There was a series of police raids Wednesday morning in Montreal North. Police made seven arrests of people who will face drug and firearm charges. The Journal calls the area the fief des Bloods and La Presse le Bronx de Montréal-Nord.
Updates from December, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Toronto police suspect a Montreal gang has been stealing SUVs in the Toronto area and shipping them abroad through the port.
JS
How much money can any one cog in the chain get? Guys at the port here, guys on the boat, guys at the next port, other guys getting the cars to and from these ports, maybe a few guys running the abroad end of things, plus all the original guys in the Montreal gang, not to mention all the guys I’m forgetting, like the guys who clean and titivate the cars, replacement parts, etc – how much moolah does each guy really wind up with for all this trouble? I mean, the ultimate buyers must be getting a discount vs a new car or a legit used one, right?
Kate
Cromulent questions, JS.
MarcG
A friend of mine uses the Simpsons word “cromulent” to mean a slight variation on pretentious that’s hard to describe and I’ve internalized it. Kate’s regular use of it in its official meaning confuses the hell out of me.
JS
Kate embiggens the rhetorical context in which “cromulent” functions.
Ephraim
The other side of it… it’s pretty easy to make cars extremely difficult to steal. But who has an interest in it? Not the insurance companies, who need you to buy insurance. No the car manufacturers, who make an extra sale. Not the police, who need forms to fill in and the occasional bust, to make you feel like they are worth paying for. So, since the only one hurt in the transaction is YOU, government needs to step in. As they did in the UK… and the reason we have key holes only on one side, more parts are engraved, etc. We need one government to mandate more security to prevent car theft (mobile tracking, pin to drive, encrypted computers, etc.) to get manufacturers and insurers back to lowering premiums. Or maybe not allow them to increase premiums unless the number of car thefts go down… realizing that it’s not the police that stop crime, it’s the manufacturers.
dhomas
I like that idea, Ephraim. And it is definitely doable. Take the example of Tesla. They have something like a 97% recovery rate for their vehicles. They are practically unstealable and thieves know it so they avoid them now.
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Kate
Projet councillor Christian Arseneault, who represents Loyola in CDN-NDG, has quit the party to sit as an independent. He says he has “fundamentally lost faith in this administration’s ability to represent and defend the interests of the citizens of CDN-NDG.” (source: Facebook)
david14
Without really taking any credit for giving voice to something everyone knows, I’ve been saying this for months:
des élus de Projet Montréal se disent frustrés parce que des dossiers sont mis de côté pour faire place à d’autres priorités déterminées par le cabinet Plante.
Uh, yeah. It’s called le cabinet Plante is smarter than les élus de Projet Montréal.
The crew around Plante is gearing up for reelection, necessitating that they reimpose the Iron Law of Montreal politics: strong mayor who champions a very few highly visible popular projects, but stays away from controversies, and mostly focuses on keeping the pot-holes filled. Consultative, atomized/de-centralized party governance just isn’t in the DNA of this town, and probably never will be.
PM has been cleaning house of the people who won’t come on board, and this guy is the latest but not the last before the election.
Kevin
And yet Plante waded into language politics…
dwgs
On a tangential note, an emergency borough meeting has been called for this afternoon in NDG/CDN. The funding that was offered to the YMCA included a proviso that they continue to serve the community for at least 7 years. Apparently Arsenault, Magda P., and McQueen think this is unreasonable.
Mark Côté
NDG’s unfair share of the city budget has been a big issue here for quite a while; it pops up on NDG Facebook groups regularly.
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Kate
I didn’t expect an emergency alert over Covid, but I suppose we all got that one?
jeather
Yup. It was announced earlier today. Part of the stepping up of enforcement and fines.
EmilyG
They mentioned on CBC Radio that there would be an alert. I think it might’ve been mentioned at a news conference earlier today as well.
Mark Côté
It was broadcast on CBC as well (I happened to be listening to CBC 2 at the time), read out in a weird robotic (text-to-speech) voice, which made the use of the word “comply” even stranger and kinda sci-fi dystopian.
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Kate
Surgeries have been cancelled at hospitals as they clear the decks for a Covid surge, lengthening wait times for all non-urgent procedures.
Faiz Imam
Hospitalizations and deaths from covid are what everyone pays attention to, but this specific step is what most experts were hoping to avoid.
A lot of people who did nothing wrong, who were as selfless and responsible as its possible to be, will suffer and maybe die due to this (nessessary) step.
Daniel
When I see people online calculating the risks of whether *they* personally will get sick and die from covid, it’s sad to me that other effects — pushing back others’ surgeries, infecting others, even the long-term effects for themselves or others of an otherwise “mild” version of the disease — often don’t seem to be considered.
It’s not just binary — you live or die. There are a lot of effects, some of which don’t have to do with you and some of which do.
Daniel
Well said in fewer words, Faiz Imam.
Faiz imam
I believe there is still some ICU capacity remaining in our hospitals, but we are getting close to the limit.
We are fast approaching the situation where trauma victims with treatable injuries, or people with heart attacks, or anyone of a million routine emergencies, will instead find themselves in a congested hospitals with reduced quality of care. How long before ambulances are diverted because hospitals are not able to take in patients?
Alternatively, many people with severe covid symptoms who really should be in a hospital with a high level of care will instead be told to recover at home with a bottle of Oxygen and a prayer. This has been a source of deaths in jurisdictions with compromised hospital capacity.
Raymond Lutz
Hmm, the shit is gonna hit the fan soon… Here we read the 1000 ICU beds (in Québec) are (pre-covid) normally filled at 90% capacity. As of today, there are 121 covid patients in ICU. So it seems we ARE at saturation NOW, even before the dreaded Christmas peak.
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Kate
Delays in the construction of the city’s own composting plants are being blamed on Covid.
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Kate
The owner of the American baseball team Tampa Bay Rays says the only way to “save” the team is to split its season with Montreal.
I don’t know where to begin here. This is not a cause. There is no need to come to the rescue of this baseball team. It could be closed down or sold to some other American city that wants one.
If anyone here starts talking about putting up a baseball stadium to host an American team for half its games, I will happily start a campaign against doing anything so stupid. I would certainly support such a campaign.
dominic
Boy, did they ever have bad timing. Asking for money for a small % of the population at a time when government finances are a mess could not be easier to reject. If billionaires can’t support their sports teams, then maybe there are too many of them?
Kevin
The team’s never coming to Montreal. The owner of the Rays just uses our city to try and get out of a contract he signed locking him to Florida for years to come.
walkerp
I hate baseball but if the owners are willing to invest in the stadium development and none of it comes from public coffers and it didn’t destroy anything already good architecturally and neighbourhood wise, I’d be in favour of it and I think it would do well here.
I think Kevin has the right of it, though. The Tampa owner is just using this concept as a bargaining chip.
walkerp
For instance, replace the Turcot with a baseball stadium. Who says no to that?
Kate
walkerp, I’m at risk of repeating things I’ve written earlier, but there’s no such thing as a major sports facility that’s only paid for by private money. A big building needs municipal infrastructure, security, transportation and other services that come out of the public pocket. Also, while such a facility should be paying the standard tax for commercial space of that size, they never do. The Canadiens organization plays poor mouth every year and gets taxes reduced on the Bell Centre, and it’s standard operating procedure. Major league sports are machines for moving public money into private pockets.
Bill Binns
Couldn’t agree more. This may be the first issue to get me out in the street with a sign in my hand.
If I had to guess how this will go, I would say that it will be announced loudly with NO PUBLIC MONEY and they will pull a Teddy Roosevelt and come begging when the thing is half built. We can then fork over millions or live with a half finished stadium in the middle of the city. There will be wild promises made about all the fine jobs that will be created by a facility that is operational for 5-8 days a month.
Hell you can read the whole script by looking into what happened to the nice folks who purchased our old baseball team.
thomas
Further to Kate’s point, not only do sports facilities require, at a minimum, additional public infrastructure resources, but they can destroy the utility of existing infrastructure. Witness the Molson Centre whose placement made Windsor Station useless. A decision that has crippled rail transport, i.e. between downtown and the airport, in this city ever since.
GC
I actually like baseball, but I think it’s a terrible idea. Kate’s right. This isn’t some species that’s about to go extinct. If their aren’t enough residents of Tampa to support a Major League team, maybe the answer is not to prop one up there.
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Kate
A man who narrowly succeeded in stopping a would-be suicide from jumping into the Decarie trench was honoured by CDN-NDG borough this week for his act.
We don’t hear anything about suicides into the sunken highway, but there must be some. My mother talked another woman off the edge years ago, when we were living on the Decarie service road. She noticed the woman standing on the overpass looking down into it, and after awhile she went out, talked to her, and walked her away from the edge.
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Kate
There is no sign of the tent city remaining beside Notre-Dame, and now the site will be covered in snow as well. The eventual behaviour of police around the dismantling of the camp is being called violent and disproportionate by homeless advocates, who cite the 250 police, including riot control forces and some mounted on horses, with a helicopter in support, as unnecessary and unacceptable.
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Kate
The Ritz-Carlton promised to donate a toy to Ste-Justine every time someone shared an Instagram, but the image was shared a million times. The promise has since been withdrawn and has received some criticism.
John B
I can’t imagine that Ste-Justine really wants a million toys to show up at their door either right now. The Global article implies that someone on the Ritz-Carleton media team has learned their lesson.
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Kate
Repair work on the Ville-Marie and Viger tunnels will take ten years because it has to be paced out not to cause any shutdowns. It will also cost $2 billion.
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