Updates from October, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 23:47 on 2019-10-21 Permalink | Reply  

    Been listening to the election returns, and of the Montreal ridings with unpredictable outcomes:

    La Pointe-de-l’Île – Mario Beaulieu, Bloc, re-elected. Big resurgence of the Bloc all over Quebec but this is the only Bloc riding in Montreal: odds are there’s a big overlap between CAQ and Bloc voters.

    Hochelaga – Soraya Martinez Ferrada, Liberal. The NDP had been strong here and some predicted a Bloc win.

    Outremont – Liberal Rachel Bendayan, first elected in a byelection after Thomas Mulcair stepped down, is back.

    Rosemont-La-Petite-Patrie – Alexandre Boulerice is the last NDPer left standing in the province.

    Laurier Ste-Marie – Liberal Steven Guilbeault has soundly defeated Nimâ Machouf.

    Some of the west-end Liberal wins were well above 50%, and it looks like Laval is all Liberal right now, although the two islands are swimming in a sea of Bloc blue.

    Oh, and Maxime Bernier didn’t even come close to winning his seat.

     
    • ant6n 23:56 on 2019-10-21 Permalink

      Montreal is all red, except 2 ridings. I bet Trudeau feels pretty smart for braking his electoral reform promise (which he did or course in the “interest of Canada & all Canadians”) & then running an anti-Conservative scare-campaign against actual progressives. (And I hope those who strategically voted for the Liberals are feeling dumb right now for falling for the tactic yet again.)

    • david100 01:09 on 2019-10-22 Permalink

      Yeah, pretty comical that you have a bunch of PLC people convincing NDP sympathizers to vote for the PLC candidate out of fear of the CPC, taking down great NDP incumbents across the province. So, a Ruth-Ellen Brosseau is thrown out of office in favor of the generic BQ candidate, or the Liberal is elected on the Plateau – because NDP supporters strategically voted PLC. Wonderful plan. The PLC got what they wanted but damn is that cynical.

    • Kate 07:40 on 2019-10-22 Permalink

      Still happy it’s a Liberal minority, not a Conservative one. Sorry to lose good NDP folks but, as Ruth Ellen Brosseau just said on CBC, that’s politics.

      Also, the minority means Trudeau will have to court the NDP, which means they will have something to say about outcomes.

    • Ephraim 13:52 on 2019-10-22 Permalink

      Laurier Ste-Marie didn’t have an incumbent. The NDP previous member retired. Nima Machouf was new.

    • Kate 14:03 on 2019-10-22 Permalink

      The NDP’s Hélène Laverdière won that riding in 2011 and hung onto it in 2015 but chose not to run again. Did someone imply this was not so?

    • Ephraim 16:18 on 2019-10-22 Permalink

      @Kate – You said defeated, which to some might imply that she was incumbent…. because otherwise he defeated everyone, not just her.

      It’s a very interesting riding. The riding has one of the lowest median incomes of all the ridings in Canada. At just $45.2K median household income. (Below that is Hamilton then Papineau and finally Bourassa riding.) But the fact that the riding went resoundingly Liberal, when it used to be Bloc and then NDP is interesting. I wonder how much Steven Guilbeault and Equiterre resounded with the people in the riding and if it related to environmentalism in the Plateau.

    • Dan_Mtl 16:27 on 2019-10-22 Permalink

      It also seemed to be a riding with an outcome that was difficult to predict: Calculated Politics had it leaning Bloc on election day, and 338Canada thought NDP would trail behind the Bloc, but they ended up in 2nd place. It was a fun riding to live in, observe and vote in this year.

    • Bill Binns 15:15 on 2019-10-23 Permalink

      Laurier Ste-Marie has an abnormally low average income because it includes and abnormally large number of social housing units. The huge complex of social housing along Maisonneuve between St Denis and St Laurent is in the riding plus dozens of small to medium sized buildings sprinkled throughout the neighborhood. This average includes a huge number of zeroes.

      We have the same problem with our provincial riding which would have been corrected a few years ago if not for the interference of QS.

    • Kate 08:18 on 2019-10-24 Permalink

      Bill Binns, are you honestly calling people “zeroes”?

      Also, if you think QS can influence the work of Elections Quebec, you’re straying into worlds of paranoia. It’s a non-partisan body and is universally respected for its even-handed administration.

  • Kate 19:44 on 2019-10-21 Permalink | Reply  

    New signs have gone up showing that Amherst Street is history and the street is now Rue Atateken, as is the corresponding bus route.

     
    • david100 23:13 on 2019-10-21 Permalink

      Pretty cool. I guess the closest phonetic pronunciation in English is aw-ta-da-ghen.

    • Kate 14:04 on 2019-10-22 Permalink

      French Wikipedia gives it as a-de-dé-gan.

    • jeather 15:25 on 2019-10-22 Permalink

      I don’t know about stress, but as a rule t/k/s will be pronounced as d/g/z in front of vowels, which use the standard pronunciations that European languages except English use (i is pronounced ee, etc). They only standardised the spelling recently (I believe we discussed it on this blog in the past few months), so it’s quite regular.

  • Kate 12:10 on 2019-10-21 Permalink | Reply  

    Ali El Harda was attacked outside an Old Montreal bar in January 2017. He was stabbed so deeply that he needed two surgeries and has had to change his occupation, and is not happy that his attacker has received a sentence of only 90 days.

     
    • Ephraim 18:26 on 2019-10-21 Permalink

      That’s a CRIMINAL court. He has to go after them in CIVIL court if he wants real justice.

    • david100 23:15 on 2019-10-21 Permalink

      You think scum like that has any money/assets to seize? Plus, Quebec doesn’t give a plaintiff’s side attorney many tools to work with.

    • Kate 07:42 on 2019-10-22 Permalink

      david100, crimes like this are not the exclusive domain of poor people. Old Montreal is not a cheap hangout. Some dick with an Audi and an attitude might well be the perp, not a homeless guy.

    • Ephraim 14:08 on 2019-10-22 Permalink

      That is unfortunately the way that he has to go. If the guy has almost nothing… well, he’ll chase him into bankruptcy. If he has something, he gets almost all of it. And if he is lucky, he has a liability policy and he can go after that. But that’s the way our society works. And even after he has the judgement, he has to go and pay for a bailiff to collect.

  • Kate 12:00 on 2019-10-21 Permalink | Reply  

    A man was shot dead in Pierrefonds Monday morning. La Presse doesn’t have much more about it yet, but says it’s our 14th homicide – so I’ve missed one. There’s also an equally scanty report from TVA.

    Update: Radio-Canada says the victim was Andrew Scoppa, described as a Mafia chief. They make this #13 of the year. Scoppa’s brother Salvatore was shot dead in Laval in May of this year.

    More: La Presse mob specialist Daniel Renaud dissects the likely meaning of this killing in the bigger pattern of the struggle to dominate the Montreal underworld. The theory is that the Scoppa brothers were involved in the killing of four Rizzuto-clan connections in 2016. There were arrests in those killings only last week, which I never blogged, since I’ve found over time that mob stories don’t interest my readers much, and even the most lurid stories pass with little comment.

    Still, they are news.

     
  • Kate 07:55 on 2019-10-21 Permalink | Reply  

    Québec solidaire is speaking up against the growing phenomenon of renoviction and wants to see a law banning them when the vacancy rate is under 3%.

     
    • CommonSense 10:51 on 2019-10-21 Permalink

      Let’s put an end to “renovictions”!

      After that, let’s cry foul about slum lords who let buildings fall into disrepair.

      Here’s a shocker: when policy makes it a more interesting proposition for landlords to have their units sit empty for a year rather than have them rented, we need to rethink that policy.

    • Ephraim 15:54 on 2019-10-21 Permalink

      We also need to stop the moratorium on condo conversion of properties under 5 apartments. When a small multiplex (duplex or triplex) goes over the $1M dollar threshold, the ability to get a mortgage becomes too difficult. Any amount over $1M now has a 20% deposit and you can’t get mortgage insurance to lower that. And the banks only offer you 70% of the rent on condition you have good leases. When someone may have the ability to buy one part and rent it out… but it’s almost impossible to do as co property and even if you can, you are stuck with an inability to get a standard mortgage, only 3 banks will write a mortgage on the property.

  • Kate 07:45 on 2019-10-21 Permalink | Reply  

    CTV says a calèche horse fell down in Griffintown late Sunday, presumably on its way back to its stable. The calèche business will cease to exist at the end of this year, so stories like this will soon be a quaint history.

     
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