Montreal City Weblog

Kate 12:47 on 2019-01-17 Permalink Reply  

• Bill Binns 11:57 on 2019-01-18 Permalink

  A grim story. Sounds like a sweet little old lady was tossed into the back of a van with a psychotic lunatic. I again wonder what the 2 billion we are spending on elevators for the Metro could have done for the adapted transit service.

• Chris 23:56 on 2019-01-18 Permalink

  Bill, there’s no either or there. We could spend 2 billion on elevators and another billion on adapted transit. For example by spending less on automobile infrastructure (ex Turcot).

• Kate 12:10 on 2019-01-20 Permalink

  When CBC first had this story, while I naturally felt sorry for the woman, it seems to me all the anglo media in particular have been running stories for awhile on lack of services for the mentally handicapped. Had this story gone a slightly different way it would’ve been about how deplorable it was that the young man had been denied transport services.

  A big change in educational philosophy since I was a kid is that students with quite serious mental deficits and problems are mixed into regular classrooms, often with a full-time attendant, and even so sometimes they’re quite disruptive. Even noting this opens me to criticism for not being sufficiently sympathetic to the problems of the mentally handicapped: it’s a hot-button issue to many people. Whether this arrangement is good for average to smart students in the class is seldom addressed, just as whether it was wise to put a 92‑year‑old woman in the back of a car alongside a young man with a record of unpredictable aggression.

  In retrospect, it wasn’t. In advance, it was the only thing they could do. He had the right to be there.