on this.
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Kate
TVA says chef Martin Picard got his laptop back, although the story that it was found in a bush sounds implausible. Did the machine contain any personal data, his or his employees’ – people whose passwords should be changed? And has he set up a background backup procedure? The article doesn’t say.
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Kate
Currently, the metro’s blue line is still running with MR‑73 cars, but when the extension is completed, in or around 2031, its new control technology won’t be compatible. The plan is to switch the green line’s Azur cars to the blue line, giving the green line the old cars, far more prone to breakdowns.
Projet Montréal is not happy about this prospect, but unless Quebec loosens the purse strings to buy more trains, it’s a done deal.
R T
The Azur trains went from final procurement to first delivery in six years (with procurement itself being a four-year mishegas), so even if they ordered trains tomorrow, we probably wouldn’t receive them in time for even a delayed Blue Line extension opening.
The bigger issue to me is that the procurement should have been integral to the entire project. (Frankly, I see the entire project as a mismanaged mistake that was prioritized for politics rather than practicality.)
Major Annoyance
Ugh. I mostly use the green line so this’ll be a step backwards.
This raises the question of whether they’ll run full-length Azur trains on the blue line or short trains as at present. If the STM chooses to stick with short trains, they’ll end up with a bunch of useless rolling stock as I doubt they have the spare end cars needed to make two short trains out of each full-length one.
Kate
Probably they expect demand on the extended blue line to build to a level where running full‑length trains makes sense.
James
In the future the blue line will only have 9-car Azur. It doesn’t make sense to remove cars to make a shorter train as there are no spare end cars sitting around.
The choice by the STM to equip the blue line with the new CBTC signalling technology has the consequence of requiring only Azur on the line as it doesn’t make sense to equip the older end-of-life trains with the new signalling system.Major Annoyance
Thanks, James. The Q&A section of the STM’s page on the new control system confirms that. The platforms of Saint Michel station will be extended to accommodate the full-length MR-73s.
https://www.stm.info/en/about/major_projects/major-metro-projects/train-control-system
Even with the longer trains, I suspect the blue line will always be runt of the litter.
GC 12:41 on 2026-08-06 Permalink
I thought the balls from that installation were sold off. Or was it only the other colours that were sold and the city held on to the pink ones?
Kate 13:01 on 2026-08-06 Permalink
I am almost certain that the La Presse headline initially said “rose” but now it says “colorées”, and CBC radio news at noon also said it would be the multicolour ones.
GC 14:27 on 2026-08-06 Permalink
It was probably edited at some point after you first posted it. When I read the article, I’m pretty sure the headline was “colorées”, but then the body called them pink, specifically.
If I remember correctly, they were all pink at first and then replaced with rainbow colours later on. (I think both installations happened while I was living here..) And _something_ was definitely sold around 2019. I don’t remember if it was just the rainbow ones or also the pink ones. It’s also possible that the city only sold a token amount and kept enough to still effectively blanked the new area.
It’s very possible that the journalist is also confused–especially if she lives outside of Montreal.
CE 19:19 on 2026-08-06 Permalink
They started out all pink then went to rainbow colours. Claude Cormier asked that they be taken down in 2019 to encourage other artists to do something but other than the flag installations, nothing really happened. Cormier died a couple years ago and his family and firm gave their blessing to bring them back. They were sold off to raise money a few years ago (I have a friend with a few of them). I assume they’ll make new balls for the new installation (which won’t be installed until the end of the decade).
I’m glad to see that the new administration didn’t end up scrapping the plan to keep that section of Ste-Catherine pedestrian-only all year.