Shea Weber has been traded away from the Canadiens after five seasons with the team, including a captaincy.
Updates from June, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A woman from Ontario has been arrested in the Laval restaurant murder earlier this month. Bernard Cherfan, known to be chummy with mobsters, was shot dead in a busy Vietnamese restaurant. It’s not often that a woman is the suspect in this kind of incident.
James
True that you don’t often hear about a “hit woman”. From now they must be called: “hit person”.
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Kate
Émile Yombo, who’s made the news before, was sentenced this week for groping women in the metro. Yombo has previously done time for pepper‑spraying people on and off the metro, as well as many other charges. He’s now been declared a dangerous offender.
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Kate
CTV gives us a glimpse of the Grand Prix hospital involving 130 people working at the track on a volunteer basis.
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Kate
The reason why water got into the blue line during Thursday’s storm is still unknown. The line flooded at Outremont station, closed all summer for repair work.
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Kate
It’s an engineering work most of us will never see: after five years of work, the Côte-Vertu metro garage was inaugurated Friday, with room to store ten complete metro trains, allowing the orange line to run 25% more trains at rush hour. The construction also includes a stub towards extending the line to Bois‑Franc.
As Mayor Plante is quoted here, before the pandemic the orange line was sometimes called “sardine class” because it could be impossibly overcrowded at rush hour. Not something that’s been a problem recently.
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Kate
The mayor is angry that Équipe Spectra, which organizes the Francos and the jazz festival, uses some English internally, and she wants them to explain why they have allowed such an offensive situation to arise.
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Kate
Notes on road closures for the weekend.
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Kate
Crescent Street is returning to its Grand Prix self as our media generally hail a “return to normal”.
Although I’m not a fan of the drawing style of Le Devoir’s cartoonist Pascal, he makes a point with Friday’s squib.
Ian
La Presse is pretty direct, too:
John B
Disclaimer: I’m a fairly recent F1 fan, (thanks, Drive to Survive!), & like the spectacle.
I think cancelling the Grand Prix would be pretty much symbolic compared to how much carbon the city releases every day. We can’t even get a safe bike path down Verdun, but we have to cancel the GP? Let’s actually take some meaningful action in the city before complaining that F1, which says they’ll be carbon neutral in 8 years, (faster than the city…), is destroying the environment.
Thomas
F1 is kind of the epitome of general eurotrashiness, but the Canadian Grand Prix is also one of those events that makes Montreal a truly global city, as opposed to the rest of North America that has traditionally only been interested in American sports. On a related note, I’m surprised we dropped out of the running to be one of the 2026 World Cup host cities, given the worldwide exposure that would have brought.
But let’s be real: building the REM de l’Est would have been orders of magnitude more useful in creating a more sustainable city than cancelling the Grand Prix ever will be.
EmilyG
Bring back Formula-E!
/sKate
Thomas, Toronto is spending $290 million in taxpayers’ money from all three levels of grovernment. Quebec quite reasonably refused to play this game having been singed before by Montreal’s venture into big world sporting events.
When the idea was still in play, in 2018, Taylor C. Noakes wrote a piece about what FIFA requires of host cities: “FIFA doesn’t pay municipal taxes. It also demands that the host city refrain from promoting any other major sporting event in the year preceding the World Cup; that no major cultural events occur on the day of, after and before a game; that FIFA’s commercial partners have free and unrestricted access to the entire site of the matches and that none of their competitors advertise anywhere close to said site. FIFA also demands the city be made as attractive as possible and — astoundingly — reserves the right to rename official venues.”
Noakes also linked to a Christopher Nardi piece for TVA which suggested FIFA might demand English only on signage for the event.
We’re well out of it. It wasn’t a good gamble when the decision was made, and it still isn’t.
On your other topic, Thomas, a REM going east in Montreal will be built, but simply not in the format CDPQ‑Infra was intent on imposing on the city.
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Kate
Urgences-Santé was short of staff Wednesday morning when a call to a baby in distress wasn’t answered promptly, and the baby died. The ambulance service is short of workers, as are many other services and businesses at the moment. The coroner will investigate what seems to be a slightly more complicated story.
Ephraim
If they think this lack of workers is going to fix itself with shutting the door on most immigration and making anglophones and allophones feel more alienated, they are going to be in for a big surprise.
Kate
I’d bet the CAQ is already figuring out an alternative storyline in which the economic problems coming from a shortage of workers is not due to the reasons you cite, Ephraim, but can be blamed on world conditions, unjust treatment of Quebec, and le fédéral.
Incidentally, I wonder who’s been holding Legault back from ordering Québécoises to have more babies.
steph
Isn’t it the plan to sabotage and exacerbate the public heath network to the point where a private alternative is desired by the populace?
Kate
Not likely to work after we saw what a shambles private care homes made of the pandemic.
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Kate
Six golf courses in the greater Montreal area have been protected from development and will be preserved as green space – although there are already condos built on some of them. None are on the island of Montreal.
dhomas
I really hope they stop building on the Golf Métropolitain Anjou. That new Costco is a monstrosity!
Kate
dhomas, I recall that piece of land was something of a hot potato, with the city hoping to preserve it as parkland and the Anjou mayor hungry for the tax revenue from development. Do I remember right?
Faiz imam
Im seeing too many golf courses being converted into developments on low density single family homes. Much better to leave them as golf courses if that’s the alternative.
On the other hand it’s an excellent opportunity for building entire dense communities, especially given how many mature trees they tend to have.
Uatu
I’ve become wary of golf courses ever since I saw an episode of The Nature of Things that was about how they’re carcinogenic from all the pesticides… This article says as much:
https://medium.com/@wgarris/could-the-golf-course-green-be-poisoning-you-and-your-child-5646511965c7dhomas
@Kate Pretty much. Mayor Miranda is always at odds with “la ville centre”. He’s not shy about it, either, taking every opportunity he can to shit on Mayor Plante in the local newspaper, Le Flambeau d’Anjou.
Here’s some info on the city losing the fight to preserve Golf Métropolitain Anjou as a green space/park:
Kate
Thanks, dhomas.
Uatu, I wondered about that. I wonder how much decontamination work is done before they’re built on.
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Kate
Thursday’s rainstorm dumped so much water on parts of town that the blue line was shut down for several hours because of water infiltration.
Two houses north of town were destroyed by lightning, several outdoor shows at the Francos had to be cancelled, and a few thousand people lost power.
Blork
Note to visitors: this is Montreal, so “north of town” means “west of town.” (Sainte-Marthe-sur-le-lac is due west of the Plateau and actually farther south than Rosemont-LPP.)
Ian
Wow, no luck for Sainte-Marthe-sur-le-lac – massive flooding when the dike burst and now houses destroyed by lightning strikes…
I’d take that as a sign to pull up stakes
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