The city plans to place new air quality sampling stations around the east end of the island, where industrial toxins have been a chronic problem.
Updates from November, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Police are promising a beefed-up presence in Montreal North and RDP, where there were four shootings over the weekend, although no fatalities.
La Presse’s underworld guy, Daniel Renaud, floats the idea that it’s a war between cliques on the “red” side. I find it bizarre that people here adhere to the old Crips and Bloods gang colours from 1960s California, but it seems they do.
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Kate
Sometimes I think it’s the CAQ running Quebec and sometimes that it’s QMI, which investigated perks given to mob bosses by the casinos last week, so that now the finance minister has ordered an external audit into the situation.
Don’t all casinos offer freebies to high rollers, without inquiring into where they got all that nice money?
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Kate
There’s a tempest going on in Quebec media and commentariat about the Association des libraires du Québec, which runs lists of books favoured by notable people. Recently they had François Legault’s list, where he praised a book by Mathieu Bock-Côté. The ALQ responded by deleting his list although they kept his video on their Facebook page. Cue general cries of censorship (the ALQ is not a government branch) and rending of garments. The list has since been restored on the Facebook page. The story is summed up here.
Tim S.
Well, at least it’s not only commentators on here who are dubious about MBC.
Jack
Oddly with Quebecor columnist screaming censorship they are the only major media outlet to take a pass on this story. https://journalmetro.com/local/montreal-nord/2583752/le-csspi-congedie-lenseignant-vincent-ouellette/
You know a story about an entitled bully crapping on his students for 25 years , telling them that he had the right to offend them and objectify them because of his “status”. Apparently he has a new job lined up.
https://twitter.com/JournalLeRevoir/status/1332731166051487749/photo/1Daisy
Jack – That Twitter post is parody, not real news.
Jack
Sorry Daisy it was deadpan.
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Kate
Police have named a suspect in the murder of the Ahuntsic dépanneur owner earlier this month. Now they just have to find him.
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Kate
Monday marks the third day running with more than 400 cases of Covid diagnosed in Montreal. The Gazette has some numbers and graphs.
More than 2070 schools have reported Covid cases since the beginning of the school year.
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Kate
Quebec’s Dominique Fortier has won France’s prestigious Prix Renaudot for her book Les villes de papier. Fortier went to McGill, and the book is about American poet Emily Dickinson. The book is in French, of course, but this struck me as a good example of a successful writer working at the boundary of the two cultures and two languages – a boundary that may well be hardened in the academic world by new language laws expected next year.
PatrickC
The book may be excellent (I haven’t read it), but the award seems to confirm the argument, made by Stephen Henighan and others, that for a Canadian novel to get serious international attention, it has to be about a non-Canadian subject. Examples: Life of Pi, The Handmaid’s Tale, De Niro’s game. Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize would be the (big) exception that proves the rule. Or is that just nationalist grumbling?
Kate
Somehow I can’t blame people in England or France for not being gripped by Canada.
Kevin
And yet many Germans are bonkers for Canada and tales of the Mounties, Inuit, and more.
Kate
But are the Germans interested in serious literary fiction about those things, or adventure fantasies like the French thing about “le far west”?
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Kate
Food banks are facing sharply increased demand as the holidays draw closer.
qatzelok
This is looking more and more like “the Irish Potato” resets of a few centuries ago – the ones that gave us all our canals so we could be connected.
Kate
What the hell are you on about, qatzelok?
qatzelok
The way that the Potato Famines were used as a “reset” for commerce.
Kate
I’ve read that the Black Death killed so many people in Europe that the resulting lack of labourers meant the remaining able-bodied workers were able to get a better deal, at least for a time.
The only other circumstance I can think of is the very local one, when Mayor Houde, faced with Depression-era unemployment in the city, created jobs by devising public projects in parks and elsewhere. I believe it’s one of the reasons he was so popular for so long (we’re still benefiting from some of the things built or improved during those years).
But are you alleging that the Irish potato famine meant a lot of workers came here and worked on canals and so on for cheap? It wasn’t always so simple. The men working on the Beauharnois canal revolted after a point. Cheap labour doesn’t stay cheap forever.
Kevin
I don’t think it’s a reset as much as it is an acceleration of the suburbanization that’s been going on for several decades – at least in the Montreal area.
I think it was in the Globe’s Cities series, two weeks ago, that said that proportionally more Montrealers commute in from outer ‘burbs to the city’s core than in Vancouver or Toronto. That’s affected the stores we have in various areas, why people don’t hear French when walking around the downtown core, yada yada.
But if downtown office work is dead and buried (and I believe it is) those office workers are never coming back en masse, and that means downtown is also going to have to shift dramatically. The service jobs that relied to office workers are gone or displaced.
If the provincial government and the suburbs jump on it, we could end up with a ring of 15-minute villages surrounding Montreal. The downtown core could end up being nothing but a university town, or office tower owners could push to build family friendly condos and put some elementary/high schools in the core (and the decision not to build a school at the old Children’s Hospital is looking worse and worse).
ant6n
Montreal could become more polycentric.
Kate
ant6n, it’s going to have to eventually, as bigger cities do. I don’t know whether the process was as painful for London or Paris, Rome or Tokyo. Big cities get polycentric by bringing in villages around them, as Montreal has done with all the West Island towns (some of them quite old, like Pointe Claire and Ste-Geneviève), but we have this thing about being circumscribed as an island that makes it impossible, psychologically, to feel that places like Vieux-Longueuil or Ste-Rose have truly become part of the city.
Of course the four big cities I mention went through most of this process long before the car.
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Kate
TimeOut offers a list of the fanciest donut places around town.
Ephraim
About a week and a half early… Chanukah starts on the 10th… donuts are traditional (fried in OIL)
Joey
Highly suggest dogunut-lovers check out Salerno’s. Very cakey. No gimmicks.
walkerp
Imagine if we could just have decent, classic donuts in the east of North America. It leaped from garbage to fancy donuts and skipped actual good donuts.
walkerp
God that is depressing. I went through the entire list and not a single classic old-fashioned among them. None of them can actually make decent dough, so instead they overcompensate with excessive and “creative” toppings. This is like getting a frappucinno and thinking it is good coffee. Very similar to all the terrible “mixology” cocktails in Canada where they hide the lack of alcohol with lots of sugary flavours. No bueno!
Su
I had no idea we had so many donut options in town! Back in the day, there was a a Sugar and Spice location in Alexis Nihon Plaza which baked on premises a vast assortment of authentic donuts. I can still taste their scrumptious “Old Fashioned”.
Michael Black
There was also a donut shop in that block near Guy where Le Fauboug is. I forget the name, but I’m sure that’s the first place I ever had a donut. For some reason, we’d stop in there after medical appointments.
Other than that, as a kid donuts were something bought in boxes at grocery stores.
That’s not true. Most of our donuts came from a bakery.
Maybe Dunkin’ Donuts were in Quebec in the sixties, but if they were, I don’t remember them being downtown.
Kate
The only donut I’ve had in years was a plainish Tim’s donut, I think they called it a buttermilk donut? There was a Tim’s briefly on St-Denis near Duluth, gone now. My landlord near there was not good, and things had happened so I had no toilet for four or five days. (I called the Régie and they said “use a bucket.” Seriously.)
Tim’s, thankfully, was open 24 hours and had a clean bathroom, so I availed myself. I didn’t like to keep using it and not buying anything, so I stuck to the buttermilk donut. It was pretty good. But I haven’t had one since and am in general not a big fan of Tim’s.
DeWolf
I’m with walkerp – it mystifies me as to why it is so hard to find a classic yeast doughnut here. I’ve tried a number of popular places and hated almost all of them. That said, Léché is good, so if you’re a doughnut minimalist like me, they’re probably your best bet. The only problem is their hours are very inconvenient if you don’t live in Westmount or St-Henri (9am-3pm). San Gennaro also makes excellent bombolone. It’s close enough to a no-frills yeast doughnut that it hits the spot for me.
49th Parallel, the coffee roaster from Vancouver, is opening a café on McGill Street in the spring. All their existing cafés in Vancouver include a doughnut bakery called Lucky’s which make some of the best doughnuts I’ve ever had. I really hope there’s a Lucky’s in their space when they open here.
DeWolf
Oh and how could I neglect Wavel. I really do enjoy their paczi and they’re light on the wallet, unlike most of the other ones on the Time Out list. (Not light on the waistline of course.)
Kevin
Anyone who’s spent time in Vancouver knows Those Little Donuts kick ass.
They’re made fresh, covered in sugar, cost a couple bucks for a bag or box of a dozen.There’s one place that makes a near-perfect replica across from Papineau metro but she’s closed for the winter.
Joey
@walkerp and others – like these doughnuts: https://www.boulangeriesalerno.com/na-605/pains
John B
Nice list!
As a fan of a great yeast doughnut, there isn’t a great place that I’ve found, but in the gourmet yeast doughnut category Leché is great! Protip, (for before or after times): The coffee & pizza place above the cafeteria at the Glen hospital sells Leché doughnuts.
I hadn’t heard 49th parallel was opening a shop here. Fingers crossed for some of their doughnuts.
Tim S.
Not on the island, but there are great simple yeast doughnuts at La Prairie market (not during winter, alas).
MarcG
Y’all have some serious Donut Obsessive Disorder issues to resolve
Kate
It became a more fertile post than I was expecting.
Meezly
Rather late on this, but I’m surprised Samos made the list as the only “classic” donut joint on the list. I haven’t been there in years because I found the pastries were of average quality. Have they improved recently? I see on their site they’re now selling Poké Bowls??
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Kate
Not everyone is happy with the city’s plan to put in a refrigerated skating rink in Cabot Square. Says here it’s “an effort to encourage harmonious cohabitation between residents in the area and the homeless people who regularly visit” and although I’m trying to imagine how this is supposed to work, it’s not coming into focus.
Tom H
I imagine it would be somewhat similar to the situation at Place Émilie-Gamelin, where they inserted the large’Jardin Gamelin’ bar/beer garden. The homeless population would be pushed off to one far corner of the space, which the city would probably prefer anyway because it makes it easier for surveillance. I find it to be no small accident that the particular corner homeless folks in Place Émilie-Gamelin were pushed to (the north-east corner) was the one nearest designated SPVM parking and furthest from the metro entrance. At Émilie-Gamelin, there is the grassy slope that was designed to be a ‘buffer’ area between the two groups, but often it just remains empty.
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Kate
A man was shot in Rivière-des-Prairies Sunday evening, but there’s little else in this report.
Monday morning: in fact there were three shootings within an hour, Sunday night in RDP, and police don’t know whether anything links them up.
Shots had been fired earlier Sunday evening in Montreal North as well, and one man turned up in hospital with an injury, but what happened there is also still unclear.
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Kate
Some bright anti-maskers had the idea on Sunday to protest outside a house in Westmount they believed to be the home of François Legault.
Legault doesn’t live in Westmount.
The Gazette talked to an academic who says too much media attention is given to anti-mask nutbars, lending them too much importance in the public mind.
Ephraim
And too little attention to the question of their education and the failure of our education system. That being said, government should be more forthcoming with calculations and R-factors and let people run their own spreadsheets with the progression to learn more from the current situation. It would also ruin much of their arguments, when the numbers and regressions are easy enough for the public to see.
Blork
Small point of distinction: there are anti-maskers and there are “anti-lockdowner.
The former are pretty much all idiots and nutbars, and the latter includes a wide range of people; from anti-maskers (it’s pretty much a given that anti-maskers are also anti-lockedowners) to people who think lockdowns are painting with too wide a brush and are not very effective while also creating other problem that are possibly more serious. That last point is debatable, but it’s a reasonable debate. (In brief, the idea is that it’s theoretically better to use masks and to engage in limited targeted lockdowns where outbreaks occur than to simply lock everything down and then suffer the increased suicides, mental health collapses, and economic ruin.)
I’m not arguing one way or the other on that; I’m just pointing it out. And I feel compelled to point it out because The Gazette’s “anti-masker” article uses a photo of people who are protesting lockdowns, not masks.
dhomas
They got the wrong place. That house was “François Legault Total Landscaping”.
Kate
Ha!
Blork, thanks for making that distinction.
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