I had no idea that it’s legal to hunt on the island of Montreal until reading this Gazette piece on efforts to put an end to it. We don’t have all that much remaining parkland, and residential streets are often close enough to the parks to make stray bullets – or crossbow bolts – dangerous to passersby, or to other users of the parks. Although municipal bylaws ban it, these are overruled by Quebec laws that say it’s perfectly fine.
Updates from January, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A woman was hit by a bus Friday as it turned into the terminus at St-Antoine and Mansfield. All reports say she was in critical condition, and while La Presse notes that the terminus is mostly used by South Shore lines, nobody’s saying what specific service the bus belonged to, or how the driver is doing, which is customarily mentioned.
Uatu
Sadly I’m not surprised. That intersection is a mess during rush hour with construction vehicles, cars, pedestrians all trying not to run into each other. I’m also wondering if this is the type of traffic snafu in store for the REM stations where traffic from all over the shore and west Island is funnelled into a couple of train stations
steph
It’s an RTL bus coming from the south shore over the Champlain Bridge. The outside St-Antoine terminus handles the overflow from the indoor 1000 Gauchetiere terminus. They’ll both be shut down once the REM takes the monopoly of the public transport over the Champlain Bridge and force everyone to switch onto the REM.
During rush hour, many south shore buses go straight down town. Many office workers just get an RTL bus pass and walk to their down town office from the terminus. The REM is going to increase the cost and the transport time significantly.
Ss
Actually it was a Chateauguay bus with the Exo system so South Shore just wrong bus system, my fiancee was about to get onto that bus and as they got to the stop they saw what happened. I hope they update if she’s doing okay.
Robert Ramsay
Can SS reach out to me? Or, can you pass on a message ? I am trying to find out what happened on that fateful night. The police are saying no one saw anything which is very hard to believe at 5pm rush hour on a Friday night.
Lili
The woman who was hit by the bus is my daughter. She later passed away in the hospital due to her extensive injuries. As you can imagine I am in agony after this devastating accident took my precious daughter’s life. We do not have much information as to what exactly happened. What lead to the accident and the exact circumstances of the impact. If anyone has any information in this regards, please reach out to me as a desperate mother who is trying to get some closure into the matter.
She had just finished her Master’s degree in Occupational Therapy and started a new job. A bilingual bright woman with a bright future. You can imagine the pain my husband and I are going through and the need for some clarity into the last moments before she lost conscious and was taken from us.Lili
BTW, I forgot to add my email address if anyone would like to contact me privately: ltajro@yahoo.com.
Thanks,
LiliKate
Folks, I’ve emailed Lili with my condolences, but I doubt anyone reading this will be able to provide information.
Laleh
Still waiting to hear from any witness. Please send me an email if you or someone 6 know has witnessed the accident. Police is giving us zero information. It’s hard to rest while no one is giving us any answers.
ltajro@yahoo.com
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Kate
Denis Coderre continues to be coy about whether he plans a
secondthird run for the mayor’s chair.Bill Binns
Is this not what he did the first time? I seem to remember him declaring very late and walking the bases with very little campaigning.
dhomas
Wouldn’t this technically be a third run? 😉
Kate
True. I was thinking “a run for a second stint as mayor” and my fingers tripped over themselves. Thanks, dhomas.
Bill Binns, yes, he seemed to expect it to be a cakewalk in 2017.
dhomas
@Kate: I understood your meaning. I was just being needlessly nitpicky. 🙂
EmilyG
But if he runs, will it be a… home run?
David447
Coderre could win this election, but in addition to the classic Montreal requirement of 1+ grand projects campaign promises, he or some other candidate will have to shred Valerie Plante to drive down her support in the non-core hoods and Ville Marie, so as to overcome the ever growing PM base that will definitely show up.
Can this guy do it? I doubt it.
If I were Coderre, I’d go full bore on “return to normal” (even though that’s a crazy lie, as Coderre is anothing but normal) because the media bigwigs will give him every assist and PM-supporting rank-and-file reporters have been frozen out enough by her crew not to be super motivated to fight back. Tides have turned on a lot less.
Kate
… a home run
That’s another thing to add to the list of Coderre’s bad obsessions. He enforced baseball fields on parks, notably Jarry Park, although there was no evidence people were clamouring for more baseball facilities. Obviously he wanted to get a major league team back, and this was part of a not very subtle scheme to build enthusiasm by implanting the sport throughout the city. A lot of money was wasted and square footage of parks put out of use for any other purpose, in pursuing this stupid plan.
EmilyG
Yeah. I even heard him mention “bringing the Expos back” when he was speaking at events that had nothing to do with baseball.
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Kate
An explosion overnight in Griffintown injured three people including two Hydro-Quebec workers. It’s not clear what caused the fire in an electrical panel that set off the explosion.
Andrew Aitken
The explosion sounds like arc-flash, which can happen in high voltage panels with very little obvious cause. You just have to wear all the right PPE and hope it doesn’t happen. If it shattered doors and windows but didn’t kill them standing right next to it, it seems like they were.
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Kate
Police busted a Hasidic gathering Friday evening in Outremont, the number uncertain, but more than the 10 now permitted in religious gatherings; TVA says plusieurs dizaines. By the descriptions many fled, and three tickets were handed out. La Presse says police officers were hit in the scramble; the CP account says dozens rushed police. The video on the TVA link is worth watching, as fleeing men in fur hats call police Nazis.
Update: A Radio-Canada reporter tweets that on Saturday morning, police also raided another synagogue, this one on Hutchison beside the Park Avenue YMCA. Here’s a report on that from La Presse.
Second update: Radio-Canada now mentions a third such incident in the same area on Saturday. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t look like this is even a special holy day, so what’s up?
Ephraim
The should put police around the neighbourhood about 40 minutes before the sabbath and follow where they are going and hand out the tickets…. every damn Friday.
They have the HIGHEST rates of transmission in Israel… they aren’t following the rules and it needs to STOP. This is embarrassing the Jewish community as well. This is a violation of the Jewish laws on Pikuach Nefesh… all life is more important than anything else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikuach_nefesh
GC
Three tickets doesn’t seem like much for such a large gathering, but at least it wasn’t just warnings.
dwgs
Am I the only person greatly amused at the thought of a bunch of Hasid guys bum rushing a line of cops? Even better would be the cops trying to pick the guys out of a lineup afterwards.
Kate
The police lineup is comedy. Very Mel Brooks.
John B 12:06 on 2021-01-23 Permalink
Interesting!
On one hand, banning hunting in the urban area is a good idea. On the other hand, someone running a farm on the west island should probably have the right to pull out a shotgun or .22 and get rid of some nuisance birds or rodents.
It does seem like some people may be exaggerating the danger, or the ability to do something. For example, the Federation of Hunters & Anglers that nobody other than a hunter has been hit by a projectile, the only accidents where other people have been hit are by poachers, and hunters are not poachers. Paola Hawa calls the distinction between hunters & poachers “semantics”, but poaching is already illegal. I suspect making legal hunting illegal will simply provide more animals, and thus more incentive, for poachers to hunt. It’s not like someone who’s out poaching in the off-season is going to say “well, now the whole season is the off-season so I’m going to stop my harvest.”
There’s also some extreme rhetoric with statements like David Fletcher’s statement “shooting at any movement, and mistaking the movement of a person for the movement of an animal.” My understanding is that one of the main rules of hunting, if not the absolute main rule, is to make sure you know what you’re shooting at. Hunters don’t want to kill people any more than you or I do.
The argument for hunting that it controls populations is valid as well – especially in areas where human activity prevents the presence of predators. For example, Longueuil wouldn’t be dealing with an overpopulation of deer in their park if there was some amount of hunting allowed, (not that hunting in parks is a great idea). Unless we’re comfortable with foxes, wolves, coyotes, and bears in town we should be ready to control the populations of prey species by other methods.
Overall, hunting “in town” seems like an accident waiting to happen, but it feels like a total ban might not really be needed. I wonder if Montreal could require a Montreal hunting license to hunt on its territory, which would have education obligations, and maybe could restrict some hunting methods, (like rifles).
Blork 13:30 on 2021-01-23 Permalink
I went for a walk in the Boisé du Tremblay in Longueuil recently, where deer hunting is allowed for a few weeks in the fall. Sort of blew my mind, because we’re walking along an area where just a few weeks earlier there could have been hunters with high-powered rifles and we can see houses through the trees. How is that allowed?
John B., above, said “My understanding is that one of the main rules of hunting, if not the absolute main rule, is to make sure you know what you’re shooting at.” Very true. And one of the main rules of driving is you don’t drive drunk, and we all know how well that works out.
A few true stories: when I was a teenager I had a friend who loved guns and hunting, and a few times I went partridge hunting with him. When you’re walking through the woods with a loaded 12-guage, there are two safety things you always do, and even as a 17-year-old I was very aware of this. (1) point the barrel at the ground, (2) keep your finger off the trigger until you’re lined up and ready to shoot. So there we are, walking through the woods, tripping over roots and all, and I notice that he’s to my right with the barrel of the shotgun pointed right at me, and he’s walking with the gun cocked and his finger on the trigger. FFS! I gave him shit for it, but he insisted it was fine because he’d never accidentally shot the gun before and therefore it couldn’t happen. I never went hunting with him again.
Another story about the same guy. We’re walking around his neighbourhood (density is somewhere between suburban and countryside) where the day before, at dusk, he had taken a shot at a deer and missed. So I’m looking at where he’s pointing; the deer had been about 100 meters away, at the top of a small hill. And what do you think was beyond that? HOUSES! Probably six or seven houses right behind where he’s pointing. So that bullet that missed the deer probably landed in a tree or maybe the ground, but could just as easily have penetrated one of those houses. Bear in mind this is a guy who loved guns and hunting, subscribed to the magazines, hung around with and was mentored by older hunters, etc. As far as I know he’s still hunting.
I also know an old guy with bad eyesight who took a shot at something moving in the bushes when he was out hunting with his (then) 12-year-old son. This guy was another gun nut, with all the gun stuff and the books and magazines and whatnot. That day he shot the zipper clasp off his son’s jacket. As in, the thing moving in the bushes was his kid, in profile, and if the shot had been a couple of inches to the left it would have penetrated both lungs and probably his heart.
So yeah, rules of hunting. Rules of the road. Etc. etc. etc. None of which account for the very high level of stupidity that permeates the human species.
Kate 14:45 on 2021-01-23 Permalink
It’s been awhile since I’ve seen mention of bullets whizzing into Lasalle from across the river in and around Kahnawake, so I don’t know whether hunting was banned over there or what. But it used to come up from time to time.
John B, how many working farms do you think remain on the West Island?
MarcG 17:22 on 2021-01-23 Permalink
Carya, Santropol has one, and Macdonald farm at the school come to mind. There are 6 on this map and it doesn’t seem to include the larger ones that are visible in satellite view. https://goo.gl/maps/vXhUh8nN26keagdQ8
Kate 21:12 on 2021-01-23 Permalink
Thank you, MarcG.
John B 22:48 on 2021-01-23 Permalink
I was thinking it might just be 2 or 3 farms, I’m actually surprised there are so many. I know driving out west there are some fields that are part of the Macdonald campus, I knew about Santropol, and I used to order seedlings from a farm out there.
@Blork: Stupidity is the problem, everywhere. Despite all my “people know about guns…” above, I had a great-grandfather that got tired of his grandson making noise so popped off a few shotgun shots in his direction… People can be idiots. I’m surprised there haven’t been accidents if there is that much hunting, but the article came across as pretty alarmist.
Kate 11:18 on 2021-01-24 Permalink
Are they real farms, or sort of cute kid-visiting petting farms? For example, inside Cap St‑Jacques park there’s a sort of demonstration organic farm – you can buy veg in season – but it’s not a farm in the traditional sense of a family or other group of people living on the land while working it.
John B 14:38 on 2021-01-24 Permalink
That kind of depends on what you mean by “real” farms. If you’re looking for hundreds of acres of soybeans or a cattle feedlot, I don’t think so. I think they’re mostly smaller-scale vegetable farms – the kind that you can order a CSA basked from for a bunch of the season. I met a guy who grew a bunch of quinoa out there one year, but I don’t think grain production is something that happens much.
MarcG 17:39 on 2021-01-24 Permalink
There are some large tracts on the map that look like corn or soy but I doubt the owners live on the land and chew on wheat stalks. The traditional self-sufficient family farm with crops and livestock is mostly dead as far as I know. There’s been a small comeback of families or co-ops doing small/medium scale organic vegetable production (e.g. Jardins D’Arlington in Bedford who have a stand at the Atwater Market). I went to volunteer on a diversified organic farm in Ontario and they bought a lot of their groceries at the supermarket.