I’ve been looking for any headlines from the annual anti police brutality march, but this may be the coldest March 15 we’ve had in years, which may have limited the exuberance of both cops and demonstrators.
Here we go: La Presse says the march remained peaceful. CTV says the march happened.
The city has said no to the idea of expanding voting by mail for this November’s election, although it hopes Quebec will kick in to help pay for an election that may be more expensive than usual, if sanitary measures have to be integrated with regular polling.
Municipal parties are proliferating right now, in advance of the campaign, both at the city and the borough level.
The Grand Prix is supposed to be held on June 13 this year; the Journal lays out why it may not happen.
Work is to begin this summer on enlarging the MAC, the contemporary art museum, and integrating it better with Place des Arts. The one thing I wish they could change is the depressing wall of garage entrances along Jeanne-Mance, facing the Place des festivals, although I suppose you can’t avoid having industrial-sized garage doors somewhere on a museum.
A woman was knocked down as she attempted to cross the diabolical intersection at l’Acadie Circle on Monday. She isn’t on the tote board yet – in fact, pedestrians have been noticeably spared after two incidents earlier this year.
Jean-François Parenteau, mayor of Verdun, is the first in the city to announce he won’t be running again this November. Says he’s weary of nasty personal attacks on social media.
Le Devoir drops one interesting bit of data at the end of their story: Parenteau has worked in the real estate business. But it doesn’t say he plans to return to it.
Wonder if we’ll see more than a few hats hung up after a year like this one.
He’s been a pretty good mayor. He was very “hands-on” and replied to every one of my emails. We’ll all be pushing Sterling Downey to follow up 😉
I look forward to watching him age gracefully in his Speedo on Verdun beach for years to come. The dude is weird, though, he made up a story about a kid being injured on a skatepark for political purposes. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/verdun-skateboarding-skatepark-injury-false-story-councillor-downey-borough-mayor-parenteau-1.3312435
I’d forgotten that incident, MarcG. That was odd.
Elected officials have been forced to sign NDAs about the REM, raising questions about keeping voters in the dark. But the Caisse has never been concerned about democratic debate, as sketched here with the headline “Tout est décidé d’avance”.
This is the biggest story in the shaping of this city for a generation or more, but it’s not being decided for or by the residents of the city nor their elected representatives.
That’s outrageous.
I assume parliamentary privilege does not extend to the city council chamber. But there’s always a chance some dedicated Québec solidaire MNA could blow the whistle on any scandalous or damaging info that emerges as the CDPQ rams through this project.
Reminds me of the muzzling of staff whistle blowers at the Glen Hospital. They were forbidden to talk to the press . Public Private “partnership”- trickle down dictatorships.
Si on veut savoir vers où on s’en va, c’est pas aux States qu’il faut regarder, c’est en France: ce muselage des lanceurs d’alerte et du journalisme d’investigation a depuis quelques années un cadre juridique avec la Loi relative à la protection du secret des affaires, grâce à Macron alors ministre (ref).
Et sous la loi “Sécurité globale” qui sera bientôt effective, personne n’aura le droit de filmer les “forces de l’ordre” dans l’exercice de leurs fonctions.
Comme écrit Lordon, «Le capitalisme ne rendra pas les clés gentiment».
While doing a family bike tour along the canal last summer, a 10-year-old passenger remarked how shockingly ugly the REM was where it goes over the canal near the Peel Basin.
I guess he wasn’t consulted. Nor was Heritage Montreal.
Police were called to a gathering of 100 people in Outremont on Sunday morning, apparently a Hasidic funeral. The people dispersed peacefully and no tickets were handed out.
“apparently”? Article says “The vice-president of the Council of Hasidic Jews, Max Lieberman, however, said it was the funeral of one of their own.”
no tickets = no inducement to change this behaviour.
They also said the event was held outdoors.
I tend to assume anything said in a situation like this is open to interpretation at best, and is more than likely to consist of statements issued in hopes of making the police go away quickly and quietly.
@Chris – They won’t change their behaviour. Look at the stats from Israel, they were infected at more than double the rate of the general public and died in even higher numbers, because they live with so many people in the same house, don’t follow guidelines, don’t wear the masks properly, etc.
Ephraim, oh, for sure. But at least ticketing would 1) pay for some of the cops’ time 2) possibly dissuade others (non-Hasidics).
@Chris – Depends on the Haredi group.
They will fight it, causing rising court costs. They, of course, will scream and yell that the government is being Nazis (which annoys me to no end, because they always do this, because apparently no one has actually studied analogies, similes or metaphors, nevermind actual history) and decry religious persecution, when it’s not about the religion, it’s about their specific cult. And the healthcare costs that they are running up because they just can’t be bothered to be courteous to others.
Most of them are poor. How poor? Kiryas Joel in NY is so poor that 5/8th of them live under the poverty line, more than 40 percent receive food stamps. See https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/nyregion/kiryas-joel-a-village-with-the-numbers-not-the-image-of-the-poorest-place.html So when they can’t pay the fine, they will have to go to jail… but you see, then need kosher certified food and can’t work on Friday night and Saturday… oh and of course need at least 9 other Jewish men to pray with them, so you need to sentence 9 other Jewish men at the same time. And on and on and on…
Ephraim: You say most are poor. I’ve always had the impression that some of them are very rich, am I mistaken? They don’t live it up in obviously flashy ways, but I had the idea some of them own a lot of real estate.
Depends on the cult, actually. In the case of Satmar, very very poor. In the case of Belz, it might be entirely different. Then there are the donations that they beg for so that they can be paid a stipend while studying. Employment levels, even in Israel are in the 30% to 50%, with women being more employed than men. Often running small businesses so they have flexibility… like selling housewares to other Haredi households. They are often a source of low paid jobs, even cutting diamonds is a low paying job, because they need work with flexibility to stop and go pray. So it’s easy to abuse. And they live in cramped quarters, often multigenerational with lots of kids.
La Presse accompanies the Équipe métro d’intervention et de concertation (EMIC) as it patrols the metro looking for the homeless, but not with the intention of harassing them, but of helping them. Feels like this is a step in the right direction.
A group of essential workers – health care workers, teachers and others – held a demonstration Sunday in Jarry Park for better pay and more respect.
They deserve everything they are demanding.
It would be nice if all these essential workers could get vaccinated also instead of waiting for their very low place in the ordering.
jeather, yes, it would. But it’s rather complicated logistically. Currently the workers at the vaccine centres just check your id, which has your birth year, to make sure you’re not jumping the queue. Easy. How would they know someone showing up is really, say, a grocery store employee? Pretty easy to fake a Provigo letterhead. Instead of wasting time with that, more time can actually be dedicated to jabbing arms.
You could, for instance, set up a vaccine clinic at the store/school/school board/etc. They know who their employees are.
That would require a mobile vaccination unit (which is not a bad idea). It would have to go to each store at least three times in order to get all the employees (shiftwork). Schools would be easier. But of course that would require a bunch of people to sit down and get a list of all stores, schools, etc. and to coordinate scheduling the visits. Sounds easy, but I suspect that is a gargantuan task and would take weeks to pull off. In the meantime people would complain that they’re putting all this effort into making schedules instead of putting needles in arms. #yacantwin
I’m not saying it would be effortless, but I think that protecting essential workers is probably worth the work. (Stores I assume would be not that impossible for the chains, it’s the small stores that would be hard to get to function. Perhaps there could be an individual code given and an online form made? That happens in the US in some places.) Also, the people making the schedules and plans etc are not actually the people who are giving the vaccines, those can continue to go on while this is planned.
I had a Covid test today.
So A few hours ago I was standing in a slowly advancing line for 25 minutes, in a maze of stairs and barely ventilated basement corridors of a CIUSSS building (vaccinations were done on the ground floor). I felt the HVAC grille on the ceiling less than a feet above me, and no air was sucked in or blown out. Meanwhile there were more than 50 people in the same corridor, of whom statically at least one would test Covid positive (2% is our current test positivity rate). Not too big of a risk for me, we were all masked and only two of them were coughing. But there were also four guards from a private security firm who were directing people to the inscription windows, telling them to advance and stand on the footstep-stickers, and making sure everyone was behaving. They were in that corridor for their full shifts, maybe 40 hrs week. I couldn’t resist asking one of them if they had been vaccinated. Nope, none of them was vaccinated yet, because they’re not front-line healthcare workers. They were, of course, all visible minorities, and the people doing the intake and testing were all white. Sigh…
I don’t think that any of them have been fallen ill so far, otherwise the health authorities would (hopefully) have changed their setup. But still, I’d say these people have priority getting vaccinated over people who are safely working from home and are extremely unlikely to ever encounter anyone who has Covid.
If I was the boss of the world… or just of Quebec…
I will also say that the plan for getting essential workers who work with the public should have been planned out from the time we saw that vaccines were coming, not just suddenly created now in March. It’s probably too late now, but there was more than enough time to make a plan for them, had anyone in power cared to.
MarcG 21:17 on 2021-03-15 Permalink
The “impressionnante présence policière” proves the point.
SMD 21:36 on 2021-03-15 Permalink
A peaceful and boisterous march in the sunshine! Nobody got hurt, despite the heavy police presence. They seemed to be actually exercising restraint, for once.