A man was stabbed Sunday afternoon at the Tam‑Tams, and there’s been one arrest.
Why does CBC describe the location as “Avenue du Parc and Chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges in the Ville-Marie borough”? Sometimes it feels like the people writing our news are talking about another planet.
Minimum wage in Quebec rises to $16.60 an hour this Friday – May Day. Does anyone have info about actions or marches that day?
The big unions march is on Saturday May 2nd. I’m sure other groups have more lively things planned for May day itself.
Doesn’t seem like a lot, given the exchange rate. In Germany it’s 14 Euro (22 CAD), even though overall I’d say people are poorer and costs are kind of lower.
Germany’s minimum wage is pretty high, and Germany has a more productive economy than Quebec. The minimum wage in Germany is the highest in the EU by purchasing power and around 60% of median hourly earnings (9th in EU when coneverted to monthly earnings), while Quebec’s median wage is roughly 50% the median. Most EU countries with a minimum wage (5 don’t have one) fall into the ~50-60% range.
How is it that Germany’s minimum wage has 37% more purchasing power than Québec’s when it’s only 10pp higher compared to their respective medians? Because German workers are about 34% more productive per hour worked. Quebecers close what would be a large gap in living standards by working about 20% more hours per year.
From my union:
MAY 1st at 3 p.m., leaving from Dawson, and another one at 6 p.m., leaving from Square-Victoria.
MAY 2nd: Large demo for International Workers’ Day: This intersyndical protest will depart from the Georges-Étienne-Cartier Statue in the Plateau at 1 pm.
Square Victoria will be hosting a fair of sorts starting at 4pm on May Day, with different groups hosting information stands and a free bike tune-up station. Then the speeches and march get going around 6pm.
@R T If Germans are 34% more productive, they are experiencing 34% more wage theft.
Productivity has gone up decade over decade way faster than wage growth.
When I worked corporate we had a target of 20% growth every year. After hitting it for 5 years straight I asked my manager if this meant we would see our wages doubled. He gave me a very dirty look.
Quebec politics was front and centre this week: Côté mixes the political colours and Godin implies that anglophones are pulling Charles Milliard’s strings. Meantime, PSPP is hampered by a certain weight and Christine Fréchette juggles her cabinet while Super Minister Drainville gets on with the job.
Canada’s new ambassador to the U.S. joins a class with Michael Rousseau and Mary Simon.
Playoff season is always a good hook so Ygreck gives us Fréchette’s starting lineup. Côté’s fan can’t see a problem (and this is from a Quebec City cartoonist!).
Of course, Trump never goes away. Godin shows him chomping down on a Mexican-Canadian sandwich, Côté finds him lost in a game of snakes and ladders and Ygreck sees him parting the Red Sea.
Sometimes a cartoonist will illustrate news I don’t see anywhere else. Godin notes Quebec’s abandonment of a system in place since 1970 for testing water safety at several beaches. (Story here on Radio‑Canada.)
And once again, Côté with good social observation, and a possible upside to the end of home postal delivery (although I’ve never seen one of those cartoon mailboxes in real life).
The Gazette ponders the future of French as automatic translation becomes ubiquitous. Recently I saw someone complain at seeing so much English in /r/quebec, then people told him Reddit had recently reset a lot of users to see auto translated postings by default. I’d seen it myself but it was so weird seeing /r/quebec in English that I knew there was something up and switched it off.
The article makes a point that sometimes auto translations can be inaccurate or misleading. I wouldn’t read Tolstoy or Murakami in auto translate, but if you just want the gist of a news story it’s fine.
Complying with the law is already a win, even when the translation is not perfect. Auto-translation has improved enormously in recent years, but like self-driving cars, it has flaws. In some cases, it can outperform humans; in others, a small error can have a big impact.
That said, human translators do not always fully understand the context either. The number one rule with AI-assisted work is still to double-check. AI can make the process faster, but whoever shares the final text remains responsible for it.
A rather big can of worms to unpack here…
The OQLF says websites for Quebec companies must have French versions. They also say machine translation is ok, & they don’t monitor quality (!). These are the same people that flip out when clerks say “bonjour-hi”?
If machine translation is sufficient and snce web browsers can be configured to translate everything, there is no obligation to provide French.
This slippery slope unveiled, when we all have earbuds that can simultaneoulsy translate for us, which is not that far off, what then?
… and yet, The OQLF claims that bilingualism poses an existential threat to Quebec culture. With this conflicting stance in the face of contemporary technology, the OQLF has clearly lost its raison d’être, point final.
@Ian the Pro and Max versions of Apple’s AirPods currently offer a live translation feature… “not that far off” is probably an understatement.
I meant more in terms of gen pop but yeah. Once that tech comes down in price and is more widely available, bonjour/hi isn’t going to even matter.
Myself, I rely on Google’s live video translate so much I’ve basically forgotten how to read Yiddish.
A pedestrian was killed in a hit‑and‑run early Sunday in Côte‑des‑Neiges.
I still find it weird to think of Goyer and Darlington as CDN but yeah, it for sure is. There are lots of new condo developments down that way on Bates to the extent that I suspect there is way more foot traffic than the crosswalks/stop signs/ street lights/ stop lights side of infra supports. People still come barreling along Bates and up Darlington like it’s still an underpopulated light industrial zone.
During the September 2024 federal byelection campaign in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, municipal employees took down several hundred posters placed by the registered party LEV 4 Palestine, whose website harks back to that campaign.
Removing election campaign posters during the campaign period is illegal, and the city has now recognized the error and come to an unstated agreement with the party.
Christopher Curtis writes about the social death of Muslim women in Quebec in The Rover.
The majority of the workers in the after-school garderie my kids went to were hijabi. Ironically a lot of them only spoke French so they made my kids speak French with them even though it was an English school… so in effect these women were actually protecting French culture.
Given that one of the biggest pools of francophone immigrants comes from the Maghreb, yes, they’re shooting themselves in the pied.
They protect the language, not the culture.
jeather, you’re right about that. Not the culture, but arguably la francophonie seen as a global phenomenon.
@jeather I was being tongue-in-cheek, referring to how the ethnonationalists like to claim that protecting the French language is a pillar of protecing French Culture™. Y’know, like how bonjour-hi is destroying Quebec.
I think the argument is that you cannot protect the culture without protecting the language but protecting the language alone is insufficient. Which, if you define culture that narrowly, is not exactly wrong
Fair point, but now we’re getting into “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” territory.
Friday morning, a man was stabbed in a Montreal North apartment.
Another man was stabbed on a Rosemont sidewalk on Friday evening and the aggressor fled.
Also on Friday, a man is alleged to have set fire to his own apartment in Verdun.
No fatalities mentioned.
The landlord who owned that building in Old Montreal where seven people died in a fire in 2023 has had his law licence suspended. He’s facing manslaughter charges.
An amateur boxer who killed a man with a single blow two three years ago at the Orange Julep has been sentenced to five years, the judge having felt that Ismail Karaoui’s training meant he knew what he was doing.
Update: Although Radio-Canada says the incident happened in 2024, I checked my map and find that it was 2023.
Life is cheap in Canada.
Patrick Lagacé writes about how Montreal dodged a bullet when Quebec decided not to back a bid for some of the matches in this summer’s FIFA World Cup.
RadCans Enquête had a full-length report on this subject a while ago. That said, I am happy to see Quebec and Montreal dodging this bullet.
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/tele/enquete/site/episodes/1158856/fifa-la-machine-a-sous
New federal money is coming to support a legal clinic in St‑Michel meant to support Black people fighting systemic racism, which is interesting given the official Quebec position that there is no systemic racism in Quebec.
Is that the official position though? Or is it just Legault-my-Eggo’s personal opinion posing as official position? (Asking sincerely, as I don’t actually know…)
Oh great. More Quebec money appropriated by Ottawa for nothing!
bob, I can’t tell whether you think that, or whether you’re mocking people who would think that.
Alexandre Boulerice, MP for the central Montreal riding of Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, and sole remaining NDP MP in Quebec, has announced he’s switching to provincial politics and joining Québec solidaire. QS had to make an exception to their rule about only women or nonbinary persons being accepted as candidates in ridings they currently hold. He’ll be running in Gouin, which more or less overlaps his federal riding, currently held by Gabriel Nadeau‑Dubois, who announced last year that he wouldn’t be running again.
Thus confirming that stuff is but woke virtue signaling.
What does that even mean, Chris?
If the NDP does not retain the seat there will be no NDP MP east of Winnipeg.
I’d ask about all the Montreal conservative ridings but there are none.
@Kate Equity rules have been dispensed with simply because they have a star candidate. There has been much discussion about this within QS and QS-adjacent circles.
Also the sole remaining NDP MP east of Manitoba, which will be the second time this has happened since the NDP’s founding, after 1993-1997.
What Chris means is that the party has firmly held principles that they stand by until it’s inconvenient.
Is it? He says “woke” a lot when talking about anything left of Nixon.
If someone claimed they were nonbinary, would there be any way of proving them wrong?
Nicholas, yes that’s what I meant.
Kate, what was unclear? The “that stuff” I was referring to?
Ian, I don’t decide what words mean. Many don’t like this neologism, but my usage fits with Merriam-Webster’s 1st definition: “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues; often used in contexts that suggest someone’s expressed beliefs about such matters are not backed with genuine concern or action”. We may not like it, but that’s what this word now means.
I used to vote NDP, I liked them back when they cared about class issues, instead of equity cards and the like. From the look of their seat count, I’m not alone. It’ll be interesting to see how few seats the NDP is down to by 2029.
Heck, if someone claimed they were a ‘woman’, would there be any way of proving them wrong? It’s not a new argument against these kinds of quotas.
Chris: you may then be interested in Avi Lewis’s press conference last week, when he flat-out refused to discuss intersectionality and insisted on focusing on algorithmic pricing, certainly a class issue for 2026.
Chris, at the risk of opening this two-litre can of worms I’ve got here, you can test someone for whether they’re a man or a woman. You can’t test them for an attitudinal stance.
Umm… forget the politics. GNP has his ass covered. Their offices were on the same floor of the same building. Obviously Soulerice’s retirement planning was not completely well thought out.
Conservative, Liberal, NDP, CAQ, BQ, PQ, Green (it would be nice if someone came up with an LGBTQ similar acronym to be inclusive of all the political parties here.)
Back to the point; they are people, they have children, they want their children to be left in a better situation then they were.
Being a politician is no longer a calling to make your territory better. It is only a way to make you and your family richer.
In the 60s, it was engineering, banking, or becoming doctor. In the 70s it was IT.
@Chris I get it, Alexa McDonough’s NDP pissed me off, too. But now that we are here so many decades later, I am curious – if not the NDP, what party do you think represents the interests of class equality, especially as the Overton window has shifted so far right and neoliberal?
@Harvey in the 70s it was still doctor/ lawyer. IT/ CS didn’t become a GOOD job until the 80s.
But let’s be real, if you just want to make money, becoming a plumber or electrician is your best bet nowadays. You never hear the Minister of Health complaining how lazy plumbers are.
Becoming a politician, well, if you;’re successful that’s still a pretty cushy job for all their complaining. The benefits package, salary, and pensions are unequalled in the civil service.
The Boston Globe looks admiringly at the ways Montreal has repurposed so many churches unwanted for their original purpose.
archive dot ph links haven’t loaded for me in months. I guess it’s just me?
Works for me. Do you get a specific error message? Do you use a VPN? Have you tried clearing your cache?
Maybe you’re a robot?
Not a robot, I promise! It just times out for me and I’ll get a message saying the site can’t be reached.
Are you using an alternate DNS provider? I think they don’t work with 1.1.1.1 or something like that.
Try a mirror:
archive.today
archive.fo
archive.is
archive.li
archive.md
archive.ph
archive.vn
archiveiya74codqgiixo33q62qlrqtkgmcitqx5u2oeqnmn5bpcbiyd.onion (that’s for TOR)
Josh, it’s been intermittently flakey for me too.
CDN-NDG borough planned to add parking meters around Sherbrooke Street, but an angry backlash from motorists forced them to scale back the plan.
A backlash championed by Projet Montréal! There was an American bureaucrat named Rufus Miles, who in the late 1940s who coined the phrase, Where you stand is where you sit – i.e., your role in a system largely determines your point of view. When you sit in opposition, you wind up standing up for free parking, even when your political identity is disproportionately informed by your deeply held belief that civic life has already ceded far too much power and subsidy to drivers.
Anyway, this sounds like the right call.
As noted earlier in this blog, Councillor Peter McQueen, an avid cyclist to say the least, really whipped up opposition here, which is very interesting.
Also interesting, I live near the Terrebonne bike path, and fear of loss of parking sparked my neighbour to start a petition to get permit parking for our street. After the bike lane was added, it in fact did not turn into a parking apocalypse… but there’s now permit zones on our street a few thousands more dollars a year in city coffers.
When I lived in Griffintown 20 years ago, the residents started to mobilize for permits, since parking was pretty sparse and lots of people would park for free and then walk downtown, especially when events were happening at the Bell Centre. From what I recall, the city has a pretty comprehensive process to determine whether permit parking is appropriate for a neighbourhood, involving some fairly significant data collection. I’ve wonder if given the ‘parking catastrophe’ overreaction to the Terrebonne bike lane, the city fast-tracked the process.
I heard McQueen talking on the radio and his angle did not seem “angry backlash from motorists” in the least, he was more concerned with people parking on the main strip of Westmount for too long, limiting parking availability for the people just trying to go to shops or whatever which is what that strip’s parking is meant for – and these meters would not help that issue at all, represents unithinking overreach, and a one-size-fits-all attitude that McQueen does not want to be associated with. Citing “angry backlash from motorists” is reductionist and does not do justice to the issue at all.
Huh? If people are parking on a busy commercial stretch of road for too long the solution is 10000% to charge for parking. Is McQueen arguing the opposite? My understanding was that there actually isn’t too much of a short-term parking crunch in that area and that this was just clearly a cash grab from the borough.
I expressed that poorly, he meant on the busy strip of Sherbrooke between Decarie and Victoria there SHOULD be these parking meters but the rest of the strip didn’t need them, and putting meters along the rest of the strip is the part that doesn’t help and is overreach etc. And yeah, a cash grab especially on the residential streets.
Nicholas 23:10 on 2026-04-26 Permalink
Essentially all of Mount Royal Park (not counting the cemeteries, mostly) is technically in Ville Marie borough, with the northeast corner at Park and Mount Royal Aves. So half of the intersection of Cote-Ste-Catherine and Park is in VM, half is in the Plateau. So they did mess up the street name, but the borough is technically correct, even if literally zero people would ever call that anything but the Plateau (or Mile End), and if told it wasn’t the Plateau would guess it’s Outremont.
Joey 23:30 on 2026-04-26 Permalink
Yes, but the area where the Tam Tams are is completely Parc Ave.
Nicholas 00:06 on 2026-04-27 Permalink
Joey, I assume you mean completely west of Park Ave. Which would make it Ville-Marie. (I remember back in the day it was much bigger and stretched into Jeanne Mance Park, but last I went by it was all on the mountain side of Park Ave.