A large empty lot on Louvain in Ahuntsic will be sown with 10,000 sunflowers this summer. This is the same space that was turned into an outdoor coworking and socializing spot in the summer before the pandemic, and called Green haüs at the time.
A briefer event of interest this summer is a Vietnamese night market planned for the Peel Basin next month, on one weekend only.
Now that assisted dying has become part of regular Quebec life, undertakers have found a way to monetize it. Whether this should be allowed is up for debate.
In some cases the only medical part of MAID is the doctor providing the medication. If the person doesn’t need to be in a hospital (which is often the case) a funeral director seems like a logical person to help as a ‘death planner’. Not unlike a wedding planner, but for a different life event. Why could they not charge for that service?
I personally would prefer not to undergo a MAID in a funeral home, but it would be 100% better than in a Quebec hospital room. Funeral homes do have the (stately) facilities and the staff is used to deal with people who are emotional.
Agreeing with @mare here. Better than a hospital room by far.
This makes me wonder if churches might be good for this. They are certainly stately and the site of many emotional events. There should be a handful that provide a space for this service. It’s a neighbouring step given that hospitals were originally/are still run by religious communities.
I doubt churches would allow this. Though I think they now allow for Christian funerals and burials for suicides, I’m pretty sure they’re still very much against euthanasia.
A decommissioned church could be turned into a sort of peaceful nonsectarian setting, but it wouldn’t be offered for free.
Yeah, it would have to be decommissioned, for the reasons dhomas says. I’m still convinced we could use a few churches for ‘wedding palaces’, so maybe a few for ‘MAID voyages’ too. They can’t all become condos (I hope).
Wedding palaces are a great idea. Marriage ceremony in the church itself, reception in a refurbished church basement. Even bells to ring if the belfry isn’t threatened with collapse.
I just learned that for certain religions, if the church is decommissioned, then the steeple has to come down.
Both dogs and bicycles have more generous access to the metro, barred only around major events, till August 20. The item points to the STM website which goes into specifics on no‑bike events and dogs.
Daniel Renaud analyzes the state of organized crime after the killing of Claudia Iacono and the recent attempt on the life of Leonardo Rizzuto. He talks to a couple of experts, but besides laying out some surmises, the final cop can only say “L’avenir nous le dira.” With a sidebar on some of the major players in that world.
In what might be a related story, police tried to withdraw the alcohol permit from the Metro Metro festival on Friday, because it’s organized by Olivier Primeau, whose businesses have been the target of arson attacks lately. CTV says threats were made against the festival and police wanted to shut it down out of caution.
Metro looks at an abandoned residential building, a handsome gray stone row in the Plateau, and asks what should be done about it. Neighbours would like to see it renovated and inhabited, the owner wanted to demolish but was refused because the borough says it’s too nice to destroy, so it’s being allowed to deteriorate till it’s too far gone to fix – a phenomenon we’ve seen repeatedly here before.
This is a good piece on the standoff that can happen when a landlord is stubborn and the city has run out of options.
What a lovely little building. So depressing. Ok, here’s a bit of better housing news, a “mega” deal on social housing, from the east end: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1980957/mega-transaction-logement-abordable-montreal
You know, it’s a put up or shut up situation. If the city wants to declare it “interesting” and keep them from demolishing it, it should buy it and make it into social housing.
I blame the city.
Instead of being progressive and allowing for new architecture, new building materials that are more environmentally friendly…
It forces the owner to keep a 100 year old structure that is falling apart.
I’d have to know more about the state of that building before deciding. It’s unified in style and scale with the surrounding buildings on Bienville and St‑André – see the setting – and nobody would pay to put up a new building in that form factor these days. It would only be profitable to put up something with more floors in the same space, which would be out of sync with the neighbourhood. That bit of the Plateau around Bienville is a quiet backwater with a certain low‑key charm.
It’s built without a basement, and you are allowed 40% of a phantom level above. Plus a new building would be much more energy efficient. You might even be able to put in geothermal, which would make that worth a lot more money
DeWolf 18:37 on 2023-05-21 Permalink
The former Green Haüs space is still active, it’s just called Esplanade Louvain now.
Blork 21:00 on 2023-05-21 Permalink
That Vietnamese night market sounds like it could be great, although it only being there for one weekend doesn’t bode all that well. I envision a variation on the food trucks thing, which is largely an exercise in spending your time in ridiculously long lineups in order to pay through the nose for whatever you’re ordering (not to mention the anguish of deciding which of the many things to zoom in on because the lineups and prices basically prohibit you from trying multiple things). I hope I’m wrong.
Blork 21:16 on 2023-05-22 Permalink
By comparison, Hintonburg (in Ottawa) has a night market every Thursday night during the fine-weather season. Sounds like a better model for an actual good time, vs. the FOMO-like event of a one-off and the resulting lineups for everything.
GC 23:01 on 2023-05-23 Permalink
I stopped reading when I got to the part about admission. I’m guessing, like Blork, that the food might not be all that cheap…so why do I have to pay admission just to get inside and pay more? I could go to Comiccon for that :P.