Updates from October, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 18:40 on 2020-10-03 Permalink | Reply  

    A man shot two women dead on or near Ontario Street on Saturday afternoon. Police winged the shooter, who was taken to hospital. All the accounts of this event are versions of the same brief CP story, which doesn’t specify where on Ontario. TVA says “dans une ruelle”.

    …OK, on or near Cadillac. A detached little three-block eastern continuation of Ontario, in an odd little residential enclave between Dickson and CFB Longue-Pointe. Not the familiar commercial stretch of Ontario Street.

    Minor updates: I find TVA’s headline “Deux femmes mortes sous les balles, un homme blessé dans une fusillade” a bit bizarre, as the wounded man is not just another victim, but the only suspect in the double killing. Likewise, CBC’s headline is now “… Montreal shooting leaves 2 dead, 1 injured” and Global’s is “…Montreal shooting that killed 2, injured 1”.

    The Journal tells us the two murdered sisters were Diane Leblanc, 61, and Sylvie Leblanc, 57 – and the alleged killer was their brother Denis, 59. Must be quite some back story.

     

    • Kate 18:34 on 2020-10-03 Permalink | Reply  

      A demonstration was held Saturday afternoon to demand justice for Joyce Echaquan, the Atikamekw woman who made a video record of medical staff in Joliette verbally abusing her as she lay dying.

      I don’t say this to doubt her, but no account has explained how the video was known about, or sent from Joyce Echaquan’s phone in her extremity.

       

      • Ian 19:31 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

        I just figured her family got her phone when she died and one of them knew the password or pattern. Both my kids can do the pattern to unlock my phone.

      • Kate 19:40 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

        Sure. But someone knew to look for a video right away. It was in circulation within 24 hours of her death.

        As I say, I don’t say it to doubt her, but no account of the story explains how anyone got the phone and knew to check for a video, so quickly.

      • dhomas 20:12 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

        She broadcast the video on Facebook Live, according to news reports.
        https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-atikamekw-joliette-1.5743449

      • Kate 20:38 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

        There you go. A rare positive data point for Facebook. Thanks, dhomas. I should have read more of the pieces about her. It’s a ferociously impressive act, to livestream your own death as witness to such abuse.

      • MarcG 09:11 on 2020-10-04 Permalink

        I think that if someone I loved died, especially under unusual circumstances, I would be pretty quick to look at their smartphone to see if there was anything worth seeing.

    • Kate 16:23 on 2020-10-03 Permalink | Reply  

      Yo ho. 1107 new cases Saturday, and another ten deaths totted up and added to the total.

       

      • Kate 09:03 on 2020-10-03 Permalink | Reply  

        Longtime vegetarian restaurant and music venue L’Escalier has closed for good in the Quartier Latin, the building will be demolished and replaced by a new condo building.

         

        • JaneyB 09:46 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

          Oh no!!! Bad enough it has closed but to be replaced by a condo complex… 🙁

        • DeWolf 12:01 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

          Condos are just apartments, I’m not sure why a condo building is any more offensive than other types of private housing. Many of the “condos” going up are actually rental apartments, especially in that part of town.

          Unless you’re suggesting it should be social housing, in which case I agree, since Montreal needs a lot more of that.

          I think the biggest tragedy here is that this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to music venues closing, something that has been happening for years but will only accelerate with the pandemic. The big venues will survive but it’s the little ones that are really necessary to support a healthy music scene.

        • Kate 12:14 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

          Thing is this: buildings like l’Escalier’s are all over town, and conventionally they have retail of some kind on the ground floor, maybe apartments upstairs, possibly offices in some cases. You tear down an older brick building like this one and put up a modern condo building and rent out the ground floor to what? Look at what’s along that stretch of Ste‑Catherine: a magazine store, the spaghetti restaurant, l’Escalier, an Amir on the corner – but a new, glitzy condo building is not going to be affordable for small-scale retail, so you’re going to get another couple of franchise businesses, and there are already enough of those. We’re getting rid of the older, run-down buildings offering space for marginal outfits and making the city fit only for chains with deep pockets for high rents. Inevitable, but the city loses some of its texture every time it happens.

        • DeWolf 12:42 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

          You’re absolutely right that low-rent buildings are vital to the cultural and economic health of the city. That was one of Jane Jacob’s most important arguments. In this particular case, I think it’s a shame that the city is allowing eclectic commercial blocks on Ste-Catherine to be torn down and redeveloped when there are still surface parking lots just around the corner.

          But I was questioning the reflexive disdain for “condos” when redevelopment is part of the natural process of the city. Most of the new development going up around town is not particularly luxurious, especially around the Latin Quarter, where new condos and rental apartments are mid-market at best. Today’s new buildings are tomorrow’s cheap old buildings.

        • PatrickC 13:28 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

          I don’t see why the problem of street-level retail in new buildings can’t be solved by some kind of land-use policy that creates favorable conditions for public amenities on that level. Don’t some European countries have this?

        • Kate 16:22 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

          PatrickC, I’m pretty sure zoning means there’s supposed to be a commercial ground floor along there, but I know of stretches of commercial streets elsewhere with sudden blocks of purely residential buildings breaking up the commercial continuity, and nothing is worse for discouraging people from walking along a commercial street than finding themselves on blocks of dead frontage. Did those developers get a derogation? I have no idea.

          I don’t know how much city hall cares about this. The fonctionnaires drive.

        • david877 18:57 on 2020-10-03 Permalink

          The city currently has a policy to require ground floor retail in redevelopments like this, despite market conditions. If we add a policy punishing empty storefronts, that gets the new space onto the market cheaper (even if the loss is pushed onto the residents of the building). We combine this with reforms that greatly reduce the difficulties/costs associated with opening/running a business in Montreal, and we start to get back to the heyday conditions that gave us the city that we all love.

          Love l’escalier more than I can say (literally first date/kiss/etc there with the before/after woman in my life), and I’m very very sad to see it go. Imagine if there was so much housing going up in Montreal that the value of redeveloping this well-used property was only marginal. Thank the artificial land shortage created by our anti-housing policies.

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