The report is in on a small plane crash in 2021. A pilot towing a “Will you marry me?” banner lost control and brought his plane down on Pierre-Dupuy Avenue in Cité du Havre. No mention here whether the deceased passenger was the suitor.
It has not been substantiated that the report suggests going down on one knee as a safer form of proposal.
A 17-year-old has been arrested in the hammer attack on a fellow kid as school let out Monday in Montreal North. Police have been deployed, it says here, to reassure the populace.
Postmedia is laying off 11% of its editorial staff.
Fwiw it’s worth I follow Brendan Kelly on Musk’s crappy site and he’s still tweeting as if he’s with the Gaz.
I have seen from certain parties that the Gazette is set to lose up to a quarter of its reporters.
via Christopher Curtis on the birdsite –
Spoken to a few ppl at The Gazette (on background). They say as many as 10 of the roughly 40 newsroom employees may lose their job. Far from the 11% cut Postmedia claims. When I started, in 2011, we had over 100 workers in the office. A devastating blow to our community.
Remember when the newspaper oligopoly all got a bunch of federal money during the pandemic.
Postmedia still got that cash from 2 levels of government.
I don’t understand why Canada allowed a US hedge fund to buy the country’s newspapers. It has always struck me as, not quite treasonous, but definitely something that was against Canadian interests.
@shawn Damn. Sad to hear about the cuts but was hoping he’d be one of the ones let go. He’s been “covering” classical music lately, which I (mistakenly it seems) took as a sign the Gazoo had reached rock bottom. At least he’s been booted from Daybreak, so it’s safe to listen on Wednesdays again.
@Kevin absolutely. It’s so incoherent (or utterly coherent if you follow the money). The CRTC’s big argument for protecting the corrupt telecom oligopoly here is precisely because they claim that that sector should not be controlled by foreign interests. But it’s okay for newspapers?!
It’s clear the guiding principle is get as much public and consumer money into elite private hands as possible.
@carswell He’s a true renaissance man, started as the pop rock music guy and now doing classical as well as hockey. His hockey writing would have Red Fisher blowing a gasket. And from what I’ve seen of the Gazoo over the last 20 years he’ll be the last man standing.
A reward up to $20,000 is being offered for information about the disappearance of Feng Tian, the 17‑year‑old who failed to return from a walk in October. Recently arrived from China, the young man speaks neither French nor English.
CultMTL also has the story, with the useless note that Tian was last seen “in the Côte-des-Neiges—Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough.” That covers a lot of ground. The TVA piece linked above says Tian was last spotted near Ste‑Élisabeth Square, the first mention I’ve noticed that he was seen south of the highway in St‑Henri.
I wonder how reliable that St‑Henri sighting is, and whether it was reported by an individual or seen on security video.
La Presse ponders how dense Nuns’ Island could get as the REM prepares to open there, and office buildings are converted to apartments.
Hopefully as dense as possible. There are several thousand units proposed for the giant strip mall that sits next to the REM station, and several hundred more already under construction nearby. There’s absolutely no reason to hold back. You can build housing for another ten thousand people without even touching the southern part of the island, where residents can continue living their pseudo-suburban dream.
I live on Nuns’ Island, where they have been building high-rise apartments and condominiums nonstop–but there has not been equivalent planning and resources dedicated to improving the infrastructure to support the added population. This has created traffic problems (although adding two traffic lights has helped to some extent) as well as overcrowding in the elementary schools (the second was built recently, but we already need a third one) and on public transit (which hopefully the REM will mitigate, but we’ll see).
A body with marks of violence on it was found in a Fullum Street flat Wednesday morning.
Update: First homicide of the year, a woman of unstated age.
Second update: Radio-Canada says a man has been arrested on suspicion of killing his mother.
The truck driver who knocked down and killed a cyclist in 2021 at the corner of Mont‑Royal and Park Avenue has been found guilty of the fatal hit‑and‑run.
Again, guilty of leaving the scene, not the actual fatal act. Unless I’m missing something about the law.
I wrote badly. He hasn’t been convicted of involuntary manslaughter, only – as you say – of leaving the scene of the accident.
You wrote it clearly enough Kate. I just wanted to emphasize the point.
The city’s defending the idea of gradually reducing garbage pickup to once every two weeks in Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough. It’s supposedly an effort to encourage better use of recycling and compost collection, which will continue weekly, but city hall opposition wants weekly trash to continue in the summer. And nobody here mentions rats.
A related piece looks at the vast amount of garbage we produce, and how we’re running out of places to put it.
I find it hard to fill up a kitchen garbage bag even every two weeks. Mostly it’s styrofoam from meat and fish, which does smell a bit even if cleaned. But really we should be moving towards underground containerized recepticles: have one within a block or two of everyone, and you deposit your garbage in there whenever you want, and when it’s close to full a sensor alerts and dispatches a truck that lifts it out of the ground and empties it. No bags on the street, less labour, fewer trucks, fewer injuries to staff and pedestrians/cyclists, less smell and pests and you can put your garbage out any time, on your way to get groceries or to work. It works wonders in the cities I’ve seen them in.
It isn’t the volume of the garbage — as a single person I don’t have that much, even with the kitty litter — it’s the food going bad, especially in the not-winter. I find compost is much worse than this than regular garbage, too.
I worry that people will just throw regular garbage in the recycling or compost bins just to get rid of it.
@Em I find the opposite is true right now. People get rid of compostable material in the trash because they can’t be bothered to change their habits.
One of my tenants simply does not compost. I don’t even know if he still has his compost bin. Everything goes into the garbage. His garbage smells revolting and creates larvae in the summer.
I got a warning from the city (warnings/tickets go to the landlord) because it was blatant that he was throwing compostable material in the trash. The incident in question was because he had thrown an entire, hardened baguette and it poked a hole in the garbage bag.
I’m loving the compost pickup, though. I try to keep my compost bin outside in the winter and in the freezer in summer. My garbage smells much less now (except when I prepare meat/fish).
Garbage and recycling are each every two weeks over here in the evil ‘burbs, and it works well enough for most people. In my case I tend to put potentially stinky stuff (meat trays, etc.) in the freezer until pickup day, but that isn’t an option for everyone.
If this finally encourages people illegally putting compost in garbage bags to put it in compost bags, which will fully solve the smell and pests problem, then great. Maybe some fines (and not to landlords who do nothing wrong) will help finish the job. Most of us have adapted, and they can too. (Of course if all three streams get their own underground bin, we really will have no more problems.)
I believe Vaudreuil is starting a test program where the actual garbage bin (the black bin) will have a QR code on it linked to your address. The truck will weigh each black-bin pick up and keep a running tally for every address. Anything over a preset limit will be charged additional fees. Recycling (blue bin) and Composting (brown bin) would remain free.
I think its an interesting method.
Dominic, I’d be concerned that people would do things like put their trash in municipal street bins (if such things exist in Vaudreuil), or simply dump it on any piece of waste land, rather than pay up.
In Outremont the city insists that address and apartment number are on all garbage, compost and recycle bins. I assume for bylaw officers’ random inspections and resulting fines and penalties. Because if there’s one things that motivates the citizenry, it is penalties, not incentives. No wonder people hate the government.
We’ve been having a mild and snowy January, but it’s possible the cold could still come. At any rate, we’ll be getting more snow overnight into Thursday.
Watching people talk about the “REM de l’Est” is like seeing someone flipping a coin. Will it be overground or underground? Surface or elevated? If it parallels the green line will it steal ridership from the metro, or – as now proposed – if it doesn’t go as far as downtown, will it overburden the eastern green line at rush hour?
// La directrice générale de Trajectoire Québec, Sarah V. Doyon, demande aussi à Québec d’étudier « toutes les options ». « CDPQ Infra proposait une option en aérien, mais il y a moyen de le faire autrement. On trouve dommage que dans le mandat du comité, il n’y ait pas possibilité d’étudier davantage le centre-ville. Plus on étudie toutes les options, plus on a de chances d’arriver avec le meilleur projet », lance-t-elle. //
Yes, exactly what we need – more studies! Another 30 years of studies!
The history of rapid transit in Montreal is a graveyard of studies for projects that were never realized. The only ones that have actually gotten built — the metro and the REM — were rammed through by political bulldozer. They’re flawed, but even flawed transit is better than perfect transit that never gets built.
In this case, just get on with it. A direction connection to downtown can always be added later. And if the suburbanites of Pointe-aux-Tremble are upset that their view of strip malls and oil refineries will be ruined by an elevated train, too bad.
(I’m not even joking about 30 years of studies. It’s actually more like 40. The project as it is proposed now is basically an updated version of Line 8, which was an above-ground light metro line proposed in… 1983.)
1906 gazette headline I saw recently: “Montreal studying rapid transit to north of city: elevated or subway”
Eventually they decided it was to be a subway, and it opened on October 14, 1966.
The old gazettes at google news archive are a goldmine of useful trivia.
Exo is experimenting with a form of customized bus service in Terrebonne and Belœil. Can apps allow transit services to adapt to demand on the fly? Would it work in the city?
This is pretty cool. Mapping companies have been offering a service to optimize multiple stops for a couple of years now, I think it was intended for stuff like parcel drop-offs, but passenger pickups for Exo-style busses seems like a great application of it too.
Makes more sense for cities where there’s less density of population.
The article mentions at the end that the STM tried out something similar with shared taxibus in Senneville & Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue.
A strip mall in Pierrefonds was destroyed by fire overnight, ten small storefronts now out of business. No cause is mentioned yet.
CBC spoke briefly to two men who have lost their businesses in the fire.
Kate, you should also start doing an annual extortion fire count along with the homicides and peds killed counts. We get enough of them.
That’s a good idea. I’ve added a layer for those.
The link for the 2023 induisent map takes me to a Google access request page. Is there a permissions issue with the map for this year? 2022 opens without issue for me.
Reply