Charlie Billions says he’d renew the notwithstanding clause that protects Bill 96 from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Obviously it’s in Milliard’s interest to demonstrate that the PLQ is not on the side of the anglos.
And Mark Carney assured Christine Fréchette on Friday that he won’t meddle with the clause.
What’s the point of a charter of rights with a get‑out clause that basically says “unless we really want to, then we will”?
It’s the 50th anniversary of Robert Charlebois’ classic Je reviendrai à Montréal, so his son has recorded a new version with a video featuring historic views of the Canadiens in their glory years. The video.
City blue collar workers are marking the last day of their three‑day strike with a protest in front of City Hall on Friday.
Weekend notes from CityCrunch, Le Devoir, Journal de Montréal, La Presse, CultMTL, the Gazette.
Some weather notes.
Mile End Kicks, a movie about the neighbourhood back around 2011 when it was felt to be a hotbed of new pop music and coolness, opens on Friday. Wikipedia says the working title was Anglophone. Descriptions in Le Devoir and La Presse.
Tangentially relevant, the Gazette looks at the disappearance of affordable artist studios, the factor which is probably most responsible for the decline of this city as a creative hub.
Pretty harsh that a film set in a Montreal music scene couldn’t pick a local song for the trailer.
Reminds me a bit of Guillaume Morissette’s fine novel New Tab (Véhicule, 2014), set in roughly the same place and time, although its (mostly anglophone) characters would have laughed cynically at the supposed life lesson of the movie, which according to a critics cited in Wikipedia, is about “learning to embrace our love, our anger, and our talent,” thanks to the magic of the neighbourhood.
Makes me think about that musician in Mile End who was bludgeoned to death by his bandmate with a bass guitar. It wasn’t all wine and roses.
Artists ate the shock troops of gentrification. People dont have loft parties because they dont like ballrooms.
Cheap studio space in a neighbourhood the cops don’t care about too much is all that is required. A couple of dive bars and a good diner helps. The parasite class like the Kornbluths and Shiller-Lavys of the world will inevitably follow when the desirable/cool boundary approaches, next come the yuppies and chain boutiques.
*artists are
Lol
I thought you were supposed to eat the rich.
no no no Janet, eat the rich is wrong!
God knows what they are filled with
OTOH, compost the rich…grows tasty strawberries and fragrant tomatoes…
If anyone’s looking for a way to support local music, CKUT 90.3FM is currently running their yearly funding drive.
It looks like more deer will have to be culled in parks in and near Montreal. Deer are vectors for ticks, besides damaging the greenery in enclaved spaces like Longueuil’s Michel‑Chartrand park. A specific species of mouse (not the house mouse) is also blamed for carrying Lyme disease in the area.
The Centre des mémoires montréalaises has acquired a collection of memorabilia from Wings Noodles, which closed at the end of last year. It includes 1700 objects spanning 130 years of business in Chinatown. La Presse has a few images.
The mayor has announced a cut of 60% in the cost of a terrasse permit, fulfilling a promise made during her election campaign.
Great initiative, although it should be noted that it only applies to Ville-Marie borough. Other boroughs like the Plateau and Verdun already have reduced rates for terrasses.
Incidentally, I love that in Montreal it’s pretty much unquestioned that terrasses are a public good. In New York, the whole “sidewalk shed” debate revealed how many people there see them as a nuisance. And in many other cities (ahem, Vancouver and Toronto), the regulations for street terrasses are extremely restrictive.
I have no idea what the right price for a terrasse permit is though I do think 1400 for the entire season on Ste-Catherine is a real steal (while 11k seems like a lot).
I’d understood that the terrasse fee was supposed to offset the parking fees lost for the space, but I suppose they can be flexible about what that amount is.
Renting ground level retail space on St Catherine St seems to be like $100-$200 per square foot per month. Obviously that would include winter, and this is high season, but indoors is more secure, so let’s just say that’s a vague range of what the market rate is. So $1,400 for an entire season should get you about space for one chair, and $11,000 gets you a two-top without the chairs.
Terasses are great, and it’s good to use this space to generate both revenue and happiness when it’s busier and then reclaim most of it the rest of the year. But I’m not sure if all that lost opportunity cost should flow to the restaurant operators rather than the public.
The cost of parking vignettes, or even pay parking for that matter, doesn’t even come close to the total cost of maintaining the road space and the negative externalities of dedicating so much public space to private vehicle storage. So I don’t think terrasses should be judged entirely on their economic benefits either. It’s what provides the most social good — and in this case, having lively streets is worth the (temporary, seasonal) tradeoff.
That said I’m not saying it should be a free-for-all. There are already a ton of regulations around the built form and opening hours of terrasses.
@Nicholas but it’s not ‘ground level retail space’ – it’s parking spots. You couldn’t otherwise establish a business in a parking space the way you could in a building. IMO the fairest method would fix the permit cost at a rate more or less equivalent to the foregone revenue – a very quick estimate has this at about $2400 per month. Obviously $11K for the season is a lot closer to the foregone revenue than $1400.
Anyway, isn’t it funny how all these cranky resto owners complain ceaselessly when the city removes parking spaces but have no issue taking them over so they can expand their footprint. I think we tend to think of terraces as just responding to our desire to be outside after another hellish winter, but from a restaurant’s perspective, adding terrace seating can significantly increase the potential customer base and lead to major bumps in revenue. Somehow an implicit ~$10K subsidy to every restaurant that builds a terrace doesn’t make a lot of sense…
“You couldn’t otherwise establish a business in a parking space the way you could in a building.” Every city that actually easily allows food carts says that’s wrong.
@Nicholas Sure, but food carts are usually charged licensing fees and not rent for the space they occupy (especially if they’re allowed to move around). And those fees are pretty low, especially compared to commercial rents. In Vancouver it’s around $1,500 for the year. Similar in LA (but in US dollars).
I was actually going to write that food carts/trucks would be a notable exception, but my editor struck it.
As the playoffs approach, voices of four Canadiens players have been recorded to announce Bonaventure and Lucien‑L’Allier metro stations and buses may return to flashing “Go Habs Go!”
Hah! I thought the system was malfunctioning and this was the operator doing an impromptu announcement. The fact that he had a very strong English accent should have been a giveaway. I’m probably not the only one though.
Salim Touaibi, who killed Meriem Boundaoui in 2021, was sentenced on Thursday to minimum 25 years in prison.
A few more details about the circumstances are mentioned in this piece than we’ve seen before: Touaibi is also guilty of four counts of attempted murder, including a person who has lingering issues from the injury, and was on parole at the time it happened.
The hammer attack on a woman on Tuesday morning, allegedly by her own father, is being called an attempted honour killing because she was planning to marry a man who is not a Muslim.
Medhat Darwish is shown in several dramatic photos because he’s a martial arts expert, wearing a black gi, although his style is not specified. Chasing him down via Facebook, I find a page for Centre Samourai Koryukan, with the arresting headline “Controlling Aggression Without Inflicting Harm is the Art of Peace”.
This right here is why Montreal City Weblog is by far my favourite source of news about the city.
Cheers, Joey.
People like to say big cities have big murder rates, but if Montreal had St Anne’s murder rate for this month there would be 350 murders in Montreal this month. (This is a jab at stories about a small town murder that say small towns are safer unlike the big city, when the average murder rate is something like 0.1 per year, and so you need to look over a bigger time frame or bigger geography to compare numbers sensibly. I know this is not a great measure.)
Also it is weird these are called honour killings and not dishonour killings: the murderer thinks the woman (it’s always a woman) committed dishonour on the family and society thinks the murderer is dishonourable.
Nicholas, were there murders in Ste‑Anne this month?
I have known Medhat for about 15 years now. I trained at his school for roughly two years, within his lineage. He was teaching under an official license from Japan, representing a legitimate lineage in both Daito-ryu Aiki-jujutsu and Niten Ichi-ryu. He was praised by hundreds of practitioners.
Having practiced different martial arts and met many people throughout my life, I can say without hesitation that he has been one of the most inspiring figures to me over these past 15 years.
We attended concert together. We spent long nights talking about art and life, philosophy, family and spirits. He never said ANYTHING about religion for 15 years to me.
I saw him train people with mental disabilities. I saw him work with elderly individuals. I saw him support someone going through cancer remission. I saw him teach children with a genuinely open heart.
And I can tell you this: the people I speak with—those who have spent even more time under his guidance—are completely stunned by this situation.
I understand the reactions and the comments I’m seeing. I share some of the frustration, especially regarding how this is being framed in certain ways. But I still struggle to fully process the information.
I am not questioning that something serious has happened, nor the emerging understanding of what may have occurred. But like many who know him, my mind simply cannot reconcile how a person with such a big heart, such calmness, gentleness, intelligence, openness, and deep kindness could have committed something like this. Right now, it feels impossible for me to make sense of it. The only explanation my mind can even begin to grasp is that of an extreme psychotic episode.
We all know the victim—his daughter—and his wife. My thoughts are with them, and I sincerely wish them strength and healing through this incredibly difficult time.
I speak for myself, of course. But I also know that these words reflect what many others are feeling—people who have been positively impacted by Medhat Darwish over the past 30 years.
Sorry, attempted murder, tired today.
In her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Kate Manne coined the term “himpathy” for disproportionately and inappropriately sympathetic reactions like Luc’s to male perpetrators of violence against women that tend to center the perpetrator’s reputation and shift focus away from the harm done to the victim.
People are complicated creatures, it is possible to have lived an exemplary life and then negate all the good one has ever done in a brief moment of madness. I read Luc’s comment as a person struggling to understand a horrific event that was at odds with the person he thought he knew.
Well put, dwgs.
Is it normal that the JDM publishes unsourced stories as facts? Other news outlets are saying much less about what happened and why.
They often do, MarcG. Their signature style is to imply they have access to police or other sources that other media do not.
I’ve rarely known them to be mistaken although it does happen (e.g. the time they claimed that a mosque made an objection to a woman’s presence in a work crew on the street outside on a Friday).
A brief “moment of madness” is not divorced from reality,
it is the explosion of reality that illuminates a “lifetime of good.”
@Luc your post reminded me of a killing in Texas maybe 15-20 years ago – IIRC a somewhat well known local musician had some kind of psychotic break after taking a dose of a smoking cessation drug (Chant) – he had also been drinking. Apparently uncharacteristically, he fought with his girlfriend and wound up banging on his neighbour’s door. This being Texas, the neighbour fired a gun through the door, which killed the musician.
@Deborah I understand the first phrase but you lost me with the ‘explosion of reality’.
The moment of madness reifies the underlying reality
So all those good acts that Darwish performed over the years were just a cover for his true evil self?
I don’t think we can say for sure. Darwish may have known he was sometimes prey to violent impulses, and found that martial arts taught him the discipline he needed to control them. He may have been one of those people who can compartmentalize his life, putting a wall between his demeanour in the dojo and his personality around his family. I suspect the latter but I’m writing about him now as if he’s a fictional character, as are we all.
the “madness” is not a departure from the person’s reality, but the sudden surfacing of their actual state which the “exemplary life” was effectively masking
Deborah, you can’t psychoanalyze a person remotely in this way. We do not know. Someone can develop a brain tumour or other physiological condition that completely changes their personality. I am not saying that this is what happened here, but you can’t know without an examination of the person. Making such statements as you have made here is not stating facts, but presenting a baseless theory.
I’m not claiming to know his medical state, but calling it a ‘moment of madness’ in an ‘exemplary life’ is also a theory—one that ignores how a disciplined mask often hides deep, accumulated conflict. Whether the cause is biological or psychological, dismissing it with a label like ‘madness’ stops us from looking at the actual fact of the violence
Beside the point, but I was curious what is meant by ‘Christian’, in this context, referring to the fiance. An actual church goer, or non-religious with Christian roots? Sounds like the former, but made me wonder…
A former Kahnawake Peacekeeper detoured from his route last week and saved five people from a duplex fire that took 55 firefighters to put out.
I was charmed by one witness’s “I was lying on my chesterfield when I heard a boom.” My folks used to use that word but I haven’t heard it in years.
This is also notable: “With no ambulances in sight, and wary of the medical charges he might have to pay if he used one, he drove across the Mercier Bridge to the fire hall in Kahnawake, where he knew medical coverage would be free.”
Earlier we had scuttled derogation, now we get chesterfield boom – fun with words!
The Lasalle hospital is closer to that home than the fire hall and probably much quicker when there’s bumper to bumper bridge traffic, which he said was the case at the time. Plus it has a (fully?) staffed ER. Not trying to blame someone with fight or flight going on, but it is useful to know where the hospitals are.
Yes, but I could see how he might want to go somewhere familiar after getting through a situation like that.
Chesterfield is very old school Canadian English.
School workers – mostly women in hijab – have received letters saying they must abandon their headscarves or be fired. But this is hardly news – we knew it was coming.
The CSSDM is about to lose 100 workers.
What a proud day for the racist garbage that runs this government of ours.
And in the French press – nothing. Well not nothing, a positive spin on ridding polite society of Muslim women – https://www.ledevoir.com/actualites/education/972275/droit-acquis-elargi-port-signes-religieux-ecoles – “L’adoption du projet de loi 94 visant à renforcer la laïcité dans le réseau scolaire aura-t-elle fait plus de peur que de mal dans les écoles de la province ?”
Just sickening.
A new pair of peregrine falcons is living in the nesting box on the Université de Montréal tower, and they’ve already produced an egg. Live cam via YouTube (which also gives a nice view of the fog over the city, Thursday morning, but you may be greeted by a raucous commercial).
One of Christine Fréchette’s ambitious plans before October is to extend the Charter of the French language to adult and vocational education. Remember, we all must suffer to protect French.
I find it perplexing that the ‘ayant droit’ logic is being applied to adults. I guess university is next.
The CAQ is dead in the water, so it’s really up to the PQ as to whether this is a battle they want to wage if/when they come into power. I have my doubts, because on language issues the PQ has often been more pragmatic than we give them credit for.
There’s so many francophones attending the anglo universities — not to mention many prominent PQ leaders, including PSPP himself, whose entire university career was in English. Is that a door they’re willing to close for themselves?
A lot of PSPP’s English education was out of Canada, though he went to McGill. I suppose theoretically he could have eligibility for English schools.
If the PQ leader starts treating Anglo institutions with anything other than scorn because he himself benefited from them, he will quickly find himself replaced by someone more comfortable compartmentalizing/being a hypocrite. I have no illusions that a PSSP government will halt or even slow down the CAQ’s assault on Anglophone Quebec. Even Charles Milliard is advocating for continuing to use the notwithstanding clause pre-emptively to restrict the rights of English-speaking Quebecers. We are a long way from Lucien Bouchard delivering a speech at the Centaur.
Even old “money and the ethnic vote” Parizeau studied Economics in London.
Ethnonationalism is predicated on “rules for thee but not for me”.
Each use of the notwithstanding clause is a fiery declaration: they won’t join me, so I’ll beat them.
H. John 16:43 on 2026-04-17 Permalink
Milliard may have taken a step back:
https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/973001/charles-milliard-fait-volte-face-quant-disposition-derogation-loi-96?
Kate 16:57 on 2026-04-17 Permalink
I think he’s testing the waters to see how the public is responding to the options. But flip‑flopping too much isn’t wise either.
Ian 22:21 on 2026-04-17 Permalink
It’s been pretty obvious for a long time that the Liberals really don’t give a crap about anglos. They assume that anglos will simply vote for them becasue they are federalists or whatever so they put all their energy into vigorously demonstrating what “real” nationalists they are, in no small part by performatively screwing dem henglish.
So given that ALL our parties are now apparently ethnonationalists, who are immigrants and anglos to vote for?