In a deal to be announced just before the markets open tomorrow, Postmedia Network Inc., the owner of The Gazette, the National Post and other papers is buying Montreal’s Suburban newspaper for an undisclosed sum.

The Suburban is a weekly newspaper (with an online-only weekly magazine) with three editions for the three parts of the island, published by Michael Sochaczevski. No change to this is expected in the short term after the acquisition.

“We’re impressed with the quality of the Suburban newspaper and feel it’s a great fit for our company,” said one Postmedia executive who didn’t want to be named because the deal had not been announced yet. “Its angryphone, pro-Israel, anti-commie-leftist editorial line also creates great synergy with our other newspapers, particularly the National Post. And we’re looking to make (editor-in-chief) Beryl Wajsman a national columnist.”

The deal is expected to open the door to some synergies between the Suburban and The Gazette, including shared stories. The Suburban is also expected to add a business section with content from the Financial Post.

In an unusual move, the Canadiens and Tampa Bay Lightning have agreed to a player trade for next season even as the current one isn’t over yet. The team announced moments ago on Twitter that it has agreed to trade Scott Gomez for Steven Stamkos after the end of the season next week.

With both teams already eliminated from playoff contention, they’re quickly looking for the future. Montreal has just fired its general manager, and is looking for fresh new talent to fill its front office.

Enter Jonathan Yarite, who posted on his Canadiens fan blog that the team should look into trading the underperforming Gomez for a big high-scoring forward like Stamkos. Canadiens president Geoff Molson saw the post, and immediately ordered that the trade be negotiated.

“I wasn’t sure if they would go for it, to be honest,” Molson said. “But they jumped at the chance to get rid of Stamkos and the potential financial crisis he could represent a few years down the line.”

As a reward for suggesting the idea, Molson offered Yarite an assistant general manager job. Yarite immediately accepted, and is expected to start looking for other trade opportunities starting Monday.

Molson said he didn’t want to reveal the trade right away, to respect the NHL’s trade deadline. But he didn’t want to put Yarite into his job without explaining to everyone why.

The Stamkos-Gomez deal is technically unofficial until after the end of the season, “but both teams have agreed it’s a mutually-beneficial agreement,” Molson said with Yarite’s head nodding in agreement.

As Quebec television viewers are mourning the end of another season – and the beginning of summer programming – producers of dozens of TV shows here are beginning to panic about a problem that could put grind their productions to a halt: A lack of celebrities to invite as guests of the week.

The problem first began to surface last fall, as new TV shows and new specialty channels put a strain on the number of big-time stars who could find the time to appear on a show where they cook up some recipe or talk about their favourite websites. But it’s reaching a crisis point now because shooting for shows that air this fall – like Les Enfants de la télé – is about to start up again, while summer shows with quicker turnaround times are also looking for celebrity guests.

Among the shows that rely on celebrity invites are Les Enfants de la télé, En direct de l’univers, Le verdict, c’est votre opinion, La Liste, La Petite séduction, Prière de ne pas envoyer des fleurs, Kampaï, Pour le plaisir, Privé de sens, L’union fait la force, Fidèles au poste, Dieu merci!, Le Tricheur, Testé sur des humains, Ça finit bien la semaine, Duo, Bar Ouvert, Belle et bum, La une qui tue, Génial, Ça sent drôle, Fan club, Les Touilleurs, Voulez-vous danser?, Cuisinez comme Louis, Design V.I.P., Guide restos Voir, À table!, Cliquez and Recettes de chefs. And that doesn’t include interview/talk shows like Tout le monde en parle, On prend toujours un train, Les Grandes entrevues, Bazzo.tv, Deux filles le matin, Le Confident, Benezra reçoit and Un gars le soir, not to mention magazines like Châtelaine, Lou Lou, Elle Québec, 7 jours, La Semaine, Échos vedettes, Clin d’oeil, TV hebdo, Le lundi, and anyone else who might want to interview a celebrity.

“I’m really, really worried,” said a producer for a specialty network who didn’t want to be identified. “We’re having to scrape the bottom of the barrel of the Bottin des artistes. We’ve had Joël Legendre on three times in the past month. We’re at the point where we’re having a guest whose claim to fame is having appeared in a minor role in a couple of episodes of Les Parent.”

Big stars are booked solid for months. Véronique Cloutier (for whom 75% of her salary now comes from making guest appearances on other people’s shows) has every hour of free time accounted for over the next three and a half years. Even politician Denis Coderre is having to turn down requests, saying he thinks the Quebec television-viewing public has seen enough of his face.

Game shows that normally end their seasons with a “spécial artistes” like La Guerre des clans and Paquet voleur are considering dropping them because of a shortage of available personalities.

Some shows are trying to find creative solutions to the problem. Some are having their hosts appear as guests on each other’s shows. Some are having special concept episodes in which the host is his or her own guest. Some are synchronizing their shooting schedules so what few celebrities are available can do a bunch at a time like going through an assembly line. And some are even experimenting with non-celebrity invites, going instead with visual artists, second-rate newspaper columnists and TV producers and writers not named Fabienne Larouche.

One producer, who swore me to secrecy as he tearfully admitted this, said one person in his production meeting last week almost seriously suggested having an anglo as a guest.

Here’s hoping they can find a way to resolve this problem before all our precious celebrities are burned out for good.

Pete Marier

Less than a month after his contract with CHOM ended, Pete Marier has a new job. He’ll be Tarah Schwartz’s co-anchor weekends at 6 and 11:30pm on CFCF.

The formal announcement is going out tomorrow, but sources confirmed the decision on Saturday. Marier is expected to start some time over the coming weeks.

In addition to his anchor duties, Marier will be starting a cooking show, tentatively titled “Cooking with Petey-Pie”, in which the former radio DJ explains to the audience how to make his signature award-winning dishes. It will air at 1pm weekdays after the noon newscast.

Marier is said to be thrilled with the opportunity to shed his tough-guy radio personality and embrace his true identity as a serious but sympathetic journalist and gourmet cook.

An ingenious solution to the West Island traffic problem has been proposed by a member of François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec: Just build a highway big enough that they can’t complain about it anymore.

The proposed 76-lane expressway (40 lanes eastbound, 36 lanes westbound) would require destroying most of Westmount below Sherbrooke Street, as well as parts of LaSalle and a big chunk of Lachine, but Moe Vessidé says it would eliminate traffic congestion along Highways 20 and 720, including the busiest part of Quebec’s busiest highway interchange, the Turcot.

A cost hasn’t been confirmed, though Vessidé said it would probably be about the same as the cost of the Turcot refit. “And with the current plan, the problem isn’t going away. Why not eliminate it for good?”

Environmental and city heritage groups are expected to oppose the plan.

Concordia’s student union president is offering to shuttle students from Montreal to Quebec City for next week’s anti-tuition-hike protest using her own personal solid-gold Airbus A380 jumbo jet, the first time she has used the aircraft in the performance of her duties.

“I’d heard that a lot of students didn’t want to take an uncomfortable three-hour bus ride,” CSU president Lex Gill said over coffee at Starbucks. “So I arranged for Solidarity, my private A380, to be made available to bring as many of them as possible to this massive protest. It’s really important as many people as possible show up.”

Though the A380 can carry more than 800 passengers, Gill’s plane was configured in its most luxurious option, with only about 300 seats. She said her airplane maintenance team (not Aveos, thankfully) will be working round-the-clock to reconfigure the aircraft to carry more passengers.

Gill said she wasn’t sure yet how other students would make their way to Quebec City. Some may still have to travel by bus, while she said the CSU is considering chartering other aircraft for the trip there and back, or having her plane make two trips.

“No expense will be spared to make this happen,” she said. “I don’t care if I have to pay a million dollars out of my own pocket. I will make education accessible to rich and poor alike. I will make the government see that they can find the money elsewhere, and not take it out of our iPhone-filled hands.”

TSN Radio 990 has managed the kind of marketing coup we haven’t seen around these parts in a while. It has convinced Canadiens owner Geoff Molson to offer an audition for general manager of the Montreal Canadiens hockey club to the 990th caller to the radio station as of Monday morning.

Extra staff have been called in to handle the deluge of phone calls, though station management admit they’re not quite sure how long it will take to reach 990 callers.

The winner of the contest will get 15 minutes in a room with Molson to try to convince him that he or she would make the best general manager, conclude the most brilliant trades, pick out the most underrated draft pick and form a squad of players easily capable of winning a Stanley Cup next season.

It’s unclear at this point what the team is getting in return for Molson’s time. A hefty donation to charity is likely involved.

In addition to making an exception to a hiring freeze to allow 69 more jobs to be added at the Office québécois de la langue française to improve enforcement of Quebec’s language law, the Quebec government is making changes to its regulations to allow some front-line enforcement officers to be armed, according to a story in Le Devoir.

“The violence against our language police has to stop,” justice minister Jean-Marc Fournier said yesterday after the seventh death of a language police officer on the job. “Hopefully giving them access to firearms will make language criminals think twice before attacking one of our officers.”

Language-related violence has spiked since the Office said it would push to have stores with English brand names to add French descriptions to their signs.

“Our inspectors are afraid to go out because they fear for their safety,” said culture minister Christine St-Pierre. “We can’t allow this to continue.”

Under new legislation set to be introduced next month, OQLF inspectors would have a status similar to border guards and private security agents. They would be armed at all times when on patrol, but would not have police powers. They would not be able to arrest people, for example.

The opposition Parti Québécois told Le Devoir it supports the move, and that it should have happened years ago. Its justice critic also said the government should give the OQLF enough resources that it can send two officers on every inspection. “Nobody should be enforcing Quebec’s language laws alone,” he said.

If approved by the National Assembly, armed language cops could be on the streets by this fall.

CJAD News Time could soon be a thing of the past as the station, looking to cut costs ahead of its parent company’s acquisition by Bell Media, considers dumping the time zone and adopting Eastern Standard Time and Eastern Daylight Time, in line with its audience.

CJAD News Time was invented in 1985 by the station’s management. Nobody I spoke to was entirely sure who came up with the idea exactly, but it was originally a crazy marketing idea: CJAD News Time would ensure it was always ahead of the competition by being exactly 0.800 seconds ahead of everyone else. When the clock struck midnight, CJAD News Time would already be at 12:00:00.800. The idea gained traction because the difference in time was about the same as the lag time between when something was said in the studio and when it reached listeners’ radios at home. “So in a sense, CJAD News Time was more accurate than any other time,” said Guillaume “Gully” Bulle, a long-time technician who worked on CJAD’s transmission system for 20 years before his retirement last fall.

A few years after coming into effect, CJAD News Time was added to the official list of world time zones. (“We’re not sure who managed to do that,” Bulle said.) It was officially defined as CJADST/UTC -4:59:59.2 and CJADDT/UTC -3:59:59.2, until 1995 when a bureaucrat at the International Telecommunication Union pulled the item from its listing. No explanation was given.

Nevertheless, CJAD News Time has continued, being used in on-air newscasts, mostly for branding purposes. Most news readers at the station, I’m told, don’t know the difference and even use clocks set to Eastern Time thinking they’re the same.

And really, they are mostly the same. A 0.800-second difference might be annoying when timing something accurately, but otherwise it doesn’t really mean much. Technical changes in the way the CJAD studio operates has reduced the lag time between when something is said and when it airs, while the lag time is much longer when the station is listened to online.

The cost of keeping CJAD News Time isn’t extremely high, but it is very annoying to maintain, Bulle said. The beeps that air on the hour and half-hour marks are on CJAD time, which requires a computer with an altered clock to keep that 0.800-second advance in place. “Considering on-air hosts can’t even finish their segments before those beeps go off at the top of the hour, it seems kind of silly to spend so much effort on 0.8 seconds,” Bulle said.

A final decision is expected in the next month. It’s unclear if the “CJAD News Time” branding would continue to be used or if on-air staff would switch to referring to it as “Eastern Time” or just “the time”.