Montreal City Weblog

Kate 21:02 on 2020-05-01 Permalink Reply  

• Roman 21:07 on 2020-05-01 Permalink

  Are all these fires self inflicted to get insurance?

• Kate 21:14 on 2020-05-01 Permalink

  I doubt it. These are mostly crappy little hole-in-the-wall café bars, the insurance wouldn’t come to much.

  If you read the piece, you’ll see Daniel Renaud thinks it has to do with these joints being places illicit drugs have been sold. He clearly doesn’t know, nor do the police, exactly what’s going on, but I suspect it’s a microeconomic glimpse of what’s happening everywhere: the bars can’t open, the owners are in debt to whoever it is supplies whatever drugs it is they sell, so a domino effect comes into play, the mobsters want their money, the dealers can’t actually move any product, and can’t collect on debts they’re already owed. So the mobsters deliver “messages” although even they must be aware there’s no liquidity in the system right now, licit or illicit.

  Like the Quebec government, the mobsters want things opened up and business returned to normal. But you can’t get blood out of a gatepost.

  Update: The price of cocaine is way down.

• TC 21:48 on 2020-05-01 Permalink

  Fire bombings seem to be a feature of the Montreal underworld, do they occur in other parts of Canada? I follow the local news in various cities in the US and the world, but bar flambé is sort of a poutine, understood only by locals.

• Kate 22:47 on 2020-05-01 Permalink

  Not sure, TC. Gangs used to dynamite each other’s clubhouses, and I recall reading that it was partly because they didn’t have access to serious firearms here (also some of them had connections to the construction industry, which gave them access to dynamite). But it seems clear from the new federal firearms laws announced Friday that it hasn’t been so hard to get hold of assault weapons here, although it seems they mostly get used by dangerous nutbars, not by gangs.