Video from CBC about the end of the last Expo 67 Minirail because Six Flags scrapped it without consulting the city.
Updates from January, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
CBC has a recap of news stories from 2022 and CTV has ten top stories from Quebec.
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Kate
TVA says the city has been shaken by armed violence and La Presse that the New Year was marked by an outbreak of violence, citing 2022’s 41st homicide and a shooting in Laval. La Presse says both incidents were attributable to street gangs.
I don’t find the same scare‑mongering on the anglo side, which doesn’t tend to group events together and package them in quite the same way. Going about your life in Montreal, there’s little chance any of this will touch you, unless you’re walking on the wild side.
Spi
Comforting words for the families of Thomas Trudel, Meriem Boundaoui, Alex Crevier, André Fernand Lemieux and Mohamed Salah Belhaj.
Just very unlucky that the little chance befell on them.
Kate
Little chance, I didn’t say no chance. Some of the writing makes this place sound like the Wild West.
Chris
There’s little chance you’ll get hospitalized with covid either, but that doesn’t stop people from worrying about it. Likewise, people worry about random violence. Humans are not perfect probability calculators.
Kate
Can somebody better at statistics than me please show Chris that the odds of catching a stray bullet in this town are far, far lower than catching a severe case of Covid?
Chris
Uh, why would you think I disagree with that?! Please re-read what I actually said.
jeather
No idea what you are getting at. There’s not THAT little a chance you get hospitalized with covid — something like 0.6% of the population was last year alone, which isn’t all that insignificant. (Though to be honest, most people aren’t all that worried about it, either, with less statistical reason.)
Chris
0.6% is “little chance”, no? You wouldn’t call that “big chance” would you?
Most people aren’t all that worried about getting randomly shot either. But there are some that are. Just like there are people that wear two masks and a face shield alone in their car. People commonly overestimate the probability of these unlikely events happening to them.
>No idea what you are getting at.
I am clearly a bad communicator. Kate seemed to be expressing surprise that people are “shaken” and that’s there’s “scare mongering”. She argued that’s silly because the events are low probability. (Though perhaps I misunderstood her point.) I’m saying this is expected because humans are not perfect probability calculators. I cited covid as an analogy. The probabilities are not identical, but the human reaction is in many ways analogous.
jeather
I wouldn’t say that — assuming that 2023 will be like 2022 for hospitalizations — a one in two hundred chance of being hospitalized in a given year is small.
Kate
Not sure why a post on armed violence has been hijacked into another attempt to downplay the risks of Covid, but I have an anecdote to relate:
Covid’s risks are not only that you might need to be hospitalized. I have a friend who leads a healthy life, eats properly, goes out running regularly, was vaccinated – and then caught Covid. She was knocked out by it for many days as she isolated from her partner, and found, even after seeming to recover and testing negative, that she often felt dizzy, and had begun to experience tinnitus.
She saw her doctor and had a hearing test, and found out that some damage had been done to her inner ear by the virus – whether temporary or permanent, she has to wait to see. She never had trouble with her ears or her balance before Covid and no reason to think herself at heightened risk.
There are good reasons to avoid catching this thing, even if one doesn’t feel oneself to be in a particularly vulnerable category. We still don’t have a complete picture of the damage that SARS‑CoV‑2 can do to our bodies.
qatzelok
“I don’t find the same scare‑mongering on the anglo side”
Kate, might this because anglos tend to normalize the urban violence they see in American media..
whereas francos fear their only metropole becoming another Detroit or Baltimore?Kate
qatzelok, I don’t think so. You can’t always blame cultural differences here on America.
It’s more subtle than that – if you look back at older newspapers here, the difference in tone, in covering crime especially, is visible all through the 20th century. And now, for example, TVA has a section called Info-Patrouille where it groups incidents of a violent nature, and no anglo media do.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying either attitude is right or wrong, they’re just cultural styles that evolved over time in slightly different moods. Looking at media on both sides of the language divide, you simply get a different feel on each side. CBC and the Gazette are always doing feel‑good pieces, for example, in an attempt to warm up their offerings, while you will not see a feel‑good piece in Le Devoir from one year’s end to the next. And there’s even the approach to weather reporting I blog about above.
The purpose of popular print media and its place in our dual culture has differences. Neither is right or wrong. Yes, the anglos may get a vibe from the US or the UK and the francos from France, but not very much. These are our own culture.
Blork
At the risk of sounding like a car lobbyist (I am not), I would like to shift the comparison from COVID to cars. Considering there are millions of cars and millions of people on the island of Montreal, and considering there are thousands of cars driving through every neighbourhood every waking hour of the day, yet we had only 10 pedestrian deaths in 2022 across the entire island, a disinterested observer would argue that the odds of being hurt or killed by a car are extremely low, and not worth worrying about.
Yet every time there’s a pedestrian death we go on at length about how bad the problem is, and argue over solutions, and on and on and on. Yet when someone gets gunned down we just shrug and say “Meh. Hardly ever happens.”
Doesn’t seem very logical.
The other thing to consider with regard to gun violence is the trend. There are (AFAIK) far more illegal handguns on the island now than there were a few years ago. How many will there be a few years from now? Given the on-going weirdness and social unpredictability we see with the on-going pandemic, when will we reach that tipping point where gun fights in the streets go from “hardly ever happens” and “it’s just criminal-on-criminal” to a situation like we see in parts of the US where guns are pulled out frequently and the body count goes through the roof?
Tim S.
Well, “we” on this blog talk a lot about pedestrian deaths, but my uninformed guess is that in terms of media attention and government spending the focus is still on the gun violence.
Jake
I do think the difference in coverage has to do at least in part with the frames of reference, English media outlets compare Montreal to other major Canadian cities, like Toronto or Vancouver, whose murder rates are about twice that of Montreal, or to cities in the west, like Regina or Winnipeg, that have murder rates around five times Montreal’s.
Quebec media compares Montreal to the rest of Quebec, where many of the relatively large cities, like Sherbrooke and Trois-Rivières see a single murder every year or two, and Quebec City, which has a murder rate around half that of Montreal’s.
There are definitely other factors (for example, Anglo outlets in Montreal tend not to have dedicated crime reporters and the couple that do mostly focus on the courts, while most of the French-language outlets have reporters who appear to have a lot of police sources) but perspective definitely plays a role.
Meezly
Well, my year started off with a bang. Just as I hit the sack tonight I heard multiple shots fired just before midnight. I had ear plugs on and it was quite loud, but I couldn’t quite believe it was a gun until two police cars showed up 5 minutes later on my street. A bunch of cops entered the same building where that ruffian got defenestrated last summer. Not going to get much sleep as I watch all this unfold. Not every day I get to observe a crime scene…
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Kate
La Presse finds that the St Lawrence has one of the worst levels of microplastic pollution among world rivers that have been studied.
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Kate
A list of what’s open and closed on New Year’s Day.
I wish all the readers of my blog a good 2023.
Dominic
Happy New Year Kate! Thanks for continuing to do this blog for everyone!
Kate
Thanks, Dominic!
MtlWeb
Happy New Year Kate – thanks for bringing this blog to so many.
Kate
Thank you, MtlWeb!
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Kate
A manager at Bordeaux Jail has been suspended in response to the death of Nicous D’Andre Spring under detention last weekend.
Taylor 13:02 on 2023-01-02 Permalink
Isn’t there an emphyteutic lease at play? You’d think that would prevent Six Flags from destroying our material culture. The city should sue them for this, or force them to rebuild it. From the video it looks like the track was in poor shape, the trains could have been more easily repaired.
I’m not sure I agree with Sarah Leavitt’s description of the minirail as the most iconic thing to come out of Expo 67… La Ronde, the Biosphere, Habitat 67… are these not considerably more iconic?
Kate 14:07 on 2023-01-02 Permalink
I don’t know anything about the terms of the lease. But I saw something recently on Facebook about how Six Flags tried to sell the antique carousel (1885!) that La Ronde owned, failed to sell, and has it stored somewhere. It was one of the few really beautiful things at La Ronde and a shame it’s probably degrading in storage. The city seemed in such a hurry to wash its hands of La Ronde in 2001.
Photos below from Jean Bureau on the Facebook Expo 67 group: