The Canadiens condo tower going up next to the Bell Centre will be the city’s highest now that two more floors are being added.
Updates from January, 2013 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
-
There will be a class action suit against the operators of the autoroute 25 bridge, who have been charging commuters two to three times the posted toll. $1.80 plus an unmentioned “administrative fee” of $5 is quite the scam.
-
Blork
-
Mark
Got dinged by that too, in a friend’s car. Similar story: expected to owe him a couple bucks but ended up having to buy him lunch in return instead.
From what I recall at the time, there is actually *no* way to only pay the posted fee. I think there is still a smaller extra fee even if you have the transponder. Ridiculous.
-
Mark
Okay correction: doesn’t look like there is an extra per-use fee if you have a transponder. It’s an extra couple bucks a month. But if I am reading it right (which it appears they don’t want you to do), the transponder is free but it’s $50 to open an account per vehicle. And if you cross the bridge with an out-of-province vehicle, it’s $35 *plus* all the other fees! Yoinks! Yay for PPPs…….
-
steph
Another part of the class action suit is for the mistaken double and triple charging & transponders that have malfunctioned resulting in extra fees. There’s obvious ‘double checks’ they could easily put into place to avoid these problems, but it’s been more profitable to just send out the bills and hope folks don’t notice they’re being marked up.
Can you imagine getting a transponder and at the end of the month you receive a 592$ bill (14.80$ each time X twice a day X 5 days X 4 weeks) because your transponder wouldn’t function car due to the angle of your windshield? how many phone calls and letters do you figure that takes to resolve? -
jeather
Here’s the fee schedule (pdf, English version).
http://www.a25.com/gestion/files/A25_Grille_Tarifaire_18_juin_2012_EN.pdf
I believe you need to deposit 50$ to open an account, but that 50$ is used for your toll fees.
I just don’t use that bridge on the rare occasions it might have been useful. (Never at rush hour.)
-
Mathieu
And on top of that, rental companies will make you pay an additionnal fee if you rent a car and use the bridge, around $15 on top of the toll and fees (for them to process the bill).
-
jeather
I wonder: the government gets some percentage of the toll amount, but do they get any of the various fees? I assume not, and that this explains why the tolls are low(ish) and the fees very high.
-
William
An EZ-Pass transponder, used everywhere else in North-Eastern North America, including in Ontario, is free (but you do have to pay a $25 refundable deposit). Quebecers can get them and they even have service en français. You have to wonder why the technology is not being used here – once again, we reinvent the wheel at immense expense…
-
Philip
Industry: “Hey, lets have a public-private toll road.”
Public: “Sounds great!”
Industry (behind their backs): “How can we take advantage of this?” -
Lugalle
I did not pay a pfenning when I crossed it twice last fall.
The thing is, I was on my bike…
-
-
The new Planetarium is to open on April 6.
More reports: Radio-Canada posted a video report with a look inside the new building, and Le Devoir and Metro enumerate the features of the new building.
-
DCMontreal
As a kid part of the fun of the old “Dow” Planetarium was watching that big projector moving around in the semi-dark. I understand the new one is much smaller.
Speaking of memory lane, I thought you might find this post of interest
http://dcmontreal.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/back-when-i-was-young-montreals-angloirish-pubs/
-
david m
as an extreme aside, in that link you’ve inadvertently neologized a neat concept, “l’angloire.” a highly specific form of nostalgia comprising an anglophone anguish at how montreal has evolved away from us, a wallowing in or pathetic (in the greek sense of the word) attachment to a faded glory, in conjunction with a stubborn but lugubrious refusal to alter one’s course in the face of the modern cultural narrative in which one has no prominent place. so that an “angloirish” pub might be a space that calls to mind a time in which we belonged, a place where we stubbornly salute the rituals of old, with the full and doleful knowledge that they’re little more than lonely gestures at a moment long past. i imagine that dominant societies in terminal decline elsewhere know such sentiments, though perhaps without such elegant words to describe them – british in zimbabwe and kenya, afrikaners in south africa (behorsverlies?), french in algeria, british in hong kong, serbians in kosovo, greeks in pontic turkey, russians in all the central asian republics, and so on.
-
Kate
david m, sorry to call you out here, but you really are a fascinating case of self-hating anglo. It’s a funny phenomenon. You’re here, writing in English, berating other people – also writing in English – who refuse to deny their own history or their own stake in this place and accept the Quebec nationalist myth that Montreal is French, has only ever been and only ever will be French.
It’s a myth that’s demonstrably not true and, with the constant immigration from non-francophone places, less true all the time.
Stick to it if you will, but accept that you’re not “right” – you’re simply choosing a myth that suits your own psychological background, and calling it a better myth than Jack’s or Ian’s or DCMontreal’s or mine.
-
david m
you have me all wrong, i’m totally in earnest. i love the old anglophone montreal, almost pathologically. i’d do anything to stroll through the montreal of the 1940s. and i certainly don’t “berate” others who refuse to buy into the ‘montreal was always french’ myth. what i dislike is how, in the face of francophone majority rule, the anglophone community has shrunken into an embittered, sometimes fanatical rump of its former self. and the canadian turn depresses me, where the gazette is basically a continuing screed against francophone quebec. if that’s the dyad, i’m on the progressive side, rather than the conservative/nostalgic side, and i utterly reject retrenchment.
you’re right that i spend too much time on this blog though responding to language issues that, actually, don’t really interest me very much. the contentious side of my personality, i fear.
-
Kate
See, you’re buying an assumption that Quebec nationalism is “progressive” while anyone who opposes it is “conservative” – whereas I tend to feel that all nationalism is inherently suspect and there’s got to be a wider, more internationalist view, which I don’t feel to be conservative at all. Step outside the red/blue world of the Canadian/Québécois split and the whole thing looks pretty sad, pointless and wasteful.
I can see the romantic appeal Quebec separatism had at one time, the downtrodden destiny thing attractive in everything from Catalunya to East Timor to Bajor. But that was part of a myth too – the myth of the evil English colonialists and the exploited francophone peasant, which situates the French colonizers as the rightful heirs to this part of the world, casually deleting everyone else who happened to be living here before 1534. But that era is past. As I wrote recently here on the blog, if Quebec did not separate in the rush of passionate nationalism between the Quiet Revolution and the 1980 referendum, it isn’t going to now.
I don’t defend the Gazette – you can see through this whole blog that I’m critical of it. I think it missed the boat years ago when it could’ve been more tough-minded about constitutional issues. I think it should always have held itself to a higher standard of thought and expression, but it will never do that now.
Step back a little. Right now Canada is unattractive, I don’t deny it. Harper is turning Canada into a country I feel alienated from now more than at any other time. But that too will turn around, although we may have to be patient and determined about it.
Quebec has been asking for too long what Canada can do for it. But to borrow the sentiments of another man at another time, the moment may come when Quebec realizes it has to ask what it can do for Canada. That could be a hell of a thing.
-
david m
hm, so i’m a ‘self-hating anglophone’ because i don’t really care much for or feel much attachment to canada qua concept/imagined community, but i do feel affective attachment to a montreal identity that has evolved since the fall of anglophonia? i’m rejecting internationalism because i take issue – in english, on blog dominated by anglophones living in montreal – with reflexive, eye-rolling criticism of foundational elements of said identity? the quebec/canada split is sad, deleterious and wasteful because the status quo is a peace enough?
we have a very fundamental difference of opinion on the substance of the national project here in quebec. i’ve come to see it as something very much incorporating the montreal that i know – bilingual, very well-educated, highly cosmopolitan, exclusively urban – and rejecting the competing strain that the canadians have built over the past 15-20 years – solipsistic, semi-urban, loud, anti-american,.anti-quebec
i mean, travel outside of quebec- you have to avoid mentioning the belle province to canadians because when it comes up, we go to instant prejudice and negativity, and entire discussions about what quebec should do for canada instead of what canada does for us. it’s nuts. and then, if you want ‘self hating,’ the quebec anglophones take on that canadian posture viz francophone governance in their province, and it’s very difficult not to call to account those putting voice to such views when one just disagrees so basically.
as for the notion of a post-nationalist moment, i don’t really disagree, even as movements in europe suggest that in highly developed countries, increased internationalism provides a better, rather than worse forum for national self-determination.
-
Lugalle
It’s funny how anglos lament the nationalism of others, while they happily assume that they should rule everything as a matter of course.
You should look at yourself in the mirror sometimes.
-
-
It’s always a bit puzzling for me when governments say one day that they have no money and yet the next day there’s millions for parks and sustainable developments of various kinds – today’s sum seems to include the parks money mentioned Tuesday plus bike paths and development around metro stations. Lisée is quoted briefly here saying that spending this money on Montreal during a lean year proves the government cares about the metropolis.
-
CTV enumerates the problems caused by the cold temperatures while the Gazette takes the line that it’s no big deal and we’re all being a bit whiny. Quebec hit a record for power consumption through Wednesday, as had been expected.
And Toronto goes on having Bixi when we do not.
-
Maria Rizzuto wanted the court to declare her husband Paolo Renda dead but a judge turned her down Wednesday. Renda has been missing, presumed kidnapped, since mid-2010. Usually the court wants a clear seven years before someone can be declared dead.
-
The car belonging to a missing man from Lachute was found Wednesday near Atwater Market, but his fate is unknown. Gary Forster has been missing since January 13. More from CTV and from CJAD where it’s stressed that it’s very atypical for this man to go AWOL.
-
A consulting engineer testified at the Charbonneau Commission Wednesday that his firm inflated contract estimates but that the surplus was handed back to municipal parties.
Martin Dumont is expected at the commission Thursday to straighten out the many questions about what he said in his earlier testimony.
-
I’ve been seeing various pieces announcing discussions on Old Montreal and this morning La Presse has a piece about how the area is seeking an identity. There’s something here I’m not getting. The Vieux has to be one of the best defined areas in the whole city. People come from far away to appreciate it, its nightlife has revived in recent years and its residential population only keeps growing. What’s to “identify”?
Maybe if this is really a covert effort to get support for re-branding (ugh) the area, they can finally order a redesign on those scarlet street signs that mar the Vieux, but aside from that, I don’t see what else they need to do.
-
Stefan
identity is about defining its difference in respect to what then becomes the other. cordon off cars from its area and quickly it’ll become a neighborhood.
-
Martin
I think it’s the Office de Consultation publique who’s looking for an identity. They have to justify their existence, even when not really needed. In the last 2/3 years, very few projects sere submitted to the OCP, so they have to come up with something. Anything. I read their dossier on Old Montreal. Nothing original in that document which only states the obvious: Old Montreal needs more parking, it needs more residents, it needs more trees, etc.
-
Kate
The OCPM has a valuable role in consulting the public on new projects and how they fit into the fabric of the city, but this business about Old Montreal has a manufactured sound to it, like they want to slip in some weird new idea sideways and see how much we kick.
-
Singlestar
http://ocpm.qc.ca/vieux-montreal for all the info. The hearings are being web-broadcast en directe.
-
Bill Binns
It would be nice to have more of a balance between tourism and local interests in Old Montreal. I come down occasionally to go to Le Gros Jambon or Holder but pretty much view the area as full of dusty tchotchke shops. Quebec has done a much better job with Old Quebec City.
-
Lugalle
Old Montréal seriously needs a consequent grocery store.
It’s always a pain whenever you go to party to people who live there, you have to think to get the stuff as you leave and carry it about.
-
-
Andrei Markov scored twice Tuesday evening as the Canadiens beat the Panthers 4-1. The other goals were picked up by Plekanec and Galchenyuk, the latter getting his first NHL goal.
-
The English Montreal school board is preparing to auction off artworks which have come into its possession over the years, mostly while it was still the PSBGM. Interesting that the sale will take place in Vancouver rather than here.
-
A sudden warming in the stratosphere over the Arctic is blamed for the wave of cold weather we’re experiencing now, and according to this article will probably be living with till mid-February. Shelters are scrambling to make sure everyone can sleep inside, even people normally very resistant to the idea.
I got dinged by that about a year ago when I had a customer in Laval that I had to go see. I decided to drive, as taking public transit from the south shore to Laval would have been expensive and very, very slow. I’d never taken that bridge before so I went for it.
I don’t mind paying a fee to use the roads or a bridge. The rates of $2.40 (peak hours) and $1.80 are acceptable, but there is hardly any warning that there’s a toll at all. I did notice a couple of signs but they weren’t very clear and they did NOT say how much the administrative fee would be. I assumed it would be 50 cents or something. Imagine my surprise when I got a bill in the mail for $14.80!
You can save the admin fee by signing up for some kind of “regular user” plan that I think involves putting a transponder in your car or something. The information on the site isn’t very clear. But that’s no help for the occasional user. In my case I made the trip to Laval maybe three times — and the other two times I went via the 15 to avoid the toll.
But any time an administrative fee is two to three times the actual usage fee, you know it’s a rip-off.