Poolgirl with Shunk, G String, and Niivi, Bâtiment 7, 1 November 2025

In December 2006, Ben’s De Luxe Delicatessen, a landmark restaurant serving Smoked Meat sandwiches and French Fries in an historic Art Deco building at the corner of Metcalfe and de Maisonneuve, permanently closed its doors.

Ben’s had been a Montreal staple for 98 years. Scenes from the classic 1965 National Film Board documentary Ladies Gentlemen…Mr. Leonard Cohen were filmed there. Celebrities like Liberace and Bette Midler had been welcomed as guests. Pierre Trudeau was a regular, as was Jacques Parizeau. It was a place where federalism and separatism fell away, where the two solitudes could put aside their differences and come together over a Cherry Coke.

The staff at Ben’s, many of whom had worked at the deli for over 50 years, joined the CSN union federation in 1995, and went on strike for what would be the last time in the summer of 2006, demanding higher wages and better working conditions. The strike drew on through autumn, and as winter fell, the restaurant’s owner and manager, Jean Kravitz, took the decision to sell the building to SIDEV Realty Corporation.

Following a number of efforts to declare it an historic edifice, Ben’s was demolished in November 2008, and the developer constructed a 16-storey hotel on the site. The restaurant in Le St-Martin Hotel Particulier has been closed for more than a decade.

A Musical Journey with Tawadros and Beethoven, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 5 November 2025

Strikes are effective only when they affect everyone equally. If nurses strike, access to healthcare is restricted for all. If teachers strike, education across the board is denied.

When public transportation employees strike, however, it is only those reliant upon public transportation who suffer. Moreover, those who take public transportation are not in any position to deliver on striking workers’ demands. Rather, through direct and indirect means, Opus cards and taxes, we are the ones who pay the costs for public transportation — costs that have been steadily increasing for services that are in rapid decline.

Metros are constantly delayed or go out of service altogether. Refuse and graffiti litter stations. And at most of them, security seems nonexistent. Violent crime in the Montreal metro system increased 80 per cent between 2022 and 2023. Three men this week were charged in the stabbing death of a 42-year-old victim at Place St. Henri. And a woman was allegedly assaulted inside a metro car in October.

STM Board Chairman Éric Alan Caldwell earlier this year lamented the lack of provincial funding for Montreal’s public transit authority, sentiments echoed by then-mayor Valérie Plante. The STM received $258 million less than expected in the CAQ’s most recent budget.

However, Quebec Transport Minister, Geneviève Guilbault, doesn’t rely upon — and consequently isn’t required to care about — Montreal’s public transportation system. If anything, Quebec City politicians privately rejoice when Montreal’s bus and metro-riding population is distressed.

Quebec conceives of Montreal as its economic engine. Perhaps that’s why the province is more intent upon building highways out of it than maintaining trains within it.

If the unions representing bus drivers and maintenance workers want their job actions to be effective, they should interfere with policymakers’ ability to do theirs.

Quatuor Molinari, Musique à voir, Fondation Guido Molinari, 2 November 2025

If there is one silver lining to the transit strike — or of an event like the wave of flight reductions at U.S. airports — it is that it necessarily enforces a slower pace upon modern life.

Traffic is the impeding power to the futurist ideal of speed, the unrestrained id. Cities are regulated by a circulatory rhythm that accelerates, slows down, and fluctuates at various intervals, depending upon the flows of traffic — on foot, in cars, in transit, in flight.

The transfer of one form of traffic into another upsets the metropolitan temporal equilibrium and imposes a different timetable upon urban space. Time thickens when we are forced to throttle our maximum velocity.

Angela Grauerholz, La femme 100 têtes, Blouin|Division, 8 November 2025

Labour unions so far have failed to anticipate or reorient themselves towards the real threat to workers: automation. It cannot be long before city bus and metro drivers will become entirely unnecessary, as driverless alternatives exceed human beings in efficiency and reliability.

Waymo, the autonomous driving technology company that Google developed, has doubled in size in the past year, and delivered more than 200,000 paid rides per week in 2025 in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, according to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

Autonomous taxis have other advantages. You don’t have to tip or make small talk with the driver. They are not prone to road rage and will never harass a passenger. And robots don’t go on strike. The degeneration of human behaviour is the biggest argument for the embrace of artificial intelligence.

David Altmejd, Agora, Galerie de l’UQAM, 6 November 2025 – 17 January 2026

It is possible that human beings, in our arrogance, will drastically reduce our own usefulness, if not strike ourselves out of existence. We have operated, for the past century at least, under the assumption that the future, benefited by the acceleration of technological advancement, would be indisputably better, and have been disappointed and despondent when it hasn’t. The question, however, is, for whom should the future improve?

If it is for human beings, then me might do well to recalibrate our expectations and ameliorate some of our manners, towards ourselves and one another. This could mean resisting the capitalist impulse to maximize exploitation; to accept less-than-peak profit and speed; to reallocate and share rather than colonize and contest our limited spaces.

The seemingly likelier and more deserving beneficiary of a better future, though, is non-human. Flora and fauna warrant superior living conditions far more than unionized workers of any occupation. Organic matter merits the right to prosperity in excess of the new class of corporate tech bros.

We will be judged by our treatment of wilder things.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Joseph Tawadros photographed by Gabriel Fournier for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.}