A report by the city’s heritage council condemns the practice of architectural façade-ism and the city’s neglect of many of its older buildings – but these are not new criticisms. These practices have been noted and called out many times before.
Updates from November, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The novelist Marie-Claire Blais has died in Florida. Author of nearly 30 books, she was the recipient of many honours, enumerated in the article. Item on her work in the New Yorker in 2019.
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Kate
A 17-year-old accused of murder in a death in September has been allowed to await his trial outside of jail. Some details about the homicide, the 19th of the year, are given in the second half of this item.
A small but significant difference in English and French usage: the French story here describes the incident as having taken place “en septembre dernier” which, to my anglo ear, sounded like September 2020. But in French there is, I think, no way to say “it happened in September” as you would in English, meaning the most proximate past September we experienced. I often find myself double‑taking at this in news stories.
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Kate
One out of ten kids in Montreal North has had Covid, compared to an average 6% citywide.
david1441
Well, 10% that hat we know about. I’ve had covid twice – got it again in August despite being double vaxxed. Very mild symptoms, and if I hadn’t lost the sense of taste and smell, I’d probably not have got tested or even thought it was more than a cold.
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Kate
The highest Quebec court has confirmed the 2019 acquittal of Leonardo Rizzuto on gun and drug charges. Evidence was excluded because conversations had been illegally recorded in the office of Rizzuto’s lawyer Loris Cavaliere.
This is the second news story in a week involving a case where evidence was invalidated because police had intercepted conversations between a suspect and his lawyer: last week it was this collusion story. Don’t police have to understand the rules on this?
Now I hope I understood the legal scenario here properly!
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Kate
An IT consultant to the city, already tried twice for fraud, finally pleaded guilty Monday to having defrauded the city of millions, 15 years ago. Benoit Bissonnette made crooked deals with city fonctionnaire Gilles Parent, who was convicted in 2012 and sentenced to six years, so he’s out by now. Nothing in either article about whether the city will get back any of the dosh.
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Kate
Simon Lamarre, a schoolteacher who took upskirt photos of girls for years and was reported to police by his wife (now ex), was given a suspended sentence this week by judge Jean-Jacques Gagné. [See clarification below from reader H. John.]
Yves Boisvert is not impressed.
Meezly
The police did a stellar job protecting the public from a sexual predator and this judge just nullified that. Kudos to Boisvert for calling this out.
Joey
Étonnamment, le juge passe sous silence dans son jugement plusieurs éléments contenus dans les rapports, notamment l’« hostilité envers les femmes » entretenue par Simon Lamarre, de même que sa « difficulté de sévère intensité pour les intérêts sexuels déviants envers les adolescents ».
Awful.
Meezly
Aaron Persky was fired after public outcry on his lenient sentence for Brock Turner. I hope something similar will happen to Gagné.
carswell
One of the first duties of the state and its legal system is to protect the vulnerable. In this instance as in so many others, they have failed. I wonder if a woman judge would have been so unconcerned about Lamarre’s past — and future? — victims and the message a decision like this sends.
jeather
Compare and contrast with the teacher who was suspended over showing his students a music video he made, see if you can guess what motivates different treatment.
H. John
He was not granted a pardon.
Lamarre plead guilty. The prosecutor did not ask for jail time. She asked for a suspended sentence. Instead, the judge agreed with the defence and granted a conditional discharge.
A suspended sentence involves following conditions in a probation order for a period of one to three years.
With a conditional discharge a finding of guilt is made, but no conviction is registered. The conditions come in a probation order that can be in effect from one to three years.Lamarre has to complete 150 hours of community service, and continue in therapy.
A conditional discharge stays on an offender’s criminal record for three years after the completion of the probation order. The offender doesn’t have to apply for a pardon for the discharge to be removed from his/her record.
The main difference between a conditional discharge and a suspended sentence is that an offender who gets a suspended sentence has a conviction registered against them. This means that the offender who gets a suspended sentence will have a criminal record and will have to apply for a pardon to have the conviction removed from their record.
Kate
Once again, H. John, thank you for your correction. It’s invaluable.
jeather
Roberge has since announced he has lost his license to teach.
carswell
So, if Simon Lamarre can no longer teach (and hurrah for that), doesn’t that cut the legs from under the judge’s reasoning that his PhD shouldn’t go to waste?
And isn’t the message to other potential offenders that a higher degree will get them a much reduced sentence? (Being a bit facetious here but only a bit.)
At least Simon Lamarre’s name is sure to come up in future Web searches by prospective employers. He needs to be kept far away from children at all times, not just in school settings.
Kate
It’s an old legal principle, carswell. Originally called benefit of clergy, after a point it came to mean that literate people were spared execution. “In 1351, under Edward III, this loophole was formalised in statute, and the benefit of clergy was officially extended to all who could read. For example, the English dramatist Ben Jonson avoided hanging by pleading benefit of clergy in 1598 when charged with manslaughter.” But there was no Google then.
H, John
Carswell, Lamarre can teach, as he has for the last number of years, at any college or university.
I really don’t understand the question about a message to other potential offenders. People who commit crimes don’t pre-think “what will this get me.” We know that.
H. John
Everyone can decide for themselves whether they’re looking for punishment or rehabilitation.
An important part of Canada’s criminal justice system is reintegration.
Lamarre plead guilty which means not a single victim had to testify; and yes, that may have made a difference.
The prosecutor has an ugly and depressing job. Regardless of what she thought was an appropriate sentence, someone is bound to say that’s not enough.
She reviewed the case she had before her, and compared it to other “like” cases.
She, or her office, did not ask for jail time.
I wouldn’t want her job.
And I don’t think Yves Boisvert’s column is fair. If he wanted to be fair, he could have said what he thought the sentence should have been, so we could understand where the prosecution or judge went wrong.
She was in the court room. He wasn’t.
Kate
Granted that journalists are not in the courtroom throughout, it’s their job to convey the facts they know will be of most interest to readers. But they don’t “waste” paragraphs on explaining the points of law that explain the outcome, as in this case.
H. John, when you say “Everyone can decide for themselves whether they’re looking for punishment or rehabilitation” you really mean that a person in Lamarre’s situation is able to choose his fate? It’s not imposed on him by the court?
Meezly
I thought that Boisvert’s article was totally fair and made his point well. Right off the bat in the article, he stated:
The man is a candidate for rehabilitation, and the public prosecutor requested a simple “suspension of sentence”. The defense pleaded for a “conditional discharge”.
And the judge went with the defense. Then elaborated on his various patriarchal reasons why Lamarre is getting so much leniency, all in the interest of reintegrating him back into society and resuming his career as soon as possible.
The conditional discharge, the downplaying of Lamarre’s crimes, willfully ignoring Lamarre’s misogyny and even showing empathy that his ex-wife was partially to blame, etc. All this sends the wrong message to society, especially to victims. That if you plead guilty and have a sympathetic judge, a sexual predator (esp. one that is white, male, and highly educated) can get away with a lenient sentence or conditions.
This Happens All the Time. Because the justice system is still steeped in sexism (and other isms). So if the prosecutor was basing her case on other “like” cases, then that is where it all started going wrong because she was looking at a history of sex predators getting away with light punishment. As Boisvert wrote, Lamarre only “risked a sentence varying from little to almost nothing.”
david1441
I like it how people hand waive almost every stupid decision our culture-victim, navel-gazing, ultra-liberal judges throw up there . . . until it’s something that they happen to have strong feelings on like this one.
This is the tip of the iceberg, people! Look at some of the murder sentences people are getting! It’s insane.
H. John
Kate, sorry I wasn’t clear. When I said “Everyone can decide” I was trying to say we each get to decide what we expect or want our criminal justice system to do. Is it punishment, lock them up for ever, or lock them up and rehabilitate them.
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Kate
Aéroports de Montréal says it needs more money – lots more money. In trying to figure out exactly what ADM is, I read in Wikipedia that it’s a “non‑profit private enterprise that does not issue share capital or receive government funding.”
Ephraim
Fancy language for we pay management all the extra profit, so we don’t make a profit. But anything you give us, will disappear forever.
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Kate
Having received a report that its Michel-Chartrand park holds five times as many deer as it can sustain without damage, Longueuil is making up its mind to thin the herd starting next year, by capturing and slaughtering some.
Update: CBC says 60 animals will be culled.
Second update: Anne-France Goldwater to the rescue!
MarcG
Unfortunately it seems like the park doesn’t have BBQ installations. Seriously, though, from the sky it looks like a really great park, mostly trails through the woods, no wonder the deer are enjoying it.
qatzelok
I wonder if the deer have conversations about how they consume *Five Michel Chartrand Parks* worth of leaves each year, and how that’s just not sustainable.
Blork
@MarcG, I go for an hour-long walk in that park several times a week, and it is a really great park. Several different grades of path (some for pedestrians and bikes, some pedestrian only, which in winter are ski trails). Lots of wildlife: deer, raccoons, skunks, foxes, owls, birds galore, etc.
Unfortunately it has been ravaged in recent years. A combination of the deer overpopulation, last year’s huge bloom of gypsy moth caterpillars, and — worst of all — the Asian ash beetle, have left much of it looking like a scrappy second-rate pile of scrub instead of the lush forest it once was. They’re currently in the process of taking down something like 20,000 trees because of that damn beetle.
A few years ago, a summertime walk through that park was green and lush with a full canopy overhead blocking out the sky. Now, in some parts of the park, it’s grey standing deadwood with only a bit of green, with sky showing through like it’s winter even in summer. Fortunately it’s not all that bad, but in some places you see as much or more standing deadwood than living trees.
…it’s still nice though.
CE
Blork, have you spent much time in the Boisé Du Tremblay? I haven’t been but it looks like a nice forest not far from the city.
Blork
CE, yes, I go there sometimes too. It’s nice, but there’s really only the one path, which is linear, versus the loops in M-Chartrand. The Tremblay path is quite well built-up and maintained, with a lot of it being elevated boardwalk above the forest floor. Oddly, I’ve never seen any deer there, nor any other wildlife aside from a few birds. It too has suffered a lot from the Asian ash beetle, with many dead trees visible.
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Kate
Aref Salem, leader of what the media persist in calling the official opposition at city hall, has named the councillors in what they’re also now calling his shadow cabinet.
(There is no official opposition in city council, and no cabinet. It’s not a Parliament.)
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Kate
The first detected cases of Omicron Covid landed at Trudeau before going on to Ottawa. They’re reported to have been two travellers from Nigeria.
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Kate
The Journal’s Louis-Philippe Messier is doing a nice casual series for the Journal, Montréal Tout‑Terrain, on Monday looking at three new kinds of fast food that have arrived in town. Some previous instalments, not all of which I’ve blogged, are listed here.
Blork
So I guess the race is on to see which will kill you first; COVID-19 or your diet. (Although the Mokili stuff looks good and not particularly homicidal…)
Kate
Mokili is in my neighbourhood. I’ve tried several of their sauces. The Berbere is exceptionally good and I also like the Mafé, a peanut sauce from west Africa, and the Kuku Paka, a coconut‑based curry sauce from Kenya. Haven’t actually ordered a whole dinner there yet. They have limited hours, not always open when I happen to go past.
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Kate
MétéoMedia is predicting a mild but stormy winter in the Montreal area because of La Niña. Snow up till winter, but then one of those icky winters hovering around freezing, with lots of ice, according to this prediction.
walkerp
Bummer! I had heard earlier that we were supposed to be getting tons of snow. Not a great start that we already have an icefest after the first minor snowfall.
Kate
Well, long-range forecasting is still a bit of a tossup.
Blork
…so is short-range. :-/
Kate
Blork, not recently. (Did I already post about this?) When I was a kid it was a standard item for comedians to talk about how unreliable the weather forecasting was, but the short-term stuff now is pretty dead on. But you don’t hear it much any more except occasionally from old folks ( 🙂 ) because it’s no longer true.
The only beef I have with Environment Canada is a tendency to catastrophize unnecessarily. But that may be policy – better to warn people of possible storms than to soft-pedal the warning and have people get steamed because you didn’t make enough fuss.
MarcG
Pro tip: When there’s a weather warning on the GC website (https://weather.gc.ca/city/pages/qc-147_metric_e.html) click on the link and read the detailed text – whoever writes it has a sense of humour.
Joey
The worst offenders are newspapers, who will write a headline like “Massive snowstorm headed for Quebec this week” over a story describing 2 cm projected in Montreal and a storm in Sept-Iles.
The golden rule for softball planning is never trust a forecast that’s more than 36 hours out. The silver rule is Jeanne-Mance Park is its own microclimate.
Mark
Meteomedia’s website has fully subscribed to the click-bait school of web promotion. Their titles are always sensationalist, but in a non informative manner., designed to get you to click futher on their site and generate ad revenue. “La tempête sera memorable, details ici” “L’hiver nous présente plusieurs suprises”. “Des conséqences historiques de la vague de chaleur”. In the end, nothing in the article ever matches the gravity or the feeling of the lead. In a few years, I half expect them to write “Nous avons les prévisions méteo que le gouvernement ne veux pas partager avec vous!”.
The pre-internet Meteomedia TV channel was actually really helpful back in the day, but it’s amazing that they have been able to keep that going on the air for so long. Even my mom who was born before WW2 doesn’t watch it anymore, but I guess they still have some audiences.
maggie rose
I like Weather Underground’s forecast, set to Montreal. I can further change the location to zone in on even more accurate local micro-climates. Local weather stations occasionally go down, but always come back up. I find their radar map’s graphics better suited to non-meteorologists than GC. I can move it, zoom in or out, and change the speed of rain/snow cloud movements. The 10-day forecast is handy too. I use both, but for daily use, it’s a bit more fun and, dare I say, accurate. Less doom-mongering too, just weather. It does give the same severe weather alerts as GC, but I prefer to read them at GC due to them not wrapping around the text for that. https://www.wunderground.com/weather/ca/montreal/IMONTREA59
carswell
Another fan of the Weather Underground. Their 10-day forecast is the most information-dense graphic for laypeople I’ve ever encountered online or in print. Wonderful to have all that information available at a glance.
mare
I’m still very happy with Dark Sky. The app doesn’t support Canada, but the website does, albeit unofficially. And you need to edit the end of the URL so the units are metric.
But no ads, and lots of info (various maps, history, humidity etc) and very accurate predictions, also long term. I was fully expecting the website to go dark after the company was bought by Apple a few years ago, but no, it’s still there. I made a shortcut on my home screen and it’s better (and cheaper) than any app.
Blork
I use Darksky (web site) without needing to tweak the URL to get Metric. It is scary accurate (most of the time) WRT precipitation. It will say “light rain starting in 12 minutes” and 12 minutes later it will start to rain.
Ian
There’s a unit selector dropdown next to the language dopdown in the upper right.
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Kate
The promise of 250 new cops was something of a ploy as most of the new hires will replace officers who are retiring.
Update: Plante is already facing an accusation of breaking a campaign promise.
paulg
I’m ok with this. The idea of more aggressive & uneducated people with guns on the streets (I’m referring to the police and not the public), doesn’t seem like an intelligent way to fight gun violence IMO
steph
It’s a shame they’re not capitalizing on the retirements to reduce their numbers instead. It just looks like Radio-Canada is trying to drum up drama where it isn’t.
Jonathan
Thank god. This is one promise I did not support one bit
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Kate
Two La Presse writers lay out a theory of territorial feuding to explain the three murders of teenagers this year. Can you really attack a rival gang by killing an uninvolved young person who happens to live on the same street? That’s the idea.
david1441 19:14 on 2021-12-01 Permalink
The alternative to facadeism is and always has been to demolish and build something else. Someone needs to inform these gentle people that life does not start and stop at their aesthetic preferences.
Ian 11:51 on 2021-12-02 Permalink
@david(n)
My wife works at a Montreal architectural firm specializing in heritage building restoration & rehabilitation, I beg to differ.