An NPR writer (who apparently lives in Montreal) reports on a suggestion box that appeared on a fence near the tracks this summer. Nice bit of fluff.
Updates from October, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Kate
-
Kate
A man who left a loaded gun in a restaurant bathroom downtown is in deep trouble, not least because he was already under a firearms ban because of his criminal record. But what I want to know is why a tough guy was carrying a purse like that.
Item goes on to note that incidents involving guns have been more prevalent this year, which seems to be true, although the homicide rate isn’t rising relative to recent years.
steph
how do they KNOW it was his gun? Did the genius return to claim it, filed a missing arms police report?
Kate
Maybe there was some ID in the purse as well?
Shoe drop: maybe fingerprints?
Jonathan
Isn’t there a gun registry? That’s how they would know.
Kate
That presupposes that he’d acquired the gun via legitimate means, which is not the only way a guy with criminal connections could get his hands on a weapon.
dwgs
Acquiring a handgun is very difficult in Canada and I would imagine pretty much impossible if you have a serious criminal record.
Blork
I guarantee the vast majority of handguns being carried around are illegal and not part of any registry (not including cops’ guns.)
steph
I always supposed a firearm ban begins with handing over the registered weapons. Maybe they’re allowed to have guns but leave them at home????
-
Kate
I haven’t seen news items mentioning the renewal of the city’s state of emergency for awhile, but this piece mentions it was first declared on March 27, and I believe has simply been extended in five-day blocks since then. It will really be news when it’s declared over.
-
Kate
Quebec’s experiencing a third day with more than 1000 new Covid cases and 12 new deaths added to the total.
-
Kate
Police opened fire Sunday morning at a man with a knife in Montreal North. The man had tried to get into a fire station with a knife in his hand. The BEI will be investigating this incident as well as Saturday’s shooting in the east end.
-
Kate
The Gazette’s Marian Scott tries to trace the roots of the October Crisis including locating the lost town of Ville Jacques-Cartier on the South Shore.
BBC has an archival radio piece called The Quebec Emergency by a Canadian professor at Oxford, in case you feel like a not entirely local viewpoint.
The Journal interviews Pierre Nadon, onetime felquiste, who did time for stealing guns from the Fusiliers Mont-Royal building on Pine Avenue in 1964.
Radio-Canada examines how the FLQ connected onto other revolutionary movements of the era and also gives us some archival footage from the time.
Journalists Dave Noël and Antoine Robitaille have dug into the mysterious death of felquiste Mario Bachand in Paris in 1971 and made a miniseries of it. One of the directors is Félix Rose, son of Paul Rose, who has also made a documentary about his family called (wait for it) Les Rose. You can watch Les Rose for free on the NFB site, but for the other, you need to be signed up to Videotron.
Antoine Robitaille probes into the still interesting question of who killed Pierre Laporte; La Presse brings in retired journalist Louis Fournier, whose view is that the Chénier cell never intended to kill Pierre Laporte.
Denise Bombardier tells us about Louise Lanctôt, who has just written an account of her time in the FLQ, and Jacques Lanctôt reviews three other books about the crisis.
Jack
Four points of my own revisionism:
1. I gotta say I always find it weird to see Jacques Lanctot commenting and reviewing texts on the October Crisis . He kidnapped someone , threatened to kill them on multiple occasions and has now risen to savant.2. The idea that the Chenier cell didn’t mean to kill Laporte is one that gives comfort to Quebec’s nationalist class and is what is taught in High School where he is either found dead or had an accident.
Watch Falardeau’s “Octobre”, thats how he was assassinated, Francis Simard wrote the script and was in the room. He characterized the killing of Pierre Laporte In 1982 as , “a sincere gesture to show that what we were saying was not just words.” Im sure Laporte’s family find comfort in that.3. A black hole in terms of Quebec’s memory of the crisis was the bombing campaign started 7 years earlier. In my neighbourhood Loyola College was bombed. For an Irish Montrealer that had consequences, the one institution that guaranteed a level of social mobility for our community was seen on the wrong side of the fence. The targets also included English-owned businesses, banks, McGill University, and the Black Watch Armoury, 9 people were killed, who remembers them? That targeting also created the psychological space for the out migration that followed.
4. I saw Felix Rose’s film, it was a love letter to his father, which I can understand. The one area I wished he would of thought of more is education. The Quiet Revolution created a context where his Dad and is his uncle could go to school. Paul Rose ( another Irishman) was a special ed teacher, his dad had an elementary school education in St Henri and started work at Redpath as a 15 year old. The real revolution in Quebec society was born there.
DeWolf
This inspired me to read more about Jacques-Cartier and it’s an interesting story. It’s not the dense urban settlement I normally associate with the word “shantytown”; more like the kind of informally-built sprawl you see on the edges of cities in developing countries like Brazil. It certainly explains the very eclectic character of many streets in not just Longueuil but parts of Laval like Pont-Viau as well.
Here’s a good historical account of Jacques-Cartier and its development after WWII: https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/hq/2000-v6-n1-hq1057166/11291ac.pdf
DavidH
I found it weird that Lanctôt reviews a book he himself published without any disclaimer. Then I took a step back and realized that nowhere in his article does he even mention his own involvement in the October crisis! He started it all by kidnapping Cross after all.
The lack of standards at Quebecor is something out of this world. The article works fine as is and a one-sentence disclaimer providing context would not invalidate anything. It really seems that it is good practices themselves that they want to take a stand against.
PatrickC
@DeWolf, thanks for the link to the article on Ville Jacques-Cartier. The writer Jacques Ferron, who was involved as a go-between in negotiations with the FLQ cell there, and who practiced medicine in that area, has many scathing things to say about the town’s chaotic and corrupt history in his works, and so does Pierre Vallières in his notorious Nègres blancs d’Amérique, but perhaps the most vivid portrayal of VJC in the 1950s is Michael Delisle’s novel Dée (2002). Details at
https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/etudlitt/2014-v45-n2-etudlitt01736/1028975ar.pdf
Of course, there is also Louis Hamelin’s tendentious re-creation of the Laporte episode in La Constellation du Lynx, on which I’ve written elsewhere:
http://www.lindaleith.com/Pages/blog/from-patrick-coleman-les-boys-of-octoberTim S.
Yes, thanks DeWolf. I’ve spent some time in those neighbourhoods – part of a South Shore childhood – and never knew most of that. Explains a lot, actually.
-
Kate
A small anti-mask march was held in Montreal on Saturday afternoon, and some participants were fined $400 each for being unmasked.
GC 21:39 on 2020-10-04 Permalink
HA. I saw that today. I hadn’t been on that part of the Reseau-Vert in a while, so I wondered how long it had been there. I didn’t spot it back in April, but it would be easy enough to just run by and not notice, as well.
EmilyG 21:51 on 2020-10-04 Permalink
I live near there and see it all the time.
JP 22:24 on 2020-10-04 Permalink
EmilyG, have you ever left a wish? 🙂
EmilyG 23:16 on 2020-10-04 Permalink
I should!