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http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/10/travel/justin-trudeau-canada-having-a-moment-feat/ It's been years since the U.S. has looked so lovingly upon its neighbor to the north, Canada. Sure, there were Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympics, when Montreal was the center of the world. Sure, Bob and Doug McKenzie invited us to the "Great White North" in 1980 and had a big hit with their song "Take Off." But recently, the country some wags have called "America's Hat" has been more in the news than ever, thanks to its handsome prime minister and our less-than-handsome election campaign. Described by Vogue as "dashing" and "strikingly young and wavy-haired," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is reviving the Trudeaumania inspired by his father's entry into politics. Frolicking with pandas and a knack for selfies have only deepened the younger Trudeau's appeal. As the new prime minister launches into his country's first official visit and state dinner in 19 years, here are some reasons why Canada is always in season -- even when it's underneath several feet of snow: A warm welcome Canadian radio DJ Rob Calabrese created the "Cape Breton If Trump Wins" site in late February as a joke. But a few weeks and more than 800,000 clicks later, he says that thousands of his U.S. neighbors are seriously considering a move to Canada if Donald Trump becomes president. Serene Canadian island courts Trump refugees It's actually much harder to immigrate to Canada than simply fleeing north in your packed Prius, but Trudeau has put out the welcome mat. "Cape Breton is lovely all times of the year," Trudeau said. "And if people do want to make choices that perhaps suit their lifestyles better, Canada is always welcoming." Creative exports While Canada has long provided Hollywood with a diverse collection of talent, there's a wide array to admire right now. Rachel McAdams was recently nominated for an Academy Award for her role in best-picture winner "Spotlight," Ryan Reynolds has gained a new following with "Deadpool," and Drake's "Hotline Bling" made a big splash in 2015. Ellen Page, Seth Rogan and television and movie star Michael J. Fox, whose foundation may help unlock the clues to a cure for Parkinson's disease, are also bringing Canada to Hollywood. And we always enjoy the work of that mighty fine Ryan Gosling. Gosling is always having a moment. The redheaded orphan who put Prince Edward Island on the map for young readers may be fictional, but the "Anne of Green Gables" series by Lucy Maude Montgomery has lured generations of tourists to the picturesque island. The author's birthplace is a museum, and the Green Gables Heritage Place features a house like the one Anne occupied. And yes, there are Anne tours. Natural beauty and cultural preservation Americans have the Colorado Rockies and the 59 parks of the National Park Service. But Canadians have incredible, wild protected nature as well. Ask a Canadian, and they'll tell you (politely) that they prefer the Canadian Rockies. We recommend starting with Banff National Park, Canada's oldest national park. For travelers looking for a bit of Old World charm, there's the lovely city of Montreal, where many residents don't mind if your French is terrible. Are you trying? That counts for something. Stay longer and learn how to speak the North American version of French, all the while reading all official government publications and commercial product labeling in both English and French. Bon voyage/enjoy your trip!

http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/healthy-economic-outlook-for-montreal-and-quebec-city-in-2016-570899271.html OTTAWA, March 3, 2016 /CNW/ - Quebec's two largest cities are forecast to enjoy healthy economic growth in 2016. Montréal and Québec City can expect growth of 2.3 per cent and 2 per cent, respectively, according to The Conference Board of Canada's Metropolitan Outlook: Winter 2016. "The depreciation of the Canadian dollar and a healthy U.S. economy is bringing good news to Québec City and Montréal and their export-oriented industries. Economic growth in both cities has been on the upswing. In fact, we expect real GDP growth in both Montréal and Québec City to outpace the national average for the second consecutive year in 2016, after trailing it for five straight years" said Alan Arcand, Associate Director, Centre for Municipal Studies, The Conference Board of Canada. Highlights Montréal is expected to see real GDP growth of 2.3 per cent in 2016, up from 1.7 per cent last year. Québec City's real GDP growth is expected to reach 2 per cent in 2016. Vancouver's real GDP is forecast to grow 3.3 per cent, making it the fastest growing economy among the 28 census metropolitan areas covered in this edition of the Metropolitan Outlook. Montréal Montréal's economic improvement will be driven by a strengthening manufacturing sector, a rebound in construction, and steady services sector gains. Manufacturing output is forecast to expand by 3 per cent in 2016, bolstered by the combination of a weaker Canadian dollar and healthy U.S. demand. Two massive infrastructure projects—the $4.2-billion Champlain Bridge and the $3.7-billion Turcot Interchange—will help the local construction industry shake off three straight years of declines. However, a decline in housing starts will limit overall construction output growth to 2 per cent in 2016. Growth among the services-producing industries is projected to be 2.2 per cent in 2016, the same rate as in 2015. All eight industry sectors will advance this year, with the biggest gains coming from the business services sector and the personal services sector. In all, Montréal is expected to post real GDP growth of 2.3 per cent this year, up from 1.7 per cent in 2015. About 26,000 jobs are expected to be created in 2016. A similar rise in the labour force will keep the unemployment rate at 8.2 per cent, well above the national average of 7 per cent.

Felicitation a la chanteuse americaine Celena Rae pour avoir chanter l'hymne national du canada dans les deux langues (francais et anglais) ce soir durant la partie canadiens-stars au American Airlines Center a Dallas, Texas.

http://blogue.onf.ca/blogue/2015/05/21/montreal-dhier-aujourdhui-films-onf/ Montréal de 1940 à aujourd’hui à travers les films de l’ONF Films Documentaire | 21 mai 2015 par Emilie Nguyen Des années 1940 à aujourd’hui, la ville de Montréal a fait l’objet de nombreux films de l’ONF. En fouillant dans la collection, force est de constater que la cité aux cent clochers a été la muse de plusieurs cinéastes, tels que Jacques Giraldeau, Jacques Leduc, Hubert Aquin, Luc Bourdon et Michel Brault. Chacun à leur manière, ils nous ont donné à voir la ville dans un style cinématographique propre à leur démarche et à leur époque. Objectif-Expo-67-tv-big Image tirée du film Objectif 67 En raison de mon obsession pour l’ordre et la chronologie, j’ai rassemblé quelques-uns de ces titres de manière à pouvoir suivre l’évolution de la ville à travers les décennies. Une occasion de replonger dans le Montréal des années 1940 et d’entreprendre une balade au parc Lafontaine sur une musique bucolique; d’être aux premières loges pour admirer les chars allégoriques du défilé de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste en 1959; de prendre le mini-rail pour revivre en couleur les heures merveilleuses de l’Expo 67; de revisiter le quartier Griffintown et les commerces du boulevard Saint-Laurent dans les années 1970; de contempler Montréal sous toutes ses coutures dans les années 1990, et de terminer le voyage par une flânerie interactive sur le Mont-Royal en compagnie de l’écrivain Dany Laferrière. Bon voyage temporel! 1940 La cité de Notre-Dame (1942) Avec ce documentaire passionnant, redécouvrez la ville de Montréal en 1942…et en couleur! Entrez dans le quotidien fourmillant de la métropole avant les gratte-ciel et les autoroutes. Déambulez parmi ses églises, ses vieux marchés, ses galeries d’art, ses universités, son aéroport, ses gares de triage et son port, guidé par une charmante narration. La Cité de Notre-Dame par Vincent Paquette, Office national du film du Canada Au parc Lafontaine (1947) Dans ce court métrage, voyez comment les Montréalais profitaient des beautés du Parc Lafontaine dans les années 1940. À l’époque où les ours noirs, les renards, les chats sauvages et les oiseaux de proie cohabitaient gaiement; où les enfants s’amusaient sous l’oeil attendri des parents, des amoureux, des promeneurs. On y rencontre des gens de tous les âges, tous les types, tous les genres, car chaque jour le tout Montréal se donne rendez-vous au parc Lafontaine… Au parc Lafontaine par Pierre Petel, Office national du film du Canada 1950 Au bout de ma rue (1958) Filmé par Michel Brault, ce charmant petit film raconte l’histoire d’un gamin vivant dans le centre-sud de Montréal qui profite d’un jour de congé pour prendre la poudre d’escampette. Suivez-le alors qu’il découvre le bord de l’eau, l’horizon élargi du grand fleuve Saint-Laurent et l’activité bouillonnante du port de Montréal, tel qu’il était en 1958. Au bout de ma rue par Louis-Georges Carrier, Office national du film du Canada Jour de juin (1959) Revivez les festivités de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste à Montréal en 1959. Soyez aux premières loges d’une foule de 700 000 à 800 000 personnes pour voir passer les chars allégoriques, les fanfares d’un événement annuel qui rappelle à tout un peuple ses racines profondes. Jour de juin par ONFB, Office national du film du Canada 1960 À Saint-Henri le cinq septembre (1962) Réalisé par Hubert Aquin en 1962, ce grand classique impérissable du cinéma québécois nous fait visiter en 24 heures le quartier populaire de Saint-Henri à travers les images tournées par un collectif des plus grands cinéastes de l’époque. Le film a été inspiré par le roman Bonheur d’occasion de Gabrielle Roy. À Saint-Henri le cinq septembre par Hubert Aquin, Office national du film du Canada Objectif 67 (1967) Évoquant les heures merveilleuses de l’Expo 67, ce film en couleur nous replonge au coeur de cet événement marquant dans la vie des montréalais. Dans sa course, la caméra prend le minirail, visite les îles, la Ronde, la Cité du Havre, envahit les pavillons, les restaurants, suit les clowns et capte la joie de la foule. Objectif : Expo 67 par William Brind, Office national du film du Canada 1970 Griffintown (1972) Le quartier Griffintown n’a pas toujours été le berceau de condominiums argentés et des jeunes gens branchés. Ce court métrage documentaire nous montre le quartier tel qu’il était dans les années 1970, ignoré et dévasté. Une population réduite mais opiniâtre s’acharne à y vivre et à lutter contre la tyrannie de l’industrie qui cherche à les exproprier. Griffintown par Michel Régnier, Office national du film du Canada Une rue de lait et de miel (1973) Tourné dans les années 1970, ce court métrage documentaire rend hommage au boulevard Saint-Laurent, artère principale de Montréal. Une rue qui demeure, pour nombre d’immigrants, l’endroit où s’est amorcée leur vie nouvelle. Dans cet excellent film, le cinéaste revisite la rue et les commerçants qui l’ont accueilli à l’âge de huit ans, lorsqu’il arriva au Canada avec ses parents. Une rue de lait et de miel par Albert Kish, Office national du film du Canada 1980 Albédo (1982) Mélangeant fiction et documentaire, ce long métrage établit un parallèle entre la vie du photographe David Marvin et l’histoire de Griffintown, un quartier de Montréal auquel il a consacré une partie de son œuvre. Albédo par Jacques Leducet par Renée Roy, Office national du film du Canada 1990 Les amoureux de Montréal (1992) Le cinéaste Jacques Giraldeau nous présente Montréal sous toutes ses coutures et dans tous ses replis… Montréal baignée dans toutes ses lumières, été comme hiver, revisitée par un cinéaste amoureux de ses rues, de ses ruelles, de ses quartiers, de ses parcs, de son fleuve, de ses églises, de ses édifices… Visages d’hier et d’aujourd’hui. Une ville disparate, de verre et de béton, façonnée par des architectes qui lui ont donné un corps et… une âme! Les amoureux de Montréal par Jacques Giraldeau, Office national du film du Canada 2000 La mémoire des anges (2008) À la fois documentaire, poème et essai, La mémoire des anges est une expérience unique permettant de revisiter la ville de Montréal des années 1950 et 1960, avec ses grandes figures, ses lieux emblématiques et ses citoyens ordinaires. Pour ce faire, le cinéaste Luc Bourdon a procédé à un assemblage d’archives et d’extraits tirés de 120 films produits par l’ONF. Un tour de force magistral! La mémoire des anges par Luc Bourdon, Office national du film du Canada 2010 Sacrée montagne (2010) Revisitez un des lieux les plus emblématiques de Montréal avec ce documentaire Web qui explore notre relation au sacré à travers le Mont-Royal. Dans cette courte vidéo tirée du projet, l’écrivain Dany Laferrière livre une réflexion sur la place du sacré dans l’histoire et l’imaginaire québécois, revivant pour l’occasion ses premiers pas dans ce Montréal que sa mère, depuis Port-au-Prince, appelait « la ville de Dieu ». Sacrée montagne – La métaphore de Montréal par Hélène de Billyet par Gilbert Duclos, Office national du film du Canada À Saint-Henri, le 26 août (2011) Tourné en 24 heures, À St-Henri, le 26 août rassemble quelques-uns des plus brillants cinéastes documentaires québécois d’aujourd’hui autour de cet ancien quartier ouvrier de Montréal. Dans un style cinéma direct, à l’affût des histoires qui font l’épaisseur d’une journée dans la vie quotidienne du quartier, ce film parcourt des trajectoires qui se côtoient ou se traversent tout en restant opaques les unes aux autres. Réalisé en 2010, ce film est un hommage à l’oeuvre collective d’Hubert Aquin, À Saint-Henri le cinq septembre. Il témoigne de la transformations d’un espace urbain resté profondément enraciné dans son passé industriel vibrant. La musique a été composée par le talentueux Patrick Watson. Le film est maintenant disponible en location. Pour le visionner, cliquez ici. À St-Henri, le 26 août – (Bande-annonce) par Shannon Walsh, Office national du film du Canada D’où je viens (2013) Dans ce superbe documentaire, le cinéaste Claude Demers (Les dames en bleu) revisite le quartier populaire de Verdun où il a grandi pour y interroger le mystère de ses origines. La ville et le fleuve Saint-Laurent constituent la toile de fond de cette ode à la vie et à la beauté du monde. Une œuvre libre et humaine, qui nous montre un visage de Verdun que vous n’avez jamais vu. Pour en savoir plus, lisez notre entretien avec le réalisateur. Le film est maintenant disponible en location. Pour le visionner, cliquez ici. D'où je viens – (Bande-annonce) par Claude Demers, Office national du film du Canada Et vous, quels sont vos films préférés de notre collection sur Montréal? À Saint-Henri le cinq septembre, Au parc Lafontaine, cité, Claude Demers, D'où je viens, Documentaire, film, Griffintown, Histoire, Hubert Aquin, Jacques Giraldeau, Jacques Leduc, La cité de Notre-Dame, La mémoire des anges, Luc Bourdon, Métropole, Michel Brault, mont Royal, Montréal, Saint-Henri, Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Saint-Laurent, Urbanisme, Ville, ville-marie, webdocumentaire sent via Tapatalk

via the New Yorker : FEBRUARY 28, 2015 Leonard Cohen’s Montreal BY BERNARD AVISHAI PHOTOGRAPH BY ROB VERHORST/REDFERNS VIA GETTY Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—a hymn to souls too carnal to grow old, too secular to give praise, and too baffled to mock faith—recently turned thirty. Cohen himself, now eighty, came of age in Jewish Montreal during the twenty years after the Second World War, and those of us who followed him, a half-generation later, can’t hear the song without also thinking about that time and place, which qualifies as an era. The devotional—and deftly sacrilegious—quality of “Hallelujah” and other songs and poems by Cohen reflects a city of clashing and bonding religious communities, especially first-generation Jews and French Catholics. Montreal’s politics in the early sixties were energized by what came to be called Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, which emancipated the city’s bicultural intelligentsia from Church and Anglostocracy. The pace of transformation could make the place half crazy; that’s why you wanted to be there. Religious thoughts seemed to be the gravest ones in Montreal then, insinuated, even inculcated, by its architecture, seasonal festivals, and colloquialisms. Cohen grew up in affluent Westmount, the best part of Mount Royal, about a mile from my family home in Snowdon—a neighborhood on a lower Western slope, where “the English” (as my mother called them) had no choice but to make room for Jewish factory owners, lawyers, and doctors. Towering over both our neighborhoods, impressing itself on our senses, was the dome of St. Joseph’s Oratory, Quebec’s great basilica, the dream palace of (the now canonized) Brother André Bessette, who healed the body and spirit of pilgrims—the place we simply called the Shrine. A. M. Klein, the first of the Montreal Jewish poets, wrote, “How rich, how plumped with blessing is that dome! / The gourd of Brother André! His sweet days / rounded! Fulfilled! Honeyed to honeycomb!” Its neon-illuminated cross was visible from my bedroom window, an imposing rival for the whispered Shma Yisroel of bedtime. The city’s ironwork staircases, its streets tangled around Mount Royal, carried the names of uncountable saints (St. Denis, St. Eustache, St. Laurent); the fall air was scented by rotting leaves and, on Rosh Hashana, polished synagogues. Fresh snow sharpened Christmas lights. Our curses, borrowed from Québécois proles, were affectionately sacrilegious mocks of the Mass: “calice,” “tabarnak,” “osti”—chalice, tabernacle, host. For Jews, a sense of rivalry was palpable, triangular, and almost Old Country in character. French public schools were run by the Catholic Church, English schools by the Protestant School Board, and some fifty per cent of Jewish students went to Anglo-Jewish day schools that embraced (and effaced) Old World movements: Orthodox, Zionist, folkish Yiddishist. Montreal’s Jews numbered well over a hundred and twenty thousand in those years. A great many men and women behind the counters of our bakeries, delis, and bookstores spoke (as did my father) the Yiddish-inflected English of immigrants who had come in the twenties. The Soviet revolution had changed the boundaries of Russia’s borderlands, closing Russian markets that had previously been open to Jewish merchants and textile manufacturers in Lithuania and White Russia (now Eastern Belarus), forcing them West—just when the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 closed America to more Jewish immigration. My father and his widowed mother and siblings were trying, in 1928, to get from Bialystok to Chicago, where an uncle lived. The port of Montreal was supposed to be their starting point, before heading down to the Great Lakes. It was where they stayed. (If the accents were heavier, you knew the new arrivals had come mainly from Romania or Hungary after the Nazi defeat, and had witnessed horrors that we did not speak about.) Jewish community life after the war was imbued with a sense of intensely felt tragedy, but so was traditional Judaism as a culture. The world of Yiddishkeit, three generations back for New York intellectuals, was just one generation back for us. Compared with “Dick and Jane” in our English readers, the characters of the Hebrew bible—their violence, jealousies, and treacheries—seemed like family. On a streetcar ride up Queen Mary Road, where the Shrine stood, a nun once told me that I had “the look of Abraham” on my face. Another, apparently reading my mind, asked me if I knew what it meant to have sinful thoughts. (She also kindly shared an amusing word game, so her Inquisition ended with grace.) The largest English talk-radio station had a call-in show on Sunday evenings on which the vexingly courteous Pentecostal Pastor Johnson explained why Jews, in rejecting Jesus, were sadly damned. Most of his callers were Jews who debated and denounced him. Unlike in the United States, Jews in Quebec did not have a neutral civil space to melt into. We had nothing as stipulated as the American Constitution; our liberties derived organically, within the tradition of British Common Law. Canada’s money had a Queen on it, not the founding fathers. The institutions of Jewish Montreal created places in which we fell back on ourselves. The heads of our welfare services and of the Y.M.H.A., the public library, the free-loan society, and political congresses were local celebrities. The family of the liquor baron Sam Bronfman, who supported these institutions, were our nobility. The progressives among us didn’t go to Reform synagogues; we just went to Orthodox and Conservative synagogues, and irregularly. If we got sick, we went to the Jewish General Hospital. My father, a Zionist leader who travelled to Israel in 1954 as if on the hajj, often admonished me with the famous aphorism of Moses Mendelssohn, the eighteenth-century liberal philosopher, that I should be a Jew at home and a human in the street. I understood Mendelssohn more readily than, say, Leonard Bernstein, who, teaching us sonata form on television, seemed human pretty much everywhere. Tolerance meant dialogue and reciprocal recognition, not assimilation. A few years ago, I walked through Bialystok with a historical map of the now destroyed Jewish city—before the First World War, Jews comprised about half the population—and found my father’s house. I was struck by how familiar Montreal’s large immigrant Jewish neighborhoods might have seemed, at least on the surface, to my father in 1928, when he arrived at the age of fourteen: the same hard winter and the same thick-walled constructions, the same forested hills, the same churches, the same easy insular Yiddish dominating commerce in textiles and clothing—the shmate (“rag”) business. The same farmers who had, a couple of generations back, been peasants, speaking a strange national language, working in our factories, speaking against us from hearths and pulpits yet greeting us warmly and with a practiced humility. The same sense that, by contrast, the propertied classes, our local nobility, would tolerate Jews so long as we helped them get richer but did not cross some invisible boundary—the presumably unavailable daughters. In his iconic Canadian novel, “Two Solitudes,” Hugh MacLennan describes Quebec as being defined by two competing cultures, nested in two little nations that were also classes, French and English. The gruff, brilliant, promiscuous Irving Layton—who had been an acolyte of Klein, and who became Cohen’s mentor and advocate—observed many years later that Montreal actually had three solitudes—a Jewish one, too, sitting somewhere between the others. Commercial life was English, so Jews as a community were drawn to the Anglophone world, narrow only in Quebec. Yet immigrant Jews engaged more poignantly, pushing and pulling, with French religious culture, which was locally engulfing. Catholic priests and nuns were ubiquitous public servants, tending to the French population, largely subsidized by provincial taxes and dominating Quebec’s French universities, hospitals, and social agencies, as well as the public schools. Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger, installed in 1953, was a kindly man, concerned for the poor, who ended his days as an African missionary (“a mensch,” my father called him), and the equal of any mayor; he kept anyone under sixteen from entering a movie theatre, except when Walt Disney films made the rounds. In the thirties and forties, the Church in Quebec had been ultramontane, and the not silent partner of the reactionary National Union Party of Premier Maurice Duplessis, who ruled, with a five year interruption, from 1936 until his death, in 1959. He had been xenophobic, populist, ambivalent about the war against Hitler, and classically (if discreetly) anti-Semitic. Behind the scenes, this political establishment instructed French voters, many of whom lived in far-flung farming villages where parish schooling was limited. They were barely literate and easily swayed. Duplessis presided over an apparently impregnable majority, rallied against sinful Montreal—Cardinal Léger sought to ban bingo—and used the provincial police thuggishly, turning it into a personal force. But the war and its aftermath gradually put the Catholic Church on the defensive. The exposure of Québécois soldiers to the triumph over Fascism, the penetration into the countryside of radio and television, the inescapable guilt that Catholic intellectuals felt about the death camps, the Second Vatican Council in 1962—all of these unleashed dissent. The Church’s chief critics were dazzling, cosmopolitan French Canadian intellectuals: Jean Marchand, the charismatic, leftist union leader; Gérard Pelletier and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the editors of Cité Libre magazine (Trudeau would eventually lead the federal Liberals to victory in 1968); and René Lévesque, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s most famous French-language host. When, in the 1960* election, the Liberal Party came to power (Lévesque joined the Liberal’s cabinet as the resources minister), the priests and nuns began losing their grip on the city’s schools and social services, and Quebec entered the humanist insurgency of the Quiet Revolution. The arts began to flourish: the Comédie-Canadienne blossomed, and the filmmaker Denys Arcand joined the National Film Board, producing award-winning French-language documentaries. The University of Montreal and community colleges were infused with provincial funds, and their graduates took social-service jobs in a new, fiercely secular Quebec bureaucracy. Public schools, still divided by language, were taken over more firmly, and funded more lavishly, by the regional government (though the formally “confessional” nomenclature—Catholic and Protestant—was not finally abandoned until 1998). By the spring of 1963, the Quebec government had nationalized old English-owned power companies, disturbing the peace of the residual Anglostocracy. In this loosened political atmosphere, Jews—who voted “Liberal” as faithfully as we conducted Seders—emerged into the culture. We grew infatuated with Trudeau’s federalist idealism. He was elected from a largely Jewish Montreal constituency and remained there throughout his years as Prime Minister. The Quiet Revolution transformed Montreal, at least for a while, into a kind of Andalusia: contesting religious-linguistic cultures rubbing each other the right way. Jews shared professional and literary ties with les Anglais, but we shared an affinity with French Catholics, for religious traditions that were thickly esthetic and that we, each in our own way, both loved and loved to distance ourselves from. We also intuitively understood congregational routine, authoritative interpretation of sacred literature, the prestige of historical continuity—we understood that messiahs matter in this world, that the divine emerged within the precincts of a discipline, commandments, and the mass, all of which produced decorum before they produced grace. As Cohen writes in “Hallelujah,” you cannot feel so you learn to touch: works, not just faith alone. Our rivalry with Catholics at times seemed fuelled by an unacknowledged tenderness, theirs for our historical struggles, professional erudition, and exegetical trenchancy, ours for their majestic spaces, genuflecting hockey champions, and forgiving, suffering servant—a Jew, after all. “I love Jesus,” Cohen told his biographer, Sylvie Simmons. “Always did.” But, he said, “I didn’t stand up in shul and say, ‘I love Jesus.’ ” My mother—the amiably innocent scion of another Bialystoker family—took me, overdressed (oisgeputzt), to Eaton’s department store to see the Christmas pageantry; and then, more reverentially (and to my father’s dismay), she took me to the Shrine’s wax museum, to see depictions of the passions of the saints. When I first heard a recording of Judy Collins’s iconic rendition of Cohen’s “Suzanne,” at McGill in the fall of 1967, a year after my mother’s sudden death—heard about the lonely wooden tower and its occupant searching out the drowning—it occurred to me that I had never expected much empathy from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It also occurred to me that Cohen, whose father had died when he was nine, knew loss, and that the distance from mama’s boy to ladies’ man could be short. Which brings me, finally, to McGill. If our emancipation was not in civil society, it was on that campus. The university had been chartered in 1821 to provide English and Scottish Protestants a colonial piece of the Enlightenment, above the atavism of habitant manors and parishes; the student population at the Arts and Sciences Faculty, in the mid-sixties, was something like forty-per-cent Jewish. Cohen was a legend by the time I got there. He had graduated in 1955, and had published three books of poetry and two novels; the National Film Board had made a fawning documentary about him. It was at McGill that Cohen found Irving Layton (he said of Layton, “I taught him how to dress, he taught me how to live forever”). Klein, Layton’s teacher, had been there in the thirties, studied law, and went on to simultaneously write “The Rocking Chair,” a poetic tribute to French Canada, and edit The Canadian Jewish Chronicle. (Secretly, he also wrote speeches for Sam Bronfman). By the time Cohen got to McGill, Klein had fallen silent, spiralling into, among other sources of melancholy, a never-completed exegesis of Joyce’s “Ulysses.” For our part, we found at McGill a kind of finishing school to make ourselves more sovereign, like Cohen was. There was no need for young Jews to offer Quebec some new model of political insurrection—no American-style howl. The restrained, verbose liberalism of John Stuart Mill seemed insurgent enough, even for Trudeau and Levesque. So was the tolerance—the scientific doubt—of the Scottish enlightenment and the lyricism of English and Irish poets, from Wordsworth to Yeats. Hemmed in by Jewish and Catholic sexual norms—and also by Victorian prissiness—the first right that we thought to exercise was the right to Eros. Cohen told Sylvie Simmons that he was first inspired to write poetry when, in his teens, he read, in English translation, the work of the Spaniard Federico García Lorca. But, like many other Jewish youths at McGill, he shuttled between the debating union and the traditions of the English, immersing himself in the study of liberty and literature as in a yeshiva. This open-spirited time of cross-fertilization did not last. The Quiet Revolution, which prompted Trudeau’s federalism, in time gave rise to a more stridently nationalist idea, encouraged by Charles de Gaulle on his trip to the 1967 World’s Fair, and soon championed by Lévesque, too: that Quebec would be better off as an independent country, maîtres chez nous (masters of our own). Spooked by the vitality of English culture in Montreal, and by the fact that many more French were learning English than the other way around, separatists began agitating for an end to English-language education for new immigrants and English signs in the city. Socialists among the separatists, recalling Lévesque’s nationalization of the power companies, began calling for the nationalization of banks and large businesses. At the beginning of the sixties, radical separatists—impatient with the Liberals’ nonviolent democratic methods—had formed the Front de Libération du Québec, or F.L.Q., and gone underground. By the end of the sixties, they had placed bombs in the stock exchange and in mailboxes in English neighborhoods. In 1970, after a spate of F.L.Q. kidnappings (a Quebec minister, Pierre Laporte, was murdered), Trudeau imposed martial law. The city was roiled by arrests; a friend at McGill known for his New Left sympathies saw his flat raided; the police confiscated books, including, he laughed nervously, one entitled “Cubism”. Lévesque despised the violence of the underground, but was undeterred in his commitment to pursue national sovereignty democratically, ultimately through a referendum. In 1968, he had founded Le Parti Québécois. Jews, like most English-speaking residents of Quebec, were shocked when Lévesque was unexpectedly elected Premier in 1976. This proved the cue. Tens of thousands moved to Toronto. Some Jewish intellectuals, professionals, and artists stayed, but most left, and the amity of the sixties dimmed. Cohen kept a house in Montreal, but as his fame as a songwriter grew he spent little time there. Nevertheless, something of his native Montreal could not be shaken off—the short, sweet tradition of which Cohen was, in a sense, the end. In his 1978 poem “The Death of a Ladies’ Man,” Cohen writes of a lover’s “high religious mood” brought low by the dangers of desire: “She beckoned to the sentry / of his high religious mood. / She said, ‘I’ll make a space between my legs, / I’ll teach you solitude.’ ” You hear the resonances of Cohen’s own religious mood, and Montreal’s, in the lyrics of many songs—“Sisters of Mercy,” “Story of Isaac,” “Who by Fire,” “If It Be Your Will”—culminating, perhaps, with “Hallelujah.” The resonances and the losses are even clearer, I think, when you go to the start of the tradition—roughly, Klein to Layton to Cohen—rather than hear only its end. Klein’s 1947 poem “The Cripples,” about French Catholic worshippers at St. Joseph’s Oratory, which I quoted from earlier, reaches this climax: They know, they know, that suddenly their cares and orthopedics will fall from them, and they stand whole again. Roll empty away, wheelchairs, and crutches, without armpits, hop away! And I who in my own faith once had faith like this, but have not now, am crippled more than they. There you have it: a freethinking Montreal Jew, in whose bones the Torah was bred, inventing precise English lines to express envy for French Catholic piety. “Anything beautiful is not your own,” Cohen told a Jewish student newspaper in 1966. “When I write, I place myself in contact with something much more glorious than anything I can pull up from within myself.” Poetry was unlocked by reverence. But reverence might, ironically, embolden the poet to cross boundaries, to perhaps court one of those beautiful Westmount girls. And if you did, if you touched the dew on her hem, you could throw your crutches away. *Correction: A previous version of this post misidentified the election year that the Liberal Party came to power.

539 Sainte-Catherine Street Montreal, QC This building is situated at the northeast corner of Sainte-Catherine and Aylmer, across the street from The Bay's 640,000 sq. ft. main store. The property can accommodate a tenant of up to 5,000 sq. ft. on the ground floor, with potential for a mezzanine if required. The 40 foot facade on Sainte-Catherine Street, ceiling heights above 14 ft., excellent visibility, and the presence of many national retailers in the immediate vicinity create an ideal location for a flagship retail store in downtown Montreal. The building is undergoing a retrofit with completion expected in spring, 2012. http://www.canderel.com/news-communication/539-sainte-catherine-street

Le parc Roland-Giguère a été conçu par la firme NIP Paysage dans le cadre d'un concours mené conjointement par l'arrondissement d'Ahuntsic-Cartierville et l'équipe de Design Montréal. Roland Giguère (Montréal, le 4 mai 1929- Montréal, le 17 août 2003) était poète, typographe, éditeur, maquettiste, graveur, lithographe et vivait dans le quartier Ahuntsic. Le parc est situé près de l'intersection des boulevards Henri-Bourassa et de l'Acadie, au coeur d'un ensemble immobilier résidentiel d'envergure, Cité l'Acadie, qui comptera à terme plus d'un millier de logements. Réalisé avec l'appui financier du ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux et l'Institut national de la santé publique du Québec, le parc constitue un espace de verdure significatif pour les résidents et contribue à la réduction des îlots de chaleur urbains. De plus, il comporte la particularité d'être doté d'un système de brumisation permettant de rafraîchir les aires de jeux en période estivale.

Québec veut faire du parc des Îles-de-Boucherville un tremplin pour le plein air Mise à jour le vendredi 24 janvier 2014 à 20 h 18 HNE Un texte de Marie-Laure Josselin Le gouvernement du Québec a annoncé vendredi un investissement de 8,2 millions de dollars sur trois ans dans le parc national des Îles-de-Boucherville, géré par la Société des établissements de plein air du Québec (Sépaq). Québec souhaite rendre plus accessible le parc aux citadins afin qu'ils sortent plus de Montréal et fassent l'initiation du plein air, a expliqué Marie Malavoy la ministre de l'Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport, et ministre responsable de la région de la Montérégie. Québec entend instaurer un transport maritime partant du coeur de Montréal, où un stationnement incitatif serait mis en place. Les navettes actuelles qui mènent au parc seront quant à elles maintenues. En 2011, le gouvernement avait déjà annoncé la construction d'un centre de découverte et l'arrivée du camping dans le parc. Cette fois-ci, ce sont une dizaine de nouvelles haltes découvertes qui vont être aménagées et qui s'ajouteront aux cinq déjà présentes. De plus, le bac à câble reliant l'île Sainte-Marguerite à l'île Pinard sera remplacé par un pont pour piétons et cyclistes. Autre nouveauté : le développement d'une offre originale d'hébergement. Il est en effet prévu d'installer des tentes de type prêt-à-camper, comme les Huttopia, et des EXP, des hébergements d'une pièce, avec beaucoup de fenêtres et entièrement équipés. Le concept de ces logements de la Sépaq est de les personnaliser selon les parcs dans lesquels ils sont implantés. Pour Martin Soucy, vice-président Exploitation à la Sépaq et responsable de Parcs Québec, cette expérience à proximité de Montréal servira de vitrine et permettra d'attirer les clients vers les autres parcs au Québec. La fréquentation du parc national des Îles-de-Boucherville a bondi de 133 % en une douzaine d'années. Chaque année, il attire quelque 320 000 visiteurs. Les retombées économiques sont de 28 millions de dollars. Au total, Québec entend investir 54 millions de dollars dans les parcs de la Sépaq d'ici 2016, ce qui devrait se traduire par l'embauche de 384 personnes et 10 millions de dollars en revenus fiscaux et parafiscaux. http://ici.radio-canada.ca/regions/Montreal/2014/01/24/002-quebec-investissement-8-millions-parc-iles-de-boucherville.shtml

(Courtesy of Vice) TeleQuebec Enjoy the read and after click on the second link for TeleQuebec so you can watch the 1st part of the doc.

November 12, 2013, 8:55 a.m. ET National Bank Completes Acquisition of TD Waterhouse Institutional Services' Business -- This transaction further confirms National Bank Correspondent Network's leadership position by adding 260 market intermediaries, $35 billion of assets under administration and 130,000 end-clients to its book of business -- The acquisition marks another major step in National Bank's expansion of its wealth management platform across Canada MONTREAL, Nov. 12, 2013 /CNW Telbec/ - Following receipt of all required regulatory approvals, National Bank of Canada ("National Bank" or the "Bank") (TSX: NA) today announced the completion of its acquisition of TD's institutional services business known as TD Waterhouse Institutional Services (TDWIS). This business will be integrated into National Bank's Correspondent Network ("NBCN"), which is Canada's largest provider of custodial, trading, clearing, settlement and record keeping services to independent registered portfolio managers and introducing brokers. Building on its large existing client base, NBCN will be servicing over 400 independent market intermediaries across the country who collectively manage or administer $85 billion for almost one-half million Canadian investors once the TDWIS business is brought on board. This acquisition greatly extends NBCN's reach, further confirming its status as the clear leader in this growing and important segment of the securities industry. "This transaction is another major step in the implementation of National Bank's strategy of expanding across Canada by broadening the footprint of our wealth management platform" said Luc Paiement, Executive Vice President, Wealth Management, Co-President and Co-CEO of National Bank Financial. "It will add considerable scale to our operations and, in the process, bring a number of appreciable benefits to all National Bank wealth management clients in the form of new products and services". "In the last few months we have met with many of our new clients, and are very pleased with the trust and confidence they have shown by joining us. We are committed to delivering to them the same industry leading service and support we have been providing NBCN's clients with for the past 20 years." said Patrick Primerano, Co-CEO of NBCN. "We are proud that all 64 TDWIS employees to whom we made offers have accepted them, and we look forward to welcoming them into our NBCN team of professionals." This transaction is accretive to National Bank's bottom line, adding $0.12 of earnings per share for fiscal 2014 and $0.14 for fiscal 2015, assuming the full benefit of the acquisition is realized in fiscal 2014. As a result of the acquisition, National Bank's Basel III Common Equity Tier 1 ratio will be reduced by approximately 40 basis points as at National Bank's quarter ending January 31, 2014. Client conversion is expected to be completed in the 8 months following the closing of the transaction, and a transition services agreement will be in place in the interim. About National Bank of Canada With $187 billion in assets as at July 31, 2013, National Bank of Canada (http://www.nbc.ca), together with its subsidiaries, forms one of Canada's leading integrated financial groups, and was named among the 20 strongest banks in the world by Bloomberg Markets magazine. The Bank has close to 20,000 employees and is widely recognized as a top employer. Its securities are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: NA). Follow the Bank's activities via social media and learn more about its extensive community involvement at clearfacts.ca and commitment.nationalbank.ca. About National Bank Correspondent Network At the service of its clients for more than 20 years, National Bank Correspondent Network has become Canada's largest provider of custodial, trading, clearing, settlement and record keeping services to independent registered portfolio managers and introducing brokers by continually redefining the industry through innovative product development, expert client care and leading technology. NBCN's team is dedicated to giving its clients the very best service and the breadth of investment choices necessary to build a successful practice. Forward Looking Statements Certain statements included in this press release constitute forward-looking statements meant for its interpretation and shouldn't be used for other purposes. These forward--looking statements are made as of the date of this document. There is a strong possibility that express or implied projections contained in these forward-looking statements will not materialize or will not be accurate. The Bank recommends that readers not place undue reliance on these statements, as a number of factors, many of which are beyond the Bank's control, could cause actual future results, conditions, actions or events to differ significantly from the targets, expectations, estimates or intentions expressed in the forward-looking statements. These factors include, without limitation, the ability to attract and retain key employees who will support the acquired institutional services business, including certain senior management of the acquired institutional services business; the ability to complete the conversion of the client records, systems and operations supporting the acquired business within anticipated time periods and costs; the retention of substantially all of the clients of the acquired institutional services business following the closing; together with general factors such as credit risk, market risk, liquidity risk, operational risk, regulatory risk, and reputation risk, (all of which are described in greater detail in the Risk Management section that begins on page 57 of the Bank's 2012 Annual Report available at http://www.sedar.com); the general economic environment and financial market conditions in Canada, changes in the accounting policies the Bank uses to report its financial condition, including uncertainties associated with assumptions and critical accounting estimates; tax laws in Canada; and changes to capital and liquidity guidelines and to the manner in which they are to be presented and interpreted. The Bank assumes no obligation to update or revise these forward-looking statements to reflect new events or circumstances and cautions readers not to place undue reliance on them. SOURCE National Bank of Canada /CONTACT: (The telephone number provided below is for the exclusive use of journalists and other media representatives.): Claude Breton Assistant Vice-President, Public Affairs National Bank Tel.: 514-394-8644 H ne Baril Director, Investor Relations National Bank Tel: 514-394-0296 Copyright CNW Group 2013 http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20131112-907876.html

Works at le Bremner http://cultmontreal.com/2013/05/top-chef-canada-danny-smiles-le-bremner-montreal-chefs-canadian-cuisine/ Danny Smiles in the Le Bremner kitchen. Photo by Dominique Lafond. Danny Smiles is repping Montreal cuisine in this cycle of Top Chef Canada, and as the show hits mid-season, the le Bremner chef is well positioned to take the title, especially after winning last week’s elimination challenge. The challenge was to create Canada’s Next National Dish, with the carrot of a 10 G cash prize for the winner and the stick of two chefs’ elimination from the show. Smiles won the contest with his creation, which he calls the “Coast-to-Coast” roll — a shrimp and crab roll, served in pretzel hot dog bun with maple bacon and a side of house-smoked BBQ chips. The Coast-to-Coast roll. “It was a weird choice that I made, to do seafood. It was 40-something out, and we knew it was going to be hot. We knew it was going to be an outdoor event, and I was just like, I’m ready for the challenge. I wanted to go big or go home,” says Smiles, meaning it literally. “Those are the only options.” Smiles wanted to move beyond the usual signifiers of Canadian-ness — maple, pork and poutine. “That was the whole focus, a new national dish. I wanted to showcase fish. I’m a very fish-oriented chef,” he says, his point proven by the shrimp and albacore tattooed prominently onto one forearm. “There’s not a lot of countries that border two of the biggest oceans in the world, too, so that’s really cool,” he continues. “I used B.C. Dungeness crabs and Nordic shrimp from Quebec,” while the overall concept references an East Coast foodie fad du jour, the lobster roll. Smiles explains that he wanted to create a dish that draws not only on Canada’s geography, but its history as well. “Smoking fish and preserving goes back to First Nations; it’s a huge part of Canadian history,” he says. “I was trying to also come up with a story, something that realistically made sense with the history of our country. I’m a huge history buff, so I decided to go back a bit and readapt that into what I thought would be the new national dish.” Smiles may be following in the footsteps of mentor (and le Bremner’s executive chef) Chuck Hughes, who rose to celebrity chef status after becoming the first Canadian to win the US Top Chef — an increasingly necessary career move for chefs as they emerge from the obscurity of the kitchen and into the limelight of cooking shows, contests and book tours in order to establish themselves. Top Chef Canada made sense to him as a next move, he explains. “I liked the show, and also just wanted to see where I match up to the rest of Canada, almost like a personal challenge.” The best part of doing Top Chef Canada, he admits, is that it actually gives him room for his first love, cooking. “Unfortunately, being a chef, you’re not always focusing on cooking,” he says. “You’re lucky when you get into the kitchen and start cooking. That’s like a bonus, because there’s food costing, there’s menu planning; you’re plumbing, gardening. Those are all fun things that I love about my job, but in a small restaurant, you kind of do everything. And now, for six weeks, your main focus — you’re not contacting anyone, you’re not phoning suppliers; that’s all supplied for you, and you’ve just got to focus on cooking. So it’s like it brought me back to when I first started on the line.” ■ Top Chef Canada airs Monday nights at 9 p.m. ET on Food Network Canada.

By Jay Bryan, Special to Gazette February 15, 2013 8:04 PM Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/homes/Bryan+housing+numbers+point+soft+landing/7973381/story.html#ixzz2L1fXbpfN MONTREAL — For more than a year, there have been two competing narratives about the future path of Canada’s high-flying housing market: total collapse and moderate decline. The moderates, if we can call them that, still seem to me to have the better argument, especially when you consider the unexpectedly upbeat housing resale figures last month. Friday’s report from the Canadian Real Estate Association demonstrates that national home sales continue to be significantly lower than those of a year ago, but that virtually all of this decline happened abruptly last August, reflecting a tough squeeze on mortgage-lending conditions in July by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. Since then, however, there’s been no further month-to-month downtrend, notes CREA chief economist Gregory Klump. Prices, which don’t necessarily track sales right away, have also weakened, but less. While sales are down five per cent from one year ago, average national prices are actually up by three per cent, as measured by the CREA Home Price Index. However, this year-over-year price gain has slid gradually from the 4.5 per cent recorded in July. What’s the bottom line? In my opinion, it’s that the catastrophist scenario detailed not just by eccentric bloggers but also in national newspapers and magazines, looks increasingly unlikely. That’s not to say this outcome is utterly impossible. At least one highly regarded consulting firm, Capital Economics, has been predicting for two years that this country faces a 25-per-cent plunge in average home prices. This is the kind of drop — almost comparable to the 30-per-cent-plus crash in the U.S. — that would probably trigger a bad recession, especially in today’s environment of subdued economic growth. David Madani, the economist responsible for this frightening prediction, understands the housing numbers very well, but he simply doesn’t share most other analysts’ relative equanimity about what they mean. Yes, Canada’s banks are financially stronger and more prudent in their lending than their U.S. counterparts, he acknowledges, and yes, there’s little evidence of the fraud and regulatory irresponsibility that worsened the U.S. catastrophe, but he sees the psychology of overoptimistic buyers as uncomfortably similar. What looks like enormous overbuilding of condos in the hot Toronto market help to make his point, as does the still-stratospheric price of Vancouver housing. Madani certainly has a point, but the countervailing evidence seems even stronger. A key example is the behaviour of Canada’s housing market over the past six months. The latest squeeze on mortgage lending, the fourth in five years, is also the toughest, points out economist Robert Kavcic of BMO Capital Markets. It drove up the cost of carrying a typical loan by nearly one percentage point, or about $150 a month on a $300,000 mortgage. And as this shock was hitting the housing market, Canada’s employment growth was slowing. In a market held aloft by speculative psychology, it seems very likely that such a hammer blow would bring about the very crash that pessimists have been predicting. Instead, though, the market reacted pretty much as it had during previous rounds of Flaherty’s campaign to rein in the housing market, notes Derek Burleton, deputy chief economist at the TD Bank. Sales dropped moderately, but the decline didn’t feed on itself as it would in an environment of collapsing speculative hopes. Instead, the market proved to be rather resilient, with sales plateauing and then actually rising a bit in January. Burleton, along with Kavcic and Robert Hogue, an economist at the Royal Bank who follows housing, believe that we’ve already seen most of the market downside that will result from Flaherty’s move. Jay Bryan: New housing numbers point to soft landing This doesn’t mean that the market is out of the woods. It’s still overvalued, not hugely, but by something like 10 per cent, Burleton estimates. But moderate overvaluation can persist for years unless the market is hit by some shock to incomes or interest rates. While there’s no agreement on the path prices take from here, some of these analysts think they’ll drift down slowly, maybe three to eight per cent over a few years. At the same time, rising take-home pay will be shrinking the amount of overvaluation, creating a more sustainable market. Let’s hope they’re right. bryancolumn@gmail.com © Copyright © The Montreal Gazette Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/homes/Bryan+housing+numbers+point+soft+landing/7973381/story.html#ixzz2L1ew0d8Y

Photos prises cette après midi,le 26 jan 2013.tous les matériaux qui vont sur le toit de la Banque. Yvon L'Ainé

I really enjoyed their take on the many different culinary choices Montreal has to offer. http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/city-guides/taste-of-montreal-photos/#/01-montreal-gallery-bakery_52907_600x450.jpg

MONTRÉAL, le 31 mai 2012 - On mange à Montréal comme nulle part ailleurs. Les rituels entourant les plaisirs de la table, la créativité et la convivialité qui accompagnent les repas y sont uniques. Tourisme Montréal l'a compris et entend bien attirer les touristes... par le ventre! Pour ce faire, plusieurs initiatives ont été déployées, dont une campagne de promotion, la formation d'un comité gastronomie et l'organisation de la première édition de l'événement MTL à TABLE, qui se déroulera du 1er au 11 novembre 2012. Ce mois-ci, Montréal fait également l'objet d'un encart gourmand d'une vingtaine de pages dans le National Geographic Traveler et d'une application iPad gratuite. Depuis 2011, Tourisme Montréal fait le pari stratégique de positionner la métropole comme une destination gastronomique de classe mondiale. La stratégie de l'organisation vise notamment à prioriser la gastronomie dans ses campagnes marketing. Ainsi, 1 million de dollars seront consacrés cette année à ce créneau porteur, principalement pour des efforts de publicité et de promotion, dirigés vers les marchés de l'Ontario et des États-Unis. « Les Montréalais font de chaque repas un véritable rituel, ce n'est pas étonnant que notre ville foisonne de bons restaurants! Nous désirons faire connaître ces établissements et leurs chefs au monde entier, puisqu'ils sont une partie intégrante de la saveur unique de Montréal », souligne l'honorable Charles Lapointe, président-directeur général de Tourisme Montréal. De plus, l'an dernier, le guide Frommer's a inclus Montréal dans son palmarès des « 10 meilleures villes au monde où il fait bon manger à l'extérieur ». Première édition de MTL à TABLE Du 1er au 11 novembre 2012, Montréal aura droit à son tout premier Restaurant Week. À l'image d'autres grandes villes en Amérique du Nord, comme New York, San Francisco ou Vancouver, la métropole invitera les Montréalais et les visiteurs à découvrir la variété et la richesse de ses restaurants. Le temps d'une fête culinaire, les plus grands chefs offriront leurs meilleurs plats à prix d'ami. Plusieurs restaurants ont déjà confirmé leur participation l'événement, dont Bar Tazaflores, Birks Café par Europea, Brasserie T!, Chez Delmo, Chez l'Épicier, Chez Victoire, Ferreira Café, Toqué! et Van Horne, Cuisine du marché. Pour la liste complète des restaurants inscrits à ce jour, visitez le http://www.octgm.com/mtl-a-table/restaurants-participants.pdf.'>http://www.octgm.com/mtl-a-table/restaurants-participants.pdf. Montréal en vedette dans le National Geographic Traveler La métropole figure au cœur de l'édition de juin 2012 du National Geographic Traveler. En effet, le célèbre magazine présente à ses 8,8 millions de lecteurs une vingtaine de pages consacrées à Montréal. Cet encart propose une découverte des plats qui font la renommée de Montréal, comme les bagels ou le sandwich à la viande fumée, mais aussi des restaurants les plus créatifs de la ville. Cette section dédiée à la métropole sera également insérée dans le Toronto Star et le magazine Food & Drink à la mi-juin. Conçue elle aussi par les rédacteurs du National Geographic Traveler, l'application iPad gratuite A Taste of Montréal, est disponible dès maintenant. Comprenant plus de 250 pages, de nombreuses photos, des images panoramiques, plusieurs recettes et des conseils de chefs montréalais, celle-ci promet de faire saliver les gourmands du monde entier. Pour télécharger l'application : http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/a-taste-of-montreal/id526949604 La stratégie de Tourisme Montréal comprend également la participation d'un comité gastronomie composé d'influenceurs montréalais issus des secteurs de la restauration, de l'hôtellerie, des grands événements et des associations liées à la gastronomie. Ce groupe consultatif, formé en 2011, permet à l'organisation de valider la pertinence de ses actions et de positionner Montréal efficacement sur le marché compétitif du tourisme culinaire. Bon appétit! http://www.octgm.com/mtl-a-table/restaurants-participants.pdf

Le Canadien National (T.CNR) a annoncé jeudi l'acquisition de 161 locomotives pour faire face à l'augmentation prévue du trafic et améliorer son efficacité opérationnelle. Le prix d'achat n'a pas été rendu public. La société ferroviaire montréalaise a précisé qu'elle recevrait 35 nouvelles locomotives de GE Transportation et 30 autres d'Electro-Motive Diesel, en 2013 et 2014. Le transporteur fera également l'acquisition cette année de 42 locomotives d'occasion de GE, de 11 locomotives en location de GE et de 43 locomotives d'occasion d'EMD. Ces achats doivent permettre au CN de faire face à la croissance prévue du volume au cours des deux à cinq prochaines années, a indiqué le vice-président exécutif et chef de l'exploitation de la société, Keith Creel, dans un communiqué. M. Creel a affirmé que «les locomotives, neuves ou usagées, permettront d'accroître l'efficacité opérationnelle et de réduire la consommation de carburant». «Le CN pourra ainsi retirer du service des locomotives plus anciennes nécessitant plus d'entretien, et affecter des locomotives de ligne moins économes en carburant à des opérations de manoeuvre moins intenses dans des triages et sur des voies locales, tout en disposant de locomotives supplémentaires lui permettant de faire face à l'accroissement du trafic», a-t-il ajouté. Le CN compte une flotte d'environ 1900 locomotives. Les actions du Canadien National ont terminé la séance de jeudi à 77,75$ à la Bourse de Toronto, en baisse de 1,13$, soit un peu moins de 1,5%, par rapport à leur précédent cours de clôture. http://lapresseaffaires.cyberpresse.ca/economie/transports/201203/22/01-4508346-le-cn-achete-161-locomotives.php

Growth in mining sector reshaping Quebec economy BARRIE MCKENNA OTTAWA— Globe and Mail Blog Posted on Thursday, March 15, 2012 12:48PM EDT http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/economy-lab/daily-mix/growth-in-mining-sector-reshaping-quebec-economy/article2370299/ Think of the Quebec economy, and the traditional drivers are energy, forestry and manufacturing. But there’s a new engine in Quebec – mining – and it’s reshaping the economy of both the province, and the country. Investment in the province’s mining industry is expected to reach $4.4-billion this year, up 62 per cent from 2011. That’s nearly equal to the capital that will be poured into manufacturing ($5-billion), a remarkable 27 per cent of all business investment in the province and represents half of all mining investment in the country, according to a National Bank of Canada analysis of recent Statistics Canada figures. “That’s never happened before,” National Bank of Canada chief economist Stéfane Marion said in an interview. “It’s a huge growth driver for the province this year, and in the future.” It’s not the only first. Quebec will lead the country in mining investment this year, outpacing Ontario, Mr. Marion said. Mining investment is expected to hit $3.7-billion in Ontario, $2.8-billion in B.C. and $500-million in Alberta. For Quebec, the money pouring into dozens of iron ore, gold, copper and other mining projects could add a full percentage to GDP this year and cause an unexpected boost in royalty revenue for the cash-strapped government. It will also have spinoff benefits for Montreal-area manufacturers, who will help supply mining-related equipment. But Mr. Marion said there are broader implications. The Quebec economy is starting to look a lot more like the booming resource-rich provinces of the West. “This is a material change in the industrial structure of Quebec,” Ms. Marion said. “It brings the interests of Western Canada and Quebec into line. It’s not just a pure Western Canada story now. It’s spreading to Eastern Canada.” Quebec is also positioning itself to capitalize on the growing resource appetite in China and other fast-growing emerging economies, he said. And the good news: The mining boom is just getting started as Quebec plots its 25-year “Plan Nord” strategy.

J'ai besoin de votre aide. Je suis en train d'écrire un billet pour mon blogue où j'essais de nommer toutes les équipes sportives professionnelles et Semi-Professionnelles que Montréal a eu dans son passé. Voici la liste que j'ai jusqu'à maintenant, pouvez me dire si j'en ai oublié Hockey Maroons de Montréal (Ligue Nationale de Hockey) Wanderers de Montréal (Ligue Nationale de Hockey) Shamrocks de Montréal (National Hockey Association) Victorias de Montréal (Plusieurs Ligues Semi-Professionnelles) Montreal AAA Winged Wheeler (Plusieurs Ligues Semi-Professionnelles) Crystals de Montréal (Amateur Hockey Association of Canada) Voyageurs de Montréal (American Hockey League) Canadiens Junior de Montréal (et verdun) (Ligue de hockey Junior Majeure du Québec Bleu Blanc Rouge de Montréal (LHJMQ) Juniors de Montréal (et verdun et de retour à Montréal) (LHJMQ) Le Rocket de Montréal (LHJMQ) Hockey Féminin Wingstar de Montréal (National Women Hockey League, a été renommé Axion) Axion de Montréal (National Women Hockey League) Le Jofa-Titant de Montréal (National Women Hockey League) Baseball Expos de Montréal (MLB) Royaux de Montréal (International League) Royales de Montréal (Canadian Baseball League, jouaient a Sherbrooke) Football Alouettes de Montréal (CFL) Concorde de Montréal (CFL) Machine de Montréal (World Football League) Il y a aussi eu 8 équipes dans la Quebec Rugby Football Union, ancêtre de la CFL soit; Les AAA Winged Wheeler, Bulldogs, Cubs, Hornets, Indians, Nationals, Royals et les Westmounts Football Intérieur Machettes de Montréal (North American Indoor Football league, en 2005 et la ligue n'a jamais joué un match) Soccer Olympique de Montréal (NASL) Manic de Montréal (NASL et NASL Interior) Supra de Montréal (Devenu l'Impact) Basketball Dragons de Montréal (National Basketball League) Royales de Montréal (American Basketball Association, renommés Matrix) Matrix de Montréal (American Basketball Association) Sasquatch de Montréal (Professionnal Basketball league) Arena Lacrosse Montreal AAA Lacrosse Club Les Québecois de Montreal (National Lacrosse League) L'express de Montreal (National Lacrosse League) Roller Hockey Roadrunner de Montréal (RHI) Je vais surement en éliminer quelques-uns comme les équipes amateurs du temps des AAA ou de la Quebec Rugby Football Union, mais je vais leur donner un petit clin d'oeil quand même. Alors en ai-je manqué ? Je sais que j'étais pas obligé d'écrire "de Montréal" à côté de chaque nom, mais c'était plus fort que moi et je n'ai pas mentionné la future équipe de la Canadian Lingerie Football League. J'ai trouvé la plupart des équipes obscures ici http://www.angelfire.com/ns/agalley/napsl/napsl4.html

Développement d’un projet immobilier d’envergure sur l’Île Charron (2008) Investissement Luc Poirier développe actuellement un projet immobilier de grande envergure (environ 1 milliard de dollars), qui sera situé sur l’Île Charron à Longueuil. Ce projet immobilier sur les rives du St-Laurent comprendra plusieurs tours de condominiums, de nombreuses maisons, un complexe de condo-hôtel, un spa, un parc national, un golf et une marina. 1 image Pas mauvais! Vous pouvez checker son site ici http://www.investissementlucpoirier.com/projets.html

(Courtesy of Journal Metro) YAY! Yet another Quebec national park that I can't get to

(Courtesy of the Financial Post) Congrats to the National Bank of Canada. Singapore supposedly like the new Switzerland.

(Courtesy of the National Post) I thought there was a topic on this already I searched and I didn't see anything pop up.

CN sells Montreal station for $355-million Reuters September 19, 2007 at 5:26 PM EDT VANCOUVER — — Canadian National Railway Co. [CNR-T]agreed Wednesday to sell its Central Station complex in Montreal to Homburg Invest Inc., [HII.A-T]but will keep its headquarters in the facility. CN Rail said it expects to get $355-million for the downtown Montreal property, and will lease back the 17-storey office building that houses its headquarters. The sale and long-term lease deal will also allow the station's passenger facility to continue being used by commuter trains, Via Rail Canada and Amtrak, Canadian National said. Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. announced last month that it also wants to sell its Windsor Station in Montreal as part of a plan to monetize the value of its real estate assets.

Interesting little article in the National Post on street food. You have to wonder why Montreal is so stubborn on insisting to not allow street food in this city. Ca fait plutot provinciale non? http://www.nationalpost.com/Hungry+Change/3356184/story.html