I wonder how many studies have looked at putting a fast train on the Windsor-Quebec corridor. Yet another study says a TGV would be viable and good for the economy. The studies themselves are available on a charmless Flash site.
Updates from October, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
-
The Lafontaine house, the last building on Overdale, will be preserved by the new owners of the lot, which was ravaged years ago and never rebuilt on.
-
Occupy Montreal is continuing in Victoria Square with fifty tents in place in the square. Does the French equivalent of referring to the protesters as “indignés” come from the title of this pamphlet?
-
Chris
Or maybe named after the “Indignados” movement in Spain?
-
Louis
I think Chris is right. Often Québec media take their international news from Agence France Presse or other French media, and it is possible that they first saw Occupy Wall Street as an equivalent of the Spanish movement. Still I believe “indignés” reflects correctly the spirit of the protesters.
-
Kate
Interesting – thanks!
-
-
Maisonneuve has a McSweeney’s-style satire on possible tours of Montreal. Metro’s liste du lundi proposes 15 Halloween costumes including going as a paralume: “Il s’agit simplement de se mettre du «styrofoam» gris autour de soi et de se laisser tomber par terre sans raison apparente…”
-
The 40th and last McGill Book Fair will be held this week, starting Tuesday.
-
Michel
Wait, the last book fair ever? Have that many people stopped reading? (reads the article): Oh, no one wants to volunteer. Weird.
-
Snowpea
Michel, most of the volunteers are quite elderly, but there is no new crop of book lovers.
-
Michael Black
Of course, a decade ago there was talk of it ending. Back in 2000, the McGill Tribune
had an editorial about it.Oddly, I thought that talk was a decade earlier, so perhaps it had come up before.
There have been some subtle changes in recent years, I started noticing them and then learned that the woman who had been in charge for a long time had died, so the changes came with the new leader. I had such a bad time last year I didn’t buy anything, and was seriously thinking about not going this year.
In streamlining, it seems like they’ve taken away some of the parts I liked best. This same five year period or so has also coincided with the arrival of the barcode skimmers, people incapable of knowing a book unless they check a source, just rifling through the books for the barcodes, grabbing the books they can resell for maximum profit. That seems to have affected prices, “well if they are reselling, why shouldn’t we raise prices?” Except, it only works if someone was willing to pay the higher price. But I suspect that is impacting on the decision to shut down, if they can’t get new volunteers but have to keep hauling those books, it can’t be that appealing when some kid that doesn’t even know the books is profiting off the book fair.
I’m not sure what about McGill is keeping them from finding new volunteers. The South Shore University Women’s Club book sale is almost as old as McGill’s, yet they have newer volunteers. The University of Toronto has four used book sales within a month, said to be among the best in Canada, and nobody is talking about them shutting down.
There is a near endless supply of books for used book sales, and while the line at McGill hasn’t been as long in recent years (and I doubt I’m the only one feeling alienated by the recent changes, so that could account for the shorter lineup), there is still a large number of people who attend. The book buyers aren’t all as old as the volunteers, I’ve been to every McGill Book Fair since 1976, and I was 16 that year, so there will be considerable time before we stop reading books.
And it’s the 41st this year, the first was 1971.
Michael
-
Kate
When I posted this, I knew Michael Black would respond : )
Thanks for all the background info, Michael. It draws a much more detailed picture of the situation.
Sometimes we forget that long-term events which become part of the scenery rely on the efforts or charisma of one person, and when they go away the event can vanish, or morph into something nobody likes.
-
-
Jean Beliveau is back and plans to write a book and promote peace. The story is appearing in various media throughout the world.
-
A poll done for Le Devoir finds that 58% of Montrealers are in favour of a toll on the replacement Champlain bridge, and similar numbers come up for elsewhere in Quebec. Imposing tolls on existing bridges is rather less popular.
-
qatzelok
So the driving public agrees to pay tolls if they can get the government to shell out a few billion dollars, but are unwilling to pay for bridges that are already built? Solution: don’t build any more bridges. The public doesn’t really want to pay for them. It just pretends to want to share the costs.
Charest should walk away from these bridge projects because the electorate is just using him.
-
-
As of Sunday evening, West Island residents can once again drink their tap water.
ant6n 13:26 on 2011/10/18 Permalink
So their cost estimate is 20B.
And they want to use the Mont-Royal tunnel, which won’t work well with AMT plans to put stations along that tunnel (i.e. at Edouard-Montpetit, McGill).