Montreal City Weblog

Updates from August, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• Kate 16:52 on 2021-08-18 Permalink | Reply  

  Christopher Curtis visits Montreal North and sees a peaceful normal neighbourhood. His interview with Sacha-Wilky Merazil is a must-read.

  Ted Rutland, also interviewed, thinks the SPVM is pushing a narrative about gangs and gun crime to counterbalance concerns about racial profiling and heavy-handed policing. If so, it’s certainly worked wonders in pushing the other storyline off the front page.

  Update: A regular reader (but non-commenter) recommended this Youtube video that purports to give some description of the gang situation here.

  Jeff and SMD are discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • SMD 21:46 on 2021-08-18 Permalink

    Great work from Curtis.

  • Jeff 08:13 on 2021-08-19 Permalink

    He says attempted murders involving guns increased by 68% in 2020, as though it’s no cause for alarm?

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• Kate 16:39 on 2021-08-18 Permalink | Reply  

  Elections Canada is doubling down on not requiring election poll workers to be vaccinated. Sanitizing theatre is mentioned here – hand sanitizer, disposable pencils and plexiglas – but they don’t mention the scrum that happens at the end of the night, when the doors close, and workers converge on the ballot boxes to count up, often with candidate delegates (no vaccination required from them either) looking closely on.

  As I mentioned before, I don’t see how they can possibly enforce distancing when workers have to work so closely together at the end of voting day to tally up, check the totals and reseal the boxes, tired after a long day and only wanting to finish the task. The public doesn’t see this stage but the officials need to address it.

   

• Kate 16:30 on 2021-08-18 Permalink | Reply  

  The REM CEO says that the trend to work from home won’t seriously cut into ridership on the system. Hope springs eternal.

  Uatu is discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • Uatu 10:42 on 2021-08-19 Permalink

    Well what else is he going to say, really?

• Kate 09:08 on 2021-08-18 Permalink | Reply  

  Film producer Rock Demers has died at age 87. Known for kids’ films, Demers did his bit to put Quebec on the map – looking for links I quickly found ones in Italian and in Russian.

  This may be the only time I ever link to a story in San Marino media.

  Raymond Lutz is discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • Raymond Lutz 16:20 on 2021-08-18 Permalink

    Ah merde, depuis 9 ans je repoussais la tenue de cette entrevue qu’il m’avait offerte : “Il faut que je vous parle de votre mère.” m’avait-il dit au téléphone. Je l’avais joint à son bureau pour lui annoncer son décès. Il ne pouvait pas venir aux obsèques de ma mère mais voulait me rencontrer. Las ! Je n’aurai pas su lui offrir l’occasion d’évoquer le souvenir d’un amour passé et moi, apprendre les détails de cette passion dont les échos restaient vifs même 50 ans plus tard. Je l’ai découverte en parcourant la correspondance de ma mère à la recherche d’amis et de connaissances à contacter. J’ai quelques photos de l’époque où il nous avait accueilli chez lui : ma mère nous expliquait ces photos (à ma sœur et moi) en le décrivant comme un ami qui l’avait engagé « comme gouvernante » pour nous dépanner. Les mères monoparentales étaient rarissimes en 1967…

    Comme on dit avec regret: ” j’aurais donc dû…”

• Kate 08:55 on 2021-08-18 Permalink | Reply  

  We’ve got ourselves a nice muggy heatwave till at least Saturday. And I can hear the trees buzzing on my street.

  A man caught video of a dust devil by the highway in Kahnawake on Monday. Dust devils “form when a pocket of hot air near the surface rises quickly through cooler air above it, forming an updraft. If conditions are just right, the updraft may begin to rotate.”

   

• Kate 08:45 on 2021-08-18 Permalink | Reply  

  Two federal candidates in Montreal – Rachel Bendayan and Anthony Housefather, both Jewish – have had their campaign placards defaced with swastikas.

   

• Kate 08:31 on 2021-08-18 Permalink | Reply  

  Tuesday the city relaunched Parc de l’Espoir in the Village, dedicated to the memory of people lost to AIDS. If I remember right, this park was originally started when local folks claimed an empty lot as a memorial. Now it’s been spruced up. La Presse’s item is mostly photos and captions, and the Gazette has a video report. To be honest, it looks like a lot of paving stone and a minimal amount of greenery. CTV quotes a community member as saying “this is not a park, this is a cenotaph.”

  Kate and DeWolf are discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • DeWolf 09:33 on 2021-08-18 Permalink

    I don’t think the cenotaph remark is a comment on the design. I passed by a few weeks before it was finished and it’s a big improvement over what was there before. The old plaza was a cramped given how many people were always sitting around, and it had a bit of a cloistered feel that made it uninviting to outsiders. This new design takes over the adjacent street and is more open to Ste-Catherine. For a high-traffic location like that, I think the amount of hard paving is appropriate. Looking at Street View images of the old plaza, it actually seems like quite a few new trees were added.

  • Kate 09:47 on 2021-08-18 Permalink

    Nor did I – sorry that the order of my post implied the speaker was making a negative criticism. But the cited person does make the point that it’s more a memorial than a park.

• Kate 08:28 on 2021-08-18 Permalink | Reply  

  CBC’s Antoni Nerestant tells us that while in 2001 only 500 Black people lived in Repentigny, now there’s a community of 5,800 – and they’re under constant harassment from police, a fact brought into prominence recently with the shooting of a distressed Black man by police called to help him.