CBC looks into how Polytechnique survivor Nathalie Provost became a character in a Louise Penny detective novel.
Fourteen beams shone into the night from the Lookout as memorials were held.
Updates from December, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The New Year festival at the Old Port, which has become a tradition, has been cancelled for 2023. It’s part of a thing called Montréal en fêtes and, reading between the lines, the city isn’t interested in funding the free event any more, so the group that runs it can’t afford to hire anyone.
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Kate
Ted Rutland reports on the SPVM presentation of its budget and the unanswered questions from the floor.
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Kate
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres opened COP15 Tuesday with a plea to make peace with nature.
Quick Twitter summary of the day from CBC’s Jaela Bernstien.
The Guardian is one of the international sites that’s doing quite a lot about COP15, but their main reporter is on the ground… in Toronto.
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Kate
Alain Charron, a stalwart of the Dubois brothers gang back in the day, has been paroled at age 74. His quotes sound quite angelic here but Daniel Renaud tells us that the last time he was let out, in 2010, he immediately went and took on a job for the “Irish” mafia.
There was a time the local media were full of stories about the Dubois brothers, but they’ve been gone a long time. I think this is the first time I’ve ever mentioned them on the blog.
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Kate
TVA says armed violence is down 11% – and this apparently means guns, not knives.
Blork
Interestingly, the number of MURDERS by gun is up but the number of ATTEMPTED murders by gun is down. Are they just being more selective?
Ephraim
Or they took shooting lessons 😀
Ian
Or hospital ERs are more full
MarcG
And that’s if you can get to the ER, ambulance arrival times are brutal right now
MarcG
“At 16h15 #Paramedics and emergency medical dispatchers serving #Montreal and #Laval are working at max capacity. There are 59 calls holding for assignment.”. Sorry, realize this is a bit off topic but thought someone might appreciate the resource.
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Kate
Quebec is not listening as the STM begs for money without which its services will face drastic cuts soon.
As we’ve all discussed here, and as we all know, cutting transit when it’s down has consequences that can rebound for a generation or more. Anyone who can drive but who’s been stood up on a cold street corner too many times by a bus that doesn’t show up would be a saint if they didn’t dream of car ownership.
Michael
This is the natural consequence of work from home. People staying home and not travelling as much anymore. I don’t see how its sustainable to keep the pre-covid schedules up…
Meezly
STM should beg for money, but they should also come up with a long-term plan on how they can continue to sustain public transport. One of which should include a complete redesign of their bus routes (which a few of us discussed in another thread) so that they can run continuously and independently from the metro system. And consolidate the routes that tend to end or start downtown. It *should* theoretically reduce the number of routes, but the routes themselves are more efficient because the buses don’t serve as dropoffs and pickups for the metro but serve to get passengers where they need to to without having to make unnecessary and ridiculous connections.
Kate
Meezly, you’re right. The STM should start a process of adapting to current reality rather than making the assumption that everything will soon be “back to normal” because it won’t be. People are working from home and/or have been viscerally spooked by the unavoidable human proximity of public transit, and that’s not going to go away. They need to do some quick studies about how and when people are travelling now and put their resources in the right places.
Kevin
It can’t help when the business group of the central city is convinced workers need to come back downtown at the same rate as 2019 in order for everything to be viable.
steph
I used to travel to work downtown by public transit 5 days a week. Now I’m forced to do it 2 days. Plainly, I need the service to be as reliable on those 2 days. If it becomes 7 days of a handicapped “weekend schedule” we’re in for a rough time…
Please Legault, tell your conceil du tresor to let me work from home 5 days. let that be the new ‘viable’ model. – don’t worry, I’ll still spend all my money, I will just do it more locally instead of downtown (not that I did anyways because I can’t afford avocato toast and starbucks coffee)
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Kate
Carey Price now says he did know about the Polytechnique massacre and has “apologized to those that may have been upset” by his recent statement against gun control laws.
Update: Here’s the Allison Hanes piece shawn mentions below, and also Brendan Kelly on the story.
shawn
And it’s all such a clownshow because there was even that statement yesterday from the team saying he didn’t know.
Blork
Yeah, as was pointed out elsewhere, that statement from the team was FROM THE TEAM, meaning from a PR person, and (in my opinion) not a very good one. At least not good at crisis management.
shawn
At this point I’m not sure which is the lie. Admittedly I’m not a hockey fan anymore but he seems permanently tarnished by this.
shawn
I’ll let Kate post the link if she chooses but Allison Hanes wrote something scorching that has just been uploaded to the Gazette site…
GC
As Blork said, how has this been handled so badly? When things like this happen I wonder if the PR firm is just that clueless. Or if they gave good advice which the client then ignored, leaving the poor PR people to see the statement go public and do a massive facepalm.
GC
Now I wonder if the team will release another statement explaining why they–presumably knowingly–lied about it. Or throw Price under the bus and say he lied to them/us.
shawn
Brendan Kelly has filed a great piece too. He’s so perfect for this because of course he covers the team as well as arts and culture.
dwgs
It’s telling that Chantal Machabee (VP Comms), who is smart, ethical, and widely respected has been silent on this. Usually she would be the point person for the Habs. So either a) she told her employer she would not compromise herself by defending Price in this or b) the Canadiens organization is doing the bare minimum to support Price in an attempt to keep it at arm’s length.
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Kate
Our 911 operators are getting a new training on countering racial bias from callers. For example, if someone sees a group of Black youths in a park, and calls in to report that “gang members are in the park”, operators are learning to make a decision whether to convey this biased observation to police. This new training involves, among other things, asking a few more questions (“Why do you think they’re gang members?” maybe) before pre‑biasing the police call.
To add: CTV covered the same story a few days later.
denpanosekai
my wife was called homophobic by a 911 operator because multiple men were coming in and out of a car parked illegally in front of a neighbor’s driveway at 3AM. This was at the peak of a busy car break-in wave last summer. The cops showed up at 8AM. Useless, all of them.
Ephraim
This bias exists in so many ways… we see it in the news all the time… do they call them teenagers, kids, youths? What is the difference between them? We have synonyms with values to them… so is grit good or bad? Is that guts, moxie, tenacity, backbone, doggedness, resolution, toughness? So is that a gang a clan, a tribe, a clique, a bunch, a party, a crowd, a circle, a club, a zoo or a horde? It’s so easy to convey bias in your choice of words.
The word DIFFERENT is pretty neutral and yet people can view it either way. Canadians are different than Americans… is different good or bad? Which one is good and which one is bad?
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