CBC’s Jennifer Yoon talks to neighbourhood people mourning the dépanneur owner murdered in his store in Ahuntsic on November 6. Nobody has been arrested yet.
Updates from November, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
One of the arsonists who set the Blue Bird Café fire in 1972 has been allowed to go home from his parole halfway house; James O’Brien is seriously ill.
A quick search shows that the other two men implicated in the fire were paroled years ago (it’s all in the last 2 paragraphs of that piece) but O’Brien has repeatedly violated parole conditions.
After all this time I find it mostly surprising that James O’Brien has a home to go to.
Bill Binns
In other news, the 37 people who died screaming in agony remain dead.
Let’s hope Mr O’Brian enjoys his remaining time while waiting to slip away, peacefully at an old age in bed.
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Kate
QMI maintains its barrage of pieces about language with a claim that English service is an aggression. Simon Jolin-Barrette is claiming to be shocked and is preparing plans for action.
I’m not trying to be an angryphone here, I want to emphasize that. It’s that this is pretty much the only Montreal story QMI is following lately.
Salvatore
Whether or not this is true in this case, it is usually a tactic to try to push through an unpopular agenda when people are distracted.
Jack
Does anyone want to guess what the measures will be to “promote” the French language. Just because it’s a rainy Sunday.
Raymond Lutz
Hmm, dunno… they can push for the creation of a Provincial Government Digital Media Regulatory Agency that will enforce publishing licence requirements for any blogging or news sites whose bytes flow through Québécois tubes. And French usage will be de rigueur… Parlez Blanc!
Kevin
I highly await legislation banning francophones from leaving the island of Montreal and ordering them all to work in plague zones. /s
Bill Binns
” a claim that English service is an aggression”
Well of course. This is how things are done now. Everything is an aggression causing injury and requiring restitution. From jokes told on stage to thousands of people to writing a letter to the SAQ to complain about the panhandler that lived at the entrance. I don’t know why anyone would be surprised that this proven method would eventually be weaponized for use in the language war.
david103
Yeah, a live by the woke sword, die by the woke sword situation seems to be emerging, as the Quebec French-only activists begin to appropriate language and analytical paradigms from the Americans that anglos were only too happy to appropriate to pretend that everyone and everything around them was a stone cold white supremist. It’s racist aggression to assign letter grades in school, it’s racist aggression not to recognize that you’re a racist aggressor -> it’s racist aggression even to speak English. Not a huge stretch, or even a new argument but one bound to be a lot more powerful now that US lefties have made the analytical framework so prominent with certain people.
david103
I have to add that I don’t really believe that English will finally be “canceled” in Montreal now that it’s a question of “equity” or whatever other nonsense the Americans have cooked up, but I do believe that this re-framing could well prove powerful with a certain segment of the population, and more generally in the province to serve to strengthen/harden an anti-English sentiment that’s mostly passive, or move people currently indifferent on the question of English toward a more well-formed anti-English opinion.
CE
The “tons of fun at parties” gang is out in full force this evening!
Wilton Guerrero
Imagine looking at America and thinking, “boy that place has gotten waaaayyy too anti-racist”. Truly astonishing. It’s the modern reactionary closed-loop: make up and exaggerated caricature of a leftist, get mad at them, then get mad enough at this image that you post about it assuming others have any idea what you’re talking about.
Chris
>Imagine looking at America and thinking, “boy that place has gotten waaaayyy too anti-racist”.
No one said that.
But there is definitely a segment that exaggerates the amount of racism that exists, and that sees it everywhere and always. In fact, the US (and Canada) has never been less racist than they are now, and they are among the least racist places on the planet.
David102
^ you’re clearly not from here. The marxian ‘systemic racism’ analysis is already in Quebec text books. The difference today is that the Americans have popularized that brand of anti-liberalism with a broader audience, and developed it to a very fine degree, and I risks going national (in Quebec) in a way that it hasn’t until now. The english school board is a dead man walking, and cultural forces have a proven tool here now to pull left and right nationalism back together.
It’s not rocket science, and it’s largely a redux of past such efforts.
Like, there was a lot of important work done by various people – from Trudeau père through Charles Taylor and many others, even up to Trudeau fils, to present a bi- or multi-cultural basis for our community’s continuation and reinscription. The anti-liberal moment that’s maybe catching on here undermines that project in a fundamental way.
Once it’s considered offensive to speak english, where are we?
And it’s funny to me that so many of the people so willing to embrace the American moment could well discover that’s it’s not exactly great for their community.
John B
I wonder if these people who feel aggressed after being addressed in English go home for a comforting meal of Chinese pie…
The stuff reported in the Journal story earlier, where people couldn’t get service in French, is pretty unacceptable though. The law is pretty clear that retail needs to be able to serve customers in French.
Michael Black
What’s “a little racism”?
“How would an uneducated dark half breed look among the fair & accomplished ladies of [ Canada]” ?
Racism can’t be dismissed because it’s less common, because for those it affects, it isn’t an abstract thing.
Which is where the notion of “ally” has appeared in recent times. White people’s role is support. It’s not about “stop that bad man saying mean things”, it ‘s about “this hurts me”. It’s life, not a cause. A while back someone said “activists are tired of explaining systemic racist”, when it’s that people affected are tired of racism. If whiite people are loudest, it drowns out what Black and native people are saying.
I can’t even follow some of these comments. Speaking French is not the same thing as being Black or native. And yes, once a cause becomes popular, and that includes climate change, people do jump on board without having to make major change or add to the discussion. Just speak the buzzwords .
But Black Lives Matter is not some import for Black people. To see it that way is to ignore that it happens here, and maybe to only see it in terms of police killings. The killings happen because some people are seen as “criminal” and thus it’s okay to treat them badly. It misses all the low level suspicion that happens too often.
Chris
>“How would an uneducated dark half breed look among the fair & accomplished ladies of [ Canada]” ?
I googled this quote to find you used it on this blog some months ago quoting your great great grandmother in 1853. That’s a _very_ long time ago. One of my points was precisely that such sentiments have _vastly_ diminished since then.
Is there zero racism today? Obviously not. We haven’t even achieved zero murder. If we can’t even stop killing each other, we obviously can’t stop hating each other. There won’t likely ever be zero racism or zero murder. It would take a total police state to achieve. But we have vastly improved. And we can improve further. And Canada is in a better state than pretty much anywhere else on earth, despite what some activists would have us believe.
>I can’t even follow some of these comments.
You might start by reading up on “Critical Theory”, “Critical Race Theory”, and “Intersectionality”. There are wikipedia articles on each. Then extrapolate to language. That’s how you get to “English service is an aggression”.
Francesco
Flak jacket on… There shouldn’t *need* to be laws about language in retail establishments, pure and simple. Thousands of non-Francophone tourists get verbally assaulted in Paris every year, by shopkeepers and waiters who speak nothing but French. No laws needed, these tourists will tell all their friends back home how wonderful Paris is, and how one *must* experience it before they die. If I go to an establishment and I’m treated poorly, whether rude staff, lousy inventory, dirty environs, I try to make a point never to go back if at all possible. If what they offer is “incontournable,” I’ll likely ignore poor treatment — as long as I don’t get robbed, or salmonella. How do places like Schwartz’s still have lineups to get in, if they only answer — curtly, verging on downright nastily — in English? Simple: people will ignore blemishes to get what they want. The almighty Piastre speaks louder than any old Eaton’s lady.
Make laws that promote the French language and culture, but legislating language at retail is is simply dumb.
Mark Côté
People getting all “haha the left did this” when the word “aggression” is used here, but what, exactly, is different this time around? I’m pretty sure far stronger words, like “assault on the French language” and so forth, have been used in the past. If anyone thinks this is “political correctness gone mad” or whatever, I guess they haven’t been watching the news here for the last 50 years.
Bill Binns
@Francesco – I don’t think Schwartz’s is having any trouble maintaining that line. Even now, I would be surprised if more than one in 10 people in that line live in Quebec. Ever ask a local to go to Schwartz’s? It’s like asking a New Yorker to go on the Circle Line cruise out to the Statue of Liberty.
qatzelok
The best way to deal with bonjour-hello agression is to reply to the anglo-ramming service person in Spanish or Arabic.Both of these languages have an Anglo-blowback feel.
Robert H
“…legislating language at retail is simply dumb.”
Est-ce bien vrai? Francesco, Feriez-vous une telle affirmation si vous ne pouviez pas être servi en anglais dans votre quartier à Montréal?
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Kate
CBC’s Verity Stevenson has a look at how Duluth Avenue businesses are doing under red zone rules.
DeWolf
Duluth is a perfect example of how the pandemic’s impact has been very uneven. I would say it’s actually going through a bit of a revival. Its designation as a shared street this summer allowed businesses to put tables outdoors, which had never been possible before, and it really made all the difference.
St-Viateur is another street that has thrived during the pandemic, although there has been a downside, since a lot of the new crowd that flocked there this summer seemed weirdly amped-up and edgy.
Other streets that seem to be getting through this pretty well: Mont-Royal, Bernard in Outremont, Beaubien, St-Hubert (the parts where construction has finished), Ontario in Hochelaga, Wellington in Verdun, Monkland, Victoria/Sherbrooke in Westmount, Ste-Catherine west of Concordia. These are streets that were healthy to begin with and have probably benefitted from people avoiding downtown and staying closer to home.
Streets that have taken a sharp turn for the worse this year: Notre-Dame in St-Henri, Ste-Catherine in the Village, St-Denis in the Latin Quarter, pretty much any secondary commercial street downtown. Plenty of others seem to be halfway between – not suffering but not exactly thriving. St-Laurent is the top example that comes to mind.
I’ll bet anything that the REV will spark a revival of St-Denis on the Plateau. It already seems busier than before, possibly because the intense media coverage inspired a lot of people to check it out, and as it becomes clear that there’s still a lot of parking but it’s a whole lot nicer to walk around than before, more people will be seeking it out as they once did.
paul
Good list DeWolf…interesting that the thriving streets all go East-West
(I suppose there are a number of factors such as length of block, sun, traffic corridors, etc – but interesting anyways)Kate
paul, that’s a good observation and a good question. Although it is funny, how we think of Wellington in Verdun as east-west, whereas on a map it’s almost dead on north-south.
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Kate
The blue collar union agreed Saturday to proceed to pressure tactics to hasten the offer of a new contract.
david103
Are they living on the moon?
Kate
They need to goose the city into taking negotiations more seriously. I doubt it will proceed to a full-on strike.
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Kate
Some Montreal folks decided to celebrate the Diwali holiday differently this year, but a gathering was broken up at the Lasalle Sikh temple.
Chris
No fines though, so expect it to keep happening.
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