Police are said to be getting mental health crisis training but this cannot be the first time I’ve seen this announced or promised.
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Kate
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Kate
The arrival of parking stickers in a Verdun neighbourhood has caused a fuss. Both their introduction, and the alleged failure of the borough to properly inform people working in the area, have annoyed people.
Idly wondering how many of these angry school and daycare workers could commute. Verdun is pretty well provided with metro stations and bus routes.
MarcG
I noticed those signs and stickers recently and figured they were probably needed because of the increased popularity of shopping on Wellington and people who live nearby not being able to find street parking, but the daycare mentioned in the article isn’t anywhere near there. The headline is wrong, it says “Verdun street”, but it discusses Verdun in general and Riverview street in particular.
JoeNotCharles
Many of them are probably commuting FROM somewhere with inadequate transit.
Deborah
Teachers often have to carry a lot of materials with them. And the daycare operator mentioned opening the doors at 7am. Adding hour-long public transit commutes, not to mention that these (usually women) will have to pick up their own children and groceries after work… Public transit isn’t a great option if you need to do anything besides home/work. Or carry anything.
EmilyG
Not everywhere in Verdun is near a metro station. And for those parts not near the metro, it can be a bit of a slog on the bus.
Jonathan
I can’t believe that most winter mornings she is on the phone with the borough. That’s a lot of phone time!
John B
As EmilyG says, Riverview is fairly far, (for Verdun, at least), from the metro. The bus that passes right in front of the school connects to metro LaSalle, which is at the other end of Verdun. There’s also a bus that passes one long block behind the school that connects to metro Jolicoeur, which is much closer, but you have a long block to walk. That said, compared to most of the Plateau/RPP/Mile End/Mile Ex/etc, all of Verdun is actually pretty close to the metro. We’re talking about a 20 minute walk, not an hour.
@Jonathan: Verdun has a weird system where, during the winter, you can call a phone number that is on the no parking sign to see if the restrictions are actually in effect that day. Most of the winter they’re not, so it’s worth calling. I’m pretty sure that’s what she means. It’s a recording and takes 15 seconds to listen to.
But it comes down to the fact that we need to change how we get around. It may suck when it gets harder to park, but it should never have been easy in the first place. Maybe the school and CPE should work on putting in truly first-class bike parking and see how many of their staff start coming in by bike. Or they should hassle the STM for a bus line that makes sense, that leaves from metro Verdun and goes down Bannantyne. It would be as simple as adding a 1-block loop to the 108.
steph
Many people transfer from the 108 at 1st avenue to Verdun metro, shlepping one block for the bus isn’t always deal breaker.
Geographically the Verdun metro platform longs Willibrord between Verdun and Bannantyne. The station could easily have a 2nd exit directly on Bannantyne.
steph
nau
Keep in mind that the 108 only runs once every half hour or so. Metro gets a little late, miss your bus and that’s a long wait on your way to work. This is the real problem with public transit commuting. Transfers don’t matter so much if you only have to wait a few minutes. But for that you need a lot more buses, and as a society we spend most of our personal transport dollars on individual vehicles and a lot of that is so people can make the vast majority of their trips in a vehicle that is absurdly oversized for the task of carrying one or two people and a minimal amount of stuff and/or for which the extra expense is spent to convey the status of the owner rather than provide any getting from A to B advantage. Just as an intellectual exercise, it would be interesting if someone who studies personal transportation looked into how extensive a system of public transit plus a Communauto-like fleet of shared vehicles (functional, for various different purposes, but no status-related extra expense) could be provided to the suburbs for the same amount of money that is spent there by individuals on their personal motor vehicles (plus I suppose, whatever is currently being spent there on public transit).
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Kate
Every so often it gets brought up that “the anglophones” burned the Parliament building in Montreal in 1849, as recounted in this review of a new book on the topic. There’s still a lot of bitterness. Would Montreal still be the capital of post‑1867 Canada had this not happened? Who knows.
david577
There’s a pretty good chance that it’s the capital without the uprising, but if you’re for a francophone Quebec, those anglo militants probably did your cause a big favor. Montreal as the capital of Canada for all those years is an anglophone city, in a mostly anglophone province, with French occupying a role in public something between what we see in New Brunswick and what we see in New Hampshire.
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Kate
Compare and contrast the headlines: Montreal to take ‘aggressive approach’ re omicron vs Legault nixes new restrictions for the holidays.
mare
From historical data here and current data in Europe we should have learned that hospitalizations are lagging 2 weeks behind infections, and fatalities another week or so. And that’s mostly with the delta variant, we only have very limited data on omicron’s spread. So rising numbers now might mean a spike of cases in a few weeks, and hospitalizations around the holidays. Hospital staff is going to have mandatory overtime again, until they all quit.
From various articles by reliable science journalists I gathered that omicron research takes time. Lots of scientists are working on it, but for instance to make a safe ‘model’ virus that can be used for lab experiments takes about 2 weeks. For reliable transmission data in a general population we need omicron to infect more people and to do variant testing on as many positive case as possible, preferably on all and not just on a randomly chosen subset. That’s expensive and requires huge lab availability with experienced staff. Labs that also do ‘normal’ Covid testing. I also read that South Africa’s labs, with few planes flying *to* South Africa because of the travel bans, is running out of lab chemicals and equipment. And that’s the area were they could do the best research on omicron because it has already widely spread because their low vaccination rate, not necessarily because it originated there.
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Kate
Yves Boisvert holds that Montreal is not a dangerous city: without minimizing the pain of people who’ve lost friends or family to violence, he points out that the city is safer now than it was at many points in the 20th century, and much safer than most other North American cities of its size – and that the idea of urban danger is being politicized.
PO
I always wish I knew how many of the annual homicides are events between people who knew each other, versus random murders. I guess it sounds bad, but if half of the murders are planned hits between competing crime families or something like that, well none of those make the city feel any less safe.
Kate
Most murders here fall into two categories: domestic, and gangs. The odds of being randomly killed are very low but occasional mistaken or random killings do happen.
This isn’t to say that domestic or gang killings are OK, more that most of the time, the police have no doubt about the motivation for a killing.
Meezly
Maybe not dangerous due to less crime, but what about infrastructure, design safety and disaster response? The majority of us have a greater chance of being killed by a motor vehicle than another person, or falling on ice, or having a piece of concrete or branch fall on us. Or contracting a disease. True safety is about not feeling like you might die or get Covid going to the supermarket. Frankly, I’m more worried about my mortality due to not having a family doctor for years than being murdered by my partner (for now).
Measuring the danger level of a city only based on violent crime seems so archaic. Nowadays it’s about how resilient a city is against climate disaster, Covid mortality rates and the health system, traffic and infrastructure safety. You look at the benchmarking tools used by sites like the Economist and there are so many factors that take higher priority to make a city safe than the prevention of violent crime.
Kate
Boisvert was mostly addressing the gun issue, and the uses being made of it politically. The full picture of mortality in Montreal is another matter!
carswell
And yet this morning’s lede story — above the fold, as it were — on La Presse is Des montréalais qui s’arment. The first paragraph already tips you off that the headline’s misleading: it’s a “minority” of individuals, none of whom are named, in northeast Montreal. I expect this kind of alarmism from PKP media but, reporting like this has me beginning to to suspect that at least some at La Presse have bought into the CAQiste Montreal-is-evil myth.
carswell
Let’s also note that La Presse’s article, which will certainly encourage some to look into arming themselves, comes on the anniversary of the Polytechnique shootings. Such class and sensitivity.
Meezly
“En réalité, Montréal est – de loin – une des grandes villes les plus sécuritaires en Amérique du Nord et au Canada et qui a rarement été aussi sécuritaire depuis un demi-siècle.”
Yes, Boivert’s point was the obsession and politization of gun crime to inject more funding into possibly needless policing.
But I wish he was more clear in this statement by making it clear that it’s the safest city in terms of homicide rates and reference the data he’s basing this claim on. He may have been referring to this data, which again, is horribly misleading because it’s ONLY based on homicide rates: https://www.montrealinternational.com/en/news/montreal-safest-city-among-20-major-cities-in-canada-and-the-united-states/
However, if you start expanding the criteria, like this report, which considers low crime rates, public trust in police, police assess and response, Montreal falls to 8th place: https://www.universitymagazine.ca/the-safest-cities-in-canada-2021/
Ok not bad so far, but then if you consider public safety more holistically, like support systems, infrastructures, inclusiveness, a more “whole-of-city” approach to safety, then Montreal isn’t even in the top 60 safest cities in the world. For some reason, Toronto is in the top spot, but that’s not my point. What makes a safe city should be much more than homicide rates.
And safety is also very relative. Quebec City is ranked the safest city in Canady by University Magazine, but is Quebec City just as safe for Muslims? And rarely does this kind of data consider sexual assault and harassment, or racialized intimidation and violence, why is this? Montreal could be the rape capital of Canada, yet it’s still “safe” because not many people are getting killed.
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Kate
A woman at home was hit by a bullet fired in the street on Friday evening in Côte St-Luc. It broke a window and hit her in the leg. She isn’t expected to die, and cops don’t know who did it or why.
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