A young man accused of causing a fatal collision on the Turcot in June has been arrested. After the crash, Yasser Laroui is said to have fled the scene and left for Algeria, but returned to Canada not long ago.
Since 2022, Laroui has violated the Highway Code and municipal regulations 37 times, but he still had his licence.
CTV says in addition that Laroui was found with car theft tools on him, but the car he was driving wasn’t stolen and he has no criminal record.
Having promised Tuesday that he would wean the healthcare system off the private sector, Christian Dubé has quickly edited his words, saying he needs the private sector.
During the period question, he repeated “we want private, we want private.”
Poor translation but I find this image very amusing.
Both François Legault and Paul St‑Pierre Plamondon are warning of a possible influx of migrants following the U.S. election and Donald Trump’s promise to deport millions of people.
Batten the hatches! God forbid we’d have any sympathy for people in dire straits.
Hard to do when so many of we ourselves are in dire straits.
If there’s a bad take to be had Chris will find it.
A new study titled Signes vitaux sur les iniquités territoriales du Grand Montréal examines the uneven quality of services meted out to poorer people in poorer neighbourhoods. Poorer areas are also more exposed to climate risks as the planet heats up. The entire study is available on the website of the Fondation du Grand Montréal.
Two Indigenous people died of overdoses in the street on Saturday. No names or ages are given in this brief piece, but their deaths are part of an ongoing crisis in the homeless Indigenous population here.
Josée Legault has an op-ed about how the growing number of homeless evokes the Great Depression, yet politicians don’t provide solutions. But who does?
A man in his thirties was killed Tuesday evening when knocked down by a truck in a parking lot in Longue‑Pointe.
Not surprisingly, gangs are recruiting poor kids online with cash offers for criminal acts.
Forbes has a 48 hours in Montreal that mostly involves a stay in a cushy downtown hotel but also mentions an interesting food tour.
No local news is on the radar tonight and probably won’t be tomorrow.
My condolences to any American readers.
It’s not over yet!
Disappointed is all I can say
In 2016, Anil Dash wrote this piece and it still applies, but mostly to Americans. They’re the ones who have to organize and get to work now. We just get to look on in dismay.
Condolences? Odd to offer sympathy to a group that got what they wanted, both by popular vote and electoral college. You didn’t get what you wanted, but they got what they wanted; it’s you (and me) that needs condolences, not them. I guess you mean to say to condolences to Democrat readers.
Alas, Trump’s win is hardly a surprise. The Dem establishment idiotically refused to have a primary contest. Instead, to their woke brains it was more important to anoint a checkbox candidate. Despite her mere 30-something-% approval rating, her inability to win a single delegate 4 years ago, her lying, flip-flopping, etc., etc. A literal loser.
She got less of the black vote than Biden, she got less of the latino vote than Biden. Maybe the DNC will at last give up on the identity checkbox game, and allow an actual contest, to choose a candidate that can win something small before trying to win something big. But I’m not holding my breath.
I think this can still serve as a wake-up call to Canadians to get involved in anti-fascist action. It’s not like we’re not part of the same idiotic zeitgeist.
Great point, MarcG. We have our own authoritarian driven by (and using) Russian propaganda to deal with.
Chris, you don’t understand. My condolences were just as much for the people who voted for him.
If there’s the Dems have proved over the past 8 years, it’s that calling Trump a fascist doesn’t stop him (or his voters). He may be one, but the effort needs to go into proposing an alternative, not just opposing.
The leaders of the Democratic party are so inept that I have often wondered if they are actually working for the Republican party or are they just Administrators from The Good Place.
Well it’s going to be interesting to watch Gilead IRL
Kate, ah, I see. I guess that makes sense from your pov, if not from theirs.
MarcG, if you mean “antifa” style, more of that crap will just get even more normies to vote right wing.
Kevin, yeah I used to think that. But now I think it’s less that they are inept and more that their real values are not actually what you want them to be, or what they purport them to be. They are still the lesser of two evils, but god damn they suck.
CBC has a video report about a rooster rescued at Sault‑au‑Recollet cemetery and brought to the SPCA. Dark hints about candles and “mysterious objects” suggest somebody experimenting with ritual magic around Samhain, or possibly voodoo.
good try. but I personally don’t think it was an effective ritual at all. because the metropolitans are charged with modern (or postmodern to be accurate) atheist conventions, to which everybody act accordingly. those ancient supernatural elements just cannot find a foothold here, even if they try to summon it in eerie places like a cemetery.
but I believe this deed did splatter a little magical colors to this boredom of concrete and steel.
The above comment makes no sense at all and reads like it was written by a LLM bot that was trained on nothing but third-rate academic papers.
No, it’s the post of an occult practitioner trying to make us think that they aren’t out there, playing with dark magics. We know and we are watching.
Haha, sorry for my deviance. and a little more output from my badly tuned LLM:
I know real ‘occult’ stuff happening to my close family members, seen with my own eyes,heard with my own ears, collectively remembered with others. The locales, however, were limited to the frontier zones, where the wild nature and human world were still colliding with each other, and rules were menacingly ambiguous.
Another thing I still recall clearly is that nobody could have any fun when those stuff happened, even the ‘shamans’ good at their job (also recompensed with good human money) got well tormented.
Those memories are more like thrill movies to me now. Safe, nostalgic, and sometimes noteworthy. I know, from heart, real exorcists in this modern world seldom get invition to big cities.
I don’t practice santeria, I ain’t got no crystal ball
I use chatgpt to parse my memories
And bloviate them all
A truck turning from Park onto Bernard knocked down an 11‑year‑old kid Monday evening, and the kid has died. Global specifies it was a boy and CTV later reports it was a child from the Hasidic community.
So awful and sad.
It is.
This is awful. Second death on that corner in a few years, eh? How many more election cycles does Projet Montreal need to win in the borough or the city to finally improve pedestrian safety on major streets? Why is Parc Avenue treated like a highway from Pine to Jean-Talon?
A parents nightmare. My kid is the same age and likes to wear dark colours now that she’s older. Visibility was bad yesterday, not to mention it was extra dark the evening after daylight savings.
A driver not ready for full darkness, plus a kid dressed mostly in black – that’s a bad combination, you’re right.
We’ve discussed it before, but the new street lights really make visibility worse. They are brighter but concentrate their light more narrowly, which means more parts of the area are darker than before and the contrast between lit and dark areas is more intense.
And it was raining at 7:30 when the accident happened, so visiblity was even worse. It was a delivery truck, of course – in this area there are tons of them and they treat road laws pretty loosely, whether driving or parking on corners to load & unload or randomly double parking wherever.
One thing that would make a really big difference would be to normalize the lights – Mont-Royal is an extended light, Fairmount is advanced pedestrian, St V is nothing in particular, and Bernard is extended north/south turn for east-west drivers… if they were all advanced pedestrian or even bettter, scrambles, that would help a lot.
If the cops actually enforced road laws on delivery drivers that would help even more. There have been cops parked around the neighbourhood since Oct. 7 “to make their presence visible” as the one I asked explained. Parked right across from the butcher at Hutchison and Bernard, where there is almost always a delivery van or customer parked illegally, all day long, one after the other, and the cops don’t do a f*ing thing. No wonder delivery trucksact like they own the road.
@Joey you are absolutely right, the one video I watched with the Hatzoloh guy that was being interviewed mentioned this specifically. Our borough councillors have been aware of this complaint for years, and for all the work on traffic slowing with bulbout gardens and whatnot they seem utterly disinterested in dealing with this more obvious problem. It’s one of those ongoing local issues like how delivery trucks get away with doing whatever they want including idling, double parking, blocking sidewalks, etc.
With winter coming, the shortage of shelter places for the homeless is on the minds of those who operate them.
TVA also reports that a homeless camp is growing up around the Maison Benoît Labre in St‑Henri and that calls to 311 about homelessness and its problems are far more numerous now than before the Covid pandemic.
Just passed by Maison Benoît Labre and it’s covered in cops.
TVA reported a possible overdose in the camp, but that was posted Monday and it wasn’t clear from the story whether someone had died.
I’ll look out for reports on what’s happening Tuesday.
The bike path on the Jacques-Cartier bridge has been closed till further notice after the surface was made slippery by the application of a waterproofing agent yet no warning was given to cyclists using the path.
Where does that level of incompetence even come from?
In this case, the federal government.
Could be the same people who decided to close Pine Ave between at Penfield without providing any signage for those coming from the west. So if you’re driving along Penfield headed towards Parc, you’ll roll along until you get to the end and have to double back along Pine headed west – you can either turn down Peel and go to Sherbrooke (literally retracing your steps) or keep going and go over the mountain. A couple of signs at Penfield/Guy and Penfield/Peel could save a detour that might last an hour in traffic.
I saw that weird closure this morning from Parc. Did you hear about what’s going on? I thought maybe it was football until I saw the closures from teh other direction. Pins is another one that feels like it’s been under construction or closure for nearing a decade (no not the same worksite, deWolf, we know)
They’ve had the closure sign up on Parc for a few days (in advance, actually). It’s the eastbound route that leaves you dead-ended. Seems like construction again – not sure if it’s the roadway, the reservoir or the Vic site.
Concordia University has closed the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies for lack of funding.
Of all the times to pull the plug on a genocide and human rights institute…
I really wonder about Con-U’s decision making processes sometimes. They couldn’t find a single foundation in Canada with a bit of scrilla to keep this afloat?
I spoke to a couple of people recently who are currently students at Concordia and…budgetary restraints are being felt on a day-to-day basis, even down to the shuttle bus between the two campuses. I think Concordia’s days are numbered, to be honest. As someone who went there, I’m disappointed but that’s what it seems like.
It has to go. UQAM will pick up the pieces.
The shuttle bus has always been an issue. Back in the early 90s it was constantly breaking down, much like the Hall building’s escalators.
This has nothing to do with budget reasons and the gov raising fees for foreign students? rite?
One wonders what lies behind this bland explanation: “the academic orientations of Concordia researchers involved in the area of human rights have diverged from the work of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies.” Is it that faculty no longer want to commit their time and effort to the Institute? Or are there ideological issues involved? This particular organization may well have done good work (I have no idea), but at many universities “Institutes” and “Centres” for this and that are mostly shells for getting external funding, and when that dries up, their usefulness to the university function ceases, while the work of individual faculty members goes on.
The prof who was the remaining driving force here, Frank Chalk, is also up in years. I suspect that’s unstated but played a part.
Escalators: The escalators in the hall Building were purchased from a company that went bankrupt a year after they were installed, and so the availability of spare parts was an issue as of the 60’s.
Buses: The shuttle bus service was outsourced something like 15-20 years ago. The buses got better (they used to be school buses), and the service was ok. Also, STM transit out to Loyola has gotten faster over the years.
MIGS: “‘the academic orientations of Concordia researchers involved in the area of human rights have diverged from the work of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies.’ Is it that faculty no longer want to commit their time and effort to the Institute? Or are there ideological issues involved?”
Short answer, yes. The institute is (was) perceived as establishment and Zionist by the activist “left”. Concordia human rights studies leans very heavily into anti-colonial, “anti-Zionist”, anti-government, anti-authority, etc. But that faction couldn’t on their own kibosh something that brings the University good pr. I think the real reasons are institutional politics (*draaaamaaa*). Some years ago there was a kind of mini power struggle when Chalk retired from the institute, and a hostile takeover by the administration (as contrasted with the faculty) ensued. Basically, it is supposed to be a research institute, but it does not produce much research, and does not fund students much (if at all). It seems to have become more of a vector for schmoozing and publicity than anything to do with academic output. I think the knives have been out for it for quite some time. The money is probably not much of an issue, except in that it provides a justification for elimination.
Thanks, bob. I was wondering when someone would mention the fairly well-known internal political side of this. Most academic institutions are incredibly political so anytime anythign like this happens that should be the first thoguht that crosses anyone’s mind.
Eric Andrew-Gee of the Globe and Mail investigates how Montreal’s fabled nightlife lost its spark. He gets some quotes from reputable people, but some of the changes he touches on aren’t new. The red light district was closed down by Jean Drapeau and Pax Plante in the 1950s, and Rockhead’s Paradise closed in 1977. The city is always in evolution.
You can’t talk about a decline in nightlife without acknowledging it’s a global phenomenon. The same thing is happening in many cities post-pandemic. CityLab has an article about how the same thing is happening in London, Berlin, New York and many other places:
The Globe piece implies that what’s happened to the Latin Quarter is emblematic of what’s happening all over the city, but the Latin Quarter has been in decline since well before the pandemic. Saint-Sulpice closed in 2019, just for example. Nightlife has shifted to other areas. Mont-Royal and St-Denis seems even busier than before the pandemic, and there’s a lot more happening in the southwest which was never a nightlife destination in the past, except for underground punk shows.
There’s also this:
“Figures released in September by the point-of-sale company Square show that a lower share of bar and restaurant spending in Montreal happens at night than in any other big Canadian city, including Vancouver, Calgary and – gasp – Toronto.”
I’d be interested to know more about this data because Square doesn’t seem nearly as widespread in Montreal as in other places, and most of the places that use it seem to be cafés and retail stores, not bars and restaurants.
I was also struck by this recent Guardian piece on the decline of nightlife in Amsterdam. Its situation sounds familiar: “Meanwhile an expensive city can have issues with complaining neighbours, said Ariza Gallego, whose club was previously based at an old ship wharf. “In the final stages at our old location, we got a lot of complaints [over] the light we produce,” he said. “There is not [always] a fair interaction between the businesses, the cultural institutions and the neighbourhood.” “
Seems like the triple whammy of cannabis legalization (plus the huge increase in good quality dep booze) , COVID shutdowns, and inflation has inspired a lot of people to chill with friends and some weed in the park rather than sit in a bar.
Montreal was a lot more gritty & fun in the 80s and 90s, but then again we were all broke, too.
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