Thirty years ago, after a shortened performance at a much‑vaunted concert by Metallica, Faith No More and Guns N’ Roses at the Olympic stadium, a riot broke out, big enough to be remembered thirty years later.
Updates from August, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
La Presse has discovered the identity of the recycling bin body although police have not released the information yet: Richard Lizotte, 58. Police have not said whether he had any history with them.
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Kate
A coroner’s report on a death by misadventure last February paints a portrait of a drunken jape in which a man tried to impress his friends with antics on a 34th‑floor balcony of one of the Tours des Canadiens. He lost his grip. Not much more to be said.
Robert H
«Les analyses toxicologiques effectuées au Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale ont démontré que M. Mahadeo avait un taux d’alcoolémie représentant plus de deux fois la limite d’alcool permise pour conduire. Des traces d’amphétamines ont également été trouvées.»
I find this so tragic, bizarre and haunting, I admit to finding solace in having my suspicion that mental impairment via alcohol and drugs was involved confirmed. I don’t want to be smug, but it seemed to me the most likely way such an event could have occurred is if the decedent were under the influence. It also resonated with me that the unfortunate was male, too. No female would be foolish enough, even after a few shots or pills to do something so foolhardy. This brought to mind an essay I read by the late American novelist John Updike about the toll mayhem takes on men relative to women. Putting the most positive spin on it I could ever imagine, he praised what he called “the superior recklessness” of the male relative to the female. This recklessness of course being inextricably connected to all manner of advancements and achievements technological and cultural, a dubious premise. He was implying that to accomplish anything meaningful, you have to be willing to go to the edge. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I’ve been drunk a few times before, but never all out high as a kite. What I have seen in others of that behaviour convinced me to never let myself go like that. I’m sure I’ve missed some good times, but I’m still alive and relatively intact.
Bert
Robert, are you serious? What about the woman who died crossing train tracks, between rail cars and was crushed / died, a few years back. From what I remember she was a bartender, so presumably might have consumed alcohol. Stupidity has no sex.
JP
My reaction is similar to Bert’s…there was another train crushing incident as well, where the woman lost her legs and survived a few years. They were coming back from the bar that’s now near the new ferris wheel. They had decided to squeeze through the rail cars too.
There’s also this “trash the dress” trend….more women participate in this than you’d think:
JP
Not that it matters, but I identify as a woman.
I just felt that part of Robert’s comment made no sense.Kate
JP, a Montreal woman lost her life during a “trash the dress” photo shoot ten years ago in a stream with falls near Rawdon.
JP
Kate, yes, I think I linked to the same story as you. It is sad.
One would think that it’s logical that all that material is going to dangerously weigh you down in water. There’s a reason people take off their clothes before jumping into the water for a swim or to save something/someone.
Blork
I’m trying to find a connection between falling off a balcony and getting hit by a train and I’m finding none. In the case of the balcony, the guy apparently climbed over several times and climbed back successfully, so what he was doing was pure DAREDEVIL BRAVADO.
In the case of the woman getting hit by a train she was just trying to get home. It’s not like she was deliberately playing chicken with the train.
Similarly, the “trash the dress” stunt was not about daredevil bravado. It was just following a stupid meme. The woman probably didn’t even realize what she was doing was very risky.
Do people really not see the difference?
Kate
JP, oof. Yes, you did.
Blork, I think the point is that women can do stupid things that go wrong, too.
The reddit sub called “whatcouldgowrong” has a preponderance of men, but there are certainly plenty of examples of women doing dumb stunts too.
Blork
I agree that stupidity has no gender bias. But there’s a certain TYPE of stupidity that you see far more in males — particularly young males. And that’s a kind of stupidity where the only payoff is a lot of shouting and feeling brave or whatever. RECKLESS BRAVADO stupidity.
Compare that with the train tracks and wedding dress examples above, where the goal was a specific payoff that had nothing to do with bravado, and the stupidity was the result of poor risk assessment. (Whereas the male stupidity is all about the risk; higher the risk, better the payoff.)
Robert H
Bert, JP, of course stupidity has no sex. But there is a specific variety of often boorish, capricious, derring-do for-its-own-sake playing with danger that’s disproportionately reflected among males. What’s more, despite the evolution in beliefs about gender this trait is still encouraged among boys and men as a desirable characteristic of masculinity. We get the message explicitly and implicitly from peers early as little boys when they dare and crudely taunt each other (C’mon! You scared? Pussy!). Boys grow into teenagers and young men who pull stupid, Jackass-style stunts (fueled by alcohol, amphetamines, etc.) for badass points with buddies and babes. Just in case we missed that, pop culture reinforces the message via TV and movies (for example) all the way from Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in the silents to Tom Cruise hanging off planes in the latest action flick. The woman who died trying to cross between train cars made a deliberate, albeit foolish choice with the objective of getting from point A to point B. The young, would-be bride was not intentionally risking death, but a victim of her ignorance about the weight of a soaked voluminous gown and the strength of river currents. Blork approaches my thinking on this when he described the young man’s plunge off a Tour des Canadiens balcony as an act of daredevil bravado. This fellow put on a hey-everybody-let’s-get-shitfaced party and amongst his fellow-revelers decided to take a chance, for fun, rep, kicks, whatever. There was no other objective that could be met by his act, unless he had dared his friends he could descend to the floor below without elevator or stairs. This is the distinction I’m making. The closest I come to this behavior is hopping on a bike and peddling on the city streets, and that’s as close as I care to get, thank you.
JP
Fair enough. I get what both of you mean now. It resonates with me as a driver. Whenever I witness speeding or aggressive driving it’s *usually* men. Also, whenever I hear cars revving their engines, it’s always a guy driving. How anyone finds that sound remotely pleasant is beyond me…
Bert
Is Bobby H, Mr. Qatz?
Kate
Bert, I don’t think so. Consistently comment over time from different IPs.
Robert H
Me? Definitely NOT, I wouldn’t know him if I passed him in the street..
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Kate
Quebec’s chief coroner is launching a public inquest into the three shooting deaths last week that were allegedly carried out by Abdulla Shaikh, himself now deceased.
It’s not an investigation of the killings as such, but an inquiry into the motives and factors that gave rise to the situation. Expect a report calling for better follow‑up of certain classes of mental patient and more stringent rules against letting people out who have issued violent threats.
Ephraim
Shouldn’t we have done this with Magnotta?
Spi
Magnotta was captured alive and went to trial, without this possibility a coroners inquest is one of the few remaining ways to get answers.
Ephraim
Coroner’s inquest into the murder of Jun Lin could have examined it. There were clearly points in the life of Luka Magnotta where intervention would have been possible. He was arrested multiple times and within the system, including the foster system.
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Kate
The Chamber of Commerce is sponsoring six new art installations downtown to make it more attractive for workers although how art installations are to make the office grind more attractive I do not know.
I just heard Michel Leblanc on CBC radio saying it was important to coax workers back to the office. Nobody asked him why.
I’m adamant that downtown exists to serve workers, we don’t exist to service downtown. If there’s a permanent shift in a segment of people working from home, it has to be better for the environment and it has to make the commute easier for the people who actually have to work en présentiel. There is no need to chivvy those people downtown every day to make the place look lived‑in.
Kevin
If your work comes from your computer and your ability to use it, you can almost certainly do your job better at home.
If your skills are lacking and your productivity is low, you desperately need people around you as camouflage so you can look busy.
Offices enable people who appear to work, but they do nothing to improve efficency.
walkerp
I’m pro-choice when it comes to working from home or the office and any management who tries to force an office on their staff is bad at their job. However, I have to disagree with your assessment of office work, Kevin. There are many situations and types of people who perform much better in the office environment. Furthermore, depending on where you are in your career and the culture of your org, people working together in the office can be much more productive for individuals and the org as a whole. Making friends in the lunch room or the fabled water cooler can often lead to cross-departmental communication that is very hard to make happen when everybody is working from home. Those kinds of relationships can lead to signficant improvements and efficiencies. Likewise, casual interactions within departments by colleagues can also lead to improved efficiencies.
Josh
Something else that disappears when everyone is working remotely: Worker solidarity. You don’t talk with your colleagues, you don’t know how they feel about anything, least of all whether they feel they’re being mistreated by the boss, say.
Robert H
That’s right. I’ve always been a big partisan of the city and the importance of a thriving downtown. But what’s the point of filling offices with workers who don’t need to be there? Perhaps the city administration is confusing what is good for its citizens with what is good for real estate companies worried about hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. Still that’s a lot of effort and expense to create a Potemkin Village. Easy for me to say: of course, it’s not as simple as that. I’m sure I’d feel differently if I owned a store selling clothes or food; or if I were a landlord trying to maintain my income and pay contractors; or if I were a politician concerned about collecting municipal taxes from full buildings. But it’s obvious that city centres are going through a profound shift. I don’t discount nostalgia either. I’m old enough to have a memory of downtowns of an earlier age. by the time I first came to Montreal in the 1980s, those downtowns were already gone in most North American cities I had seen. I thought Montreal was extraordinary. A few days ago, I saw a brief clip on Reddit of Saint Catherine Street in 1962. It was amazing: a kaleidoscope of blinking neon over crowded sidewalks and no visible vacancies. Now in the era of télétravail, and virtuality, we might have to accept that the streets downtown will no longer bustle as they once did and Centreville will evolve to something different that still serves les citadines but in a different way. Because as you say, that has always been the ultimate reason for its existence.
EmilyG
I enjoy art, I’m an artist myself, but art wouldn’t convince me to go back to an office job downtown.
Kevin
@walkerp
In certain situations being in an office and sharing material hard copies is effective — like, say, examining blueprints and looking for errors. But there are many workers and managers who spend a fair amount of their day looking busy – not actually being effective – and for them, the office is a necessity.
I also argue that any manager who is counting on water cooler talk to improve efficiency is inept. I can imagine the reaction if someone walked into the C-suite and said “our method of improving efficiency relies on random co-workers accidentally overhearing discussions and making connections that their managers failed to make.”
I’ve been working in offices since the late ’80s. Open plan, cubicles, places where everyone had their own room with a door, places where we had hours-long meetings each day. Offices have their place but they are not essential — not anymore.
walkerp
I don’t understand how the office is a necessity to “look busy” at a job? Isn’t it even easier to do that when working from home?
Uatu
I think the downtown chamber of commerce has to accept that it’s probably never going to return to the pre COVID days of a jam packed downtown core. What they should do is make downtown more affordable to live in and convert office towers into residential units. Personally I get more work done away from home. Less distractions and I have a clear separation between work and home life. People like me can probably get a cheap remote work place in the burbs within walking distance so that still doesn’t solve downtown’s problem. It sounds like the last gasp of Don Draper type office Luddites
Josh
Walkerp: I think what Kevin is getting at is that in the office you can take “meetings” and be seen walking around the place “working” with colleagues. That’s not possible at home. The only indication at all that you are working when you are remote is your output.
Kevin
Walkerp,
Have you never encountered people who act like the Forgotten Employee? Or worse?
https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/
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Kate
The city has passed a bylaw to limit the stink coming from the Sanimax plant in Rivière‑des‑Prairies so the company is now threatening to close, putting 300 people out of work – but more to the point, ending the main facility in Quebec that treats waste like abattoir trash and used cooking oil.
There’s got to be some way to do this without making a foul stench all the time – but of course it might cut into profits.
Chris
>but of course it might cut into profits.
Not necessarily. Reducing smell will likely increase their costs, which they could pass on to their clients without reducing their profit. But will the clients want to pay more?
Faiz imam
To answer that, the question becomes “if this place closes, what’s the next option?”
dhomas
I’m of two minds on this topic. That plant has existed in that spot for many decades. And yet, they keep building new houses in that area of RDP. Those people either knew of the stench and bought anyway (hoping to “eliminate the problem” later) or didn’t do any due diligence. If I bought a house next to train tracks, would I be trying to get rid of the train because it’s too noisy?
On the other hand, it’s not exactly a bad thing to have this kind of law on the books. Any new plant that would open on the island (perhaps to replace the one potentially closing?) Would have to abide by these laws, no matter where they opened.Em
dhomas — I live in Pointe-St-Charles and can confirm that there are lots of people who bought places next to train tracks and want to get rid of train noise.
I personally feel like cities need to continue to offer all kinds of jobs, including some industrial ones. Then again, I don’t live next to a rendering plant.
Phil M
Those are thw same types of people who move into an apartment next door to a night club or concert venue to be “close to the action” then complain about the noise, and get the venue shut down.
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Kate
Gunshots were heard in NDG early Tuesday then a man showed up with bullet wounds at a hospital. His life is not in danger.
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Kate
The mayor has asked for an independent investigation into why the Pride parade was cancelled last minute on Sunday, and the organizers have agreed. CBC notes that the city had put $600,000 into the event and was not consulted about the cancellation.
walkerp
This was such a giant shank, especially in a city that prides itself in the one area it is actually half-decent at organizing: events.
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