The Gazette tells us sadly that there’s hardly any Irish community left here, but that a memorial including the Black Rock will be constructed after Bridge Street is moved. The annual Walk to the Stone happens Sunday, not from St Gabriel’s, which is falling down, but from St Charles next door. (Is Centre Street the only spot in town where there are two adjoining Roman Catholic churches, one English and one French?)
Updates from May, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The Supreme Court has ruled: it would have been unconstitutional to sentence mosque shooter Alexandre Bissonnette to 50 years without a chance at parole. He will have a chance at parole after 25 years. The original sentence had been 40 years without a chance at parole, but the Quebec appeal court had reduced it to 25. Then prosecutors pushed to have it increased to 50, which will not happen now.
Update: Justice minister David Lametti has tweeted a statement about his position: he’s evidently not thrilled, but the decision has been made.
Blork
…which does not mean he will GET parole.
Kate
No, and I doubt anyone is celebrating the decision, including members of that mosque, but given the human lifespan, 50 years without even the possibility is fairly considered cruel and unusual. It really is locking someone up and throwing away the key.
H. John
Yves Boisvert with another thoughtful piece:
https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/chroniques/2022-05-28/contre-l-americanisation-de-la-justice.php
Kate
Thanks for that link, H. John. It’s a good one.
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Kate
A man who was challenged by two security guards after allegedly shoplifting in a Lachine SAQ on Thursday evening later died in hospital and his death has not been explained.
Also, really, does an SAQ need two security goons to operate?
Tim S.
Do they need two security goons? Well, if he was aggressive as reported, then yes. Also note the post just below about armed holdups.
I was in a grocery store a couple of weeks ago when a client, for reasons no one could make out, flashed a gun at a cashier before a bystander/friend hustled him away. It wasn’t a robbery, he was just disturbed. I do not begrudge retail workers security guards.
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Kate
There has been a wave of phone store holdups in Quebec. Apparently organized and professional teams hit a store, holding guns to workers’ heads, and make off with a swag of the latest hot models.
Minor update: I’ve switched to Helix, and had to bring my old cable modem back to a Videotron store today. There were a few people inside, but the door was locked and posted with explanations that if you wanted to enter you had to show several forms of photo ID. I don’t habitually walk around with ID on me and was expecting to be turned away, but I suppose being a woman of a certain age, unaccompanied by brigands, convinced the door guy that I really only did want to bring back a piece of equipment.
Chris
Hopefully we don’t descend into something like San Francisco, where there’s a huge increase in brazen robbery. And the security “goons” (tell us what you really think about them) often do nothing.
Ephraim
That’s a difficult sale… The stores would have the IMEI and would blacklist the phone, so it can’t be activated in Canada or the US. You would have to ship them overseas. Which would diminish their value. Of course, if someone buys it unknowingly they are stuck. And if someone overseas buys it and travels to North America, they are in for a surprise. Seems like a lot of work and risk, especially if they are brandishing a gun, which increases the penalties.
The companies could buy cell phone safes and install them, with 10 minute timers. It takes them about that to finish the paperwork anyway. This way, you have to wait for 10 minutes. Makes a hold-up much less viable, riskier and less profitable. So you need set the safe to open. Set too many at the same time and you can have it automatically trigger to call the police. Sort of like the bank machine tellers. (Like the ones that banks here use, to prevent robberies)
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Kate
Shots were fired overnight in Rivière‑des‑Prairies, hitting a house and two cars but no victims.
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Kate
CBC has a brief video showing glimpses of the old Molson brewery on Notre‑Dame and how elements will be preserved as demolition proceeds and the area is built up.
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Kate
The city will be adding 36 km of new bike paths, some new, some meant to connect up paths that already exist.
DeWolf
It’s a decent plan that solidifies the bike network, but it’s also remarkably unambitious for an administration that supposedly cares about cycling above all else. There are still a number of gaping holes in the network of protected bike paths that need to be addressed.
Kate
I suspect they’re balancing bike path creation against the volume of outcry over lost parking spaces, over time.
DeWolf
That was the excuse last year, when the administration was nervous about the election, but they won an unquestionable mandate. The loudest and most militantly anti-bicycle candidates lost. They hold all the levers of power. So why are they being so timid, especially at the very beginning of a new term?
Uatu
Now is the time to press for more bike infrastructure. It only makes sense with the price of gas and the rise of electric bike sales. Especially also that business is using cargo ebike delivery for the last mile.
mare
[sorry, carried away with the length. I type very slowly, so it’s hard for me to edit this down]
Because of health reasons I’ve been cycling a lot lately (200km last week, on an eBike), and ended up in parts of Montreal that I had never visited before, or only by public transport. I’m amazed how many bicycle paths there are in Montreal, even in neighborhoods that are not in the core. And that’s great. Some are grade separated, and some are just painted but they are there and it reminds drivers that cyclists exist. I actually think bike lanes with painted shards are okay in quiet neighbourhood streets that are often much wider than they need to be, but would prefer them to be against the direction of car traffic, to prevent dooring accidents. (Little know fact: almost all one-way streets in the Netherlands allow bikes to go in both directions. And these are often *very narrow* streets, that just fit one bike and a car.)
REVs are nice but are very expensive and slow to built and they anger drivers (less lanes!) and store owners (less parking!) although those are obviously not arguments I agree with. IMHO More side streets used by bicycles is better than REVs, but you run into issues with blocking train corridors and highways (with their high speed busy service roads).I agree with @Dewolf there are a lot of gaps in the network though, and connections are not well indicated so if you haven’t been in an area before you often have no idea if, at the end of a bike path section, you should turn left or right to find the continuation of the path, and even *if* there is a continuation at all. Lots of improvements could be made to make our network less patchy. The fact that many of our East-West streets are busy arteries doesn’t help, but is inherent to the grid system. More of those busy streets should be turned into one-way streets with bike paths and wider sidewalks.
During my recent wanderings I found some gems in our bike network though, some of them even unknown to Google. One of them is a gorgeous 5 km bike path on the grassy area along Rue Prince-Albert in Pointe-au-Trembles and Montréal-Est. It used to be a railway line but is now transformed into a linear park. It’s an absolute joy to cycle there, because there are very few cross roads and there’s no car noise. It can imagine it makes bike commuting from the east of the island a much more viable option.
Bundling bike paths next to railway lines should happen more often. These corridors are very under-used, and often have quite wide gravel roads along the tracks, only sparsely used by railway maintenance trucks (and security to see if nobody crawls through holes in the fence). Using some of this excess width for building bike paths would be relative cheap (just eliminate some shrubs and move a fence is sometimes all it takes) and it would make for great additional paths. The bike path North of the CP rail line between the Plateau and Petite-Patrie could easily be extended to the Université de Montréal campus, and, in the other direction, from Rue Masson all the way to Notre-Dame. If some extensions to bridges are made (which is more expensive than you’d think because they have to support a snow load too, and maintenance trucks and snow plows) you could also go further west, all the way to Dorval even. You’d think the city can find some bargaining power to negotiate with CP and CN. They got the public land their rail lines are built on practically for free. There are many other possibilities of course, just looking at Google map will tickle your imagination.
It may seem like impossible dreams now, but know that the Netherlands wasn’t changed into bike-heaven overnight either. It took decades, and is an ongoing process.
The number of separated bike paths in core areas of Dutch cities is much lower than people think, but because there are so many cyclists they just take up a lot of space and cars need to adapt their speed and driving style (or kill and mame a lot of cyclists, but that’s frowned upon). One of the reasons that there are so many people riding bikes in the Netherlands is that almost all kids ride their bike to school because there are good bike paths in the periphery of cities. (There are also no school busses, no parking near schools and the driving age is 18 and driving a car or moped is in general more expensive and some other reasons.) A lot of them continued riding bikes when they’re university students but also after they aged into jobs and got families. And almost all drivers rode bikes when they were younger, so they know how it feels from the other end. (Maybe we should abolish school buses and have large car-free zones around schools… and while we’re at it, cancel cold and snowy winters.)Robert H
@mare: Vous m’avez donner l’envie de sorter ma velo et parcourer les sentiers!
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Kate
Twenty-five cases of monkeypox have been confirmed in Quebec, with 14 of them in Montreal. Contacts of these cases will be offered vaccination.
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Kate
Tony Accurso lost his appeal and is facing four years in prison for contract collusion. Accurso is 70 years old.
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Kate
Sad to report that a minke whale was found dead in the river near Contrecœur.
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Kate
The city has to carry out Bill 96, but wants to know how it can discriminate between those with a right to be spoken to in English, and those without. “How can the person who picks up at the other end of the [311] line know whether the person calling him has the right to have services in English?” asks the chair of the city’s executive committee. How indeed.
azrhey
I am reading this at my Drs office. We usually speak in French to each other because we default to that, but he serves his patients in french, english, spanish, hebrew and arabic. The waiting room is a hodge-podge of anything from Argentine dialect to Pashto and lots of other languages I don’t recognize. The admin staff usually adresses newcomers in French. but sometimes if she has two or three patients in arabic she’ll greet me with that ( gotta love my “non descript mediterranean genes” )… sometimes I answer in English, sometimes I answer in Spanish…. and I love Montreal for all of this!
I was born in France, I did all my school in French, French litt and French linguistics included. And as a bona fide professionelle de la langue française, my opinion is that this bill, and others like this have the exact opposite results that they want. You don’t protect a language by shoving it down people’s throats, you show them how to love using it.DeWolf
That sums it up beautifully, azrhey, both the problems with this bill and the way Montreal works in real life.
Robert H
@Azrhey : Exactement, parce que la loi 96 est subordonnée à la loi des conséquences imprévues.
J’aimerais organiser une rencontre entre vous et le premier. Vous pouvez jaser un peu, peut-être avec un verre (vin, bière, gin). Essayez de lui parler avec bon sens. Pensez-vous qu’il vous écoutera ?
Oh well, let the lawsuits begin.
azrhey
Il m’écoutera peut-être, mais je suis certaine qu’il ne m’entendrait pas : je ne ferai jamais partie de son électorat cible et pour lui, rien d’autre ne compte.
Uatu
Interesting take in Bill 96 from a Washington Post op Ed:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/26/quebec-bill-96-french-language-nationalism/
Robert H
That was interesting Uatu. J.J. McCollough is a talented writer and rhetorician (see his amusing/annoying youtube videos). He makes a sharp argument here against bill 96. His argument would be even sharper if it weren’t stained with Quebec-bashing in particular and francophobia in general. He’s perceptive about the position of Montreal relative to the ROQ, and he compliments the city. But he completely misses the point about Québécois sensitivity to survival of its language and culture. In fact he gleefully mocks it. That alone wins him a following in the ROC and the States. Of course one could say that Bill 96, a classic blunt instrument deserves at least a few sneers. It’s a badly-built contraption that won’t endure, but you don’t fight it by vilifying Quebec and branding it a stain on the otherwise pristine progressive face of Canada.
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Kate
The city has created a framework for overseeing households offering space for refugees from Ukraine. A flight is expected to touch down here on May 29. There will be background checks and the scope of the offers will be defined so that nobody’s misled about what to expect.
I think this is very wise. You’re dropping people abruptly into a new culture and it’s smart to make sure expectations are understood, and also that nobody falls into the hands of pimps or crooks.
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Kate
Here’s part two and part three of Linda Gyulai’s examination of the state of the Metropolitan and its future.
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Kate
This week the mayor restated her demand to the federal government to crack down on handguns as news of the massacre in Texas unfolded amid a mood of concern for gun play here in town, including recent bullet pocks on a daycare in Rivière‑des‑Prairies.
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Kate
A report submitted to the National Assembly slams the ARTM, the entity that manages public transit in the Montreal area. This is one of those news stories: what are the odds the report is not biased in such a way to give the CAQ government extra leverage over the city, even if it does contain some legitimate criticisms?
DeWolf 13:20 on 2022-05-27 Permalink
I still don’t get the outrage over naming the REM station after Bernard Landry. I get it, the self-appointed leaders of the Irish community are militantly federalist and anglophone, but there are a ton of francophones with Irish ancestry too – a lot of whom no doubt voted for the PQ and for independence.
According to the census, “Irish” is the third most declared ethnic origin in Quebec after “Canadian” and “French,” and there are 446,215 people in this province who consider themselves ethnically Irish. There are only 601,115 native English speakers. So either 75% of anglos in Quebec are Irish (pretty unlikely!) or the so-called leaders of the Irish community are doing some serious gatekeeping.
Kate 14:11 on 2022-05-27 Permalink
I don’t feel outrage, I just feel fatalistically discouraged. If even DeWolf can’t see why naming that station after Bernard Landry is at least culture-blind, there’s little point in discussing it.
Kevin 15:30 on 2022-05-27 Permalink
Everyone always forgets the 120,000 Quebecers who say they have English and another language as a mother tongue, and the overlapping Venn diagrams of ancestry.
Ian 12:51 on 2022-05-29 Permalink
…but to Kate’s point there’s lots of different Irish. There’s the Irish regiments that fought for the French and came over with the early colonists – by the late 1600s Quebec’s population was 5% Irish. The massive emigration in the mid 1800s from the famine raised that to 10% – but again, these are different waves with different relationships to Quebec. Then there are the Irish “neighbourhoods” like the Point and Griffintown. Then of course there’s all the intermarrying of the Irish with French Catholics. Then there’s all the Irish orphans from the Irish Famine that got adopted into French families here and Quebec City but were “allowed” to keep their Irish names.
All this to say, after a presence in Quebec as long as the French themselves it’s hardly any surprise that nobody’s exactly sure how much of Quebec is Irish, but it’s a signigficant amount…
All that aside, very simply I think having someone famously chauvinistic like Landry’s name associated with a station plonk in the middle of what was once ground zero for refugees and immigrants is in poor taste at the very least.