September brought ‘smart retail’ and municipal election campaigning
As announced in our September 10 issue, members of the City of Laval’s executive-committee signed a letter of intent stating the city’s interest in purchasing a Sainte-Rose golf course for the purpose of redeveloping it into a public park.
According to a release issued by the city, the undertaking was being done in conjunction with the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal (CMM), which is a regional government authority with a mandate to eventually conserve 30 per cent of the greater Montreal area’s overall territory for a network of regional parks.
The city turned a big-box parking lot into a three-week experiment in ‘smart’ retail it says could help bring life back to its main streets. The pop-up, branded ‘Lab Achetons plus ici’ (“Buy More Here”), was running until late September and put automation front and centre: self-scanning on smartphones, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) checkout to ring up a basket in one pass, and wired inventory systems.
In a meeting between Laval region teachers’ union reps and three Quebec Liberal Party MNAs, including two from Laval, the union contended there had been a noteworthy drop in the number of university students working to become teachers because of the CAQ government’s failure to address worsening workplace conditions in public education.
Senior officials with the Syndicat de l’enseignement de la région de Laval met at union headquarters in Pont-Viau with Quebec Liberal MNA Madwa-Nika Cadet, the PLQ’s official critic for education and employment, as well as Chomedey PLQ MNA Sona Lakhoyan Olivier and Mille-Îles PLQ MNA Virginie Dufour.
Unlike several mayoralty candidates who were seeking re-election in Quebec’s third-largest city over the past few decades, incumbent Laval mayor Stéphane Boyer was not dangling the prospect of flashy new projects – like Place Bell or the Aquatic Complex, as his predecessors did – when he was campaigning before the November 2 election day.
In a wide-ranging pre-election interview with The Laval News, Boyer said he had no major electoral promises to make, but was concentrating rather on smaller and more local things impacting the city’s neighbourhoods.
“The opposition always wants to do wedge politics, while telling people that they are forgotten in their neighbourhoods,” said Boyer, accusing the opposition of spreading disinformation.
A new municipal community centre in one of Laval’s more disadvantaged neighbourhoods was officially declared open by the city as well as community activists who had long urged Laval to move forward with the project.
The Centre communautaire Simonne-Monet-Chartrand is located on Notre-Dame Blvd. on the boundary that separates the city’s Chomedey and l’Abord-à-Plouffe neighbourhoods.
