Jacques Cossette-Trudel, one of the kidnappers of James Cross, has died at 76. After fleeing abroad for several years following the kidnap, Cossette‑Trudel returned to Quebec where he pleaded guilty to several charges and was sentenced to two years minus a day.
The item adds that his son Alex is known for being an anti‑masker and a devotee of QAnon. Never far from the tree.
Quebec is tabling a bill that’s to establish guidelines for stopping motorists. Police will have to account for their actions.
It was interesting to hear the CBC interview a couple of hours ago in which Christopher Skeete, the minister responsible for combating racism, sidestepped questions from Sabrina Marandola about whether this was a tacit admission that institutionalized racism exists. Skeete, faithful to the dictum of his boss, deked the point around the existence of institutionalized racism, spreading the blame around, saying racism was everybody’s fault.
OMG… accountability? Really? I’m surprised they even know the definition of the word
I listened to this interview live and was left with the impression that it’s just free PR for CAQ ministers to go on Let’s Go or Daybreak and be interviewed– I listen to these programs every day and both Sean and Sabrina are (sorry) fluff interviewers whose strike zone is community groups and special interests. Mike Finnerty or Sue Smith (or Ainslie, or Nantali) wouldn’t have let him get away with this level of prevaricating and would have quoted this bill at him chapter and verse.
Let’s invite Mr. Skeete to have a chat with Nahlah Ayad or Piya Chattopadhyay (or even Nil Koksal) and we might get something more substantial– too bad we can’t talk about Quebec issues on the national stage without receiving francophobic vitriol in response…
It’s hard to fathom how bad policing must be if an officer can’t find even one thing a driver did that’s contrary to the Highway Safety Code. The US banned random stops (other than drunk driving checks) decades ago, and they have no problem pulling over any driver they want, and escalating it too.
This further shows the need for automatic enforcement. Cameras can’t profile and they work better at reducing dangerous driving by vastly increasing the rate people get caught. There’s no risk of escalation, violence or arrest. With higher rates of people getting caught, you could even reduce the fines to keep overall revenue the same. But it would reduce the police masse salariale, so no way to know if it’s a good idea.
The interview was replayed on Daybreak shortly before 6 this morning. Infuriating. Might as well have been a CAQ commercial. Systemic racism is an argument over semantics of interest solely to academics; meanwhile the government is taking bold action by letting the police do… pretty much the same as they’ve always done. insert eyeroll icon here
Marandola and Henry are indeed fluff interviewers (so was Smith IMO) but Henry is in a class by himself, one of those interviewers who sticks to the script even when the interviewee has just answered his next question. Is he even listening to the interviewee’s replies or is he just an automaton unable to spontaneously generate questions on his own? That, combined with constant traffic and repetitive sports reports (constituting, what, a quarter of the airtime? a third?) and mindless cultural coverage mainly focused on Kleenex music, have made the program close to unlistenable.
A friend recently lamented that one of the big disappointments of the last decade or so has been the dumbing down of CBC Radio (both channels). There remain a few programs of interest but, overall, it’s hard to disagree. Thank dawg for BBC Sounds.
Jonathan Massari, convicted in the killings of Lorenzo Giordano, Rocco Sollecito and the Falduto brothers, was sentenced to 25 years this week.
In other mob-adjacent news, someone shot Leonardo Rizzuto Wednesday as he drove his car in Laval. Rizzuto was wounded in the leg. La Presse goes on to remind us that his older brother and his grandfather, both called Nicola, were murdered, and his uncle Paolo Renda was kidnapped and no trace of him was ever found.
I’m seeing on social media that the pedestrianization of Duluth and Mont‑Royal will start earlier this year, Mont‑Royal from May 20 and Duluth from June 19, both until Labour Day.
Labour Day?! There’s lots of terrasse weather after then. Should be at least until Thanksgiving.
In 2022, my last al fresco meal, a leisurely lunch at a cafe on DeCastelnau, was on November 9.
That was stated by Plateau borough mayor Luc Rabouin on Facebook just now. Maybe minds will be changed on this point later.
I’ll post anything I see about pedestrianized streets as the season progresses.
And according to this: https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/car-traffic-will-soon-be-banned-from-duluth-avenue-at-jeanne-mance-park
Parc Jeanne Mance will be enlarged. Yay! And this will eliminate right hooks for northbound cyclists on Parc.
Finally!
Disappointing. When the borough said the Mont-Royal pedestrianization would be extended this year, I was expecting more than just a couple of weeks in the spring. As carswell said, it’s always a bit of a shock when cars invade the street once again in early September when it’s still summer.
If the issue is transit access for la rentrée, make it a transit mall in September. There’s no need to allow every random person with an SUV to barrel down the street.
Duluth should be pedestrianized year-round. I’m there several times a week and it adds absolutely nothing to the street to allow cars to drive down it. Parking is already very limited and most traffic is just people cutting from St-Laurent to St-Denis. Hopefully now that Duluth is being permanently pedestrianized from Park to Esplanade, there will be incentive to pedestrianize the portion from St-Laurent to St-Denis, if not St-Hubert.
Columnist Patrick Lagacé is going to replace Paul Arcand next year as 98,5 FM’s morning host.
Although satisfied with the monetary settlement of $6 million accorded by a judge, people arrested during the student unrest of 2011 and 2015 still want a heartfelt apology from the mayor and the chief of police – neither of whom held those roles during that period.
Apologies from institutions are of a different sort. A personal apology from Coderre (was he mayor that entire time?), and whoever was in charge of the police, might be nice, but it’s not what they’re asking for, they want an actual acknowledgement that what was done was wrong, and that’s done by the current person in charge as a spokesperson for the institution, as a sort of “and we won’t do it again”. (Though I am sure they would, if they could.)
I agree. They want a formal institutional apology – I was only making an incidental observation.
And I’m sure that at the time the authorities knew the police actions were outside the law, but it was a case of paying later for the convenience of repression now.
East Germany apologized for the Holocaust 4 decades later. Even though the crackdown on student protests isn’t at the same level of trauma and suffering, experts from various disciplines believe that government apologies for historical injustices fulfill important psychological and democratic goals as a society and helps to re-examine past wrongs.
@jeather Tremblay was still mayor at the time. Then Applebaum, then Blanchard, then Coderre.
Someone’s getting the media to bring out the massed violins over the cemetery strike. At least this piece has the marginal decency to mention the long labour standoff that has led to the situation – just before the end of the piece.
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