The shooter in a notable homicide three years ago was found guilty of murder in the first degree for killing a man in a north-end Italian café, evidently after mistakenly identifying him as a mobster.
Updates from March, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The city has launched pre-budget consultations, the first time the public has been directly consulted over fiscal priorities in this way. You can put in your two cents verbally, or by written memo. The deadlines are short.
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Kate
Rosemont has revised its law to protect shoebox houses, trying to balance individual property rights against the preservation of heritage buildings.
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Kate
The EMSB has voted to refuse to comply with the impending Quebec law against religious signifiers worn by teachers. It’s standing on the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms – which François Legault can dismiss with one flick of his notwithstanding wand.
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Kate
The city is putting pressure on the federal government to renew its funding of the Biosphere museum. Environment Canada rents the building and has run a museum focused on environmental matters there for years.
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Kate
The euthanasia of that Montreal North pitbull has been put on hold after Anne-France Goldwater lodged an appeal Wednesday.
Chris
Surprise!
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Kate
A retired judge has been given access to Catholic church records and been asked to make an audit of the situation concerning sexual abuses in the church, over seven decades and five dioceses.
Update: CTV says victims of priestly abuse are not happy with the procedure as victims will not be invited to participate and “the judge was selected by Archbishop Lepine is a friend of his and a very devout person” as one of the victims is quoted.
Chris
“given access to Catholic church records” -> voluntarily by the Church itself no less, not by court order.
The Catholic church really should just let priests have sex (with adults I mean!). Sure, it’s against doctrine, but they’ve been infinitely malleable in the past, they can again. Slavery was ok, now it isn’t. Death penalty was ok, now it isn’t. Limbo was dropped. Mass had to be Latin, no longer. extra Ecclesiam nulla salus? Gone. Fasting before communion got shorter and shorter. Fasting every Friday? Gone. etc.!!!
Just reinterpret the gobbledygook and flip flop on abstinence already!
Tim
@Chris: you think that pedophiles will stop having sex with kids just because their church says it’s OK to have sex with adults?
Chris
Tim: not in every instance, of course; but in some instances, yes, I think so.
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Kate
Even though it was called impossible a couple of days ago, Lynne Shand has been chucked out of Équipe Anjou by the party, and will sit as an independent.
Ginger Baker
Can’t quite tell which is more disgusting, Shand’s vile comments, the fact that she happily accepted treatment and then trashed her doctor for being who she is, or the fact that she was only tossed once her party was certain she was no longer an asset.
Politicians are a cancer on our society.
Chris
Just a few stories down, Kate said “I don’t like it when people are described as garbage or trash.”. I don’t see how your last sentence is substantially different.
Kate
Chris, Ginger Baker is free to say that people who choose to do a certain type of job are bad for society. The key is in the choice.
BB
Keeping vicious dogs that maul children and maim them for life is a choice that is bad for society.
Chris
The key is in the choice? Being Muslim is a choice. If she said “Muslims are a cancer on our society” she’d be (rightly) pilloried (a la Lynne Shand).
Politicians, as a group (there are of course bad apples), are a blessing on our society. Yes, they are down in the muck slinging words, but the alternative is not a magic utopia where everyone agrees, it’s violence. Better they/we fight with words, ideas, and laws than with guns.
Blork
Some choices are choicier than others. Being a Muslim (or a Christian or a Hindu, etc.) is a “choice” they were born into for most people of those faiths. When you grow up in it, and surrounded by it, there is ultimately a choice to remain, but it’s a passive choice. Unless something happens to rattle your faith, you will continue in it, to one degree or another.
But a career (be it politician, lawyer, whatever) is a hard, conscious, and active choice for most people.
The only way a Muslim (or Christian, etc.) is operating at that level of choice is if they actively converted to the faith as an adult.
#perspective
Kate
Blork, thanks. I was gathering my thoughts to say something along those lines, but am distracted by things connected with making a living 🙂
Ginger Baker
@Chris
I’m venting, I’m genuinely and generally disappointed with the conduct of most politicians these days, regardless of their affiliations and/or political orientations.
If I were a public person – in any capacity – I might be more cautious. However, that aside I don’t think these situations are comparable.
Ms. Shand alleges members of a marginalized community of visible minorities are actively conspiring to upend and destroy whatever our culture is, and only somewhat walked back her statement once she discovered it wasn’t politically viable. Clearly she thought it was beforehand, ditto her party.
I haven’t a kind word to say about any organized religion… quite frankly I personally feel that kind of reliance a supernatural celestial dictator is odd. However, I’m cognizant that religion plays an important role as a point of community amongst diaspora communities, and Muslim women in the ostensibly ‘civilized’ West often bear the brunt of both racism and misogyny.
Ms. Shand should have known better before she discovered her comments weren’t politically viable. That she would trash the person who helped her… who cared for her and made her well, and with the ultimate aim of securing political points amongst her base, is beyond the pale.
So I’ll happily rephrase: Ms. Shand is a cancer on our society. She should be shunned. I hope this results in her dismissal from council, she has demonstrated her inability to serve the public, and she owes the doctor an apology. Were it up to me, she’d be forced to do some kind of community service that directly benefited Muslim women, and further subjected to a psychological assessment.
Chris
Blork, yes, I agree. Some choices are harder than others. But it’s not like there’s a vanishingly small number of ex-theists; over 1/4 of Canadians are irreligious, and many of them were brought up religious. So it’s not *that* hard a choice, nor that rare.
Anyway, it was just an example of a sweeping generalization about someone’s *choices* that would not be tolerated, whereas other sweeping generalizations are apparently ok. (Which of course is altogether different from sweeping generalizations about things that really are out of someone’s control, like their skin colour.)
Ginger, thank you for rephrasing.
“Muslim women in the ostensibly ‘civilized’ West often bear the brunt of both racism and misogyny” -> lamentably, that sometimes happens of course, but I dare say they’d suffer more misogyny in say Saudi or Iran. #perspective
I’ll just add that I too deplore Ms. Shand’s thinking of course.
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Kate
It’s not like they’re doing anything they didn’t say they would do: the CAQ is not backing down on the taxi bill and François Legault is said to be preparing to invoke the notwithstanding clause to pass his law forbidding teachers from wearing religious symbols. Quebec wanted this kind of government. Now we’ve got it.
I wonder who’ll police the symbol law. The principal? Will it depend on parents making complaints? Or will a squad of inspectors visit schools randomly, removing kippas and hijabs or marching teachers out who don’t comply?
Betcha cross necklaces will still be acceptable.
Brett
I’m getting a headache from the CAQophony of anti-CAQ posts in this blog.
Chris
Brett, props for continuing to read anyway! These days, people tend to stay in their bubbles and never expose themselves to ideas/options they disagree with, but it’s important to do so.
Brett
But this is supposed to be a Montreal City blog, not a commentary on Provincial politics.
Kate
Speaking of policing…!
The CAQ matters to Montreal because they were elected in the ROQ more or less in opposition to Montreal and its culture and aims. As such, a lot of what the CAQ chooses to do is crucially relevant to Montreal and I intend to keep a sharp eye on it.
Blork
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qatzelok
In a perfect world, teachers are weighed down with gold chains and medieval clothing, and there’s a cigarette-smoking taxi driver zooming around every street corner at high speed?
/trying to helpMr.Chinaski
Brett, this blog was anti-PQ for a long time, but pitchforks gotta be kept sharpened so it’s anti-CAQ now. In the end, this blog feels more and more angryphone/CJAD’esque and less about local events in Montréal.
dwgs
Really Mr. Chinaski? Really? You just caused me to go back over the last month of posts here and I found exactly 3 that mentioned the CAQ, all of which were directly tied to Montreal (taxi licensing, etc). Every single post was about Montreal affairs. The only one that was kinda tangential pointed out the Mtl origins of the guy who ratted out the college admissions bribery scandal in the States. I’ve also found Kate to be, if anything, overly tolerant (in my view) of certain opinions.
Uatu
No. If this blog were like cjad, then I wouldn’t be here because seriously, fuck cjad and it’s bullshit. At least Kate let’s you respond and not cut u off like the producer of the Tommy schnurmacher show…
Ian
It’s pretty safe to say the vast majority of civil servants in religious garb are in Montreal, and our city was subjected to intentional traffic slowing in many places yesterday because of taxi protests. If you think CAQa policy is a solely provincial issue you’re not paying attention, like Kate says much of their policy is meant to specifically target & punish Montreal and its big-city ways.
jeather
This blog isn’t really pro any of the provincial parties as far as I’ve noticed, but the Liberals don’t do as much anti-Montreal stuff when they’re in power because more of their support is here than the other parties, so the things they do wrong tend to be less relevant because they affect the whole province rather than the city specifically.
Kate
I am in favour of Montreal. I’m against provincial party initiatives that have as an implicit part of their philosophy to sculpt Montreal to be more like the rest of Quebec. Both the PQ and CAQ operate partly on this principle – why let the big, shambling, tolerantly multicultural metropolis get away with things that would never fly in the regions – and, as such, I am constitutionally opposed to their activities.
But the unstated motto of this blog is “Montreal first!”
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Kate
A big water main break has closed St-Antoine between Peel and Mountain near the Bell Centre.
dwgs
It was open (with about a lane and a half closed) when I rode the 420 through there about an hour ago.
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