A teenager was stabbed in the metro on Monday afternoon, and is in critical condition. The suspect fled the scene; Honoré-Beaugrand station was closed for a few hours but has reopened.
Updates from September, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Kate
-
Kate
I’ve had three Canada Revenue Agency scam phone calls so far Monday and it’s not 4 pm yet.
CBC link to a radio segment about call centres in India and how impossible it is to police the problem from Canada.
La Presse’s Tristan Péloquin deliberately went down the rabbit hole with one of these calls and describes what happened and what he was instructed to do.
Just now, I tried it: I pressed “1” as the recorded voice said, and a human being came on the line. “Exactly what is it I’m charged with?” I asked him, patrician like, and I was immediately cut off.
Ephraim
I ask for service in French…. they just hang up now.
Douglas
I pressed 1 and asked him when he was going to arrest me because I was waiting all day.
He taunted and hung up.
walkerp
I am finding it harder and harder to keep these guys on the call for any length of time. I think they have new orders to hang up at the slightest suspicion. It’s a really good test of one’s acting skills. I would be curious to know how they are coached to decide if they have a real mark on the line.
When I do get them believing, my reveal is not to be aggressive to them. I am sympathetic that they are just as much trapped in our unequal global system. I try to get them to be conscious of the impact of their behaviours and that they should use their skills in a more positive endeavour.
Kate
walkerp, that’s a compassionate take on the whole thing. The CBC reporter in the piece I linked had the impression the people working the phones in India were not naive, and knew full well they were actors in a scam. What kind of response did you get when you told them they were scamming people and should do better?
walkerp
Usually they hang up at that point. The one guy that debated me tried to argue that he was providing a necessary service (it was the virus removal scam). We just deadlocked and called it a day. I do not expect any immediate success, just hope to put a tiny thought into their brain that may change their thinking.
Of course, they know it is a scam, but it’s much easier to swallow actually doing it when you don’t have to think about the impact on real people. I think they tell themselves we are all rich and can afford it. In some cases that may be true, but I suspect it is usually the elderly who may have a fixed income that fall for it. I try to play on their sympathies of somebody’s grandmother losing money they desperately need.
Mark Côté
I just watched the first few episodes of “The Business of Drugs” on Netflix, and it’s easier to feel sympathy for a lot of people involved in the drug trade (and there are *a lot* of people involved) when you see how incredibly difficult their lives are, at least over where the drugs originate. I have a feeling it’d be similar for these scammers. Are all these things hurting humanity? Absolutely. Do many of these people have real alternatives for making any sort of a living? Barely if at all.
MarcG
I agree with Mark, nobody would choose that job over something meaningful.
-
Kate
St Gabriel’s church on Centre Street in Point St Charles has been condemned because the structure is not sound. Till recently the church housed a food bank, which has now moved to an empty storefront nearby. The church building was severely damaged in a fire decades ago and may never have been properly rebuilt; its social support role is far more important now than the original religious purpose for which it was built.
Jebediah Pallindrome
The city should buy all the old churches the diocese no longer wants or can’t maintain, deconsecrate them and use them for public purposes (or even rent them back to religious groups).
Demolition via neglect is a sorry way to go. Besides, some of them have great accoustics and nearly all are located in primo locations. They’re also excellent examples of indigenous architecture.
Kate
That sounds very well, but the actual church spaces are of limited usefulness. People have been using church halls forever for sales, food banks, social assistance offices of all kinds, but the actual sanctuaries are expensive to maintain and have limited application if you’re not doing religion.
Your idea would also be vastly expensive for the city. Example: there’s a big old church on Crémazie a little east of the metro station. It was called St-Alphonse-d’Youville while it was operating, but it actually didn’t have much of a lifetime. It was completed in 1931, but the Met cut across its face in 1960 and everyone stopped going to church a few years later anyway. It was already long moribund when the whole lot was sold for condos, but here’s the story: a guy had backers to turn it into a café and show bar – good location near a metro and a highway – but the borough won’t let him (that item’s from two years ago) because he won’t pay for the roof to be replaced with solid copper. He’s willing to put a new roof on – but copper is expensive. Nope. And we’re not talking Notre Dame de Paris here, you know?
Jebediah Pallindrome
Limited usefulness now, but once the pandemic ends in 2046 it would be great to have more space for libraries, concert venues and theatres.
I get it though, I’m a bit of a dreamer.
That story is infuriating. The city/province isn’t very good at helping small businesses but they are world class champions at putting up every conceivable roadblock.
david25
Also, I’m sure we all appreciate the crazy requirements that owners make buildings in various neighborhoods look historic when they’re not, or even to demodernize existing buildings by rebuilding elements that may have existed historically on buildings so that they look like they did 100 years ago . . . while actual historic buildings of real value are rotting away.
When I’m Archon of Montreal, I’ll redirect the entire budgets of all borough-level planning department staff who work on zoning directly into a big historic preservation fund. Why should we pay a bunch of people city wages, so that they can take money off normal people who are trying to build or even just own housing/commercial, with the result of increasing the cost of housing/commercial for everyone? When we could instead kill that whole process, and funnel the savings into stuff we all agree is actually valuable?
-
Kate
The Journal interviews a woman who has succeeded in making a banana tree grow in her Montreal garden. It’s rather more startling than another recent story about a guy whose sunflowers grew to be 12 feet tall.
Joey
There are some sunflowers on the corner of Drolet and de Castelnau (city curb extension) that are approaching that height.
DeWolf
That is very impressive. My landlord planted some canna lilies next to the sidewalk in front of our place and they are now seven or eight feet tall. We get a lot of people stopping in front to take photos (some of whom mistake them for banana trees).
Kate
I got my hollyhocks to over six feet tall this summer, and I saw occasional people in the alley stopping to admire them, although they were generally more interesting to bees than to people.
-
Kate
CBC has a good piece on the Pho King Bon restaurant but unless there’s anything else, this is the last free publicity it’s getting from me.
Update: Radio-Canada says the owner is backing down, going to change the name of the resto and alter the menu. After getting a boatload of free PR. Is there a word or phrase for provoking free PR via provocation?
Jebediah Pallindrome
This is fascinating because the Viet Cong were freedom fighters combatting wreckless American imperialism, but the overwhelming majority of the people with the means to get out would’ve propped up and supported South Vietnam’s dictatorial government.
And now because the grand-daughter of someone on the wrong side of this conflict is offended a restaurant has to change the name of one of their drinks?
If Death and the Maiden were released today the Chilean-Canadian community would protest the negative stereotyping of the Pinochet regime.
If a restaurant wants to fill its menu with risqué puns that’s their business, no one has to patronize it.
Besides, if you’re heading off to Rosemere for Vietnamese food cooked up by white Quebecois guess what, you’re probably going to be disappointed anyways.
Vote. WIth. Your. Wallet.
Meezly
I think it’s fascinating that someone who is supposedly more educated than the Pho King Bon guy feels they can judge and trivialize what some of these Vietnamese people are feeling, just because their grandparents happened to be on the ‘wrong’ side of a political regime.
Was the new regime that overthrew the old one any better? Just because some of the people who fled were doctors, bankers, bureaucrats, military personnel, it was ok to forcibly seize their properties and send them to internment camps? and I don’t think people of means were even the ‘overwhelming majority’ that arrived in Canada.
No matter what your station in life was, fleeing a war-ravaged country as a refugee is a traumatic experience that can have repercussions in later generations. If these kids think a cocktail name is offensive because it reminds them of how their grandparents lost their homes and loved ones, then let them speak up and not let some ignorant resto owner normalize racist/sexist humour, not to mention doing such a shite job appropriating their cuisine.
dwgs
Also Jebediah, ‘reckless’.
Uatu
I worked with a Vietnamese guy who fought for the ‘wrong’ side. He was sent to a “re education camp” where he learned to agree with everything or get shot in the head. Also to work at hard labor or get shot in the head. Sometimes someone would ask for something. They would get shot in the head. The new regime didn’t seem all that better to him.
Ian
Well revolutions are successful rebellions, and revolutionary heroes are usually considered terrorists if their side loses. In any case, we certainly have enough Vietnamese Boat People even here in Montreal that it wouldn’t be too hard to hear some different sides to the story.
I think I’ll stick with My Canh on St. Larry – their Pho is amazing – as the name of the restaurant (beautiful soup in Vietnamese) would suggest.
Reply