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  • Kate 21:49 on 2020-07-03 Permalink | Reply  

    East-end Montreal used to have its own newspapers. Est Média has an interesting look back at some of them and interviews some of the folks who worked on them.

    Although onetime city councillor (and very brief mayor pro tem) Laurent Blanchard, who once owned the Nouvelles de l’Est, says here that the oldest local paper is the Guide Mont-Royal from 1938, the Westmount Examiner was launched in 1935 and Wikipedia says The Monitor began in 1926. This CBC piece from 2015 says the West Island Chronicle dated from 1925.

     

    • Kate 21:29 on 2020-07-03 Permalink | Reply  

      The potential conversion of STM security goons into cops is not sitting well with everyone.

      In other STM news, they have a bit of PR out about testing its new electric bus (Autobus electricus) up to its axles in water to make sure it can handle this kind of condition.

       

      • Kate 21:17 on 2020-07-03 Permalink | Reply  

        The MSO is going to play a bunch of pop-up performances in outdoor locations around town, with no advance publicity.

         

        • dwgs 23:14 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

          That’s an excellent idea, well done.

      • Kate 21:13 on 2020-07-03 Permalink | Reply  

        Of twenty recent promotions in the SPVM, every one was white.

         

        • dwgs 23:16 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

          When your membership is 99.9% white (64% of all statistics are totally made up) it’s kinda hard to find a brown person to elevate.

        • Chris 00:57 on 2020-07-04 Permalink

          There are around 4600 officers in the SPVM. 20 seems a rather small sample size to draw any conclusions from.

      • Kate 10:55 on 2020-07-03 Permalink | Reply  

        Some communities around Montreal are asking residents to limit their use of water, not only because summer brings heat waves, but because it turns out that people working from home use more water.

        At the same time, intermittent heat wave warnings include advice on staying hydrated, cooling off by dabbing yourself with damp cloths and so on.

        Last week, TVA even shamed a Ville-Émard resident for running a hose pointlessly on a piece of alley pavement for an hour. With a link to the city’s guidelines on not misusing water (PDF).

         

        • GC 18:42 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

          I’m struggling to understand what his motivation was, other than wasting water. Did he just murder someone there? Was he planning to eat off that surface? Within a few minutes, a car is just going to drive over it and make it dirty again.

        • Chris 19:17 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

          Charging for water by the litre would help a lot. Shame we managed to botch the whole water meter thing.

        • Ian 16:23 on 2020-07-04 Permalink

          Don’t we still lose 45% of our potable water to leaks in the existing infrastructure? Kind of hard to justify residential water meters when there’s that much wastage by the city itself.

      • Kate 10:48 on 2020-07-03 Permalink | Reply  

        EMSB chair Angela Mancini has been called out in a report written by an independent HR company about the state of EMSB management. They recommend barring Mancini and her supporters from running in board elections again.

        Note the rather shady photo the CBC uses to illustrate this story. I don’t know the inner story here: it’s easy to jump to the conclusion Mancini is in the wrong, but it’s also possible that what we’re seeing is the tip of a power struggle.

        Update: Mancini says she’s the target of a vendetta and that her complaints of harassment were not taken seriously.

         

        • dwgs 11:22 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

          I had dealings with her back in the late 90’s, she was nasty and manipulative back then and the stakes were incredibly small, I believe all the bad things I read about her these days.

        • Mark Côté 11:40 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

          Unless the law is overturned in court, there won’t be any more EMSB elections anyway…

        • walkerp 12:58 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

          Whatever the back story, her public behaviour and her complete disappearance for months, while still being in a position to block anything from moving forward is damning enough.

          Her behaviour reeks of petty authoritarian controlling a tiny political fiefdom.

        • walkerp 13:01 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

          Just to add, that while it is good to reveal the crimes of an individual, situations get like this because of underlying cultural and structural problems. It is all too late now as Mark Côté says, but would be nice to not allow it all to be easily blamed on one individual. This way does not lead to change.

        • Kevin 18:41 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

          @Mark Coté
          That’s wrong. ALL the anglo school boards (or service centres if you prefer the new name for the same structural body) have elections on Nov. 1.

          On the French side all commissioners were replaced by appointees to a board of directors (or they should have been. They were all fired/decommissioned as soon as the bill was rammed through. I don’t know if the government got around to replacing any of them, since the government did go back to lots of commissioners when they started shutting down schools in March and asked them for help — but that’s an aside).

          On the English side the community elects the majority of members of each Board of Directors.

          I haven’t parsed it out in a while, but I think it’s 10 parents, 6 people from “the community at large”, and 4 people chosen from principals/Teachers/Support staff/administrators.

        • Mark Côté 12:41 on 2020-07-04 Permalink

          True they will live on in a reduced form. I’m not sure if Mancini could sit as a parent representative (does she still have children in elementary or high school?) but I guess technically she could sit as a community representative.

      • Kate 10:43 on 2020-07-03 Permalink | Reply  

        It’s a usage thing that irritates me: the Gazette reports on an old house demolished without a permit in Pointe Claire. All through this piece, the building is described as a “home” – “make the owner rebuild the home as it was” and so on. That’s pure realtor-talk: they use that word to “warm” a property. A building may be someone’s home, but a random building standing on a street corner is a house.

        Did people call that building “the pink home” as the piece claims? Or did they really call it “the pink house”?

        OK OK, maybe it’s a flinch left over from a time when I worked on publications that included some real estate stuff. But I think I have a point.

         

        • dwgs 11:25 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

          “But without love it ain’t nothin’ but a house, a house where nobody lives”

        • Patrick 14:37 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

          Plus, an apartment is a home, too. I hate it when newscasters say a fire or flood destroyed X number of “homes.” You never know if/how multi-family dwellings are counted.

        • GC 18:37 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

          Yes, I’m with you and Patrick, Kate. I call my condo a “home”, but it is definitely not a “house”.

        • david23 22:02 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

          I, for one, welcome you to the dark side, Kate.

        • Francesco 21:40 on 2020-07-04 Permalink

          Another usage thing: The Pink House was the common Anglo appellation of “Chez Francis,” a seedy strip joint on Côte-de-Liesse just near the airport. 😀

      • Kate 09:39 on 2020-07-03 Permalink | Reply  

        Somebody in the Plateau is shooting at cats with an air gun. Indoor-outdoor cats are turning up with pellets in them.

         

        • Kate 09:25 on 2020-07-03 Permalink | Reply  


          Every so often it comes up about the inclusion of Mussolini in the fresco inside Madonna della Difesa. This writer thinks this work by Guido Nincheri should be erased. The church, and the community around it, have resisted the idea of painting over the fresco for years.

          Would we all be better off if this art was painted over with plain white primer? Can anyone really believe that preserving this glowing Nincheri piece is done out of respect for Mussolini?

           

          • MarcG 10:37 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

            Hire a local graffiti artist to deface him? “Cock in mouth” would be classic but maybe not to the church’s tastes.

          • Mark Côté 11:43 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

            “Can anyone really believe that preserving this glowing Nincheri piece is done out of respect for Mussolini?”

            While modifying a fresco isn’t a small thing, I think it’s been demonstrated here sufficiently that intention is not enough to justify keeping something offensive around.

          • Kate 12:20 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

            True. But if someone paints a black rectangle over Benito there, it’ll call more attention to him.

            I guess it’ll have to go. The church better price out some house painters.

          • Uatu 13:45 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

            I guess they could put up a plaque or something pointing out il duce and who was and why he’d be in the fresco.
            Re: cock in mouth; Italians urinated on Mussolini’s corpse when it was strung up so that wouldn’t be surprising

          • Michael Black 14:44 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

            It’s an odd artifact since it’s a painting on the ceiling rather than a painting in a frame or a statue.

            I saw it almost forty years ago, cycling by the church, a friend wanted to go in and see it. He was born in Italy, though came over young and ultimately stayed. It was the novelty, not sympathy to Musolini’s ideas.

            This is what some people believed in at one point. It seems important to keep it to remember that bad time.

          • mare 15:17 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

            They could paint is over with a portrait of another deserving politician of that era, say Lionel Groulx.

            No current or recent politician will be known for being “the replacement of Mussolini”, and putting our local saint Pere André there might not go over well with his admirers, and it’s not “his” church anyway.

            So either leave it and make a plaque of some sorts explaining about its history, or just paint some nice trees or other scenery in place of Il Duce.

          • Kate 15:18 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

            It seems important to keep it to remember that bad time.

            Thing is, that argument could be used to keep any of the statues now being taken down in response to repugnance to slave ownership and other historical wickedness.

            Pieces that are only memorial, and without other virtues, should probably be obliterated.

            My argument about this piece is simply the aesthetic value. It’s a gorgeous piece. Admittedly, Nincheri was not Michelangelo, and this piece is something of an imitation of Renaissance painting, but it’s not like we have a whole lot of that kind of thing here.

            The church is not always open, but now and then it is, and it really is a piece worth seeing in place – and see it soon. I think the feelings of the community must be respected. A plain off-white paint will suffice. I’d happily climb up and wield the first roller. We’re in an age of iconoclasm and it befits us to comply.

          • Chris 16:41 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

            >putting our local saint Pere André there might not go over well with his admirers

            He was a charlatan, pushing nonsense oil cures. And he was a member of a racist, misogynist, homophobic organization. Surely not someone to memorialize.

          • Matthew H 17:39 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

            This feels different than the statues, as the figure is a small part of a painting which itself is part of the larger architecture.

            They should obscure his face with a black line or an X. A simple gesture to acknowledge that revering or honouring this person was wrong. The fresco is fascinating, I hope they don’t destroy it with clumsy alterations. Painting over Mussolini with someone else would be an absurd solution to this problem.

          • Matthew H 17:43 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

            Alternatively, they could just install an air conditioner right where his face is.

          • MarcG 17:47 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

            There are probably a bunch of less-famous assholes in that painting as well. I see some white-saviors-of-Africa stuff happening on the left side…

          • Kate 21:37 on 2020-07-03 Permalink

            It would be fair to assume that none of the people portrayed on the two bottom tiers held attitudes we would approve of today. Maybe if we painted them all out, and simply kept the angels and the Virgin Mary at the top? Or do we regard the Virgin as a poor role model for women, and erase the whole thing?

          • MarcG 09:18 on 2020-07-04 Permalink

            I don’t think that the current movement has any beef with people’s attitudes – it’s their behavior that matters. And in that case I think you’re right that the mythical creatures would get a pass.

        • Kate 09:09 on 2020-07-03 Permalink | Reply  

          A couple of crooks who impersonated an older couple to sell their paid-up Outremont house fraudulently in 2017 will do time. Even so, the real owner, and the man who thought he was legitimately buying a property, remain out of pocket.

           

          • Kate 09:05 on 2020-07-03 Permalink | Reply  

            There’s a boil water advisory for a part of Anjou and Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve right now. Map showing the perimeter.

             

            • Kate 09:00 on 2020-07-03 Permalink | Reply  

              One of the inevitable news cycle reports: the mess left behind by Moving Day. People donate worthless junk to charities and leave the rest behind on the sidewalk.

               

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