A big water main break has closed St-Antoine between Peel and Mountain near the Bell Centre.
Updates from March, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Some may remember that a young man died by drowning last August during the Osheaga festival. The coroner’s report says there’s no evidence it was due to a criminal act but that it can’t be determined whether Collins Obiagboso fell into the river by misadventure, or went in the water voluntarily to cool off.
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Kate
City council chair Cathy Wong has lodged a complaint with the Quebec municipal commission against Anjou councillor Lynne Shand over her recent rant against an emergency doctor wearing hijab. Wong points out that 10% of Anjou residents are Muslim, so how can Shand fairly represent her borough?
Chris
Through cognitive dissonance. People are good at holding contradictory values/opinions beliefs.
How can an ER doctor (a person a science) be a theist? Likewise, a councilor can dislike some people yet still fairly represent them. Internal subconscious compartmentalization.
Kate
Thing is, Chris, I don’t care what the inner beliefs of my ER doctor are. If she’s qualified, and I need a doctor, I’m happy.
Chris
Kate, I agree (as long as those inner beliefs don’t impact her outward behaviour as a doctor). But that’s not in conflict with my statements.
Can a lawyer represent a client he believes is a bad person? Can a doctor suggest an abortion if she’s personally against it? Can a city councilor represent people she doesn’t like/agree with? Yes, yes, and yes.
dwgs
Chris, would it be wise for that lawyer to go on a public forum and complain about what a nasty and poorly behaved person his client is? Would it be okay for that doctor to go on FB and excoriate the ‘sluts’ and ‘loose women’ who present themselves needing abortions? Sure they can do those things but they are likely to lose clients and have it affect their ability to earn a living. No one is saying that Shand can’t hold her own private views, no matter how odious they may be. They’re saying that she can’t air them in public without expecting consequences.
Meezly
From Cathy Wong’s FB post: “Auparavant, la Commission municipale avait déjà statué que «les membres du Conseil doivent traiter les citoyen.nes avec égards et respect en évitant toute forme de discrimination (interdite par la Charte des droits et libertés de la personne, L.R.Q., c. C‑12)»”
jeather
Seems like she is out of the party and standing as an independent, despite what Miranda said the other day.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-councillor-complaint-1.5073202
Chris
dwgs, I could agree with all that, it doesn’t conflict with my earlier statements. Kate asked ‘how can Shand fairly represent her borough?’, I still answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmentalization_(psychology)
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Kate
Irritating fumes halted metro service on three lines early Tuesday afternoon, after an incident at Berri-UQÀM. A suspect has been arrested.
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Kate
I noticed not long ago that my Opus card was about to expire, so as I was passing through Berri-UQÀM today, I stopped to get a new one. At the machine I was reminded I had some tickets on the old one, so I went to the service counter to get the contents swapped over.
I figured it should take, what, five minutes or so, to do what must be a routine process for the people behind that glass.
A man and a woman were at the wicket, talking intensely with a previous supplicant. When that person left, my number did not immediately come up. The pair of them chatted for awhile, then eventually summoned my number.
I explained my request, and the man and woman conferred again intently. The man took six dollars from me, took my old Opus and put it on the reader, then swapped it for a new card, then repeated the swapping a few more times. He turned to the woman, who got on the phone and had an apparently complicated conversation, while the man waited.
I wondered if I could’ve somehow picked up a stolen card and was about to be cuffed and dragged away.
Finally she got off the phone, and he took a little pad of forms, on which he carefully copied down the number on the back of my old Opus and the reason for my request, and the date, and had me sign the back and note down my phone number.
“Did I ask you for money?” he inquired.
“Yes, I gave you six dollars,” I told him.
Then he printed out a receipt, and stamped it. I looked at it later: it says “Vente Finale”.
Later when I was buying a few items in a store up St-Denis, the person before me asked the cashier if she knew where some nearby business was, and the cashier took out a phone book to look it up.
I think my time machine is on the fritz.
Tim
Kate, you paid for a new card? Twice I have had expiring cards and both times I had them replaced free of charge no questions asked. Maybe this has changed?
Kate
Tim, a Twitter reader of the blog feed reminded me that there’s a pending case against the STM about the cost for an Opus card, so I should hang onto the receipt.
I don’t hold out much hope. The STM is pretty cavalier about court rulings. Remember, it’s still fining people accused of being delinquent passengers, even though a judge said they couldn’t assume guilt in that way.
It’s only six bucks, but it’s the principle.
John B
@Tim Cards below a certain number can be replaced free because the Opus cards were originally sold as “Permanent.” Once it became clear they were not permanent there was some cutoff date so cards with a higher number than the cutoff cannot be replaced for free. It was a while ago, so I bet you’ll have to pony up $6 for your next card.
I actually combined 3 old cards, (one of which was old enough to be replaced for free), into a new card recently. It wasn’t _so_ bad. There was no phone call involved. I bet the call the person made was just a call, although it’s weird they would choose to make it then.
DeWolf
This whole “expiring card” thing is complete nonsense. I am still using my Hong Kong Octopus card from 2008 with no problems. It was only a couple of years ago that Hong Kong recalled the *original* Octopus cards from 1997. And it’s not like they’re different from the Opus card. They use identical technology and they are made from exactly the same materials.
That combined with the $6 fee for an Opus card makes me think the whole thing is just a shameless cash grab by the STM.
Kate
DeWolf, someone once told me (it may have been in a blog comment) that the Opus card only has so many “slots” in the programming, and once they’re full, the card is no good. However, in practice it has a date when it becomes obsolete, regardless of how many or how few recharges have been applied to it, so you may well be right.
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Kate
CTV says the attempt to preserve the life of the dog that bit six people last summer has failed, and the dog will be euthanized, but doesn’t name the animal’s chief champion.
BB
I’m only half joking when I suggest that we should consider putting the owners down too. People who buy and keep dogs like that are pure trash.
Kate
I don’t like it when people are described as garbage or trash.
That woman should never have had the dog in her house, but a footnote to the story says she was also dealing drugs. She may have thought the presence of a scary dog would keep her and the kids safe, rather than the opposite. Yes, unwise actions and generally disordered lives – but not trash. Not here.
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Kate
Montreal and surrounding towns have been given a mere ten days to pose questions to CDPQ Infra, the Caisse branch building the REM. And they have no power to insist on changes in its plans.
Who gave CDPQ Infra this power?
Steve Q
I’m glad they have this power, otherwise we would still be discussing and analysing and studying etc… nothing would get done. We are beyond all these never ending discussions about transit. It’s time for action.
Kate
Governance by diktat. It works in a lot of places. It makes a lot of people feel safe.
I’m not one of them.
ant6n
I find arguments like “if we planned things properly, nothing would ever get done” weird. If we had proper long term planning on transit, and a decent pipeline of projects that integrate with each other and urban planning, then we could still accomplish good things at a decent rate.
Or another way of thinking about it: a bunch of the transit/rail geeks have been complaining about the same issues form day one. With proper expertise, even a quickly planned project could’ve been done better.
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Kate
People who can prove they were living near the Ville-Marie twenty years ago when it underwent lengthy repairs are getting cheques from a class-action suit over the noise and inconvenience, but not everyone who’s eligible knows they are or has applied.
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Kate
Two major developers are said to be close to an agreement on the Peel Basin which would include a new baseball stadium. The mayor is super keen and thinks a REM station could be built for the stadium and the “retour des Expos.”
Insanity, I’m telling you. In general I like Plante, and haven’t made any secret of being pro-Projet, but how can she be deploring homelessness on the one hand, talking up social housing, while applauding a project that will transfer millions in public funds into private hands to move a marginal team here and sustain its activities? It makes no sense whatsoever.
Chris
Be sure to tell her: https://mairesse.montreal.ca/envoyer-un-message-la-mairesse
Faiz Imam
If I want to maintain a positive spin on it, I could note that she’s still against any public involvement in any of this. The land is owned by the federal government who will sell it at market rates, and the developers will build what they want on it.
But yeah… Not sure that’s exactly how it will go. The more this moves along and the more legitimacy this gets, the more room opens for the developers to extort the city into ‘partnering’ with the team.
Also there are loopholes where the team benefits without getting actively subsidized, such as rebates on taxes or investment in infrastructure or ancillary costs.
PS: the REM station is the one near bassin Peel. It’s gonna be built regardless to serve griffintown and old Montreal.
Kate
Faiz Imam, I know I’ve said this before, but against any public involvement is meaningless verging on the fraudulent. You cannot have something as big as a stadium without the city’s involvement. It has to provide transit, sanitation and security for free on an ongoing basis from the moment construction begins. And the history of big-league teams in general shows a pattern of teams holding cities to ransom with threats to leave if they don’t get tax breaks and other benefits they demand.
A major league team is first and foremost a device for funneling public money into private hands, using civic pride and boosterism as a lever. The entertainment value is a distant second.
My resistance to baseball has recently been called “hate” and I’ve in the past been accused of shitting on the city because I don’t support it. On the whole, this blog has always been civil. Those are the hardest words I’ve had to face, and it’s over a nonexistent sports team – not over politics, sexuality, language or other hot-button issues. Odd, isn’t it?
JaneyB
@Chris – Thanks! Done. I wonder if the REM folk who are probably pushing it threatened to support putting it in Laval or something. It’s a crazy plan for a hockey-mad city. More rinks for ice time definitely, more soccer stuff maybe but…baseball?
Thomas H
As both someone who both abhors corporate involvement in public affairs and loves baseball, I can’t help but feel conflicted. But it’s no wonder to me that many people, like Kate, feel particularly polarized on this issue based on the amount of vitriol slung by baseball boosters. As Kate and others have pointed out, baseball fans need to put aside blind boosterism and nostalgia.
I feel that Mayor Plante’s bizarre, quiet, and newfound support of the baseball stadium is shrouded in mystery and non-transparency, which really bothers me. First and foremost, as a citizen, but second and distantly as a fan.
And therefore, it pains me to say that I cannot support the baseball stadium or team without exhaustively addressing the issues that have been brought up about public financing. I would want to see a written , contractual commitment from the new franchise to fund both the capital and ongoing costs themselves and the security of the stadium (including paying any SPVM officers assigned to game days) before jumping on the bandwagon.
I do, however, feel compelled to address a few of the anti-baseball arguments I have seen many people advance on this blog. Not necessarily because I support the return of a base franchise (though I have disclosed my bias as a baseball fan), but because I think many opponents of the baseball stadium/team are being too dismissive of the popularity of baseball, and therefore undermining their case.
— Baseball is not an old man’s sport. I am 25 years old, and attended the exhibition game last evening, and just like each of the five years before, the stadium was full of people in their 20s and 30s and MANY young families with kids under 10 years old. All this on a Monday evening. There were old men also, but often accompanied by their younger family members. The make-up of baseball fans in Montreal includes the children of former Expos fans, current Blue Jays fans who may have family in Toronto and already attend games there once or twice a year, and many former Expos fans who have become Red Sox or Yankee fans since the departure of the Expos.
–Baseball games offer a fundamentally different experience than NHL or MLS games. The game moves slower, the overall volume of the stadium is quieter, so it is easier to attend primarily or secondarily as a social function (as I did with many of my non-baseball fan friends last night). It would have been pretty hard to convince my sports-disinterested boyfriend to attend a loud hockey game with me. Baseball games are also a magnitude cheaper than NHL games and therefore more accessible to a wider fan base. I guarantee you that Habs games are whiter, more suburban, and more affluent.
–There is interest in baseball locally, and specifically the former Expos franchise. I have seen consistently for years that Expos merchandise sales (locally, in Canada, and across North America) rank number five through ten after big teams like New York, LA, and Boston, meaning that the brand is selling well ahead of many existing baseball teams.
On the whole, I still cannot support baseball in Montreal until the very legitimate concerns over the public funding are addressed. I would want to see, in writing, that the private backers will not take any form of public funding for a period of 30 or 50 years. But, perhaps it is helpful for opponents of the project (like myself) who are not baseball fans themselves (unlike myself) to see that there is a broad market for baseball in Montreal, and that it’s going to take a bit more than “baseball is for old geezers” jabs to dismantle that. Opponents need to focus more squarely on their very compelling concerns over private involvement in our public affairs and point to the experiences of other cities that have had a raw deal.
Tim
Building a stadium without a firm commitment from MLB for a team is a risky proposition. It puts Montreal in a position of weakness from a negotiating point of view. Building a stadium without a team in Quebec City did not bring the Nordiques back.
Blork
Speculation: this might just be good politics. If Project Montreal is only known to the less-progressive crowd (who are numerous and love to vote) as the party of expensive parking, bicycle lanes, and other things they find annoying, then this will show at the next election. But if the party can throw a bone to the people who are more concerned with Montreal being “fun” and a great place to live when you have money, then it might help them in the next election.
That might sound cynical, but I think it’s just reality. A government has to serve all of its constituents, and sometimes that means taking backwards steps. But if you have a long-term plan for forward steps then you have to plan for some backwards steps along the way in order to ensure you’re still in the game to make those forward steps.
walkerp
Let’s get an NBA team here first. Or maybe WNBA.
Uatu
I dunno about the viability of MLB. I guess if it doesn’t work out then a baseball stadium could be used by a minor league team.
Or maybe they could play cricket .
The family angle mentioned above works now at the big o with lots of parking and space. I wonder if it will be the same when there’s less space to stretch out. The most memorable parts of going to expos games in high school was eating a hotdog with my feet up on the seat in front of me, talking to my friends about girls while a game was going on in the background. Also getting home around midnight via public transit because I lived in Brossard…
In any case it’s in the hands of the young and most young people I know are soccer fans and during yesterday’s Bronfman announcement ,it was hard to see anyone under the age of 40. So there’s that….DeWolf
I think Blork is right on the politics. There are a lot of people who admired Coderre’s cigar-chomping “big city mayor” persona and the goodies he delivered. They’re usually the same people who blame Plante personally for the fact that we had an icy winter. This could help win them over, especially if Coderre attempts a comeback. “The mayor who brought the Expos back” may be a very good thing to people who aren’t especially invested in municipal politics.
My concern about this is the placement of the REM station. The Bassin Peel station’s location has not yet been fixed. If it is built next to the future stadium, it will anchor a new development area, which would be good for ridership and getting people out of cars. But I have a bad feeling that this project may not come to fruition, in which case we’ll have a REM station marooned in the middle of nowhere, away from the heart of Griffintown where people actually live and need better transit.
mare
@Thomas H
With only a few edits you could let Mayor Plante know via the link above.@Dewolf I’m sure some developers will propose something else to built there that the Federal government (probably a Conservative gevernement after the next elections) thinks is a good idea. They can dig up that plan for a permanent circus tent for the Cirque de Soleil for instance.
Ian
As somebody who doesn’t give a crap about major league sports I’d be a lot more impressed f they could figure out infrastructure before building new touristy crap that the existing infrastructure can’t support. Call me nuts if you will.
qatzelok
**A too-late spoiler alert**
`Le premier des deux matchs hors concours opposant les Blue Jays de Toronto aux Brewers de Milwaukee a lieu ce soir. La tenue de ces matchs préparatoires au Stade olympique est l’occasion de remettre le retour des Expos dans l’actualité.’
This is just a fake news advertorial for another Paid-ticket event.
Vazken
I love the Expos and I would love to see a return but only if no public money is used other then what the city would have to kick in normally. Also, the spending in baseball is out of control and I can’t see the expos competing with 40 million a year contracts unless there’s a REALLY deep pocketed owner.
A NBA team sounds like a good idea, they have a stadium built already. (yes, salary is out of control there too)
Faiz Imam
Hey Kate. I don’t know what it is about the way I write that gets me so misunderstood, but it’s happened again.
the first paragraph of my comment above was designed to be overly, unrealistically charitable to set up the rest of my point, which was that I fear this is a slippery slope towards more and more of a public investment.
I agree with you 100% that if this happens, the city will inevitably be entangled in it and that it will go poorly. Not to mention a noon-multifunctional stadium is huge waste of space in that area with such high density and so much missing features(school, community service, green space)
Also, I used the term “hate” a few days ago and It was not targeted towards you AT ALL. I was actually replying 100% to Uatu and to what I perceived was a attack on the sport of baseball as a whole. Hence my use of jays and league wide statistics to defend the game. Same as Thomas did above.
Going back to that comment, looks like they were talking about Montreal specifically, so my use of words was unwarranted.
Not sure what other reactions you’ve been getting, but I really don’t want my part in this to be misunderstood.
Kate
Faiz Imam, thanks for the clarifications, and no worries.
Blork and DeWolf, that’s canny analysis. Plante may be perfectly well aware there won’t be another MLB team here but that looking keen on the idea may bear fruit. Thanks for helping me see it that way.
Chris
Blork, the party of bicycle lanes? They’ve done just about nothing in that department.
Blork
Chris, from the point of view of the “less progressives” it’s less about what they’ve done and not done and more about the perception.
Marc
I was curious if a new team could call themselves the Expos and use the old logo and came across this article for anyone interested. https://everythingtrademarks.com/2015/09/05/you-can-go-home-again/
Morgan
@Dewolf et al, I saw that Plante said it would be relatively easy to add another REM station to serve the new stadium because it’s an above-ground system. I get the impression they may not build the station now, but maybe could lay the foundations or at least make sure there will be space for it.
(I believe this would be a second station in addition to the currently-planned Bassin Peel one, which I’m guessing will be in Griffintown).
There’s going to be significant development in that area in the next 10 years, stadium or not, so it would make sense to plan for it.
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Kate
City hall’s mobility squad is being beefed up after a successful year of keeping traffic moving downtown. It’s moving into more boroughs and being given more staff and the power to issue fines.
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Kate
TVA says taxi drivers sowed chaos downtown Monday with a demonstration, although no other media seem to have reported it.
steph
How is this bill going to bankrupt 22,000 quebec families when there’s only 8800 permits in the province? Lets not forget that a bunch (I don’t know how many) are owned by companies/investors and simply rented by taxi drivers.
Ian
That’s how the CAQ is positioning it, too – all you cabbies who rent your medallion will have 12 grand more in your pocket at the end of the year. We’ll have to wait and see I guess.
@Kate this was getting covered on the radio all day yesterday, kind of a ply-by-play so people would know where the ding dongs were “rallying public sympathy” or whatever they thought that would do… but it was at least on the cbc website (I didn’t check any others) and very present on many channels on twitter.SMD
Le Devoir covered yesterday’s slow-down and today’s actions as well, noting that today an alliance of disabled transit users are also speaking out as the new law does not ensure access to accessible taxis.
@Ian: “Ding dongs”, really?
SMD
Oops, meant to also link to this article from today: https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/550704/reforme-des-taxis-d-autres-manifestations-a-prevoir-mardi. Can you please add it, Kate? Thank you!
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Kate
Montreal priest Brian Boucher has been sentenced to 8 years for sexually abusing two underage boys.
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Kate
A student at Marianopolis has died suddenly of a meningococcal infection as she celebrated her 18th birthday on the weekend. Public health authorities are checking that her close contacts are protected from the bacterium.
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Kate
Last year’s census of the homeless found 5,800 visible homeless people in Quebec, mostly men between 30 and 49. The number in Montreal is substantially the same as were counted in 2015 – 3,149. A homeless person was defined as someone sleeping outdoors or in a shelter on April 24 last year.
Immigrants, indigenous and LGBTQ folks are disproportionately represented among Quebec’s homeless.
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Kate
The CAQ says its secularity bill, expected later this week, won’t go so far as to mandate changing the hundreds of saints’ names used for towns, streets, schools and other features of public life.
Blork
I can’t say that bothers me. It’s one thing to say that the crucifix hanging in council chambers or the national assembly is there for “heritage” reasons or whatever, but it’s a whole other thing to mandate wide-scale sweeping place and street name changes. That is hugely disruptive and expensive, and is pretty much pointless.
One can happily live on rue Saint-Charles in Saint-Guillaume without feeling like you’re under the yoke of Catholicism. Those are literally just names, and they do say something about the history of Quebec (and I am not in favour of erasing history). Completely different from going to City Hall to defend your hijab while being lorded over by a crucifix.
jeather
I also agree that changing the street etc names is unnecessary. Has there been any serious push to do so? I hadn’t heard of that.
dwgs
Agreed. It would be nice if we could agree that we should refrain from naming anything new for the saints though…
Kate
Not that I’ve heard, jeather. The article says the bill will be worded in a way that doesn’t allow existing names to be challenged on its behalf, is all.
However: I think schools ought to stop having religious names, given that we no longer have Catholic school commissions and religion is no longer taught in public schools. Many CSDM schools are still named after saints or other Catholic entities or concepts. I wouldn’t want to send my kid to École Christ-Roi or whatever.
dwgs
@Kate, and the newest school in NDG was named… St Raymond. They say that they named it after the neighbourhood, not the saint per se but come on, you couldn’t find something better?
Blork
I totally agree to stop naming new streets and institutions after saints. And I do not object to renaming existing schools, but only if they don’t rename them after people. Can you imagine how many “École René-Lévesques” and “École Jacques-Parizeaus” we’d end up with?
jeather
I am still sort of annoyed about renaming of University given this. I agree that NEW places shouldn’t be given saint names whether after the town or the street, but let’s just stop renaming old public things please.
Out of curiosity, what does the secularity bill say of the cross on the mountain? (I do not object to it and assume it will be excluded in some way or another.)
Kate
Bill’s not out yet, jeather. I gather from this item and the CAQ’s general take that a lot of existing Catholic stuff will be grandfathered. But we’ll see.
Ian
I don’t think it’s a good idea to rename streets or towns for the same reason – when they renamed Saint-Louis to Laurier after the town of Saint-Louis du Mile-End was amalgamated, a good chunk of historical awareness of place was simply erased.
Joey
I can’t say I see a lot of value in maintaining the name of my kid’s school, Ecole-Saint-Enfant-Jesus, which some smarmy person will be all too happy to tell me is named after a *parish* and not, you know, the son of god. Re-naming public schools after people, places or things that are not merely the most direct form of tacit Christianity can be a very good thing for all involved. It would give the students, teachers and staff a chance to develop and adopt a real identity beyond merely being the school near the church of the same name.
Granted, I’m Jewish and thus much more sensitive to these issues than most people, but the extent to which the fundamentals of Christianity (at least the kids’ version) are deeply ingrained in our public, secular school system is troubling, especially when there is so much hostility toward minority religions in Quebec. Our public schools don’t teach religion, but they do reinforce that Christian holidays and traditions – Christmas, Easter, etc. – are the norm. Obviously that’s unlikely to change. And kudos to our school’s openness to diversity and increasing cultural awareness and sensitivity (and for allowing my family to come present the story of Hannukah to my son’s class) – but it would be so much more rewarding to explain to my son that his school is named after a notable resident of our neighbourhood, and not someone else’s deity.
Anyway, the moment the City erects a public school called Ecole Muhammad, I will gladly drop my beef.
Tee Owe
Jeather – the Guardian report on this but get it wrong, that the cross on the mountain is also a crucifix – a cross is a cross, a crucifix is a man being crucified on a cross – very different IMO
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/25/montreal-take-down-80-year-old-crucifix-from-city-chambers
Sorry, don’t know how to insert a link, but you can copy-paste itIan
@Joey I’ve been pushing for my kid’s school to allow me to come give a talk to the ERC class on secular humanism but they won’t allow it. We have had Muslims, Jews, and Christians of varying stripes, but no atheists, agnostics, or humanists.
Chris
Ian: what reason do they give?
BB
“Granted, I’m Jewish…”
So was Jesus, incidentally.
“Anyway, the moment the City erects a public school called Ecole Muhammad, I will gladly drop my beef.”
So, you’re not taking a principled stance after all. You simply have a beef with Christianity.
Yes, there are more names for public spaces alluding to Christian themes and personalities but that is simply commensurate with the contribution of Christian ideology to Quebec society and Western Civilization in general.
No need to be thoughtless iconoclasts and condemn everything to the memory hole, erasing that historical awareness of place and other things that Ian refers to.
Faiz Imam
As we have covered before, there is a huge dearth of women and indigenous people in our place names, not to mention other visible minorities.
In the past we have been quite ready to remove British and English names and replace them with french ones, was that not erasing history? I think there is a huge opportunity to hit two birds with one stone here. But its a question of political will and a cultural consensus of what peoples and values we choose to highlight.
Chris
“Our public schools don’t teach religion” Don’t they? They should, academically of course, not as indoctrination.
Joey
Well, my beef was with the politicians and commentators who claim the high ground of “laïcité” all the while reinforcing the predominance of Christianity in our supposedly secular society. But it turns out I was distracted from the real beef, as always, with blog comment trolls. Thanks for keeping me focused!
@Ian could be a fascinating charter case.
Kate
Chris, certainly kids should be educated about the major religions, their beliefs and customs. It’s part of being a well-rounded citizen and a Montrealer to understand about the part played by religions in our society.
But Ian, it’s shocking that the ethics class can’t have a segment on living without religion. That’s important and I wonder what can be done about it.
CE
I wouldn’t hold my breath getting a school name changed. I took a French class at École St-Louis and had a teacher who was lobbying hard to get the school renamed in honour of Émile Nelligan. Despite the fact that Nelligan was a renowned québécois poet, his work was studied by the students in the school, and he was born across the street, the school board insisted on keeping the school named for a French king who wasn’t even actually a saint.
thomas
@CE perhaps the school is named after Louis IX who is a saint.
Kate
There used to be a Catholic parish called St-Louis in the area. Their first church, on Roy near Laval, burned down decades ago, and they put up a new one at the corner of Roy and Berri. This was sold off to a non-Catholic denomination years ago. So the parish doesn’t even exist any more, yet the school goes on carrying the name.
Ian
There used to be an école Saint-Louis on Fairmount & Saint Dominique where les Habitations Émile-Nelligan is now so in a way, CE, I guess your teacher got their wish … as for the high school still on Fairmount, I always thought it was named after the former town of Saint-Louis-du-Mile-End, not the parish, specially since that’s within the Saint-Enfant-Jésus-du-Mile-End parish, I think.
dwgs 09:46 on 2019-03-27 Permalink
It was open (with about a lane and a half closed) when I rode the 420 through there about an hour ago.