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SAAQ at La Prairie and Dancing

Would you normally associate the SAAQ with dancing? The SAAQ mandataire at La Prairie donates all of its profits to a local organisation that organises dancing classes for children.

Isn’t that nice?

Avoiding the Queues at la SAAQ

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of going to the Société d’Assurance Automobile du Québec, the SAAQ, you know how much fun it is to queue. It’s a delightful administrative complex with, well lots of people. You need to go for your drivers licence, car licensing, driving tests etc.

And you spend a lot of time there queuing. Demand is high – it’s like that. There are however other alternatives.

The SAAQ has outsourced some of its activities to “mandataires” – private companies that perform services on behalf of the SAAQ. These are generally much smaller than the main SAAQ office with only a relatively short queue of maybe 20 minutes, or if you go at the right time not at all.

To find your nearest mandataire consult the website of the SAAQ.

Some services are equally available online at SAAQClic.

Canadian Thought Leaders

This week anyone who’s anyone really wants to be in California at this year’s TED conference. If you haven’t yet been introduced to the concept of TED, it’s a big annual meeting of some of the world’s brightest minds on a whole range of subjects. You can watch talks from previous conferences at www.ted.com

Canada of course has it’s own share of thought leaders as you would expect. Quite some have had their views recorded by the Canadian Voices project – they are well worth listening too. Here are some of the more interesting ones that I’ve come across:

Matt Hern talks about reinventing education and why current education systems are not optimum for our children.

Irshad Manji is a muslim speaker who talks about the positive aspects of Islam and gives a different view of this religion than we usually see

David Suzuki is a top biologist and popular science speaker

Severn Cullis-Suzuki is David’s daughter and an activist in her own right. Famous for giving a speech to the United Nations as a teenager amongst other things.

Chantal Hérbert is a top Québec journalist and columnist working in both English and French

And now back to TED for a video of Mosche Safadie who built the famous river front “Habitat” appartment block for Expo ‘67:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/219

Snow Removal in Montréal

Snow removal is a very important, and sensitive, part of the winter here in Montréal. A new Snow Czar has just been appointed, Luis Miranda the mayor of Anjou. This part of Montréal has the best record on cleaning streets and pavements/sidewalks.

As soon as there is 2.5cm of snow on the ground, the snow ploughs come by and clear the streets of snow and leave salt/grit on the road. Pavements are cleared by a small snow plough too so that you can walk along them.

Once the snow fall has stopped, the snow left by the plough will be removed. See the images below to see this in action.

Large stock piles of snow exist around Montréal waiting for spring and summer to come and melt it. After last year’s record snow fall, it was still melting in dumps in August.

Pushchairs are useless in Winter

When there is a good inch of snow on the ground pushchairs are useless as the wheels won’t turn. Effectively this means that a pushchair is useless in Montréal from December until April.

You won’t believe what’s used instead! A sledge of course! Once your little one can sit up straight, you dress them all warmly in:

• hat – known as a toque
• gloves – hint put them on before the coat or buy bigger ones to go over the sleeves
• scarf or “cache cou”
• boots – starts at size 20 so once a child is between 12 and 18 months
• bunting suit

and they can follow you around in a sledge.

When you arrive in Montréal for your first winter you’ll realise that there is a lot ot buy. It’s worthwhile going to the Mountain Equipment Co-operative at Marché Central as they sell good quality stuff at a reasonable price.

Public Transport in Montréal

I was watching a video from TED.com the other day from a guy who was building a skycar. It’s a facinating video, but I expect it to be quite a few years until we’re all riding over the Saint Lawrence in such a vehicle.

One slide that Paul Moller, the head of Skycar, showed involved the cycle of transport infrastructure and he came to the conclusion that no more highways would be built.

This led me to think about the transport situation in Montréal. Essentially there are not enough roads for all of the cars that need to use them. Most of the bridges suffer congestion at peak times, so commutes can be long.

Public transport is growing at a good rate and there are some excellent initiatives such as reserving a lane for buses at peak times on the Champlain bridge. The island itself has reasonably good transit, there is the metro and buses are quite regular. However, many of the highways block frequently, the Metropolitain, the Trans-Canadian (known as the T-Can on the radio) and Décarie. So the buses get stuck in the traffic too.

Going out further into the suburbs are the AMT trains. This week there has been a terrible fuss about the poor service offered by the AMT who have responded well in my opinion to make quick improvements. There are 150 new railcars on the way to help improve the service too.

One of the big problems the AMT has is that it uses tracks that are owned by the two freight rail companies, CN and CP. Thus it has little control over the lines and can only run trains when CN and CP don’t need to. 

Frequencies tend to be alright at rush hour, but at other times there are very few trains running.

Suburbian buses are similar too. South shore services are offered by different companies depending upon the territory. Longueuil and Brossard are served by the RTL, La Prairie by CIT Le Richelain. Buses run reasonably often at rush hour, but outside these times there are very few services.

So coming back to Paul Moller’s presentation – he suggests that in order to cope with increasing traffic, the only thing that we can do is to use a skycar. I would suggest that the trend in Montréal is towards public transport, the need is understood and will probably be met before the skycar arrives at a driveway near you.

Here is the TED video of Paul Moller:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paul_moller_on_the_skycar.html

Spacing Montréal

Whilst you’re waiting to arrive in Montréal, or you want to learn a bit more about the city, it’s worthwhile checking out Spacing Montréal.

Spacing Montréal ia a blog with photographs of the urban environment of the island of Montréal. Really noteworthy is the work of Guillaume St-Jean who compares old turn of the century photographs with up to date images of the same location. You get a sense of the history of the city and understand more of what the city looks like today.

www.spacingmontreal.ca

Montréal in Winter

Montréal receives quite some snow in winter covering it with a blanket of white. On average about 10 to 15cm of snow will fall per week, usually over one day. Locals will talk about snow “storms”; but in reality it just amounts to a lot of snow falling in one day.

Snow falls can be very beautiful; leaving a clean feeling to the environment.

However, once 2.5cm have fallen the city’s snow removal team will jump into action and start clearing the roads and sidewalks. They do this with snowploughs mounted on the front of trucks and by distributing salt on the roads. After this has happened, much of what was white has turned brown. The mountains of brown will then be slowly removed to dumps so that it can melt away. After 2007-2008’s near record snowfall, the dumps were still melting in August.

Generally it’s easy to drive around after the snow has fallen as it’s cleared pretty quickly, but people will drive more slowly so you need to allow more time to go anywhere.

What really make’s Montréal spectacular is the strength of the sun that shines down on it. Montréal has the same latitude as Bordeaux, so you have this wonderfully bright sun with deep blue skies illuminating the snow covered ground. Much nicer than grey and mild central European winters!

Here are some photographs of Old Montréal and the port a few days after snow fall.

Montréal’s Port walk

Montréal’s Port walk

Montréal’s Port walk

Place Jacques Cartier

Montréal’s Port walk

Montréal’s Port walk

Hotel de Ville – Town Hall – Montréal

Montréal’s Port Frozen Over

Place Jacques Cartier

Montréal’s Port

Montréal’s Port walk

Places d’Armes

Place d’Armes

Place d’Armes

Montréal’s Port walk

Montréal’s Port walk

Sun on the Snow

Shipping your Container into Montréal

When you move to Montréal you probably want to bring your personal items with you.Unless you’re coming from continental North America, your possessions will be coming by boat.

 

The first big question you need to ask yourself is: do I sell or do I ship? When you get a quote for your shipment, which will be around about €9000 / £6000 for a family-sized house you will ask yourself this question. So of course, sell and buy new! Stop though, second hand furniture is hard to sell and isn’t very valuable – yet new furniture can be very expensive.

 

Hence, when you add up the replacement value of your furniture, electrical goods, books and clothes, you’ll find that it is several times that of the cost of shipping your container.

 

How do you find a shipping company? Ask around or look in yellow pages for specialists in international residential shipping. Generally, try to avoid companies specialising in office moving because they don’t have the expertise in packing odd shaped home furniture and are likely to charge you more. Remember though the golden rule: shop around as prices can vary a lot.

 

Once your container arrives in Montréal it’s more than likely that Customs will inspect it. Montréal port authorities like to go through residential containers. The cost of the inspection will probably be around $600 but could be as much as $2000 so make sure you budget for the worst.

 

After the customs inspection you will need to go to the SAQ* to declare your alcohol. Unopened spirits bottles are NOT taxable. Open all of your spirits bottles before putting them in the container and empty out an inch. This will save you around $7 a bottle. Wine costs around $6 a bottle. For the SAQ you will need:

- a copy of your manifest (supplied by your Canadian Removals Company)

- your Permanent Resident or Temporary Work Permit card

- your B4 form you received from customs when you landed

- a copy of your goods to follow list

 

Once you’ve been to the SAQ you need to telephone Canada customs* for a meeting, and go down to the customs hall just before the alloted time. At this point, they will take your well prepared goods to follow list and determine how much extra you have to pay for your alcohol. You will need:

- a copy of your manifest

- your Permanent Resident or Temporary Work Permit card

- your B4 form you received from customs when you landed

- a copy of your goods to follow list

 

Apparently the British are very good at preparing goods to follow lists – this is effectively just a list of what’s in your boxes, on a high level, and the approximate value. For your spirits it’s worthwhile noting them individually as Canada Customs will ask what they are  and what their strength is in order to charge you appropriately.

 

Once finished, Canada Customs will give you a stamped copy of your manifest and you take this to your removals company who can then organise your move. If your container has been examined, ask your removals company to double check that it has been blocked before they move it. Blocking is placing wood barriers in the container to stop your belongings from shifting (and breaking) during transit.

 

It’s worthwhile double checking with the company you contracted with in your original country and the one in Canada to make sure that the Canadian end will respect the terms of the contract you have. We were surprised to discover that our Canadian removals company would not rebuild the furniture that the Belgians dismantled. After a lot of wasted time the Belgian company agreed to pay to have everything put back together, but it’s a lot of messing around when all you really want is to have your boxes unpacked!

 

 

Addresses:

*SAQ

7500 TELLIER ST.

MONTREAL, QC.

H1N 3W5

TEL: 514-254-2020

Open: 8.30am until 4pm

 

*Canada Customs

400 PLACE D’YOUVILLE

OLD MONTREAL, QC

(CROSS STREET: MC GILL)

H2Y 2C2

TEL: 514-350-6142