WTF: the rest of the week in news

A train pulls into Vendôme station, around which traffic will likely forever suck, photo via Flickr

Dear readers who live in or commute to NDG: sorry, but your traffic nightmare is not about to end anytime soon, and Vendôme station, the most direct route to the MUHC, is about to suck even more.

Turns out a single tunnel linking the metro station to the future megahospital won’t cut it, according to Gazette transportation reporter Andy Riga. Considering 12,000 people are expected to access the MUHC each day, we’re surprised it took the city and the STM this long to come to this conclusion. And because this is Montreal, where civil engineering is essentially mandated to be done ass-backwards, there’ll be a second tunnel eventually, once the government rolls up its loose change — but it won’t be before the hospital opens in 2015.

In non-transit-related news, the Supreme Court of Canada today ruled that common-law couples who split up in Quebec don’t have the same rights as married couples who do the same. So if you’re among the 31.5 per cent of couples here who live in de facto marriages and, you know, things at home start to sour, you better get married if you don’t want to end up like “Lola,” whom, after a long court battle, the apparently super-wealthy “Eric” does not have to support.

In an editorial published today, the Gazette advances an intriguing idea for Our Favourite Commission: give the thing a mandate that actually speaks to the breadth of this province’s corruption. That way, a guy like Jean Fortier, Frank Zampino’s predecessor as executive committee chairman, could tell the inquiry about the many and sundry attempts made to corrupt him on all fronts — real estate, zoning, you name it. So, yeah, give this man a forum. And give us a front-row seat.

But hey, if you think things here are bad, look who gets to keep his job (for now, anyway) in Toronto. ■