Building a better city

By Cathy Gulli - Monday, November 28, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Roger Lemoyne; ENVAC

Deep beneath the streets of Montreal’s entertainment district, running alongside the usual water, sewage and gas pipes that lie underground in every community across the country, something entirely unique is buried: 1.5 km of carbon steel tubes that will eventually funnel the neighbourhood’s garbage, recycling and organic waste into a massive subterranean container with a capacity of up to 10 tonnes. The trash will be sucked through the pipes and into the container by four fans with a combined power of 440 kilowatts, and later trucked to a landfill or another destination.

Once up and running in 2014, the Envac system will be Canada’s first municipal automated vacuum waste collection program—a stark contrast to the weekly curbside pickup most people are used to, which is labour-intensive and inefficient. “Today we are collecting waste like we did hundreds of years ago,” says Sean Monclús of Envac, who has been working with the city of Montreal to set up the system, which is costing $8.2 million. That makes no sense, he says: “If we have waste water underground, why not the waste?”

Perhaps most surprising about the implementation of this innovative program is the fact that it’s being done in Quebec, which has become the poster child for aging infrastructure, and the perils of failing to manage municipal services in a progressive way. In Laval in 2006, five people were killed, including a pregnant woman, when the neglected Concorde overpass crashed onto cars below. Parts of the Champlain Bridge corridor, which crosses the St. Lawrence, have been deemed “mediocre to deficient,” according to an annual inspection obtained by the Montreal Gazette. And in July, a 25-tonne concrete beam collapsed from Montreal’s Ville Marie tunnel onto an expressway travelled by 100,000 vehicles every weekday (no one was hurt). “But it’s not just a Montreal problem,” said Mayor Gérald Tremblay then. “When I talk to my colleagues in other big Canadian cities it’s the same issue.”

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‘It’s important that we have our say’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 11:24 AM - 0 Comments

Laurin Liu goes back to school.

She shared an anecdote to show them “how people really aren’t used to seeing young people in politics.” On one of their first days of work in the House of Commons, an MP from another party tried to give one of her young NDP colleagues an envelope, thinking she was a messenger or a page.

The Insite ruling

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 9:53 AM - 41 Comments

Brian Howell/Maclean's

(This post last updated at 7:46pm)

The Supreme Court’s ruling on the Insite safe injection facility—a unanimous ruling in the facility’s favour—is here.

 The Minister made a decision not to extend the exemption from the application of the federal drug laws to Insite. The effect of that decision, but for the trial judge’s interim order, would have been to prevent injection drug users from accessing the health services offered by Insite, threatening the health and indeed the lives of the potential clients.  The Minister’s decision thus engages the claimants’ s. 7 interests and constitutes a limit on their s. 7 rights.  Based on the information available to the Minister, this limit is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.  It is arbitrary, undermining the very purposes of the CDSA, which include public health and safety.  It is also grossly disproportionate: the potential denial of health services and the correlative increase in the risk of death and disease to injection drug users outweigh any benefit that might be derived from maintaining an absolute prohibition on possession of illegal drugs on Insite’s premises.

Early reads from the Globe, Canadian Press, Postmedia, Star and CBC.

10:33am. Libby Davies, whose riding includes the Insite facility, applauds. Three years ago she lectured Tony Clement and called on him to abandon the government’s appeal.

10:46am. Liberal health critic Hedy Fry applauds.

10:51am. The Canadian Public Health Association applauds.

11:37am. Ms. Davies raised the court’s decision in QP just now, provoking a response from Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq. Continue…

Will immigrants save the French language in Quebec, or hasten its demise?

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 15 Comments

If, as one of Quebec’s own websites proclaims, the province is on the hunt for “willing, dynamic people” to immigrate to its shores, then Jessica Rosales almost certainly fits the bill. The college-trained Rosales and her husband, Roberto Belmar Torres, a design engineer, wanted to emigrate from their native Chile and, spurred by a string of cheery, unsolicited emails from Quebec’s Immigration Department, the pair chose to settle in Montreal in March 2010. “We decided on Quebec for the French culture,” the 37-year-old Rosales says. “We chose it even though we knew it would be harder.”

It certainly was. Because neither could speak the language, they each took a 10-month French course. Save for the occasional nervous breakdown (“I got burned out, I couldn’t stop crying,” says Rosales of one episode) that even prompted the purchase of a pair of one-way tickets to Toronto that they never used, the pair is quite happy with their lives here. They even found jobs in their new-found language. Jessica is an administrative assistant at a refugee resource centre, while Belmar Torres works at a large Montreal engineering firm. They work almost entirely in French.

Yet increasingly, language advocates are turning this apparent success story into a narrative of decline of the French language in Quebec. The reason: though the pair conduct much of their public lives in French, they speak their native Spanish in the confines of their home. Earlier this year, the governing Liberals announced plans to cut the yearly number of immigrants allowed into the province by 4,000, to 50,000, by 2012, while the the right-of-centre Action démocratique du Québec has called for a further clawback to 46,000. The Parti Québécois believe “immigration should be set at the ability to Frenchify new arrivals,” says PQ spokesperson Éric Gamache, and popular former Péquiste minister François Legault, who is flirting with the idea of running for premier, has called for the number to be capped at 40,000.

Others are even more strident. “We must become our own country, period,” militant sovereignist Gérald Larose told La Presse in the wake of a report detailing a decrease in the percentage of Quebec-born francophones. His argument: an independent Quebec would have absolute power over its immigration policy.

On the face of it, so-called “allophones” (immigrants whose native language is neither French nor English) would seem an odd target, and not only because, unlike the Canada-born English population living in Quebec, they are required by law to attend primary and secondary school in French. Like nearly every other province in the country, Quebec is faced with a looming demographic problem brought on by lower birth rates—a void often filled by immigrants. Ontario, for example, took in roughly 104,000 non-refugee immigrants in 2010 alone.

And even with 54,000 new arrivals a year, Quebec is falling behind. According to demographer Jacques Henripin, the province needs between 70,000 and 80,000 immigrants a year to compensate for its lower birth rate—people like Rosales and Belmar Torres. To Rosales, the idea that Quebec would cut down on the number of immigrants allowed into the province is absurd. “I’m a taxpayer,” she says. “Who needs who?”

The feeling is often mutual. By and large, Quebecers have long cast a beady eye at Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism; a recent Angus Reid poll noted that 66 per cent of francophones in the province believe multiculturalism is a threat to the French language. Practically every major demographic report released in the province over the last two decades has sparked debate and uproar about the survival of the language.

But does the decline of francophones necessarily mean the decline of French, when those immigrants arriving here must by law attend school in la langue de René Lévesque? Marc Termote thinks so. The demographer authored a recent report illustrating the demographic decline of Quebec-born francophones in the province; he says they will be overtaken as a majority by immigrants by 2031. And while he makes pains to say he isn’t a Larose-style sovereignist—“We don’t need independence to ensure the survival of a language,” he says—he believes the sheer numbers, coupled with the creeping bilingualism of Montreal, is detrimental to the language. “I am one of those people who says that the government should have no say whatsoever over what language is used at home,” Termote says. However, “the problem is that the language used at home becomes the language of the children.”

This wouldn’t be a problem in, say, the overwhelmingly francophone city of Saguenay. But roughly 75 per cent of Quebec’s immigrants settle in the 500 sq. km of Montreal where, says Termote, “there is free choice in what language you work in.” (Montreal is home to roughly 48,000 businesses with less than 50 employees that don’t fall under the province’s language provisions.) “The problem is Montreal. In the regions there are no problems. You will only speak French in Chicoutimi.”

“It’s not up to immigrants to resolve the problems of French in Quebec,” Termote adds. “We tell immigrants to have children, because we don’t want to have any. We tell them to go out to the regions, because we don’t want to, we tell them to learn French in a hurry, because French is declining. I can’t accept that the future of the French in Quebec is the responsibility of immigrants.”

Still others see no problem at all with the immigrant influx into Quebec. Jean-Benoît Nadeau, author of the book The Story of French, recently published a column decrying the accepted definition of the term “francophone” in the province. “French is no longer the language of one ethnic group, but one for all ethnic groups,” Nadeau writes. “Only in Quebec do we tolerate such a restrictive definition. Why not include the woven sash or ketchup tortière in the definition of francophone while we’re at it? It’s a disgrace.”

Jessica Rosales agrees. After being courted by the Quebec government (and spending an estimated $13,000 in fees and plane tickets) to get here, then spending nearly a year studying the language, she knows quite well that she can still vote with her feet. “I like Quebec, I like Montreal, but I can live somewhere else.”

Montreal ranks high on bike-friendly index

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 12:48 PM - 1 Comment

With its 535-km—and growing—bicycle network, popular Bixi bike-sharing program and vocal pro-pedaling lobby, Montreal tops North American cities on a new index of the best urban cycling centres. The Bicycle-Friendly Cities 2011 index, compiled by a Danish consulting firm, looked at 80 major cities around the world. Montreal ranked No. 8, best in North America, and with a bicycle infrastructure that “should embarrass other cities on that continent,” according to the compilers of the index. Still, the consultants found room for improvement, suggesting Montreal put bike lanes on both sides of designated streets, for safety reasons, rather than sticking with the current bi-directional lanes on just one side. The top three cycling cities were in Europe: Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Barcelona. But they were followed, perhaps surprisingly, by Tokyo, just a notch ahead of Berlin.

Montreal Gazette

Der Spiegel

Could an ‘innovative’ school in Montreal’s fall victim to religious infighting?

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 5 Comments

Photography by Roger Lemoyne

The closing of an English school is hardly news in Quebec. Fourteen institutions have shut down in as many years in Montreal alone, thanks in large part to a dwindling English population and language laws preventing children of French parents and immigrants from attending. Yet, in the case of Nesbitt Elementary School, home to some 420 students and, according to commissioner Julien Feldman, “one of the most successful bilingual programs in the province,” the culprit isn’t numbers or stifling regulation. According to many Nesbitt proponents, it’s the victim of age-old infighting between Catholic and Protestant factions within the English Montreal School Board itself. And, in an odd twist, one of the school’s would-be saviours is none other than Louise Beaudoin, a staunch French-language hawk and former Parti Québécois minister who fought for decades against expanding access to English schools.

Nesbitt, which faces the chopping block in January, is located in Rosemont, a traditionally francophone neighbourhood with a significant English population. Because of this historical reality, Nesbitt is one of the few schools in Montreal’s east end to offer both majority English and French immersion programs. The result: French families who qualify (under Quebec law that means at least one parent had to have attended English school) can send their children to learn English, while English children receive nearly 70 per cent of their education in French. It has certainly impressed Beaudoin, the district MNA. “In an era of alarming dropout rates, it’s important to support the schools that have a winning and innovative formula,” she wrote in a letter to Nesbitt principal Mary Theophilopoulos last June.

Yet, despite the unexpected plug, and a noisy grassroots campaign on the part of Nesbitt parents, it remains on the list of six schools targeted for closure next year. Not even the EMSB can fully explain why. According to board policy, there are five reasons (including low enrolment numbers and proximity to other schools) why a school would be considered for closure. And yet, EMSB director general Robert Stocker concedes that “the school doesn’t fit into any of the five criteria.”

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Montreal is falling down

By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 12:05 PM - 9 Comments

Photo by Roger Lemoyne

When a grapefruit-sized chunk of concrete smashed through the windshield of a 29-year-old man’s car in Montreal last Thursday, city officials quickly scrambled to the scene. Like most Montrealers, they assumed the worst—that it was yet another in a series of mishaps involving the city’s crumbling infrastructure. Their worries turned out to be misplaced. Within a few hours, police had eliminated the possibility that the object was once a part of the overpass above busy Papineau Avenue and were instead investigating whether someone had thrown it. “I want to reassure the people of Montreal: the rock that caused this incident has nothing to do with the structure,” Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay told reporters at the scene, deftly avoiding the very word “concrete.” “Vehicles can pass in total safety.” Still, it’s hard to blame even the most paranoid residents for assuming the contrary. It’s raining concrete in Montreal, it seems, and the situation has people on edge.

The most recent incident occurred in late July, when a 15-m long, 25-tonne chunk of concrete fell onto the busy Ville-Marie expressway in the city’s downtown core. Miraculously, no one was injured. (Transport Québec estimates 100,000 vehicles travel along the expressway daily.) Montrealers were no doubt shocked by the accident but, at this point, it may be a stretch to say they were surprised.

The accident was, after all, a grim reminder of a similar collapse in nearby Laval in 2006. Five people died and six more were seriously injured when the de la Concorde overpass came tumbling down onto cars travelling below. And the de la Concorde collapse was itself reminiscent of an incident in which eight heavy concrete beams fell from the Souvenir Boulevard overpass in Laval in 2000, killing one and injuring two others.

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Good news, bad news: July 28-August 4

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 2 Comments

Good news

Tom Williams/Roll Call/Getty Images

Declaring war on war criminals

For years, the federal government stubbornly refused to release the names and faces of suspected war criminals hiding in Canada—for fear of violating their privacy. But after renewed pressure from the media, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives finally relented, posting mug shots of 30 wanted war criminals online. The result? Six of those fugitives are behind bars, two have been deported, and the rest are no doubt scrambling for cover. In this country, privacy should never trump justice.

Hard-headed

More than two-thirds of British doctors believe bicycle helmets should not be mandatory, and that forcing riders to wear them may prompt some people to give up biking altogether (and relinquish the obvious health benefits). But that surprising conclusion, contained in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal, doesn’t jibe with the Canadian experience. According to a study conducted here, the number of cyclists suffering serious head injuries is down nearly 30 per cent over the past decade, largely because children are now wearing helmets when they pedal.

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Fallen concrete blocks Montreal expressway

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 at 11:32 AM - 0 Comments

The city of Montreal is working to mitigate potentially chaotic traffic congestion after a concrete beam collapsed onto a busy thoroughfare near the city’s downtown core. The incident occurred early Sunday morning when the beam fell from an overpass onto the eastbound lanes of the Ville Marie Expressway. No one was hurt. Montreal’s transit authority, the Société de transport de Montréal, has increased bus service to downtown and the west side of Montreal Island. The city has also suggested alternative routes for drivers coming into the downtown core from the surrounding areas. Parking is prohibited on swaths of streets like St. Antoine St., René Levesque Blvd. and Ontario St. until the Ville Marie Expressway is reopened.

The Montreal Gazette

Trouble in Bixiland

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 20 Comments

CHRISTINNE MUSCHI/REUTERS

It is as Montreal as a two-cheek kiss, a made-in-Quebec success story that has garnered both awards and lucrative contracts around the world. Yet the Bixi bike-sharing system, best known for its sleek two-wheelers of the same name, is plagued by lack of administrative oversight, questionable management and a business plan that has it teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, with a whopping $37-million debt after only two years of operation.

Such is the contention of a scathing report by the city’s auditor general’s office, published in mid-June, which takes both the city and Bixi administrators to task for “neglecting or avoiding several elementary management rules,” and the “illegal nature” of Bixi’s initiative to sell the system to cities including Toronto, Ottawa and London, England. And while administrators have hit back—Bixi spokesperson Michel Philibert recently called the report “old news” in an email exchange with Maclean’s—it seems clear now that the beloved Bixi system won’t likely be able to run without a regular injection of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Bixi began life as part of the city’s 2007 transportation plan entitled “Reinvent Montreal,” a wide-ranging plan that sought to coax Montrealers out of their cars, and make Montreal “a bicycling city par excellence,” according to an executive committee decree from that year. The idea of a bike-sharing program wasn’t new—Paris, notably, has had one since 2007—but it was the first in North America, and a pet project of Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay. The “pay and go” idea was developed by Montreal’s parking authority, while Montreal industrial designer Michel Dallaire crafted the bike.

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For your own good (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 13, 2011 at 3:44 PM - 0 Comments

The government has decided to release the Champlain Bridge report, but denies this constitutes a change in position.

“I think that they will be released, actually,” Sara MacIntyre, a spokeswoman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, told The Canadian Press on Wednesday. ”I think that those reports will be out shortly.”

A spokeswoman for Lebel added that a statement from his office would be out Wednesday afternoon. She rejected the suggestion that the government had a change of heart. ”It’s just a question of timing,” Vanessa Schneider said. ”We received the report, I think, in the department just before the election, and as you know, Minister Lebel was appointed in late May, so it’s just a question of going through all our processes.”

Connoisseurs of the subject matter can read the report here.

For your own good

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 13, 2011 at 11:13 AM - 16 Comments

Transport Minister Denis Lebel explains why the general public is not allowed to see a report on the condition of Montreal’s Champlain Bridge.

“When you release information into the public that is handled by people who are not exactly connaisseurs of the subject matter, that can create worries that I do not want to create,” Lebel said. ”Above all, I do not want people to try politicizing this issue and to work against the public interest. This isn’t the time to be starting something that would create insecurity in the public. And I’m not saying there are things in the report that would create insecurity; I’m simply saying that we treat very thoroughly everything in such reports to allow for smooth and secure transport.”

The life and times of Jack Layton

By John Geddes - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 54 Comments

Photographs by Peter Bregg; Courtesy of Jack Layton

Jack Layton died after a months-long battle with cancer in the early morning hours of Monday, August 22. He was 61. Below is Maclean’s post-election cover story on the charismatic NDP leader, originally published on June 16, 2011. For more on Jack Layton’s life and his fight against the disease that would eventually take it, click here.

The Hudson Yacht Club, founded in 1909, doesn’t look like a promising spot for a young left-winger to get his first real taste of rebellion. The sailboats bob at their moorings near a sandy beach on the shore of Lake of Two Mountains, formed by the widening of the Ottawa River before it empties into the St. Lawrence just west of Montreal. The clubhouse of cream-coloured stucco and cedar shingles looks like the kind of place that would have a cozy private bar, decorated with nautical pennants—and it does. Over the mantle of the stone fireplace, there’s even a framed portrait of the Queen.

Jack Layton pretty much lived at the club during the summers of his childhood and teenage years. His parents, after all, were pillars of Hudson’s well-heeled English-speaking community. They sailed an 18-foot lightning, but the club’s main appeal for Jack was its outdoor pool. He was a fast swimmer. In an old black and white snapshot of the club’s competitive team, he’s the wiry kid wearing a medal around his neck and the grin that would later become famous.

Behind that halcyon image, though, was a reality that began nagging Jack as a teenager in the mid-1960s. Hudson’s population of about 3,500 was perhaps three-quarters English at the time. But what about the rest—the less prosperous French-speaking families? They weren’t members of the club. Either they couldn’t afford the fee, or they didn’t know anyone who might invite them to join. With Quebec’s Quiet Revolution well under way, the club presented a glaring example of how the province’s linguistic divide tended to run along economic and social fault lines. Layton recalls growing uneasy about the fact that while he swam in the club’s first-rate pool, the French kids were cooling off in the polluted river.

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Stephen Bronfman is betting big on Montreal's future

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Roger Lemoyne

There are a couple of reasons why Stephen Bronfman seems to be smiling more than usual these days. Having failed in his bid to purchase the Montreal Canadiens last year, the eldest child of billionaire Charles Bronfman got quite a consolation prize by luring the Habs’ former president Pierre Boivin to Claridge Inc., the private investment firm the 47-year-old has run for 15 years. Scoring Boivin, who will serve as Claridge’s president and CEO, is a coup for the small investment house: as one of Quebec’s most respected business minds, he was reportedly courted by some of the biggest companies in the province.

Mostly, though, Stephen Bronfman is decidedly optimistic about the future of Montreal—which, coming from a Bronfman, is good news for the city. Though the family made their name and much of their fortune in Quebec through liquor behemoth Seagram’s, practically all of the members of the sprawling Bronfman family tree have left.

The reason represents a familiar narrative in Quebec’s history: the province’s political upheaval, beginning with the election of the Parti Québécois in 1976, caused a monumental flight of capital, mostly to Toronto. This included Stephen’s cousins Peter and Edward, who departed shortly after selling off their ownership of les Canadiens in 1978. Stephen’s father Charles debarked for New York, while American cousin Edgar Jr.’s disastrous reign as head of Seagram’s is the stuff of dubious legend.

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Nobody puts Cleopatra in the corner

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 11:35 AM - 0 Comments

Photography by Roger Lemoyne

Johnny Zoumboulakis, the trim 61-year-old owner of the Montreal strip club Café Cleopatra, favours button-down shirts and dark ties underneath rumpled sports coats. He could pass for Ralph Nader promenading through a blacklight-bathed maze of scuffed bar tables and naked flesh.

“I like the Main,” Zoumboulakis said recently of St-Laurent Boulevard, the heart of Montreal’s historic red-light district. The man who just wants to keep his little piece of the street fabulously trashy speaks quietly, his accent tzatziki thick. “I don’t see anything wrong with being red-light. Almost every city has a red-light district. Some people want to erase it, change the image, and the Cleopatra is the last one standing, I guess.”

That Cleopatra’s sign still advertises strip-teaseuses and spectacles continuels between glimmering lights (along with two stark naked lasses beckoning patrons to come inside) is a testament to Zoumboulakis, who recently fought off a two-year expropriation campaign on behalf of developer Société de développement Angus. Already, SDA has bought out all the businesses (save for an electronics store and a Chinese restaurant) on the west side of what is known as the Lower Main, and plans to turn the area into condos, office towers and an entertainment complex where strippers and drag queens won’t likely be on the marquee.

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William Quintero Martinez

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 0 Comments

Illustration by team macho

William Quintero Martinez was born on Dec. 2, 1993, to Eduardo Quintero and Floralba Martinez Romero in Tocancipá, outside the Colombian capital of Bogotá. “We lived in pretty little cottage in the mountains, with a nice view,” says Floralba, who stayed home with the kids (William’s big sister, Esperanza, was three years older) while Eduardo ran an importing business. “We had a chauffeur and a cleaning lady; the chauffeur would drive us into the capital, and Eduardo to his office.”

When William was still a baby, his father died suddenly. Later, Floralba told her son that he’d been killed in a car accident, but that wasn’t the case. “I didn’t want to upset him,” she says, “but his father was assassinated by the chauffeur,” who planned to steal the family’s car. The chauffeur, a teenager at the time, spent two years in prison. Floralba was devastated. “I couldn’t live in the house where William’s father died, so I stayed with my sister in the capital,” she says, and eventually rented an apartment there. She got a job as a hairdresser, and as an office receptionist. “I felt like I was finally starting over, because I had my two children with me, and a job.” But when William was a toddler, tragedy struck again: while on vacation with another family member, his sister Esperanza drowned in a pool. Floralba sank into a deep depression and “couldn’t eat or sleep,” she says. “I thought a lot about William’s future, and knew I had to get better for him. He was my life.” After Esperanza’s death, a psychologist visited with William—a loving, social child—and told Floralba, “He’ll be okay.”

When William was still young, Floralba paid two visits to Montreal, where she knew other Colombians who’d emigrated. “I decided that I had to leave Colombia because there were too many memories,” she says. “I started thinking I’d like to go to Montreal so that William could grow up there, where it’s safe, and we could start over.” When her son was five years old, they boarded a plane for Canada—this time, to set up a new home. “It wasn’t hard for him at all,” she says. “In the plane, I told him, ‘We’re going to a country where there’s snow, like in the movies.’ He was very excited.”

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The NDP agenda

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 12:25 PM - 8 Comments

The party is ready to propose language law reforms. And Brian Masse, potentially the industry critic in the next NDP shadow cabinet, sees an opportunity for high(er) speed rail.

In the meantime, the federal government should back “prep work” needed for a Windsor to Montreal high-speed network, such as building road-rail grade separations, Masse said. Improving travel time from Windsor to Toronto by an hour to 90 minutes should be the initial goal, he said. “It’s doesn’t have to be high-speed, but can be higher speed,” Masse said. “Then it becomes real viable. That’s when we have a real ability to start connecting it internationally.”

The Commons: To believe

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 2, 2011 at 1:11 AM - 36 Comments

Just after midnight, at something like 39,000 feet—the reporters at the back of the plane, taken with the elation that comes as a long journey nears an end, having turned this cross-cross country flight into a giddy party—he danced to Aretha Franklin’s R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

Eight hours later, having landed in Montreal six and a half hours earlier, Jack Layton boarded a bus that bears a gigantic likeness of his face and set off for a market downtown. Upon arrival he disembarked and was greeted by a man who proclaimed him the next prime minister of Canada and handed him two miniature flags. Strolling the scene, with Thomas Mulcair and the local candidate keeping close, he paused at a fruit stand and accepted a slice of watermelon. A woman stopped him and asked him to take a picture with her daughters and their dog. He cooed over an infant and purchased some dates. The proprietor of a cheese shop stepped outside to shake his hand.

Across the street then and into the middle of a mob that waited to hear him.

“You have an historic opportunity here,” he told them. Continue…

Goodbye B.C., Hello Montreal

By Jacob Richler - Monday, April 18, 2011 at 1:40 PM - 0 Comments

Dale May/Corbis Outline

On April 6, just 3½ weeks after the incomparable Daniel Boulud beat a long-anticipated retreat from Vancouver, his team in New York was putting the finishing touches on the contract that would enable his return to Canada. His fresh assault is to be launched through the far more sensibly considered bridgehead of Montreal’s Ritz-Carlton, whose general manager Andrew Torriani had been courting Boulud for six months. The hotel is in the midst of a massive renovation that will ultimately see it shed 99 rooms and gain a floor, along with 46 condominiums and a rooftop swimming pool—and when it reopens in January 2012, in place of the venerable Cafe de Paris you will find something entirely new: Maison Boulud.

“It’s a rebirth—a new life for this hotel,” chef Boulud said to me, late that morning at his flagship three-Michelin-starred Restaurant Daniel, on 65th Street in Manhattan, where his windowed office sits dramatically perched a half-level above the rest of his kitchen, to provide a better view of the work stations below. “It will be something new for Montreal, something unique.”

Boulud’s unique qualities as a chef and restaurateur have given rise to an empire that includes five restaurants in New York alone (Daniel, Café Boulud, DB Bistro Moderne, Bar Boulud, DBGB Kitchen), as well as outposts in Miami (DB Bistro Moderne), Palm Beach (Café Boulud), London (Bar Boulud), Beijing (Maison Boulud) and Singapore (DB Bistro Moderne). Aside from the Boulud Brasserie, which he closed last summer after a five-year run at the Wynn in Las Vegas, he has experienced but one major setback—Vancouver—where he stepped in to replace the ousted Rob Feenie at Lumière and Feenie’s, relaunched the latter as DB Bistro Moderne, and failed at both, closing their adjacent doors on March 13. “It’s a passage in life,” Boulud says, his disappointment obvious. “Fortunately, financially it made no difference. Emotionally, I would have loved to have been there longer.”

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Is Gilles Vaillancourt Canada’s most powerful mayor?

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, April 18, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 7 Comments

Photographs by Roger Lemoyne

The cabane à sucre is an annual rite for many Quebecers, and on a recent Friday afternoon, 650 golden agers from the city of Laval, a vast suburb north of Montreal, bused into the nearby town of St. Eustache to eat crepes with maple syrup, cretons, and maple syrup-flavoured fèves au lard, and to indulge in a spot of line dancing. Aside from the festive sense common to sugaring-off events, though, this one had a spirit of civic pride. “Our mayor is number one!” said Gino, an ebullient 58-year-old. “Every year he invites us here.” “It doesn’t cost us anything. It’s a gift from Mayor Vaillancourt,” said Gabriel, who along with his wife was on his fourth free cabane à sucre outing.

Indeed it was: the merry event was entirely paid for by PRO Lavallois, the political party that has governed Laval for 22 years­—­the last 10 unopposed. Paying for seniors to go to a cabane à sucre has been a tradition for over 15 years. Over the course of two days, the party footed the bill for some 2,600 seniors, at an estimated cost of $16 per person, and most were quite appreciative. Attendees interviewed by Maclean’s said cabane à sucre was something they looked forward to every year. Across the room, the object of their affection, Gilles Vaillancourt—the bespectacled 70-year-old architect of PRO Lavallois’s two-decades-long supremacy and a man currently mired in allegations of bribery, favouritism and influence peddling—shook every hand, listened to every anecdote and chuckled graciously at every joke.

The event had all the hallmarks of a campaign stop, down to the huge “Team Vaillancourt” banners decorating the sugar shack and the PRO Lavallois pens handed to every senior as they left. Yet the next election isn’t for two years, and the people in attendance aren’t all PRO members. Arguably, Vaillancourt wouldn’t need to campaign even if there were an election—he beat his last opponent by nearly 40 percentage points in 2009. He just seems to love doing it.

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From the magazine

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 1:09 PM - 55 Comments

I spent last Sunday hanging around with Stephane Dion. Here is what that was like.

If you’re interested in a director’s cut, full of never-before-seen material, see below.

You can add this as a post-script to what I wrote the night of the 2008 election.

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David Dodge's plea

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 8:46 AM - 56 Comments

The former governor of the Bank of Canada has released a new report calling for an adult discussion of the approaching health care crunch. Mr. Dodge made a similar plea to the Liberal conference in Montreal last year.

Free the rodent

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 31, 2011 at 1:15 PM - 6 Comments

Greetings from Montreal, where Jack Layton just promised to end oil subsidies and redirect the funding to clean energy sources.

The party has also released the following new spot.

The Commons: Rave-up

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, March 27, 2011 at 8:08 PM - 68 Comments

The circular amphitheatre, used in other circumstances by a circus school, was bathed in red light. A muscular DJ spun pounding dance music, the heavy bass shaking the floor. In the audience, signs and thundersticks waved approximately to the beat.

After a few warm-up acts, Justin Trudeau bounded on stage, vibrating with apparent enthusiasm. He wore a suit jacket, but no tie, the top two buttons of his dress shirt undone. He and a cohost proceeded then to introduce the party’s Montreal team, Mr. Trudeau announcing each arrival as if introducing the starting line-up of the ’76 Habs.

On defence, the bespectacled one, Francisss Scarrr-pa-leggia! At left wing, in the tweed coat, Irwinnnn Cot-ler! Each descended the stairs from the top of the crowd. Each of the men wore the same look: suit jacket, no tie, top button of dress shirt undone. The lone candidate in a tie promptly removed his upon arriving on stage.

Finally, the captain, Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal leader appearing in a pink shirt, his wife by his side. Continue…