Is this a hangover from the Olympics? La Presse lists the boroughs and shows how they’re doing in percentages of snow cleared.
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Kate
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Kate
This New York Times piece titled A 48-Hour Layover in Montreal With an Airline Pilot makes the city sound far more glam than it is.
steph
That reads like an exhausting 48 hours (I’m getting old).
DeWolf
Nice to see an itinerary that isn’t just the usual spots. I had no idea the ICAO headquarters has a museum.
PatrickC
34,000 steps! Talk about exhausting!
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Kate
Woke up to find that Canada is supporting the U.S. attack on Iran.
A demonstration against the attack is planned for Saturday afternoon.
bob
Yes, well, Iran is an enemy of Canada’s, so it would stand to reason.
Kate
Why is it an enemy of Canada?
bob
I suppose it has something to do with what they get up to in the world.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran has a long-standing history of abhorrent conduct, both domestically and internationally. For years, the Iranian government has denied its citizens their human rights and fundamental freedoms, and it has undertaken actions that seriously threaten global peace and security.” and so forth (https://www.international.gc.ca/country-pays/iran/relations.aspx?lang=eng).
Chris
Because they are an Islamist theocratic dictatorship.
Let’s see how close today’s protest gets to the 350k in Toronto protesting *against* the Islamic regime.
Kate
Does this mean we have to support killing people there? We may not like the regime but now as Canadians we’re forced to countenance attacking it and killing people inside it.
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Kate
A rink has opened at Place Ville-Marie near the ring, but its operations necessarily depend on the weather.
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Kate
Not sure why this is news, but it’s in the Journal as well as on CTV that a bakery got a letter from the OQLF warning them to put all their TikToks up in French.
Doesn’t this kind of thing happen all the time? I mean, isn’t that mostly what the OQLF is for? Is this news?
Not that I want to minimize the impact on a small business. Lahmajoune Villeray is a terrific bakery. And I’ve never spoken anything but French with the nice people working there.
Saturday, CBC and the Gazette also have the story.
JP
Well, being in the news for this has given them some publicity.. maybe that was the idea behind sharing this with the media; although I can believe that they’re genuinely confused and have tried to get in touch with the OQLF but haven’t been successful in getting adequate help. In any case, I’d never heard of them before and might check them out next time I’m there.
Nicholas
A former colleague told me about two friends from another province who started an instagram-based florist as a side gig and got fined $400.
I was confused why people would think this wouldn’t be necessary, but a friend mentioned that you can air a TV or radio ad in one language without needing to air one in French.
Kate
The thing to do is to go to Lahmajoune Villeray, buy some pita, baba ghannouj and muhammara, then walk along Faillon to Jarry Park and have a picnic.
It helps to have it be summer, though.
Kate
Really, Nicholas? It sounded like the OQLF told these bakery guys that there was no law against doing Tiktoks or other social media stuff in English, but they had to post French versions of the same content simultaneously. This was what I heard on CBC radio, at any rate.
Tim S.
It makes sense that the OQLF is a world-leader in demonstrating that governments can indeed regulate social media. Not quite the first case use that many were pushing for, but hey, it’s a precedent.
Kevin
The only use for the OQLF is that it acts as an outlet for the most petty and xenophobic members of our province.
Annette
Of all shops to target! Reflecting on the land where lahmajoun originates, and the atrocity of ethnonationalism taken to its extremes: stamping out natural multilingualism whatever the cost. For these bakers to hear echos of that same mindset in the modern age must be so dispiriting.
steph
It’s time for Charbel to make the business tictok a personal one where he can share information about a “cool local business”.
JP
@Kate…thanks for the tip! I’ll add that to my Montreal summer to-do list.
Kate
JP. they also have other dips, little meat pies like sfiha and kibbe, and of course lahmajounes, and lots more things I’m not thinking of. Also baklava, although I tend to find those too sticky for a picnic.
I should also add: I’ve never tried anything from Lahmajoune Villeray that wasn’t good.
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Kate
McGill and Concordia are giving up on the fight against Quebec’s out‑of‑province tuition hikes.
Nicholas
The government raised prices, lost in court, then said they’ll just raise prices another way. Sounds familiar…like when they gerrymandered the electoral map, lost in court, then said they’ll just gerrymander a different way. Oh, were you thinking of something else?
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Kate
Gilles Deguire, who used to be mayor of Montreal North, has been acquitted of harassment of an older woman to whom he was delivering food as part of a Meals on Wheels thing. The woman alleged that Deguire had offered her money to take her clothes off.
La Presse also notes that Deguire did jail time for sexual aggression against a teenager, which makes the story a little weirder.
Tee Owe
Don’t see why this would make it ‘weirder’ – sexual aggression is sexual aggression, why does age of the victim matter?
Kate
It could have sounded like the complaint was baseless – as the judge seems to have decided – till you read that Deguire had done jail time for a previous transgression. Yikes.
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Kate
A new study suggests that Greater Montreal should have a green belt to limit sprawl.
Maybe this blog has made me a cynic, because I can foresee that no sooner will the belt be named and declared, than exceptions will be made. Notably, the TGV will have to cut right through.
Nicholas
The feds can generally ignore provincial zoning and protection law. But also no definition of a greenbelt means literally zero development. We’re not turning ourselves into an island (you know), where no new power lines, transportation links etc. can go.
Canada loves its greenbelts, but the problem in the past has been not enough building in the centre, meaning instead the sprawl just pops out the other side of the greenbelt and people drive even farther. You need to pair it with strong housing construction closer in, and that often means tearing down single family homes to build more densely. I hope the inner couronne is ready.
Tim
Building more density is not the silver bullet that we need in this country, where too much economic might is centralized in too few cities. I tend to agree with CD Howe: we need more large cities. The feds need to incentivize long term plans to build up other cities in Canada.
Kate
Can you do that? I know that some countries have just plunked a marker on a random spot on the map and ordained that their new capital city should exist there, but I’ve never gone to look at them. Wikipedia even has a list.
Cities tend to grow organically where they’re needed and have resources nearby to support them. Montreal, and other cities we know in Quebec and eastern Ontario, grew up as ports on major rivers and lakes, in a part of Canada where you can readily grow food and cut timber. Makes logical sense. Maritime cities grow up in sheltered bays where you can harbour ships. And so on. The form of the resulting city relates to the reason it exists.
But if you just make a street grid in a place, what do you get? A suburb on a grand scale.
Nicholas
Canada seems to have a similar number of million+ cities compared to other countries its size, and similarly proportional number to larger and smaller countries. Many people just want to live in larger cities with more amenities, and you have to do a lot of work to beat the first-mover advantages of already big cities. Even if you build elsewhere, people will still want to move to the big cities, and there’s not much you can do about that, unless you institute something like a hukou.
Tim
Which countries are you using for your comparison Nicholas? Do any of them have a land mass approaching ours?
I am not suggesting that building up other large cities would be easy. Far from it. But overall, this country would be better off being more diversified and economically decentralized.
Kate
In North America, often a new town got started because someone put an industrial facility in some random spot, attracting related businesses and bringing people in with offers of work. A railway line also helped.
Does industry even work like this any more? Do jobs?
Nicholas
Tim, Canada has six cities (measured by metro area population) of at least a million. Spain, France and Poland also have six. Italy has just four. Australia has five. UK and Germany have more but have more people. Countries of similar population with more such cities tend to be less developed than Canada, and developed countries with more such cities tend to be much more populated. All the countries with a land mass approaching ours are much, much more populous (also they don’t have a huge portion where nearly no one lives).
We could certainly try to grow our mid-sized cities, like Winnipeg or Halifax. Whether the people want that, both locally and nationally, and whether it should be a national government priority, seems less certain.
DeWolf
It’s already happening, Tim. Immigrants are increasingly moving to smaller cities, many of which are growing quickly. The second fastest growing city in Canada last year was Moncton, which grew by 2.9%.
Winnipeg, Kitchener-Waterloo, Quebec City and Halifax are all growing faster than the big three cities. Toronto saw no population growth last year, for instance.
That said, the big cities are still growing — Montreal grew by 0.3% and Vancouver grew by 0.93%. The scale is so much bigger that even small growth in the big cities means a lot more people, and you need to manage that growth in a sustainable way.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/260114/dq260114a-eng.htm
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Kate
Weekend notes from Journal de Montréal, Le Devoir, CityCrunch, La Presse, CultMTL.Nuit Blanche notes from Radio‑Canada. Official Nuit Blanche site; the STM’s plans, the REM overnight service.
We also have celestial entertainments in store – a lineup of planets on the weekend followed by a lunar eclipse on Tuesday night.
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Kate
SMF has promised to the chamber of commerce to speed up the work on Ste‑Catherine Street West, between Peel and St‑Marc, delivering it in 2029 rather than 2030.
DeWolf
“La nouvelle mairesse compte éventuellement implanter une forme de piétonnisation temporaire sur la section ouest de cette artère majeure, mais de façon prudente et après avoir consulté les commerçants du secteur.”
Well at least we know she isn’t anti-pedestrianization, which is something to be grateful for, I guess.
Kate
Temporary, though. Whatever that ends up meaning.
Jonathan
For sure the commerçants with the loudest voices will say no, and then she’ll be off the hook
azrhey
I question the “artère majeure”… sure it is an important street…. but artère majeure sounds to me like René-Lévesque or Sherbrooke, Large streets that can move a lot of vehicles relatively fast. Ste Catherine, is famous. important for shops and what not, but I wouldn’t call it an artère, even less importante.
Why anyone, save for some particularly special reasons, few and far between, would want to drive on Ste Catherine?
/pedanticKate
azrhey, there’s that whole American thing about driving down the strip, especially in summer with the top of the convertible down. I don’t know whether anyone does this on Ste‑Catherine here, but where else would you do it?
Nicholas
St Hubert was the other drive down the strip street, sometimes compared to Times Square or Vegas. It is no longer that. The lower portion of the Main and in Little Italy has a bit of that, and you could argue some other places like Laurier West. Imagine the push back if you tried to pedestrianized Greene.
Ian
In the 80s Ste Kitty was totally the strip. People would drive up and down very slowly from about Crescent to St. Larry, then back, Friday and Saturday night. This is of course back in the day that there were also street dealers (ash-coke, ash-coke), half the stores between Atwater and Guy were porn shops, and the corner of St Larry was all hookers… so obviously times have changed some.
Montreal used to be a LOT grittier.
steph
Back when I used to enjoy hanging out on the strip I noticed that firetrucks would drive down St-Cat VERY often. I don’t know if it’s because it was an emergency corridor (for trucks departing from the Saint-Mathieu station) or just because the firemen liked to show off that they had a bigger engine vs the other competing sports cars/convertibles. It amuses me thinking it was the former.
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Kate
The sixth snow removal campaign of the season is to begin Thursday evening. I’d been about to post about this, wondering if snow was being allowed to accumulate in Villeray because we’re a Projet borough, or because city hall believed the groundhog and expected winter to end soon (cf Godin’s cartoon).
My street has massive berms heaped up between sidewalks and the road, making it difficult to do simple things like cross the street or put out the recycling.
DeWolf
It’s supposed to get up to 6 degrees on Saturday before plummeting to -11 overnight, so I hope they do a good job with the clearance to avoid some pretty severe ice!
Kate
People doing Nuit Blanche will go out in the rain and slide home later!
DeWolf
I’m already wondering how to dress. Long johns or no? Wool coat or parka?
Kevin
Long johns from October to April. Longer if you spend lots of time outdoors
MarcG
Ectomorph gang rise up
Janet
Dress in layers, they say. I normally have seven. Eight if it’s really cold.
Kate
Uniqlo’s warm layers are comfortable and keep you toasty without being bulky. I don’t know how they do it.
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Kate
Every now and then, media run a bit about somebody who plans to go on working in a dreary job after winning a lottery jackpot.
If that’s your only plan, why even buy a ticket?
Harold
Nursing is not a “dreary job.” And while the headline touts $5 million, in reality, after taxes, it is likely to be much less than that.
GC
Lottery winning aren’t taxed, though. But, if she starts giving it away to loved ones, as she said… $5 million is a lot for one person, but depending on how many ways she splits it it’s no longer enough for her to retire for good. I don’t think the article says how old she is, but she looks relatively young.
It’s possible she just likes her job that much, too. Some people do!
Blork
Well, to be fair, she’s a nurse, and while nursing can be a difficult line of work, some people are drawn to it as a sort of calling, and I rarely see that work referred to as dreary. Plus I think she said she’s going to keep working for the time being. No guarantee she’ll stick with it until classic retirement age.
As to why buy a ticket, most of the lotteries have a number of smaller prizes with better odds, and who wouldn’t want to have 10 or 20 or 50 Gs land in their lap? Even if they buy it hoping to win the big one, sometimes it’s probably just with an eye on financial independence more than a desire to stop working.
And of course the lottery archives are full of stories of winners whose overall happiness and sense of well being ended up in the toilet after a lottery win followed by quitting their jobs.
Ian
5 mil in a TFSA with an investment counsellor could represent as much as 20% return per year, it’s no small seed amount.
That said, yeah if she likes her job and feels like she’s doing good in the world, why not keep working?
Kate
People say they will keep doing their jobs, and give a lot of their money away. I wonder how many actually do either when it comes to the crunch.
Maybe it’s not fair to see nursing as possibly dreary but when it suddenly dawns on a person that they don’t need to get up early and commute, they can travel if they like, go back to school if they want, focus on their kids if they have any – there’s so much more they could be doing – do they keep to the daily grind? I don’t suppose anyone’s done any studies.
Blork
Ian, good luck hitting 20% on a regular basis with a TFSA. Also, you can’t just dump $5 mil into a TFSA; there are maximum yearly contributions and a lifetime cumulative limit of around $109K.
I’ve done a lot of reading on the phenomenon of big lottery wins, and one of the main problems that people experience is a loss of friends. Initially everyone you’ve ever met is suddenly your bestie and expecting you to always pick up the tab and to entertain them extravagantly. Even if you can afford it, what hurts is the change in dynamic with your friends and family.
Everyone always says nothing will change, but it does, and it becomes weird to hang out with friends and family who are not wealthy. They look at you differently and you look at them differently. Always walking on eggshells and avoiding certain topics of conversation, etc.
This doesn’t happen so much with people who have earned their wealth over time, but when it’s a lottery win, everyone else sees it as you suddenly overflowing with free money. And even if they don’t see you like that, you’re likely to think they see you like that since you spend half your time fending off obscure cousins who are constantly hitting you up to pay for their car repairs or their boob jobs or their kid’s daycare.
GC
Yeah, Blork, I think you would learn who your REAL friends are if you didn’t already know. I do think it’s far easier to maintain close friendships with people in the same economic bracket. Everything from choosing where to eat out–assuming you can even AFFORD to eat out–to all sorts of other leisure activities, is influenced by how much disposable income you have. And it can cause serious tension if people with different budgets travel together. This is all assuming everyone pays their own way, of course–not the situation you describe above.
Kate, I think a lot of people would feel the pressure to say “I’ll give it away” when they are asked right after winning. Probably a lot don’t in the end, but I’m sure some are sincere about it. Also, she said “give gifts to loved ones”. That can mean a lot of things. Is she buying people bottles of Champagne or cars? It’s quite a spectrum.
I’d like to think I wouldn’t hoard my money like a dragon, but it would be difficult to know where to draw the line. My extended family is not small. Do I give everyone the same amount? Go by my perception of their need? By how close I am to each of my twenty first cousins? Also, what about friends who are like family? Or charities? And how much do you give away, versus keep for yourself?
Kate
With a windfall like that, your financial advisers would tell you how much you need to give away yearly to offset taxes. You need to pay your fair share of tax, but you also need to learn not to do avoidable things that trigger massive tax penalties.
A news story like that never considers that, in most cases, the winner has never had so much cash, and will have to learn how to manage it and make decisions about it.
jeather
Trust me, I would quit working if I got 5 million tax free.
Actually, don’t trust me, I think we need to test this — someone should give me 5 million after tax and see what really happens.
Blork
You know those videos where a bunch of hungry raccoons are all fighting over the same scraps of food, or a bunch of monkeys are swarming a zookeeper who has a bag of fruit? That’s what your daily life would be like if you won the lottery and announced you want to give a bunch of it away. Kate, the tax angle isn’t really an issue here, because when people say they’re going to give it away they generally mean to friends and family, and there’s no tax breaks for that.
Jeather: ha ha, good one!
Kate
jeather, when I read pieces (it’s the other typical journalistic angle) that winning a jackpot doesn’t necessarily make people happy, I find myself thinking I’d be willing to act as a test subject.
Blork: I know that friends and family are usually not tax‑deductible charities. But someone like that nurse is likely to feel that $5 million is infinite money. When a row house in the Plateau can cost $2 million easy, $5 million can be burned through fast if you’re intent on treating all your relatives and friends to Gucci purses and new cars.
jeather
My father used to buy the big lottery tickets (lower 8 figures) so I have a very good idea of what I would do with that amount of money, because we had a lot of fun discussing it. Obviously the exact details would depend on what a financial adviser says, but I have a plan. What I don’t have is a lottery ticket.
GC
$5 million won’t make you happy, Kate, but if you’re already happy then it’s going to make a whole bunch of things easier 😉
Andrew
The general rule of thumb for safely withdrawing long term from a well invested nest egg is about 4% per year. If she’s smart she doesn’t need to work another day, but the problem is smart people don’t tend to buy lottery tickets.
CE
I’d buy an exotic pet, like a llama or an emu.
GC
And a green dress?
CE
Not a real green dress, that’s cruel.
MarcG
Barenaked Ladies reference inspired me to look up the Steven Page cocaine arrest story and it’s pretty funny that it happened right in the middle of a tour for their children’s album called Snacktime!
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Kate
After being banished by the OQLF, the slogan Go Habs Go will be returning to STM buses.
I don’t care if they say “Go Leafs Go” so long as they show up on time.
Nicholas
What if, and I know this is a radical idea, the buses showed the number and name of the bus route all the time? Even better if they showed the direction.
Kevin
Never doubt the power of one thoughtless person who should be committed.
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Kate
Women who’ve been hired to work for the Centre de services scolaire des Mille‑Îles have been issued ultimatums to remove their hijab or leave their jobs, and other women in similar positions will soon have to choose between their work and their identity as the law is applied.
These women aren’t teachers – they’ve been working in after‑school programs and other support positions – but they’re now covered by the new law.
I’m sure that parents who’d relied on this service will be delighted to lose working hours because there’s no one left to look after their kids after school. At least the kids won’t be exposed to the sinister brainwashing of headscarves.
azrhey
in any article or speech about banning the hijab if you replace the “women wearing hijab” by “women wearing trousers” in public spaces, if it makes you sound like an old crummy person from 1925… then shut up about the hijab and stop telling women what they can and cannot wear in public.
jeather
So unlike for teachers, they don’t even get to keep the jobs they had as long as they never change anything?
Joey
@jeather the exemptions for existing employees are pretty narrow – you must have been employed before the bill was introduced (not before the law was adopted) and the exemption ends if you change your job or, more likely IMO, your job is reclassified somehow
jeather
I thought it was before the law was adopted. I do know you can’t change jobs.
The thing is, this is mostly hurting people in Montreal who aren’t the support for the CAQ anyhow. (Both employees and parents.)
Kevin
Hurting Montreal is the point, because Montreal proves ethnic nationalists wrong.
Ian
@jeather et al
“Quebec had included an exception for employees who were already working in school service centres, but that protection retroactively ended to when the bill was tabled.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bill-94-secularism-school-staff-9.7106299@Kevin Cruelty is the point, because the ethnonationalists want everyone that they “other”to weigh their options and either voluntarily assimilate, or preferably, leave.
Kevin
Ian
Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics, and separatists study demographics and cry.jeather
Yes, I was just saying I had understood it incorrectly, that the exception ended when the bill was adopted, not tabled.
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Kate
La Presse has an investigative piece about how Jewish schools partly funded by public money have invited Israeli soldiers to address their students, and are giving military‑style training to their students.
jeather 14:57 on 2026-02-28 Permalink
The city page shows the percentage, as it has for a long time; infoneige.ca has an even more informative page with percentage cleared/clearing this 12 h/planned/not yet planned.