I was passed a link to the Journées du patrimoine religieux event, not this weekend but next. There are definitely some church buildings worth a look, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, but I think the only non-Christian open house is a Hindu temple. I didn’t even know there was one in DDO.
Updates from August, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
In 2007, Verdun leased out some Nuns’ Island land to be used as a public golf course. Since then, the operator has started charging $10,000 a year and has been flooding nearby houses with bright lights at night. Verdun plans to have it shut down for breaking its rules, but there’s bound to be a legal fight.
Not the first time this has been reported. Radio-Canada had a piece almost a year ago and there have been reports about the egregious floodlighting since.
Why is Verdun frittering scarce land on golf when it could use either more housing or a decent general park in that area, anyway?
John B
I believe it’s on an old garbage dump, so that limits, somewhat, what it can be used for without serious contamination expenses.
Knowing that, and viewing things through a 2005-2007 lens, I can see how creating a “public” golf course that’s not too expensive to use, is fairly self-contained, resource-wise, with filtering ponds & stuff to maybe even improve the surrounding environnement, would make sense. Done right maybe the land would end up partially decontaminated!
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Kate
The city is weighing options for the massive, unoccupied Institut des Sourdes-Muettes building on St-Denis in the Plateau as well as the old Soeurs de la Miséricorde building (I believe it’s this one down St-Hubert). They still belong to the province, which would like to hand them over to the city – but Montreal needs to have plans, and both buildings would need extensive modernization.
Since we’re short of school buildings, one or both of these buildings might come in handy. We’d need teachers to staff them, though.
…On considering, what was happening here in the 19th century to require two massive buildings – this one on St-Denis at Roy, and the other up St-Laurent north of Jean-Talon, now condos? – to educate deaf students? Here’s a piece on the city’s official site that answers part of the question, at least: boys and girls had to be educated separately, according to the mores of the times.
dwgs
Also, if it was anything like Ontario all the deaf kids in the province were shipped to a central school. My nephew was sent away to school in Belleville from northern Ontario at the age of maybe 8 or so.
Kate
Right. They were residential. The one at 7400 was condemned for child sexual abuse awhile back – priests and boys. I don’t know whether anything like it happened with the girls.
Ian
The clerics of Saint Viateur founded that one, and as I recall the sex abuse was around boys but the violence wasn’t gender exclusive. A dark bit of Quebec history there that needs to be remembered. Legault is making a big deal about the funny hats but we all know it wasn’t people in hijabs raping children in schools.
jaddle
They’ve been considered for temporarily housing FACE during that school’s planned renovation.
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Kate
Although a judge stayed almost a thousand fraud charges against Frank Catania this summer, Revenu Québec is saying not so fast.
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Kate
Radio-Canada has a piece echoing recent reports that east-end residents are concerned about poor air quality while TVA reports that Montreal East mayor Robert Coutu is happy about the most recent reports of a reduction in arsenic in the air of his town.
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Kate
Metro has a brief look at some of the alleys in the Plateau, drawn from a new Ulysse guide to walking in Montreal. Seems we have 450 km of alleys in this town. Some are much nicer than the streets out front.
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Kate
The Gazette has tales of renoviction from Verdun and Côte-des-Neiges; Metro has a story about the Régie ruling that a landlord can’t hike the rent from $400 to $800.
TVA has the renoviction story Thursday as does Metro.
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Kate
Jean-Louis Roy, who directs the BAnQ, explains that they’re abandoning museum-style exhibits to put their limited budget into digital educational material to “transmit the culture and history of Quebec to new generations.”
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Kate
No surprise here: the EMSB will comply with Bill 21 and exclude teachers who wear visible signs of their beliefs.
In related news, Quebec says parents can’t pull their kids out of classes in which the teacher is wearing a religious symbol, which in this case – as it overwhelmingly does – means a hijab. Fifty parents signed an open letter in Le Devoir demanding the right to a strictly secular school. (It’s interesting that some of the signatories are people likely to have come from majority-Muslim countries.)
Glancing at the CSDM site, I see that some of these students will be going to École Christ‑Roi, École Coeur‑Immaculé‑de‑Marie, any of five Notre‑Dame‑de‑ci‑et‑de‑ça, and an entire litany of saints from Saint‑Albert‑le‑Grand to Saint‑Zotique. But that’s not a problem.
Update Thursday: This piece clarifies that the EMSB chose not to vote on the issue, thus passively assenting to the law.
Jack
Our School Boards are utterly irrelevant, abolish them.
If they can not defend community members from a law that openly discriminates, what kind of message can they conceivably convey to children about discrimination and racism.
They cared more about their pitiful station and pay cheques than they did about individuals who will now be subject to a law that for all intents and purposes polices what one can wear or cant. I worked for these institutions for thirty years and trust me that last thing almost all these apparatchiks ever thought of was your kids in the classroom. Most had never taught or if they had, a school board appointment meant getting out of the classroom.
Angela Mancini, the chairperson and her commissioners demonstrated a lack of courage that will be remembered for a long time. This is a sad day.Chris
>It’s interesting that some of the signatories are people likely to have come from majority-Muslim countries
Interesting, but not at all surprising. This was discussed back in the height of the Bill 21 debate[1]. It’s no surprise that some people that *left* Islamic theocracies should be happy to see less Islam. If you were forced to wear hijab against your will, like 10s of millions of people are today, then you too might not be too fond of them. Likewise friends and relative of such people.
The other religious signifiers, like kippahs or crucifixes, are less controversial precisely because there’s no place on earth that *forces* you to wear one.
Kate
Chris, nobody here forces anyone to wear a headscarf, so the issue is not the same.
Chris
Kate, nobody here is forced, obviously. I was replying (and quoted) your part about “people likely to have come from majority-Muslim countries”. Many of them were forced. You don’t see how that could make some of them support 21 and sign the open letter?
Mark Côté
The school boards, or at least the EMSB (not sure about the others), did put up at least something of a fight against Bill 21. How would it be better if the government that *passed* the legislation was administering the schools directly?
Blork
Hey, this is me siding with Chris. Take a screenshot; it might not last. 🙂
Chris, I think your point is that Canadians originally from countries where the wearing of hijab/naquib is enforced (either legally or culturally) are the likely to be vocal in opposing the wearing of hijabs. This is a natural reaction, and is similar to people from the former Soviet countries who came to the west and became very right wing and anti-government because they felt burned by living under an omnipresent and repressive government boot.
It’s an interesting observation, but I would counter that there is a strong bias in place that needs to be factored in, so I don’t think those opinions come from a place of insight and clarity. It’s more a reflex against a past injury, and is probably driven more by emotion than logic.
And as Kate says, it’s not like Bill 21 is forcing anyone to wear something, so it’s a separate argument. But Chris’s point is still useful for understanding the discussion and understanding why people who have lived under forced hijabbery (hey, I think I just coined that!) might be among the loudest supporters of Bill 21. However, it is a logical fallacy at heart (I’m not sure which one… deficits fallacy maybe?) because they are separate issues but under the same umbrella. And given that we live in a world that is more and more governed by emotion than logic, we can’t just dismiss it.
Kate
Arguably, Bill 21 comes from a similar impulse, from Quebec’s memory of being dominated by the Catholic church. But now the feelings are softened somewhat to sentimentality, so that crosses and saints’ names can be forgiven as cultural trappings, while alien sights like hijabs and shtreimels don’t have that glow around them.
Michael Black
Oddly, I think we have as much obligation to people who want to wear religious symbols as those who want to get away from tyem.
We gave Malala honorary citizenshio, but we also let that young woman from Saudi Arabia come here when she wanted to get away from strict religion. There’s nothing contradictory in either act, both are about recognizing what they choose. That family that killed their daughters for being “too western” were tried, but we should give the same protection to woman who wear a hijab.
We worry too much that people wearing such things are strict etc. I used to think that, then saw better. So that nurse last week could enjoy a joke, and certainly wasn’t trying to isolate herself from the world.
I recently saw some photos of Syilx women with incredibly long and thick braids. That’s cultural, but not really different from women who wear hijabs. But in the past, those women probably would have been told or coerced to cut their hair. Men were in the same situation. “Honor the ancestors” I think is as much because others tried to take that long hair away as some cultural thing. I can have long hair since I was 11 years old, sadly most of it came out this year, because I’m white. Yet I just barely lost the hair genes, so I’m the first without black straight hair, and never as thick as the cousins. But in retrospect it was inadvertently bold, and the loss is doubly so since I’ve lost my familiar hair and now see it as a cultural loss.
I now see the Gazette story today, which explains that by not voting the EMSB defaulted to provisional rules, whuch explains why the CBC story last night said they didn’t vote, which at the time I thougt just meant a postponement. But no meeting before schools go.back on Tuesday, so they caved in.
Michael
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Kate
I’ve been asked to take note of this story, even though it includes elements of the kind of international politics that I usually leave aside. The Pride parade on the weekend barred some Hong Kong participants saying there had been threats, and yet some pro-Chinese marchers showed up even to singing the Chinese anthem during the minute of silence. (Thanks to Christopher DeWolf, who linked to that second piece on Twitter.)
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Kate
STM workers sometimes have to come face to face with attempted or successful suicides. They’ve set up a mutual support group to deal with the fallout from this part of their jobs. Text and audio from Radio-Canada.
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Kate
Steve Faguy has a piece comparing Jump, Lime and Bixi – the latter both the standard and electric models – in terms of cost, availability and so on. He doesn’t judge them as a rider.
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Kate
I’m noticing the opening of the World Press Photo show this week at Marché Bonsecours mostly because I saw somewhere a link to Daily Hive’s brief mention.
Daily Hive used to be a reasonable if a little overexcitable source of cultural news, but when it tells you feverishly that last year’s show contained “73,000 images from 4,500 photographers in 125 different countries” you realize it’s morphed into MTLBlog. Too bad: we didn’t need another one. (TVA explains more reasonably that the show’s judges evaluated that many pictures, to narrow it down to the 42 pictures that will be on display.)
Le Devoir finds this year’s exhibition particularly moving; the Gazette comments on some of the winners. The photo show’s on till the end of September.
Blork
To be precise, there were 42 prizes awarded, but there are three or four times as many images on display, as they also show the runners up.
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Kate
The Journal notes a circulating photo of a Lime scooter abandoned on the platform at Papineau metro. Lime has been promising to resolve issues but how can they possibly police all their users?
Chris
Odd. Why take the trouble to carry it down to the platform when you could just abandon it outside the station?
Blork
Possibly because the person knew it would attract attention and become a widely circulated photo.
Chris
Yeah, good hypothesis. I’d wager such a person is more likely to be an anti-scooter activist than a Lime customer.
Ephraim
Easy way to fix, if the GPS doesn’t indicate that it’s in one of the blue squares, tell the user that it’s not released and keep on charging. It’s amazing how they will start to put it where it belongs if it will cost them money. As for the helmet and sidewalk… tell the police to start writing tickets. After about 30K worth of tickets in one day, we will see things start to change. People don’t like tickets for $128.
Bert
Does anything prevent someone else from picking up the scooter and carrying it away in order to plop it on a platform?
Blork
No. Unlike Jump bikes, which are locked to things, these Lime scooters are just sitting there for anybody to walk away with. I’m surprised there isn’t a thriving business in stealing them and overriding the pay system. Free e-scooter!
Jonathan
There’s an alarm that goes off if you move it around and don’t unlock it with the app
CE
@Blork. You can get conversion kits to turn Lime or Bird scooters into personal scooters pretty easily online. There are lots of tutorial videos on YouTube. I’d be very surprised if there isn’t at least one person in Montreal converting one in their garage right now.
Mr.Chinaski
This is all part of their business plan. As citizens, we have no time and most people don’t care to take a photo and send it to Lime. WHen they do, they tell you “we cannot do anything if you don’t give us the bike serial #”.
As more and more citizens go against the rules, there are two things that can happen : The city bans Lime or the city changes their rules to open Lime to more possibilities. If the city lets them go, they will only have lost investment on the early scooters. If the city drops the street parking zones and helmet, then Lime will win and start putting 10x more of them.
Disruption is the way they make money.
qatzelok
I like Ephraim’s idea of changing the world by charging people lots of money for their sins.
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Kate
A police spokeswoman says the weekend attack on two off-duty police is unacceptable but that’s pretty much a given; she also says the whole force has been shaken up by the incident.
I’ve seen various reports about what’s happened judicially since: Radio-Canada last reported four people charged but CTV says six people have been arrested and the Journal reports that a young woman on the scene, who made a video of the attack, has also pleaded guilty to taking part in it. This last link has the video, which is poor quality but sufficient to see what went on.
Jonathan
Imagine how whole communities of people of colour feel (shaken up?) when the police force unjustly targets them…
walkerp
That video does not make it look like they just jumped the cops. Looks like something went down first and then they got jumped. I strongly suspect there is more to this story than what is being reported.
Mark Côté 10:20 on 2019-08-29 Permalink
I think DDO has a higher percentage of immigrants from India than most of the rest of Montreal.
Ian 15:19 on 2019-08-29 Permalink
I vaguely recall that map a few years back showing most popular 3rd languages in Montreal and around DDO it’s Bengali. Makes sense.
There’s a ton of Indians around Parc Ex but there’s a lot of other southeast Asians in the area too so I guess it dilutes the pool somewhat. lots of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans etc.
js 09:56 on 2019-08-30 Permalink
Aren’t there several Hindu temples in DDO? There’s a Tamil one with a gopuram (maybe the congregants are Sri Lankan?) on St-Regis that can be seen from the 40 that’s very much worth swinging by to check out up close if you have a few minutes.