Anyone wants to know what systemic racism looks like can read this story from Repentigny in which one set of teenage boys playing pickup basketball is fined $1,500 each, while another set – playing the same game on the same day in the same place – is let off with a warning. No prizes for guessing it’s the Black kids who got ticketed.
Updates from July, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Downtown restaurants with massive rents to meet are facing closure with no tourists, office workers or students to support them. Article doesn’t say, but it seems likely that a good neighbourhood restaurant with lower rent and regular takeout and delivery business is more likely to weather the pandemic.
david232
It’s a shame that Sergakis is a landlord, as it would be nice to see his businesses culled. Cage aux Sports = blight à Montreal.
Ephraim
Sergakis does NOT own La Cage aux Sports, that’s Sportscene group and George Durst. CVE: SPS.A
Spi
I’m not sure how one would get stations des sports and cage au sports mixed up.
Ian
By never going to either of them or really even spending much time int eh neighbourhood, one might suspect.
That said, are there really “neighbourhood” restaurants downtown anymore?
Kate
Ian, what I meant was, I’d back a neighbourhood joint like Romados or Chalet BBQ to weather this interlude better than a downtown establishment that’s constantly just making rent, bills and payroll.
Ian
Oh yeah for sure. A place like Lester’s or Snowdon Deli that owns the building is going to be totally fine. I suspect Chalet BBQ owns their building, no idea about Romados but it would make sense, too.
I’ve noticed a ton more restaurants on delivery apps, too, which is great – I’m enjoying being able to get food from downtown restos up here in Mile End where otherwise the Chinese food pickings are slim.
Kate
Any recommendations for Chinese nosh, Ian? Around Villeray I can get sushi or Vietnamese or that vague area of pan-Asian food where pho and pad thai are on the same menu, but real Cantonese food, nope.
Ian
On SkiptheDishes I’m seeing a lot of the old Chinatown restaurants, I’m not that much further south than Villeray so they may deliver to you too…
david292
I stand guilty, I admit, of having no clue of the difference between Station aux Sports and Cage aux Sports.
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Kate
A man fell into the rapids at Cap St-Jacques on Saturday and his body has not been found. There have been a lot of drownings in Quebec so far this summer.
Sunday morning they were still looking for him. Some reports say he was swimming, but this one says “it’s still unclear how the man ended up in the water.”
Update: Media are saying that a body was pulled out of the river later Sunday but that police were not prepared yet to say whether it was the same man seen falling in.
Second update, mid-Monday: police have confirmed that the body is indeed the man who had the mishap at Cap St-Jacques.
Ian
I’ve been to parts of Cap S-Jacques where you could quite easily fall into the rapids trying to navigate the shore. My guess is he fell in, goofed around a bit since he was already wet, then got caught up by the current.
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Kate
In the “closing the barn door” category, police will now study the crossing of St‑Ambroise south of Sir-George-Étienne-Cartier square where the eight‑year‑old boy was killed in traffic this week. CBC’s Kate McKenna notes that crosswalks have already been painted.
I have advice for the police: the people crossing there are not only going to be nearby residents. Anyone walking between the canal and Notre-Dame Street or St‑Henri metro willl need to cross St‑Ambroise somewhere near that spot because of the proximity of the Beaudoin Street foot bridge.
It’s time for traffic lights. Here’s your study, wrapped up in a paragraph.
Kevin
But can we include clowns?
Kate
Clowns are always an admissible adjunct, Kevin.
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Kate
There were three armed assaults overnight: a man was found with serious injuries in Anjou around 22:25 Saturday night, another around 23:00 was hit with a blunt object (“objet contondant”) in Ville‑Marie, and a young man was found by police on Park Avenue near St‑Viateur around 1:30, after being stabbed during a brawl.
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Kate
An exchange of remarks about masks led to a brawl on an STM bus in the north end, Friday afternoon.
mare
Nice autocomplete. (Original version: was “An exchange of remarks led to”. Early on a Sunday, and it’s remarkable how few errors our blogeuse makes.)
Kate
What? That’s what I wrote, and it isn’t a mistake. I’ve since added “about masks” because that was only mentioned in the invisible headline.
mare
Hmm, I copied it verbatim from the text, the headline was (and is) “Mask exchange ends in bus brawl”.
The combination of the title and the text substituting the word “mask” with “remarks” made me think it was an autocomplete error. It was just confusing, not necessarily wrong. My bad, mea culpa.
(BTW, That headline isn’t invisible, it’s used in the sidebar, and when you click on that, and in the RSS feed.)
JoeNotCharles
An important to part of this story is buried in the middle of the second paragraph:
Un passager muni d’un masque assis à proximité a reproché au jeune homme d’être entré sans masque et avec une bière à la main.
“Beer in hand” explains a lot.
walkerp 22:20 on 2020-07-26 Permalink
Just so infuriating. Note this: “But she also acknowledged that police were responding to a call from a civilian about Black youths playing basketball”. What is the Quebecois name for Karen?
If you have ever wondered why there are tennis courts but no basketball court at parc Jeanne-Mance, here’s a clue.
david232 22:22 on 2020-07-26 Permalink
Who knows the real story. I can believe that some Repentigny cops busted some kids they’d been dealing with repeatedly and finally hammered them with the big fine, when maybe they’d have chased them off yet again if they hadn’t been Haitian. I can also believe that this kid is lying when he claims that a group of whites were not ticketed for doing the same just 15 minutes later.
We’re all primed to believe the worst about francophones and cops and people from Repentigny, but we don’t know.
walkerp 22:38 on 2020-07-26 Permalink
No, we’re all primed to believe that black people deserve whatever cops do to them as evinced by your ignorant comment.
david232 22:43 on 2020-07-26 Permalink
Kids break the laws repeatedly, get fined. Said kids claim – without evidence – that whites were doing the same thing and didn’t get fined.
Online poster 1: Perfect example of how awful our society is.
Online poster 2: Maybe our society is awful, this story could be true, it could be false, we don’t know.
Online poster 1: A comment like this means that you believe cops should target blacks, you’re part of the problem, your comment offends me.
Great!
Kate 22:56 on 2020-07-26 Permalink
I can’t get my head around the sense of fining teenage kids $1,500 for playing a game in the outside air. Granted, Quebec keeps changing the rules, but the item notes “non-contact sports were authorized a few days earlier and, that day, small outdoor gatherings were allowed.”
These kids have to challenge those tickets. With any luck, a sensible judge will cancel them, but who knows how this will go. I hope CBC reports on how it pans out. I can’t imagine what would’ve happened to me had I come home at 16 or 17 to tell my folks they had to pay a $1,500 ticket for me.
Michael Black 23:35 on 2020-07-26 Permalink
Change is about balance, and enpathy helps to rebalance.
Racism shouldn’t be defined by someone spewing hate, but by the people who suffer from it.
I’ve said it before, my great great grandmother Henrietta wrote in 1853 in Red River that she’d not go to Canada because she was concerned about being an “uneducated dark half breed look among the fair & accomplished ladies”. She’s wrong on both accounts, but racism makes people distrust themselves.
Racism isn’t a single incident. It keeps happening and grabs ahold of someone. It colors how people see the world. If it happened before, there might be legitimacy this time, but that feeling of being targeted is very real. It’s not “opportunity”.
Black Lives Matter is about that racism, not just the tip of the iceberge of brutality and death. It’s not just about initial racism, someone must be a criminal because they are black or native, but how it is handled. No need to apologize because criminals don’t need to be treated nicely, and too.much force is okay because they are criminals.
That time forty years ago when the undercover cops disappeared so one could threaten me with a beating, maybe it was only a threat because I am “white”. I don’t know. But the weird thing is that my “white privilege”, somewhat dubious given all the times I was stopped while walking along busy sidewalks, comes from racism. “Let’s be white, it’s simpler”. Whatever happened to my family can be amplified when it comes to the distant cousins and Black people. Nobody should wish to be somebody else.
Dan 07:02 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
@David at this point I assume you’re adding a random number to your name every time you comment here so that one day you can plausibly deny it was you who spewed all the racist crap that you do on this blog.
Ephraim 09:52 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
Those kids need to not just challenge the tickets, they need to open a file at the commission. When the commission is so inundated with these files… they might do something. I’ll make you bets that the chief of the station is already in process to get those tickets cancelled and apologize… just to keep them from taking it to the commission. But that’s where it needs to go… where they can look at the calls of the day and see if there was discrimination.
Meezly 09:53 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
I was half expecting davidxxx to say that there are no black people in Repentigny, period.
Uatu 10:42 on 2020-07-27 Permalink
Why the fines? Didn’t Christian Rioux say that Haitians were the noble blacks unlike the uncouth ‘muricans? ;P