A man was shot in Montreal North on Saturday evening, and is in critical condition. Details are currently scanty.
TVA says there was another shooting Saturday evening, this one in Rivière-des-Prairies. Cops are trying to figure out whether the two incidents are linked.
Update: the man shot in Montreal North has died.
Montreal was supposed to get a small piece of the FIFA World Cup 2026, but Quebec has pulled the plug on funding it as the projected cost inevitably keeps climbing. La Presse focuses here on city disappointment, particularly the likelihood this will put the games out of reach of the only francophone city in the running to host games for the first three-country World Cup.
Would have been something to have the Olympic stadium host a game or two. With Trudeau showering money on everyone and everything he can think of, hopefully someone puts this in front of him, and the feds can throw another bunch of millions onto the debt to give us this, among the greatest of all circuses.
It’s hard to have any sense how things will be going, and what the public mood will be, by 2026.
A Longueuil homicide, so it won’t go on my board, but at least one person who reads this blog sometimes visits Michel-Chartrand park where a body was found Saturday morning. There’s now a police perimeter around the park, as the body had signs of violence on it.
Update: Police now think it was a case of suicide.
I walk in that park almost every day. Not today though, obv. So instead we drove into the city and harassed the plateau with the presence of our tiny automobile. Although it’s snowy and icy, it’s the first time I’ve had a good look at the work done on St-Denis (bike lanes, mid-block pedestrian crossings, etc.) and I must say, it seems like they did a great job. It will be interesting to see what it’s like in warm weather and without a lockdown.
A teenager was stabbed in Pointe-aux-Trembles Friday evening during a fight with several others. He isn’t dead but neither of these stories sounds hopeful.
Earlier this week QMI’s Joseph Facal wrote a piece bluntly titled Montréal n’a jamais été un territoire mohawk which I saw but didn’t link, seeing it was just more QMI provocation. Now Radio-Canada looks at the Mohawk side of the story.
If you want to see how intellectually incurious Joseph Facal is check out his list of must reads for “understanding” Quebec. It’s the conservative nationalist canon. I wonder if he reads them to Sophie and Richard. https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2020/12/24/10livres-pour-comprendre-le-quebec-actuel
The fact that MBC is one of the authors on that list is probably all I need to know.
That Radio Canada piece also gets some credible historians to look at the other side of the story, which is complicated. It’s a debate between oral history vs. written sources, and politics plays out on both sides.
Breathtaking idiocy. Next we will be hearing that Quebecois go so far back that they coexisted with the dinosaurs. I just do not know what to do with this level of ignorance…sigh.
When conservative nationalists argue that Montreal was never Mohawk territory, they’re only partially concerned about the Mohawks themselves. Mainly they’re trying to write the narrative that the St. Lawrence Valley was uninhabited, that the Iroquoians that Jacques Cartier had simply disappeared and therefore the land was ripe for the picking. It’s erasure.
I think one of the most egregious examples of this was on r/Quebec when some amateur historian was arguing that the Mohawks originally came from New York (you know, that ancient political jurisdiction that has existed for thousands of years) and were therefore foreigners – and even worse, they had allied with the British and were therefore conquerors. (The same person argued that the Huron-Wendat were good natives because they were friendly with French colonists.) It’s the kind of argument I would have expected from the 19th century, not the 21st.
We don’t really know if the specific area of Montreal had permanent Mohawk settlements, but the bigger point is: why does this guy give a shit?
If I were one of these Quebec nationalist historians, and I felt the need to say anything at all (which would be extraordinary), I’d be explaining that the Mohawks were conquered, as the Quebecois later were, not that the historical record is patchy, and so it may well have been terra nullius. The French defeated their enemies in battle and claimed the land! If you’re going to talk about the past, own it!
For many anglos, the First Nations are just another wedge issue to use “against” non-anglos.
DeWolf, you encapsulate the situation well.
Terra nullius is a strange concept. No, the people who lived here before 1492 didn’t have a European-style system of land ownership. That doesn’t mean the land belonged to nobody. It meant the land belonged to everybody. This isn’t to say that all indigenous people were noble idealists – there’s evidence of clashes over access to some of the better territory – but there wasn’t anything like a system of allodial title.
qatzelok, for conservative nationalists, the First Nations are a pawn in an argument “proving” that only the French have a right to Quebec.
“for conservative nationalists…”
Strawman of the week? I’ve never heard “only the French have a right to Québec” from anyone who is officially in this category. Of course, one can always find some crazy with this opinion somewhere out there. But to smear all nationalists with this statement is more wedge-issue-aggression.
Why defend conservative nationalists? I thought you were a proper lefty.
Shouldn’t you be comparing the whole „Montreal was empty“ idea with the „Palestine was empty“ idea of zionists?
A Concordia student was shaken to find out that the professor with whom he’d been taking a course in art history had been dead for two years. The university hadn’t been clear that the prerecorded lectures were made by a faculty member who was no longer available.
The story was first covered by Slate then tweeted by Steve Faguy.
Oh wow. That story is going to go straight to the union. Yipes! For sure, there will be a lawsuit for copyright infringement against the university. The union (and my department) informed the profs to include an intellectual property clause in all their syllabi indicating that all their coursework remains their own. It’s also true that students retain copyright for all the work they hand in, even if it’s submitted electronically.
Incidentally, I’d be surprised if anyone (but the very time strapped) is interested in online courses in the future. The medium is so, so shitty – even live. Both students and faculty just hate it and students resent paying for it. Covid has set back MOOCs probably a generation. It’s something…but barely.
And…I’m reading the article more carefully. I think there might be a difference between deliberately developed online courses versus the general e-misery that we’re all in under covid. He might have signed something giving the university a right to use it. Also, as a tenured prof, he might be under different rules than part-time, temporary faculty (like me). I don’t think Concordia’s online offerings are especially successful so…small mercies. Still, the students should raise hell over this ultra low-effort offering by the university.
I have a friend who is doing a few classes through TÉLUQ, which has been doing distance-ed since long before computers were in everyone’s house so they know what they’re doing. The experience he described didn’t sound so bad. At the beginning of the course, he received a big package in the mail with all this course work including work sheets, readings, and sample work. He would fill everything in based on his readings and research and mail it back. Other than research, I don’t think he really needed a computer. He could book a call with an adviser whenever he needed to get help. Compare that to what I’ve been hearing with online classes at normal universities (or the online classes they normally offer) and it seems to be night and day!
When I was studying at Concordia, they were always trying to get me to do online classes and I always refused, I’m glad I never did. Anyone I knew who took them (usually because they had to get some credit and couldn’t fit it in their schedule) always complained about how terrible the experience was.
JaneyB, it seems the lectures done by the Concordia prof were part of a planned collection of recorded lectures, so presumably the professor knew this and assented to it. But the university should not be claiming – even passively implying – that the course is taught by François‑Marc Gagnon.
I suppose the step from “professor does lectures, student work and questions are dealt with by TAs” to this is not a big one, but the union surely will have something to say about the promotion of courses as supposedly taught by people who are no longer with us. How could any lecturer get tenure if all the important teaching posts are held by the dead?
Sabrina Rose Dufour, charged with the manslaughter of her partner Philip Lloyd Celian in February 2019, was acquitted Friday after she made a case it was self-defence after years of domestic abuse. It took the jury three days of deliberations.
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