Visiting St Sauveur....4 months at a time.

            Well so much for owning a Chalet in StSauveur & hoping to capitalize on the Summer months or the Winter Months, cause now you can't just stay a week,but rather 4 month only..........   Is it just me ,or are we being over regulated by ur friendly local govt's.

MONTREAL - A Laurentian municipality’s hard line on short-term rentals seems to have turned renting out a country house into a black-market activity.

The city administration of St. Sauveur in the Laurentians refuses to tolerate the practice of country-house owners charging guests for stays of less than four months and has sent out numerous letters warning owners whose homes are in residential areas that they are prohibited from running a business in a non-commercial location.

St. Sauveur town manager Jean Beaulieu told The Gazette he is identifying people through the many sites that advertise chalets. He estimates his office has sent out more than 100 letters and says St. Sauveur is doing this to protect the tranquillity of residential areas.

Asked what happens if they don’t comply with the letter? “We’ll take them to court.”

Critics of the get-tough approach on residential area businesses say the city is kneecapping homeowners who want to earn extra money and are ignoring the fact that many vacationers prefer chalets to hotel rooms.

They also question why the city would sacrifice the extra tourist dollars from additional visitors.

“Nobody rents for four months at a time,” said real estate agent Diane Bouthillette, who represents many chalet owners and says she has seen many properties being unloaded in St. Sauveur because of the law, as well as in Ste. Adèle, which a few years ago decided to take a similar hard line.

Beaulieu says he has seen a rise in entrepreneurial activity among property owners. “It used to be that people would stay in their homes all year and lend their country house to a friend or occasionally rent it out. Now it’s the opposite.”

He says many homeowners spend just a couple of weeks a year in their chalet and then rent it out.

Beaulieu says that has led to greater activity in the residential areas. He heard of one incident of a bus pulling up to a private chalet and unloading an entire hockey team that he figures decided to save some money on a hotel by renting a private chalet.

The government has the law on its side. A 2009 court case found in favour of the municipal government, which had taken Chalet Saint-Sauveur to court for renting their five country houses for less than four months at a time in a residential zone.

While some owners have felt the chill, others still seem to be renting by taking themselves off the visible market and using word of mouth and sites that help them from having their properties identified.

That’s what one owner who asked to not be identified has done. He bought his home as an investment for $400,000 and has put $50,000 into renovating the dwelling. He charges $1,300 to $1,700 for a week’s stay and has been finding regular clients.

He’s located in another Laurentian municipality, but worries that this hard-line stance in St. Sauveur will come to his area.

He had been registered with the CITQ, the provincial body that classifies bed & breakfasts, hotels and other tourist accommodations, but has since decided to not renew his membership with them, saying it would be best to stay off their radar.

Beaulieu admits there will be people who will work under the table and knows he can’t catch everyone who is doing this. “If someone has a place in the woods and they’re not advertising, then we’re not going to know about it.”

Letters to chalet owners have also been coming from the CITQ. It has been asking owners that they make sure that they receive permission from their municipality before they set up their businesses. “Most of my clients have been contacted by Tourism Quebec,” said Jean-François Demers, owner of chaletsalouer.com, referring to the CITQ.

Demers charges chalet owners $100 a year for online advertising and says he has lost most of his customers in St. Sauveur. The irony is not lost on him that the sites that help owners offer summer weekends in their country places have also been offering up both the municipality and the province addresses for where they can send their letters.

Bouthillette, the real estate agent, thinks the city should show more flexibility. “Why can’t they make a special category, one for private owners? Why penalize everybody?”

Chaletsalouer’s Demers agrees and thinks about couples where one person has lost their job and needs the rental income from their country property.

For now, the unidentified chalet owner tries to stay off the radar. He tells his guests no music outside and recently refused potential clients that wanted his chalet for a wedding reception.

(ZENN) Zero Emmision No Noise----Well What Happened To Them ?

Zenn Zutomobiles made in Canada headquarters in Toronto ,were building ,(maybe they still are )  Little electric cars ,which would be great commuter type vehicles which use No Fuel.straight electric power only.....How Come We Can't Have them here ? Apparently they are legal here in BC ,but why not the rest of Canada ?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"So Where Is It" ????????                                  Cheers !! HF&RV

Rural Valcourt Quebec Mid 1930’s

The tireless inventor

  June 22, 1967

Born in 1907, Joseph-Armand Bombardier shows a genius for tinkering early in life. He's only 10-years-old when he takes a cigar box and a broken alarm clock and makes a working model of a tractor. As he gets older, Armand dreams of building a vehicle that can glide over snow — a fitting goal for a boy growing up in rural Valcourt, Que. At 15 Armand designs and builds his first snow vehicle which is basically a large sleigh powered by a Ford Model T engine with a wooden airplane propeller at the back.

He and his brother drive the noisy contraption through Valcourt before their father orders them to stop. Undeterred, Armand keeps working on his idea while he earns a living as an auto mechanic. His big breakthrough comes in the mid-1930s when he develops a drive system that will revolutionize travel in snow and swamp. In 1937 Armand sells 12 snowmobiles — named the B7 — and opens the company l'Auto-Neige Bombardier Limitée five years later.

 

 • Bombardier attended school at a seminary in Sherbrooke, Que. He was expected to enter the priesthood but convinced his parents he would make a better mechanic.
•On Aug. 7, 1929 he married Yvonne Labrecque, with whom he had six children.
•The death of his son Yvon in the mid-1930s further motivated J. Armand Bombardier to complete his snowmobile invention. The young boy died of an appendicitis attack when a snowstorm prevented getting him to a hospital.

•Adalbert Landry and Antoine Morisset of Quebec's Gaspé region made a rudimentary snow vehicle in the mid-1920s. They converted an automobile by putting skis in the front and a caterpillar belt over the double rear wheels. In 1924 they travelled nearly 600 kilometres to show off their vehicle at a Montreal automobile show.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Power Play $$$$$

                                  Regardless which Province , State, or Country you live in,we are always asked (or taken from is more like it) for more money,.it's always rising costs, higher taxes, or were giving money by the 100's of millions to other country's (that don't even like us....hahahaha) but I always get a laugh ,when banks or oil companies boast about record profits..Just like this Gazette story about HydroQuebec ,....making Billions in profit ,but we never see a decrease in cost ,nor an increase in better service >...Hmmmmm   I wonder whose pockets are being filled here: but it happens everywhere,like an organized game plan (more like an organized Crime Plan)

MONTREAL ­­ Hydro-Québec posted a record income of almost $3.04 billion from continuing operations in 2009 despite strong recessionary headwinds that included less revenue from industrial sales in Quebec and a higher Canadian dollar.

“This is an historic summit for the enterprise,” chief executive officer Thierry Vandal told a Montreal Board of Trade luncheon Thursday. “We are very proud of this result.”

Active risk management in the form of financial hedges for exchange rates, aluminum prices and energy prices helped offset a drop in industrial sales in Quebec and revenue from exports, Vandal said.

The hedges were put in place before the severe downturn in 2008 and “we harvested the fruits of that during the crises,” Vandal later told reporters.

Hedging added about $600 million to the utility’s bottom line.

Vandal’s speech to a receptive audience of business leaders provided financial details for Hydro-Québec’s 2009 fiscal year along with an outline of ongoing hydroelectric projects and various projects related to the development of electric vehicles.

With a strong grid – which will see $8-billion in improvements over the next five years - and low-cost hydroelectric power, Quebec is ideally suited to electric vehicles, Vandal said.

“In Quebec, it would now be seven times less expensive to run (vehicles) on electricity than on gas,” he said.

Vandal also used the occasion to clarify a couple of issues related to the utility’s recent out-of-province ventures.

Firstly, the cancellation of Hydro-Québec’s $3.2-billion offer for most of New Brunswick Power Corp.’s generating assets has no impact on the utility’s 2009-2013 strategic plan, he said.

The deal – which was initially proposed by New Brunswick Premier Shawn Graham and subsequently ran into stiff public opposition – came apart as Hydro-Québec was assessing NB Power’s assets during the due diligence process, Vandal said.

It “exposed conditions and costs that Hydro-Québec was not ready to assume,” he said. “Those elements were quite significant, unforeseen and we weren’t able to resolve the differences” with NB Power.

Vandal addressed a recent published account about the 26-year power deal between Hydro-Québec and Vermont in which an energy expert estimated that the U.S. state would pay only 4.5 cents per kilowatt hour for the power.

“That is incorrect information,” he said.

If the cost formula for the deal was implemented today, Vermont would pay between six and seven cents per kilowatt hour in 2012, when the juice starts flowing south. Rates are linked to market prices and will evolve during the term of the contract, Vandal said.

Hydro-Québec’s net income for 2009 was almost $3.04 billion, or $106 million lower than the $3.14 billion posted in 2008 because results for that year were inflated by gains from a price adjustment related to the 2006 sale of the utility’s Chilean assets.

Income from discontinued assets in 2008 totalled $129 million.

Revenue from 2009 electricity sales in Quebec increased by $104 million from 2008 to almost $10.55 billion, mainly because of rate hikes. Revenue from large industrial customers dropped in part because of lower aluminum prices. Special industrial rates are linked to aluminum prices.

Revenue from exports in 2009 totaled $1.51 billion, compared to $1.92 billion in 2008, mainly because of a drop in energy prices.

In 2009, energy exports accounted for 10 per cent of Hydro-Quebec’s sales but 22 per cent of its revenue. In 2008, a bumper year for energy exports, about 32 per cent of the utility’s revenues were from energy exports which then made up eight per cent of its sales.

Hydro-Québec paid its sole shareholder, the Quebec government, a dividend of almost $2.17 billion.

Income from continuing operations in 2008 was $3.012 billion, compared to $3.035 billion in 2009.

More to follow.

© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

           .......but it's for our own good you know.........hahahaha     and you see who the 'sole shareholder' is......the Quebec Govt'.........