A Bit More Detail

• The Map Room Blog links to some old maps of Montréal.


• Major English-language newspapers in Montréal, including the Montreal Gazette, are no longer being distributed to Québec City clients. CBC reports.


• Radio-Canada employees' union is concerned over cost overruns in the construction of a new headquarters for the French-language chain. CTV NEws reports.


• La Presse notes how the to-be-demolished Champlain Bridge is a home for, among others, falcons.


• The Bibliothèque Saint-Sulpice, after the latest delay, will have been closed for nearly two decades. La Presse reports.


• The Montreal Children's Library is celebrating its 90th anniversary with a fundraiser. CBC reports.


• CBC Montreal looks at how, even without a stadium, legendary mayor Jean Drapeau brought major league baseball to his city.


• The anti-gentrification University of the Streets group has some interesting ideas. CBC reports.


• The city government of Montréal is looking into the issue of the high retail vacancy rates in parts of the city. CBC reports.


• At CBC Montreal, Ontario-born Jessica Brown writes about her struggles with employment in her adopted city.

Incredible as it may seem, there was a time in recent memory when cutting-edge urban planning could include replacing a bustling residential neighbourhood with parking lots. If the CBC and two private developers have their way, a notorious result of that kind of raze-and-pave mentality in Montreal’s east end may be partly reversed.

The public broadcaster has accepted two purchase-and-development offers for its large and desolate Maison Radio-Canada property, which was expropriated in the 1950s from a working-class community of 5,000 people. The deals are the first step in a plan to build a new headquarters for French-language broadcasting on the site’s eastern edge, and a 280,000-square-metre mixed-use development on the rest of what used to be the old francophone neighbourhood of Faubourg à m’lasse.

“We’re definitely going to try to make up for what was done,” says Vincent Chiara, whose Groupe Mach plans to build about 20 silvery buildings of varying heights on the western portion of the site, including condos, social housing and retail and office space. Chiara also said he would restore some of the road network that criss-crossed the vanished Faubourg, and convert the 24-storey Radio-Canada tower into loft-type offices.

The new broadcast centre would be built by a consortium led by Montreal-based Broccolini, with Béïque Legault Thuot Architectes of Montreal and Quadrangle, a Toronto design firm that developed CHUM/MuchMusic’s pioneering broadcast spaces. Computer-generated illustrations and a video of the concept show a luminous, mainly glass-walled complex of buildings linked by a four-storey atrium. Elevated walkways will pass through the wooden-beamed atrium, which will be visible from offices and multiplatform studios, and will have the same versatility as the atrium at the CBC’s English-language HQ in Toronto. The aim, CBC president and chief executive officer Hubert T. Lacroix says, is to create a more compact, transparent and publicly accessible HQ than the old tower, where 80 per cent of the usable space was underground.

CBC/Radio Canada has submitted a position paper to the federal government proposing the public broadcaster move to an ad-free model, similar to the one used to pay for the BBC in the United Kingdom, at a cost of about $400 million in additional funding.

"We are at a critical juncture in our evolution, continuing to operate under a business model and cultural policy framework that is profoundly broken," said the CBC's document, released on Monday afternoon. "At the same time, other nations are moving their cultural agendas forward successfully — and reaping the benefits of strong, stable, well-funded public broadcasters."

The additional money CBC is asking for would largely be "replacement funding" if the media organization eliminates advertising. The proposal requests $318 million to replace advertising revenue: $253 million in lost ad sales plus $105 million to "produce and procure additional Canadian content" to fill the programming gaps in their absence. CBC is also asking for $100 million in "additional funding of new investments to face consumer and technology disruption."

However, the proposal notes that removing ads will also result in savings of $40 million in the cost of selling advertising.

Total government funding for CBC would equal an investment of $46 per Canadian every year — up from the current $34 per Canadian it currently receives, the document says.

Two-thirds of the ad revenue given up by the CBC, the proposal argues, "would migrate to other Canadian media, including private TV and digital, for a net gain to them of $158M."

Conservative leadership candidate Maxime Bernier is promising to overhaul CBC/Radio-Canada – an institution he says “seems frozen in time” — by cutting hundreds of millions in funding, streamlining its mandate and getting it out of the advertising market.

Bernier says CBC/Radio-Canada “should stop doing three-quarters of what it still does” that private broadcasters are already doing, including running game shows and cooking programs, sports programming, music streaming and a website devoted to opinion journalism.

It also needs to stop “unfairly” competing with struggling private media in a shrinking advertising market, he says.

With a media landscape that now includes hundreds of channels and millions of sources of information and culture, “CBC/Radio-Canada seems frozen in time,” he said.

“It tries to occupy every niche, even though it doesn’t have and will never have the means to do so, with the result being lower-quality programming,” Bernier told reporters.

“With my proposal, CBC/Radio-Canada will stop competing unfairly with private media, and will be more respectful of the taxpayers that help fund it. It will also become a more relevant public institution, helping to reinforce our culture and our national identity.”

Tragically Hip fans were dumbfounded by the speed at which scalpers grabbed concert tickets to the band’s final tour, with resale prices shooting up to thousands of dollars after a fan club pre-sale launched Monday morning.

In the band’s hometown of Kingston, the cost of seeing the Hip perform one last time ranged from $799 to $5,999 — per ticket — on the site atbtickets.com. Many of the tickets made their way to the site StubHub, where Kingston ticket prices ranged from $720 to $5,000.

On Ticketmaster, the tickets were priced between $60 and $126.

Some fans questioned how the tickets — which required buyers to use a code to complete a purchase — could turn up for resale within minutes. Others lamented that concerts that were raising money for charity were being exploited by scalpers.

“Did ANYONE get Tragically Hip presale tickets? Were there like, 10 released???” asked Twitter user Donna D. shortly after tickets disappeared.

“This is insane. Scalpers win, fans LOSE.”

Fans frustrated by sky-high ticket prices will be happy to know that the CBC wants to broadcast the Tragically Hip’s final show — but the deal isn’t done yet.

“We are interested in airing the Tragically Hip’s final show and are having conversations with the band to see if we can make it happen,” said CBC communications adviser Emma Bédard.

Ontario’s attorney general said Tuesday she’s prepared to try to find out why so many Tragically Hip fans couldn’t buy tickets for the group’s summer concerts — unless they wanted to pay many times face value on resale sites.

Attorney General Madeleine Meilleur, sympathetic with fans who would have to pay such tremendous prices to see the band, said the ministry needs to look at resale prices and insists she wants to fix the situation.

A number of fans outraged by the scarcity of tickets to the hotly anticipated concert series — announced at the same time the band said lead singer Gordon Downie had incurable brain cancer — urged the public broadcaster to help make the band’s farewell tour part of the public domain.

Hi everyone. Thanks for coming out and listening. My name is Kathryn Borel. In December of 2014, I pressed sexual assault charges against Jian Ghomeshi. As you know, Mr. Ghomeshi initially denied all the charges that were brought against him. But today, as you just heard, Jian Ghomeshi admitted wrongdoing and apologized to me.

It’s unfortunate, but maybe not surprising, that he chose not to say much about what exactly he was apologizing for. I’m going to provide those details for you now.

Every day, over the course of a three-year period, Mr. Ghomeshi made it clear to me that he could do what he wanted to me and my body. He made it clear that he could humiliate me repeatedly and walk away with impunity. There are at least three documented incidents of physical touching. This includes the one charge he just apologized for, when he came up behind me while I was standing near my desk, put his hands on my hips, and rammed his pelvis against my backside over and over, simulating sexual intercourse. Throughout the time that I worked with him, he framed his actions with near daily verbal assaults and emotional manipulations. These inferences felt like threats, or declarations like I deserved to have happening to me what was happening to me. It became very difficult for me to trust what I was feeling.

Up until recently, I didn’t even internalize that what he was doing to my body was sexual assault. Because when I went to the CBC for help, what I received in return was a directive that yes, he could do this, and yes, it was my job to let him. The relentless message to me, from my celebrity boss and the national institution we worked for were that his whims were more important than my humanity or my dignity. So I came to accept this. I came to believe it was his right. But when I spoke to the police at the end of 2014, and detailed my experiences with Mr. Ghomeshi, they confirmed to me what he did to me was, in fact, sexual assault.

And that’s what Jian Ghomeshi just apologized for: the crime of sexual assault. This is the story of a man who had immense power over me and my livelihood, admitting that he chronically abused his power and violated me in ways that violate the law. Mr. Ghomeshi’s constant workplace abuse of me and my many colleagues and friends has since been corroborated by multiple sources, a CBC fifth estate documentary, and a third-party investigation.

In a perfect world, people who commit sexual assault would be convicted for their crimes. Jian Ghomeshi is guilty of having done the things that I’ve outlined today. So when it was presented to me that the defence would be offering us an apology, I was prepared to forego the trial. It seemed like the clearest path to the truth. A trial would have maintained his lie, the lie that he was not guilty, and it would have further subjected me to the very same pattern of abuse that I am currently trying to stop.

Jian Ghomeshi has apologized, but only to me. There are 20 other women who have come forward to the media and made serious allegations about his violent behavior. Women who have come forward to say that he punched, and choked, and smothered and silenced them. There is no way that I would have come forward if it weren’t for their courage. And yet Mr. Ghomeshi hasn’t met any of their allegations head on, as he vowed to do in his Facebook post of 2014. He hasn’t taken the stand on any charge. All he has said about his other accusers is that they’re all lying and that he’s not guilty. And remember: that’s what he said about me.

I think we all want this to be over. But it won’t be until he admits to everything that he’s done. Thank you.

Disgraced former radio host Jian Ghomeshi today pleaded not guilty in a Toronto courtroom to all five charges against him.

The former host of CBC Radio's cultural affairs show q is facing five charges, including four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by choking.

The 48-year-old did not speak with reporters as he walked into the downtown courthouse, where he was arraigned during a court appearance.

Ghomeshi, wearing a dark suit and tie, said only "not guilty" when asked how he pleaded. He had to repeat that because he wasn't speaking into a microphone.

On the same day Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau pledged to reverse $115 million worth of cuts to the CBC, the national broadcaster unveiled its plan to sell off all of its buildings.

The Canadian Media Guild said CBC announced at a staff town hall today that it will be “selling all its property across the country, including major production facilities in Montreal and Toronto.”

Ian Morrison, spokesperson for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, had not yet heard about the announcement when reached by Torstar News Service Tuesday evening.

“It’s news to me,” he said, adding the broadcaster’s decision to sell real estate assets was akin to “burning the furniture to heat the home.”

Not only will this saddle the CBC with the need to pay rent forever, Morrison added, but the timing couldn’t be worse.

“This is a period of time when a government only makes caretaker decisions,” Morrison said. “It is widely understood during a general election you don’t do controversial things.”