Ted Rutland has a sharp piece Monday on déjà vu among police methods with an examination of a public forum about youth violence in 1994, in which the same issues were examined and the same solutions proposed as in the one held last month.
Rutland’s coda, translated: “It’s time for our elected officials to justify their preference for investments in policing and punishing marginalized youth rather than provide them with the resources they need.”
Sometimes I see a theme developing in stories from different media.
Workers at Molson Coors are close to a strike and a dairy producer is forced to destroy a lot of milk because of a labour dispute.
CBC has the headline Workers in Quebec say employers need to ‘sweeten the deal’ to get them back. Damn straight! Finally, workers have the leverage to get better deals, after a generation has watched management bringing home ever bigger payoffs and bonuses as wages and salaries have stagnated compared to inflation. But workers can’t take this for granted, they need to organize, unionize and use their collective clout. Cue up the Internationale, somebody.
There have been three arrests in the notorious holdups of cell phone stores recently. I did not realize that there’s an actual law against using a fake gun in a holdup (if the explanation here is correct).
Yes, but it’s less time than a real gun. The one time I was in a bank robbery, they never showed a gun… Just a very pointy finger in a pocket
I’m pretty sure that using a fake gun in a holdup (or other crime) is treated the same as if it were a real gun. I think the reasoning behind it is that if the victim doesn’t know it’s fake then it amounts to basically the same thing, on a few levels. Also, since realistic-looking fake guns are easy to come by, this discourages people from thinking they can commit armed robberies without the risk of punishment for armed robbery.)
(For context, you can go to Canadian Tire and buy an air pistol that the average person cannot distinguish from a 9mm semi-automatic pistol. AFAIK you don’t need to show any ID or to go through any kind of verification or registration.)
(Ephraim is right I think, about less jail time.)
Here’s a Beretta look-alike for $43 at CT. You only need to show you’re 18+. BTW, this thing is spring-loaded, so not powerful at all. But it sure looks real.
https://www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/daisy-powerline-340-air-pistol-1756381p.html#plp
If you’re feeling fancy you can buy an actual Glock (not even a kick-off) air pistol that is indistinguishable (to the untrained eye) from a Glock 9mm. $155 at Canadian Tire.
https://www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/umarex-glock-12-co2-non-blowback-pistol-3750522p.html#plp
It’s a brief piece but interesting: Valery Fabrikant has again been turned down for parole.
Every time I see his name in another headline, I remember Rose Sheinin.
Rose was Concordia’s Vice-Rector, Academic.
She did everything she could to terminate Fabrikant’s contract.
Under the collective agreement in place at the time, neither the Rector (Kenniff), nor the Vice-Rector could terminate a faculty employment contract (for any reason). Nor could the Dean of Engineering.
Only the committee in his own department had that right.
After months of escalating odd behaviour by Fabrikant, Rose chaired a meeting over lunch at the Montreal Athletic Club which included that departmental committee, the head of Health Services, and a psychiatric consultant (he hadn’t met Fabrikant and he only spoke about behavioural types).
Rose begged the committee to consider his behaviour, and take action to end his contract.
She spent two hours trying to move them.
Their response was ‘he only gets difficult when it’s around the time of his contract renewal’ , and then it’s all fine.
H. John, that’s a story.
At the time, I was doing some occasional work for the Concordia magazine and I was also occasionally working at the Nebula bookstore when it was around on St‑Mathieu.
I knew about Fabrikant because he was an early adopter of email, sending out many angry emails to a long list of Concordia people including the person I was working for at the university. Typically, he blamed a range of people for his problems, repetitively and crankily. His emails spilled over a little onto the local internet, which was rudimentary in 1992 but did already exist.
I was working alone at Nebula when I heard a lot of sirens nearby. Back then, the building on St‑Mathieu at de Maisonneuve was still a police station. (It may still have been called Station 10, which was also the name of a notorious bar nearby on Ste‑Catherine, but that’s another story.)
I turned the radio on to hear about an ongoing incident at the Hall building, two blocks from where I sat, and where friends of mine were working that day in the MITE-Avista lab, as I knew. Of course, my thoughts flew to the Polytechnique massacre – but also, I remember thinking of Fabrikant, the university’s most prominent loose cannon.
So it didn’t surprise me when I heard what had happened.
Everyone knew the guy was angry and potentially dangerous. It was a powder keg situation and a lot of people knew it.
“Everyone knew the guy was angry and potentially dangerous. It was a powder keg situation and a lot of people knew it.”
I couldn’t disagree more.
You may have noticed I described him as “odd”. After HEC ‘odd’ made people nervous.
No one thought that meant “powder keg” or “dangerous”.
He’d been odd for a decade. There had never been violence or even a threat of violence.
I personally asked every person he worked with if they had ever been threatened.
Kate you used to work at Nebula? I was a regular there for a time. I used to come in weekly and even followed them when they moved to st. Catherine. Did you work with Keith Logan? I remember him because one customer kept on calling him Logan (I think he was a Wolverine fan). It was a great store and I even enjoyed perusing the books while the owner’s dog ran laps around the shelves. Good times.
I’ll stop with this for tonight.
At the time, Concordia had a Code of Conduct. Complaints could be brought against any university member..
No one complained about Fabrikant. No one.
Fabrikant brought two complaints against the university: one for assault, and one for calling the police to search him at a university senate meeting.
Both complaints were heard by panels of faculty members not in his department.
He won both complaints.
During his trial for murder, his students signed up to testify on his behalf.
I don’t think “Everyone knew the guy was angry and potentially dangerous” is true.
H. John, I can’t cite anyone in particular, but although I was not a Concordia student I knew about Fabrikant before the shooting and the thought of him did cross my mind that day before we heard who the perpetrator was. My contact at the magazine had definitely mentioned him as a person of concern, shall we say. Maybe not quite dangerous but definitely a known weirdo.
Uatu: I was basically on call and filled in for Claude’s regulars now and then. Never knew Keith Logan. The only person I still remember by name that I sometimes worked with was Tamu, but it was a small store and usually I would be working alone.
I was a 20-something working in the ICU where one of the victims was on life support. He had suffered irreversible damage and the decision was made to withdraw treatment. Have never forgotten the young son, who they brought to say goodbye, standing at the foot of the bed, biting his lips while staring at his Dad amongst all the lines and equipment we had for him – that image broke our hearts then and rekindles those same feelings every time that name is in the news.
Metro takes note of a Globe and Mail editorial posted Monday praising Montreal, cycling and Mayor Plante. I rarely link to anything in the Globe because of its hard paywall – the link to the original piece is in the article.
A Journal writer went for a bike ride with Stein Van Oosteren, invited here for the Go Vélo festival last month. Van Oosteren, nicknamed Monsieur Vélo, points out places where our bike paths are ill conceived and unsafe for cyclists, but this piece is very brief and we don’t get too much of a sense of how the European expert felt about the city.
He’s exactly right about the problem of cars parked along the Rachel bike path. I both drive and cycle along there, and it’s nasty. From the motorist perspective, turning off of Rachel onto a side street is difficult because the only way you can see if a cyclist is coming is to nudge into the cycle path, thereby pissing everyone off (but there’s no other way).
It works the same way when driving from a side street onto Rachel; the only way to see if there are cars coming in your path (on Rachel) is to nudge across the bike path so you can see around the parked cars.
But good luck getting those parking spots removed for the sake of bike path safety. It’s been done for the stretch that runs along the top of Parc Lafontaine. I doubt there would be much success extending that.
The refuge for the homeless established at the old Hôtel‑Dieu has become controversial in the neighbourhood with claims of antisocial actions by its denizens, from mental health crises to relieving themselves in public places.
Daniel Renaud looks at the first half of this year in homicide. We’ve seen 13 killings in the city so far this year. Renaud says in one place that we haven’t seen a single “gangland settling of accounts” this year, yet in his summary at the end, puts four homicides in the “règlement de comptes” category.
This year seems to be returning to the recent pattern of roughly 25 killings a year, which was notably broken with a high of 37 in 2021.
Update: On Twitter, Ted Rutland tells me that “règlement de comptes” does not necessarily imply gang activity.
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