City Hall lobby will be open to the public tomorrow as of 7:45 p.m. with a giant screen showing election results. The web result page will also be active. This is all to the good, as it doesn’t sound like most local TV stations will be covering the result. CBC Radio and the Radio-Canada site may be the best way to stay on top of the story.
Posts Mentioning RSS
-
-
The population should not panic about the flu, says the Quebec health minister, although the very fact that it’s kids under 5 who are most affected is likely to sow exactly that among worried parents.
Having Halloween fall on Saturday has meant good business even though some health officials are recommending people stay home and refrain from passing flu germs around.
Oh, and don’t forget the clocks go back tonight too.
-
Prince Charles will visit the Biodome on November 10 under high security, and people can go look at him there. He’s been warned off by the SSJB, which says it will welcome him only if he makes an apology for the “cultural genocide” visited on francophones by his ancestors.
Two things occur to me about this. One is that “genocide” is not a word to bandy about lightly. The other is that if cultural genocide had taken place, the people who had experienced the genocide would a) no longer be able to speak and b) certainly not in the language which had been submitted to genocide. Ask the Beothuks. Oh wait, you can’t – they’re all dead and their culture with them.
I am no fan of Charles Windsor the man, but unless some revolution occurs in matters which don’t affect most of us from day to day, eventually he is likely to be on our money. It’s just a fact. That means that occasionally we may have to deal with him as a person.
I hedge because the women in his bloodline live a very long time (his grandmother died at 101 and his mom is still going strong at 83) and it’s not inconceivable his mother could outlive him and pass the crown directly to Charles’s son William. Charles is already 60. -
La Ronde closes tonight after a Halloween evening party, admitting to a lousy season blamed on the weather, the recession and even on swine flu.
-
The policewoman involved in the Fredy Villanueva shooting has started her testimony and has mentioned she had never fired a gun in the course of her job and that it was the first time she had patrolled with Jean-Loup Lapointe, but she won’t get to continue with her account till December. Meantime there’s doubt where the testimony that Lapointe fired his gun because he was being strangled even came from.
-
On the eve of one of the craziest municipal elections in living memory, as kids take to the streets to beg for candy and clubs burst at the seams with folks in costume, everyone writes a wrapup.
Fagstein has a roundup of media endorsements dealt out pretty evenly among the three candidates – Le Devoir has a piece today contemplating the likelihood of a minority government at city hall, but I can’t link to it because it’s truncated online –; Spacing’s Alanah Heffez has a basic voting guide to help anyone who’s puzzled why they’re getting four or five separate ballots tomorrow; La Presse has a pdf file showing, diagrammatically, how the various levels of council work, and how the structure is displayed on your ballot.
Some good reasons to vote, some reasons why people don’t bother to vote in municipal elections. I’m not sure why the Gazette went on to list more than half a dozen dandy excuses for the use of people too apathetic to vote. La Presse has an okay look at eight boroughs with interesting issues and candidates.
Also the view from the Toronto Star and from Ingrid Peritz at the Globe & Mail and a piece on our city corruption in Bloomberg.
-
Encore des notes sur la campagne electorale: Le Devoir appuie Louise Harel à la mairie – elle trouve que la campagne a été comme une émission de téléréalité; le philosophe Charles Taylor donne son appui à Richard Bergeron dont le journal Métro décrit la risque qu’il prend de ne pas faire partie du nouveau conseil de ville; un Coles Notes de la campagne; le FRAPRU n’est pas impressionné par les promesses des trois partis en matière de logement sociale; CBC nous donne des profils de Tremblay, de Bergeron, d’Harel et même de Louise O’Sullivan.
Je viens de constater que le 1er novembre n’est pas seulement le jour du scrutin, c’est aussi la première journée du retour à l’heure normale, ce qui a le potentiel de sémer un peu de confusion, je crois.
-
Le prince Charles et sa femme seront ici en novembre et la Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste veut lui demander des excuses pour la génocide culturel des francophones d’Amérique.
-
Trois projets majeurs au centre-ville sont complètement confiés au Christian Yaccarini, un homme au passé criminel, et il n’y avait pas d’appel d’offres dans l’affaire. C’est une histoire étrange quand ça prend un proprio d’un bar à danseuses qui démontre les problèmes éthiques de notre hôtel de ville.
-
Un sondage réalisé pour La Presse a montré que les 3 candidats à la mairie sont coude à coude: Harel à 34%, Bergeron à 32% et Tremblay à 30%. Un peu de suspens pour la fin de la campagne!
L’éditorialiste de La Presse dit que son journal ne peut pas appuyer l’un ou l’autre d’entre eux. Ce journal révèle aussi aujourd’hui que M. Tremblay songe à hausser les taxes fonciers de 16% sur 5 ans.
-
Here’s how my election poll stands now (it’s not likely to collect many further votes). -
City Eye comments on Union Montreal’s pride at having its campaign funding from two elections ago approved by the chief electoral officer; the same anonymous editorial voice that endorsed Tremblay for mayor is suggesting people mix it up and think locally when it comes to picking councillors; a look back the city’s two most colourful mayors; the Mirror has an interesting ragbag of election items with yet another summary of the whole Labonté-mob debacle in it; another decent selection of soundbites from the candidates.
-
A festival of then and now photos from Coolopolis and also a few new ones from Guillaume Saint-Jean: Saint-Antoine and Bonsecours (Saint-Antoine was Craig Street back in the day), Saint-Antoine and Berri and Saint-Denis and de Maisonneuve (was this part of the street still named de Montigny then? The sign’s too blurry to tell).
-
Detailed and fascinating look at maps of Montreal’s lost rivers.
-
The flu vaccination schedule has been posted, and the official clinics indicated here – although the amount of vaccine available is unclear and the Parti québécois claims Quebec has been short-changed by federal authorities.
I just love how Quebec made Montreal “region 6″ of 17, talk about minimizing the importance of your big metropolis.The children’s hospitals are overwhelmed with nervous parents and sick kids, so that the authorities are telling parents to keep kids with mild symptoms at home. In doubt, the brochure you probably got in your mailbox this week (the English version is available as a PDF) is pretty clear on which symptoms are serious and which are not.
-
Montreal is a corrupt, crumbling, mob-ridden disgrace according to the November 9 issue of Maclean’s with an article written by Martin Patriquin of which only the first three paragraphs are available online.
-
The Gazette’s Henry Aubin gives his endorsement to Richard Bergeron with the same air of faint praise that the paper itself gave to Gérald Tremblay. Bergeron’s Projet Montréal party has opened its books to show that its financing is clean, after both of its competitors have shown up with distinctly besmirched records in that area.
ruefrontenac.com’s Beaudet has some entertaining Halloween cartoons of the three main mayoral candidates – you can pick your favourite in each category.
-
Fear and bribes are among the means used to control access to public works contracts in this city, according to a construction entrepreneur; some of the successful bidders also have troubled legal histories that are on record. Other investigations show that the city is prone to giving contracts to a small circle of engineering firms who tend to schmooze up to executive committee members at executive boxes at the Bell Centre. Fear, money and Canadiens games, the currency of our decline.
-
A molotov cocktail attack on a third bar in Saint-Michel this week raises suspicions of a protection racket turned nasty.
-
Flu vaccinations have started in Montreal as schools report outbreaks of the illness and the children’s hospitals are getting bogged down with parents wanting their kids tested (that death of an otherwise healthy Toronto boy must have frightened many); public health officials say they won’t speed up vaccinations although Quebec has called up to ask why not.
-
The Gazette endorses Gérald Tremblay with a susurrus of faint praise.
-
I ran a quick election poll last night in the Livejournal Montreal community and these are the results as of 9 this morning.You can’t game these polls unless you have more than one LJ account (and I recognize most of the usernames so am pretty sure nothing like that has happened).
Livejournal skews anglo (although people are explicitly welcome to post in French or English in the Montreal comm) which may explain the lack of Harel love, but that may not be the only reason.
-
All three candidates are making big promises of offering expanded cheap or free wi-fi in various parts of town.
-
General article on Via Rail’s plans for new stations includes details on a new Dorval station – but that it’s held up by the endless waffling over the airport train link.
-
Toronto Star writes an admiring piece about the recent successes of ruefrontenac.com.
In other metanews on media, the U.S. online news chain Examiner is opening five Canadian city sites including a Montreal one.