An older man survived gunshots Wednesday afternoon in Rivière-des-Prairies. This brief report says no more than that.
Update: On Thursday, QMI identifies the man as an old associate of Vito Rizzuto. He took two bullets but got himself to hospital for treatment. More on his history in La Presse.
The ARTM has extended its suspension of annual transit passes till next March, which may be an indication of a general tendency not to stampede back to office life. La Presse reminds us that 60,000 public service employees will be going back as of November 15, although this item goes on to say that Quebec aims to have 50% of employees return to the office by January 14.
Wouldn’t it be a better environmental move to allow more people to work from home permanently? Most of these folks won’t be taking public transit. They’ll be driving.
In a familiar trope, shots were heard overnight in St‑Léonard, but no victims turned up.
Who is still firing shots? Don’t they know the election is over?
I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist, but is it possible that the police are themselves firing shots? They would have easy access to firearms (I don’t think they would use their own) and have motive: to keep themselves relevant in the “defund the police” era. That Pivot article from a few days ago made it clear that counting the number of gunshots is a new statistic the police started measuring only recently.
That idea was floated a little while ago. No idea if they’d go that far, but there is plenty of documented evidence of police acting as agents provocateurs in Canada.
Obviously I have no evidence, since the people charged with collecting evidence are the ones who would benefit from an increase in random shootings.
Marc-Antoine Desjardins says he was betrayed by Balarama Holness and, piling on after Hadrien Parizeau, another defeated Ensemble candidate, Réal Ménard, is going public with his complaints against Denis Coderre’s campaign.
Meantime, various media wonder what Denis Coderre will do next.
But you know what? We don’t have to care about any of that!
In better news, five Black women are now part of city council, including Dominique Ollivier, Vieux-Rosemont councillor and Valérie Plante’s choice as new chair of the executive council.
It was somebody here in the comments who first mentioned that Holness was suspect. I can’t remember the exact words, but something like fraud or being entirely out for himself. That seems to be borne out by his behaviour.
I think everyone saw from the start that it made no sense for Holness and Desjardins to try to merge their parties, even on a temporary basis. I don’t think Holness was in the wrong.
Well according to the article, he changed comms without checking with Desjardins and made a unilateral decision to hold the language referendum for Montreal, which does seem pretty messed up. And his constant refrain of “I’m the boss” as his explanation (which he also used in the CBC article about how he didn’t listen to volunteers and colleagues in his other org) seems pretty uncool.
Not much different from Plante or Coderre in the end, at least in that regard. They’re all autocrats in their own way, the only decision was to see whose general, not predicated on provincial power goals align with your own more.
If one plays close attention, this a continuiation of the discussion on how Montreal does not have a real parliament with democratic parties, but instead a collection of wannabe autocrats. In pratice, this deficiency doesn`t matter so much, because the municipal level doesn`t have much power. With some imagination (or perhaps a look at other cities), one can perhaps see that there may a better way (and no, it´s not about trying to drag the nationalist debate onto the municipal level)
ant6n, does your comment belong below in our discussion of municipal parties?
I think the issues are very connected
A cyclist was killed Tuesday afternoon at Liège and St‑Laurent under a dump truck on the turn. Details of the incident are gruesome. CBC radio says this is the fifth cyclist death in traffic here this year.
Je ne peux pas m’empêcher de penser à tous les cas où je me retrouve à vélo roulant parallèlement à la circulation. Méfiez-vous des gros camions avec de longues remorques. Chaque fois que j’apprends une telle tragédie, je me pose des questions: Y avait-il un feu de circulation? Rouge ou vert? Je me demande si le conducteur a même vu le cycliste. Peut-être qu’il était distrait par son cellulaire? Considerant ce que je sais maintenant de la situation, il n’y avait rien que j’aurais fait différemment, sauf d’aller plus lentement. Hors des pistes sur une voie urbaine, j’essaie toujours de résister à l’impulsion d’aller plus vite. C’est deprimant de devoir penser comme ça, mais ça vous aidera à rester en vie.
Kate, autant que j’aime le vélo, je ne vous en veux pas d’avoir rangé le vôtre.
Robert H, even before I put my bike away, I had been mostly sticking to side streets and alleys. Big trucks are terrifying, especially around here in Villeray where drivers are mentally revving up to get on the 40, or just coming off it. The incident Tuesday happened minutes from where I live.
Can someone who knows more about this weigh in. That dump truck was turning right on Liege, there is no way that driver could see anything beside him for 75 feet , impossible. If that dump truck was turning left
could he see in his rearview and peripheral vision what he couldn’t see on the right.
My question and I’m not an engineer or urban planner, if that’s case …..
Can we ban large trucks from turning right in Montreal ?
Thanks
The TVA article says – translating – “Police said the truck and the cyclist were both heading south on St‑Laurent Boulevard. The collision occurred at the intersection, when the driver of the truck made a right turn onto rue De Liège.” CBC’s report, Radio-Canada’s and La Presse’s all say the same.
There was a move a little while ago to make truck operators install side barriers on their vehicles to make it less likely for cyclists or pedestrians to get dragged under, but the last I read, it was blown off as too expensive. But this poor man got dragged under the dump truck so far that the fire department had to be called to get him out.
It sounds like the cyclist was riding alongside the dumptruck (to the right) and when the truck turned the cyclist got pulled under. If this isn’t an argument for more and better bike paths, I can’t imagine what is.
That said (and at the risk of being accused of “blaming the victim”) one should NEVER ride a bicycle alongside a large truck like that. Ride in front or behind, but not alongside unless you have a full lane to yourself. This exact scenario has happened multiple times. People need to understand that those truck drivers have large blind spots, and they’re not always very smart about them. (It’s not about blaming, it’s about knowing what the risks are and what’s safe and what isn’t.)
I saw this play about a garbage truck turning right ( Masson-Molson) in 2013.
You literally felt the pain and anguish of this woman, her survival a miracle but what it cost her….
https://www.theatredaujourdhui.qc.ca/corpstitan
That truly was gruesome. What an awful way to go. Do we have a running tally of the pedestrians and cyclists killed by trucks specifically? It feels like the majority have been by trucks. Coderre was talking about reducing the number of trucks in the city… I would never vote for him regardless but it seems like a good idea.
Those truck side barriers have been in discussion since at least 2014:
https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/city-to-start-equipping-trucks-with-safety-barriers
Can we finally start putting human life over money, FFS?! This should just be made law already. ALL trucks, not just city trucks, should be mandated to install these. This pisses me off. How many more people need to die?
After having spent a while driving around in semi-large trucks for a previous job, I got to know how significant those blind spots are. I quickly changed how I ride my bike around trucks accordingly.
Can trucks engineered without any thought for the people and bikes, be banned from turning right? It’s that turn that kills..any engineers, urban planners…or is this just nuts.
>even before I put my bike away…
Kate, if you don’t mind my saying, this seems like a classically human misevaluation of risks. Yes, biking has some risks. But not biking has risks too. Studies have shown regular cyclists live longer and healthier. i.e. the benefit of the exercise, using your heart and muscles, fresh air, etc. outweigh the risk of being flattened.
>one should NEVER ride a bicycle alongside a large truck like that.
Agreed, but in some cases it’s the trucker that moves himself alongside the cyclist, not vice versa. Both parties should of course avoid being beside each other, both by not doing it, or moving away if the other does it.
>Can we finally start putting human life over money, FFS?!
Ha! Good luck with that. 8 million people die every year from air pollution, 1.3 million die from car crashes. Humans just don’t value human life as much as we value having our trinkets and comfortable easy travel.
Chris, I have amblyopia and poor depth perception, so for me it’s always been difficult to cycle in traffic because I can’t easily judge distances, especially when things are in motion at speed.
This isn’t self-diagnosis: I’ve been a study subject at the McGill Vision Lab because my amblyopia is so classic, and it isn’t something that can be fixed.
As I explained in another comment awhile back, I hadn’t made a conscious decision to stop cycling, I just rode home after one too many close calls in traffic, and never felt like taking the bike out again. I miss it sometimes but it isn’t a “classically human misevaluation of risks” it’s common sense, under the circumstances.
Even with legislation these things often take ages to implement
https://jalopnik.com/mansfield-bars-on-trucks-arent-all-terrifying-garbage-a-1792910886
Kate, indeed, that changes the calculation!
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