There was an arrest this week in connection with attacks on a bar in Verdun in June and July this year. The suspect is 14 years old, and two other 14‑year‑olds had previously been arrested over the same incidents.
People who shot at a restaurant on de la Montagne several times in August were also arrested. At least these two are not described as minors.
Montreal, which already devotes 11% of its budget to policing, is being asked by the police brotherhood to increase funding to the SPVM in the 2025 budget. The amount already being paid for police here has been criticized.
Don’t worry, Plante promised a big, big conversation about it. I’m sure the city won’t just increase the police budget again. /s
After a man died of exposure on Tuesday, lying on a sidewalk in Hochelaga‑Maisonneuve, La Presse has a dossier on the rising numbers of deaths here among the homeless, including an inquiry into how the homeless die and a short list of individuals and how they met their ends.
Access to French classes has been reduced all over Quebec, and is now happening here in Montreal, all while the Quebec government insists newcomers must learn French quickly.
The Rover published a first-person account.
This was reported on reddit Wednesday: a man was walking along Ste‑Catherine, punching random women in the face. A suspect has been arrested.
Countdown till someone denounces the BBC’s headline description of the Véloroute Gourmande as Canada’s delectable 235km food trail because the Véloroute is only in Quebec.
also, boo to the BBC for “Montréal”
And Québec! And Café! And Véloroute!
The horror! 🙂
We’ve been through this before.
I read “Montréal” as pronounced in French. Perfectly fine in names like Journal de Montréal or Université de Montréal, but I don’t know anyone who, while speaking English, determinedly pronounces “Montreal” as in French. (Does anyone?) So my eye always snags on that, and I detect people trying to be politically correct by indicating that it is a French, and only French, place.
It tells me the writer is either paid by Quebec tourism people, who insist on it, or is trying to show they’re excessively correct. Both of those options make me doubt them as writers.
It’s Montreal for the same reason you don’t say “Paree” or Barthelona– the names are different in different languages.
That was a fun read and it makes me want to follow the Véloroute myself. Sold! All you need is time and a full platinum card.
Yes, I realize you have a well founded objection to that accent aigu in references to Montreal in English text. If it was done as you speculated in collabpration with Tourisme Québec, it’s certainly on brand. I just see it as a benign nod to local flavor for a foreign readership. But I guess that’s the difference between a drop-in like me and a born and raised citizen who detects a bit of anti English Fact cultural cleansing.
There are no accents in English. Look in Merriam-Webster’s or the Canadian Oxford, both of which have entries for Montreal and Quebec and neither of which even list Montréal or Québec as alternative spellings, though I see the MW website has recently made Montréal (but pronounced à la française) as one (letter to the editor coming up, though the canned reply will almost surely be “we’re descriptive, not prescriptive”).
@Kevin Exactly. In fact, a city’s name having a different form in foreign languages can be seen as a sign of respect, an acknowledgement of its status as an important place, a sign that it’s a major population, business and/or cultural centre. Wonder what the reaction would be if francophones were suddenly told they could refer to European cities only by their official names. Don’t expect we’d be seeing franco Quebecers making a sudden switch to Roma, Köln, London or Athínai anytime soon.
J’ai passé deux semaines en Florida l’hiver passé.
Les grandes villes de la California sont énormes.
Victoria est la capitale de la British Columbia.
Go for it, OQLF!
I used to work as a copy editor for a small publication and helped write their style guide. Place names had their own section in the guide and were sometimes contentious. I think my having lived in Montreal made me more conscious of this than the rest of the (mostly British) staff. It’s generally agreed as to which places maintain their accents in English (Bogotá, São Paulo, Türkiye) but most lose it or have completely different names (Mexico rather than México, Brazil rather than Brasil, Germany rather than Deutschland). This can be different from one publication to another though.
It’s likely that Montreal just isn’t important enough to have a spot in the BBC style guide, so the writer and editors erred on the side of caution in using the accent (and/or wanted to make the city look a little more exotic to their English readership). Most newsrooms have been gutted over the last couple decades and it’s unlikely many eyes had been assigned to what is more or less a fluff piece.
carswell, soyez pas méchant! Je vais les appeler en 10…9…8…7…
I always put the accent in Montréal, in either language. It’s cool. It’s a little symbol that we aren’t like the other big cities in Canada and a nod to the official language of the province.
Yes, but Montréal does not have one, much less two exclamation points in its name!
@walkerp
… what the CAQ considers to be the official language of the province, denying hundreds of years of multicultural history 🙂
Two people were found dead in a car in St‑Léonard early Thursday; deaths are being called suspicious but not yet given homicide numbers.
Wednesday, a mother and son were reported missing in that part of town, but whether these stories are linked hasn’t been revealed yet as of midmorning Thursday.
Thursday afternoon, CTV is hinting that it was indeed the man and his mother that were found.
A tanker truck burst into flame Wednesday night on Autoroute 20 near Angrignon.
The car belonging to landlord Emile B*namor was torched outside his house early Thursday. Radio‑Canada has the scoop; TVA only reported yet another vehicle arson.
(TVA caught up later with the public broadcaster.)
What a delightful development.
May that SOB forfeit his life for all the grief, pain and suffering he foisted on innocent people with his unvarnished greed.
Till Wednesday, this city hadn’t seen a temperature below 4°C since April 27 – 171 days, a record.
The homeless encampment along Notre‑Dame East in Hochelaga now counts seventy tents and keeps growing. The mayor won’t discuss evicting them, but also says the inhabitants can’t be left there over winter.
The city is buying 11 hectares of Technoparc land where 222 bird species hang out.
Bixi will be adding 1250 new analog bikes next year plus 100 new electric ones.
Always happy to see Bixi growing. I used to think that Bixi was headed for an all-electric fleet, I noticed a lot of griping on reddit this summer about the scarcity of non-electric bikes (which don’t come with a per-minute fee, the way the motorized ones do). I think a more expensive, electric-only Bixi service would be a bad idea, even if the experience of riding an electric Bixi is way better than the base model (which is extremely heavy and clunky, and can be a literal pain if your legs are too long).
Yes, I was wondering about electric bikes being branded as eco-friendly. Of course, they are compared to cars, but traditional bikes are unbeatable in that regard. I honestly don’t use Bixi a lot since the pandemic, but I still keep my annual subscription. I can spare the money and love the convenience, especially on weekends when we go on city walks. Sometimes it’s just fun to bike around a bit, even if it’s just to get back to the car after a long walk. I wish they would expand more to the west, though. The LaSalle area is still quite limited, except near the riverside.
I got my first membership last year after starting a new job that required me to start the day in one part of the city and finish in another. I still use my personal bike most of the time but Bixi makes my life much easier. I almost never use the electric Bixis, usually when there is no other option available or if I’m lugging around my trailer. It can be annoying to arrive to a station and only find blue Bixis, especially when I don’t have a helmet with me (I’ve had to dodge police stops I see in the distance a few times while riding an electric Bixi sans helmet). However, I know a few people, usually older in age, who use almost exclusively the electric bikes.
Teenagers and early 20somethings seem to prefer the electric Bixis too, for obvious reasons: they’re fun and they get you to where you’re going with minimal effort.
I know some people who get real snobby about the electric Bixis because they think they’re “cheating” or something like that. But they make cycling accessible to a lot of people who might never have used Bixi. I notice the same in NYC where the electric Citibikes are extremely popular and also in London, where the Bixi-based Cycle Hire did not expand to include electric bikes, and now seems much less well-used than the electric Lime and Forest that are littered all over the city.
There’s been an arrest in the fatal stabbing at Guy‑Concordia station on the weekend.
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