The convict called le caïd Raynald Desjardins is due to be paroled in April. La Presse’s organized crime specialists have a story to tell about Desjardins’ lawyer and how things have gone sour between the two men in recent years. When you’ve got unhappy clients whose solution to strained relationships tends toward the lurid, it’s bound to be tricky.
Updates from March, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Greedy landlords are nudging rents up even though the vacancy rate is at a more reasonable level of 2.3% now.
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Kate
Aéroports de Montréal is totting up its losses from 2020. But the numbers don’t add up for me. I think of losses in the sense of what you make vs. what you spend, but the big number here seems to be arrived at by comparing 2020’s profits to 2019’s.
Says here that the operating costs for 2020 were $158.6 million and the revenue was $282.2 million, so it seems to me they’re still well in the black and have nothing to complain of. In fact they’re doing better than I would’ve expected. Maybe someone can explain to me how you look at a disappointing profit compared to last year’s profit, and call it a loss.
steph
They always calculate losses to ‘expected gains’. It’s ass-backwards.
Spi
The article is literally about ADM publishing their yearly report, you could look up the yearly report that’s very easy to find on the ADM website.
https://www.admtl.com/sites/default/files/2021/T4-2020-A.pdf
Kate
Thank you both. You can see I am not a trained economist. I think it is ass-backwards.
Tim F
Not having read the report, I expect the cargo business in Mirabel (especially extra orders from Amazon) probably fared better than passenger service in Dorval.
ant6n
The report ist 4 pages long.
In 2019 they made a profit of 100M profit on 700M of revenue.
In 2020 they made a loss of 230M on 280M revenue (with only slightly reduced expenses).Although 170M of the cost is depreciation. That’s not a cost that you have to pay with money, its just spreading the initial cost of investments over the years of use, so won’t affect cash flow in the short term – that’s perhaps why they focus on only operating costs (160M), although there are other expenses, like pandemic related expenses (40M), etc. that will cost the airport money today.
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Kate
Teachers’ unions are warning that getting high school kids back into in-person classrooms will spark a third Covid wave in Quebec.
qatzelok
Interesting, but neither Heidi Yetman, Michael Cohen nor Stéphane Lapointe – the only cited sources – are experts in anything related to contagious diseases or social policy.
“Sigourney Weaver warned that a Third Wave…. bla bla bla…”
Kate
So they shouldn’t express any opinion calling for caution for teachers under the circumstances?
dwgs
Interesting that you use Sigourney Weaver as an example since it was her crewmates’ refusal to follow mandatory 24 hour quarantine (against Ripley’s wishes) that allowed the xenomorph access to the Nostromo, eventually killing everyone but her. Don’t even get me started on Ghostbusters.
Meezly
In terms of allowing a supernatural entity to invade NYC, Sigourney made a terrible Gatekeeper in Ghostbusters!
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Kate
Unusually, Radio-Canada puts on top of the local news a commentary about baseball stadiums and François Legault.
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Kate
Le Devoir talks to people convinced that there’s a whole pack of communications people behind Denis Coderre’s new book and his obvious plan to wrest the mayoralty back.
DeWolf
I’ve seen a few passages from his book and they are definitely PR-crafted nonsense. There’s one about the need to avoid being “dogmatic” about bike lanes, widened sidewalks and pedestrian streets, but it’s written in such a vague, non-specific way that it doesn’t actually say anything.
Joey
Coderre’s book is the leading contender for the highest ratio of sales bought to book actually read for 2021.
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Kate
The Montreal Marathon is to be run again this September with different management from the last one, in 2019. No race was held in 2020.
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Kate
Amazon is going to have a game development studio here, and the news is all over the place so I thought I’d better take note. Seems they’ve poached several influential Ubisoft people to start them off.
Ephraim
Good news! That means more competition and more jobs and higher salaries. Can we get Microsoft in on it? Maybe they can buy discord and move it here!
Uatu
This sounds good, but lately game studios have been closing down so we’ll see how long this will last
Kate
What I’m curious about is whether Quebec gave them a lot of money to come here, but I can’t find anything out about that.
Hamza khan
I am almost positive the govt threw Amazon a few hundred million in tax breaks and kickback arrangements. I’m waiting to find out what Amazon intends on building here , if anything.
A
Most of the video game companies in Quebec are entitled to the CTMM.
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Kate
The Journal found some neighbours of the sex doll brothel in Greenfield Park to express outrage and even say “think of the chi-i-i-i-ildren!”
They want it to close. But I don’t know that we have a law making it illegal to offer inanimate objects for sexual purposes. Maybe they can make the case on something as simple as the inconvenience to other tenants caused by customers coming and going at all hours.
dwgs
Okay, I’m going to ask the question. Who the hell is the client base for this enterprise? I mean what kind of a loser do you have to be to pay money to screw an inanimate object? SMDH indeed.
Ephraim
In other news, some people haven’t yet discovered the SQDC. This is about the stupidest NIMBY I have ever heard… just let the business PETER out on it’s own 🙂
j2
I’d rather we didn’t sex-shame and just let them do this (generally speaking I mean). I find this far less gross than VLTs for example.
Kate
dwgs, some journalists have asked that question and found some answers.
dwgs
I’m not sex shaming. If getting it on with dolls is your thing then that’s fine, my philosophy is so long as it’s between consenting adult(s) no one else has a right to judge. But travelling across town to pay what I would imagine is substantial coin to be alone in a tacky room with a doll… The hygiene questions alone would be a turn off.
Having read Kate’s links I’ll back off on the ‘loser’ comment but the rest of my argument stands.Blork
The article from a few days ago said that the service comes with virtual reality porn, so I guess the idea is you see a real person in your headset but unlike when you’re just watching on your phone or whatever, in this case you can reach out and feel something real(ish) while watching your porn.
JS
I wonder what the idiots that the Journal dug up think about the cigarettes on sale at the corner store?
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Kate
Back in November, I didn’t even notice this item on the death of a man killed in a taxi in Cartierville when it was struck by a street racer. But now that another death has been ascribed to street racing, he’s back in the news.
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Kate
Manon Barbe, who’s been mayor of Lasalle for 20 years, announces she won’t run again this November. Before her mayoralty she was a councillor for five years, and she’s had her own party for awhile, Équipe Barbe, which only operates in that borough. But unlike two other mayors who’ve bowed out recently, she doesn’t cite abuse from social media as a cause.
Orr
The Lasalle election issue I hope to see is to get the long, long, long delayed replacement of the Quebec-owned half of the Pont Mercier bridge structure actually replaced.
I want this not just for cars and trucks to have a structurally safe bridge but also for pedestrians, runners, bicycle riders, scenic walkers, active transport commuters, tourists, etc because the replacement bridge will have a modern-safety-standard extra wide pedestrian & bikepath sidewalk. The federal government built their half of the bridge & sidewalk a decade ago and it is sitting unused waiting for the Quebec to rebuild its half of the bridge with the new wide-sidewalk section.
It seems Quebec ministère des Transports will delay as long as possible and then five more years.
Pont Jacques Cartier and new Pont Champlain have shown how popular these new wide mixed-use sidewalks are and local citizens in Lasalle & Lachine and the surrounding areas are really missing out on this access to and across our magnificent Saint Lawrence river.
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