Le Devoir marks the 20th anniversary of the Grande Bibliothèque with a dossier of items. In particular, they look at how a social worker at the library manages the presence of homeless people who need a peaceful place to hang out.
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Kate
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Kate
Fans of the Canadiens are ramping up the festivities. The Bell Centre has added a third big screen so more fans can watch the away matches there.
La Presse talked to men at the Old Brewery Mission. One says that the playoffs remind him he’s still alive. It’s all very Victor Hugo-Charles Dickens, this piece. Sometimes the news reminds me we’re slipping back through the Robber Barons era into the depths of the Victorian age.
Ian
Free viewings t the Rialto for those willing to travel to Mile End.
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Kate
Every so often this theme crops up: last year, a man was killed in a parking lot when a driver hit the wrong pedal and knocked him down. His friend, a 98‑year‑old woman, “wants answers” – but what does that even mean? The driver was 80 and the victim was 89. The woman is described as wanting accountability.
Is it lawyers or journalists who urge people to say these things? An older driver made a fatal error and a man died. The article talks about families wanting to sue, but money is not going to bring the man back, and how would taking money from the 80‑year‑old fix anything now?
Nicholas
Did the driver lose their licence? That’s a question I think we’d all want the answer to.
Kate
I looked up this incident on last year’s map but none of the reports from the time mention the driver losing their licence, although now that you mention it, Nicholas, that’s a question the journalist should have asked.
su
The story says the vehicle was a jeep, but the photo appears to show a Toyota sedan with rather huge impact damage. For that kind of damage to occur, the car must have been backing up at very high speed!
H. John
@Kate Do any of the reports from last year that you looked at mention the age of the driver?
The reason I ask is that this report says the driver was 80, and yet the report that it links to about the original accident quotes the police saying the driver was 60. The Suburban says 80.
Either way what exactly makes this newsworthy?
It was an accident, there were no charges, and we’ve had no fault insurance in Quebec since 1978.
If the driver was 80:
Starting at 80, and every two years after that, drivers have to undergo medical and vision assessments.
When there are concerns, the SAAQ can require a road test, impose conditions on the licence, or even suspend or revoke it.
The legal standard is fitness to drive. The SAAQ itself says that “very few” seniors lose their licence after the assessments.
R T
“Her son James Torosis, who is a physician in California, says that at her age, it’s a miracle she is alive.”
I’m glad they added that. Without it, as a lay person, I would have had no way of knowing that a 98 year old woman surviving a car crash despite multiple broken bones, multiple surgeries and multiple months of bedrest was remarkable.
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Kate
Restaurants without TVs don’t get much business during a Canadiens playoff run.
CE
I was a cook in a restaurant years ago. During a playoffs run, the dishwasher came in for his shift and asked what happened to the TV in the kitchen. The head cook had put it away because he said nobody was doing anything while the game was on, so we were going to listen to it on the radio. The dishwasher walked out of the kitchen and we never saw him again.
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Kate
Habs garb is good for various kinds of laugh as the playoff series continues.Godin crosses threads, the Olympic anniversary and the resumption of National Assembly sessions, a sports fan eagerly awaiting the launch of the Quebec digital health platform. The platform was also deftly spoofed by Côté while Chapleau mocks Ontario’s attempt to scare the defense project off Quebec.
Nobody managed to get any comic leverage on the naming of Louise Arbour as Governor General: Ygreck tried and Chapleau tried but neither scored a point.
Notably this week, Chloe did a lengthier piece about the repurposing of churches in Quebec.
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Kate
Dragon Flowers has left Bernard Street and moved around onto St‑Laurent.
Ian
Right at the corner of Bernard, next to the gas station. Tammy hasn’t gone far.
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Kate
In 2015, P.K. Subban promised $10 million to the Children’s Hospital. He has now delivered on the promise.
DeWolf
TIL The Gazette finally has a website that is actually readable!
Kate
Depending where you click you can sometimes find yourself looking at a full-page condo promotion. But it’s better than before.
Ian
It’s not paywalled anymore, for one.
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Kate
Two women were shot near closing time in a bar on the Main, Saturday morning. Both were brought to hospital and the attack was not fatal. One of the owners of the bar, Club École Privée, says he was shaken up by the incident: his bar was the target of arson attempts late last year.
La Presse says the shooting was a gang conflict but the young women were simply bystanders when shots rang out.
Nicholas
Innocent bystanders getting harmed, and especially killed, is the kind of thing that sets off the public for a crackdown, as it mostly did for the 90s biker wars. It certainly sounds like there has been a rise of events in public the last few years, and if they don’t tamp down this will boil over.
Also they call this place a bar but it looks very much like a club.
Kate
Is there a legal distinction between bar and club? I always took it to be that a club is pretending to be more upmarket, and possibly has a dance floor, whereas any corner dive with a drink licence is a bar, but the licence is the same.
Nicholas
As we learned with Champs, if you’re a bar that has dancing you need a dancing licence from both the city and the RACJ. But I just mean this colloquially as the vibe: a club is a venue that exists to do a certain kind of dancing (e.g. to house music/EDM, not line dancing), and often has a DJ, coat check, bottle service, more expensive prices, a bouncer who doesn’t let people in first come, first served, but checks your clothes and vibe, etc. So yes more up-market, but there are lots of fancy bars without dancing, from some Irish pubs to French places to lounges. And there are bars with dancing that aren’t clubs, especially on the dive-y end (Copacabana on the Main RIP). There are definitely places that straddle the fence, but, to use two more examples from recent Plateau shootings, Fitzroy is a club and Mr. 250 is a bar.
Ian
And then there’s Club Social on Saint V that is more of a café that sells booze.
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Kate
Heliomass has a nice visit to Glen LeMesurier’s sculpture garden on his blog currently, with plenty of photos.
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Kate
The competition to land the
NATOdefence bank is percolating in the media, Quebec’s politicians saying Montreal is the logical choice and accusing Toronto of a fear campaign over a possible independence referendum should the PQ win in October.bob
I was under the impression that it was going to Gatineau, but I can’t remember why.
Darth Canuck
The fear is well-founded. Consequences follow from actions. If separatists do not like this looming outcome, they might want to reconsider their words and deeds.
Tim S.
Unless an independent Quebec stays in NATO, in which case it doesn’t matter.
H. John
The Defence, Security and Resilience Bank is a proposed multilateral defence bank for NATO countries and allied states.
I think the press is lazy and misleading calling it the NATO bank. It’s not formed by NATO. It’s not controlled by NATO. NATO members Germany and the UK have both at various times distanced themselves from it.
Kate
Thank you, H. John.
in which case it doesn’t matter.
I think it would matter, Tim S., because breaking up a country introduces unknown instabilities which are a thing you would not want in the place where you’re putting a big security headquarters.
Tim S.
H. John’s precision aside, I’ll point out that both NATO and the EU have their headquarters in Belgium. I’m not especially up-to-date on Belgian politics, but isn’t Flemish independence also a thing?
Nicholas
Tim, Brussels isn’t part of Flanders, though it is surrounded by it. There were many concerns about putting the UN in NYC, the largest city of a great power: would it block access to certain countries, would it be the site of bombing, etc. These things are like 30+-year commitments, you don’t want instability. It’s probably not a big concern, but it is a concern.
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Kate
Some metro stations win and some lose in the latest data from the STM. It’s not surprising to find that more passengers pass through Édouard‑Montpetit since the REM station opened below, or that De la Savane – typically one of the least travelled stations for years – is busier since the opening of Royalmount with its footbridge over Decarie offering metro access.
Usage of some downtown stations has fallen slightly, this piece suggesting avoidance of the homeless who frequent them.
DeWolf
If we had tap-in and tap-out we’d have even more precise data that shows both origin and destination (something the TTC benefits from in Toronto), which would help with transit planning. Unfortunately, scanning your card twice seems like a step too far for most people here.
Nicholas
DeWolf, lots of countries don’t have that and yet still get pretty good data. Germany mostly has no taps at all, and they do surveys, just like we do. Also in the vast majority of cases people do return trips, so you can mostly fill that data in, and then also augment it with the surveys.
Germans don’t like being tracked, while the Dutch and English have no problem at all. No gates are more efficient, but you need more controllers, and some people really don’t want that. It’s a tradeoff.
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Kate
The city has four expensive pothole repair machines but can’t give a clear explanation why they’re not in use.
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Kate
CTV interviews Leisa Lee, a PR and production figure behind many big shows here on the anglo side.
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Kate
Urbania with five easy ways to get killed on a bicycle.
mare
I’ve encountered them all, but managed to survive.
Missing: going over the handlebars and landing on your head because your front wheel disappears into a pothole. Potholes are often at the side of the road where water in the gutter damaged the surface, and where snow scrapers hit the kerbs. And potholes or big cracks on the bike paths don’t get much attention even though they can cause major damage to *people*, not just to tyres and shock absorbers.
On top of that is the fact that it happens quite often that drivers suddenly move sideways into your path to avoid potholes. Drivers aren’t looking at traffic or in their mirrors anymore, they’re just preoccupied by the state of the road surface. So far I managed to avoid being body checked, but it scares the hell out of me.
Meezly
Yup me too. With 20+ years of cycling in Montreal, I’ve been doored twice and had innumerable close calls with terrible drivers.
Drivers don’t like to use turn signals here either. They’ll use it at busy intersections to signal to other cars, but they don’t use it on side streets, or when there are no cars around. They don’t consider how a turn signal would be helpful for pedestrians and cyclists. If I’m approaching a moving car at an intersection and they’re not using a turn signal, I usually assume there’s a 50/50 chance they’re going straight and I look at their wheels. More often than not, they’re about to make a turn without bothering to signal.
Also, cars will pass me, then turn right without signalling thus forcing me to slow down or stop. They can’t be bothered to wait 3 seconds for me to cross the intersection before making their turn. I’m only alive and in one piece because I’ve been fairly lucky, careful and don’t trust the drivers here!
DeWolf
One thing I’ve noticed happening more often these days is very aggressive drivers on narrow side streets.
For example, I’ll be on the Plateau, cycling up St-Dominique when a car zooms up behind me and starts tailgating Sometimes the driver even revs their engine. The thing is, St-Dominque only has one narrow lane, with parked cars on both sides, so there’s absolutely no room to pass. This has happened a few times on St-Dominique specifically but also on some other narrow streets around the Plateau. One I turned around and gave the driver a “what are you doing” kind of look — she was in an Audi SUV — and she made an exasperated gesture with her hand that implied I was wasting her time.
Sometimes it feels like you can’t win. If you’re on a major street like St-Laurent, you’re dealing with speeding drivers who aren’t paying attention, which forces you too close to parked cars, where you risk getting doored. But if you take a side street, which should be more relaxed, you’ll get drivers who want to do 50 in a 30 zone.
All of this is why we need extensive traffic calming on side streets — to get rid of the impatient rat runners — and REV-style bike paths on all major streets.
DeWolf
Oh and another thing to get off my chest — drivers who absolutely need to zoom past cyclists on little streets like St-Viateur or St-Zotique, where there is a stop sign at every corner. They’ll often pass too close, or veer dangerously into oncoming traffic, but the cyclist will inevitably catch up with them at the stop sign because on these types of streets, everything moves slowly.
On these minor neighbourhood streets we need signs like they have on small streets in the Netherlands: “auto te gast” — cars are guests.
We also need better driver education.
Joey
I’ll keep posting this article every chance I get – it’s been a year and a half since Maxime Bergeron reported in La Press that the SPVM basically doesn’t enforce driving offences: https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/chroniques/2024-09-16/tickets-en-chute-libre-des-policiers-du-spvm-inquiets.php. All the things documented in this thread happen all the time; somehow after two PM terms the behaviour of Montreal drivers has just gotten worse.
DeWolf
@Joey All due to a change in administrative policy in 2019, according to Bergeron. Pretty astonishing.
The other week I was surprised to see two police officers in a car parked the wrong way on St-Laurent just below Duluth. I wondered what they were doing and my best guess is they were watching the crosswalk at Bagg, where drivers almost never stop for pedestrians. That said, maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part and they were doing something else entirely.
Tim S.
Not quite a cycling thing, but over the past year or two, when driving I’ve noticed an increasing number of people honking at me for doing legal things – waiting for an opening to do a left hand turn, for example. This morning it was a guy annoyed at me for going straight in a lane in which it was possible, but not obligatory, to turn right.
azrhey
as a pedestrian I was hit (just a light tap, but enough to scare the heck out of me) by a side mirror this morning while on the sidewalk waiting for the light by a car turning right fast enough and tight enough that his wheel got ON the sidewalk. It is not the first time that this happens or almost happens. This time it was a car driving like crazy down on Muir turning right on Cote-Vertu, making the corner close enough to tap my arm. I wasn’t even that close to the edge, but the car got on the sidewalk to turn right and catch the light…
That intersection is a menace, and cars turns right really tend to clip the sidewalks… Don’t know how it was before, but with the REM station at that corner the sidewalks are full of people and idiots drivers think they are in a Formula 1 circuit….
Tim S.
Jeez azrhey, glad you’re OK.
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Kate
The long-awaited city pound was finally inaugurated on Friday, although it has been in operation since January. A veterinarian on staff is quoted as saying they will keep animals while trying either to return them to their owners, or euthanizing them. There isn’t anything about animal adoptions.
CTV’s report mentions pet adoption in passing, so that’s good.
David S 13:15 on 2026-05-11 Permalink
FYI « intervenant psychosocial » does not necessarily mean « social worker », a reserved professional title. It is a general term, similar to « therapist » or « life coach » etc.
A social worker can call themselves an intervenant psychosocial, but an IP can’t call themselves a SW unless they are members of the Ordre (OTSTCFQ)
And in this case, the person is not a social worker, I checked.
MarcG 14:10 on 2026-05-11 Permalink
It’s only therapy if it comes from the Ordre, otherwise it’s just sparkling chit-chat.
Kate 20:51 on 2026-05-11 Permalink
Info and insight from David S, and a good laugh from MarcG!