The Mohawk Mothers want to intercede to stop the sale of the hôpital de la Miséricorde building on René‑Lévesque. As with the old Royal Vic, they want excavations made to confirm or disprove the theory that there were covert burials on the grounds.
Updates from May, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The Journal says most outdoor pools and splash pads won’t open before mid‑June; meantime, hot days will see people flocking to the beaches.
Chris Kearney
Montreal West opens tomorrow night!
dhomas
The splash pad at the park next to my kids’ school has been open since last Friday. It actually hasn’t turned off since then and has been wasting water ever since. Odd.
Kate
You’d think they could have it on a timer, even if they can’t spare a worker to come around and shut it down after dark.
dhomas
It looks like they “fixed” it between yesterday afternoon, when I picked up my kids, and this morning, when I dropped them off. It was off this morning. But the sensor to turn it back on did not work, either. So it looks like they just turned if off completely. On a day where it’s expected to be over 30 degrees.
MarcG
Anecdotes: Verdun beach was jammed last night at 8pm and the water feature in my local park has been on for a couple of weeks already.
Em
Splash pad near me (Pointe-St-Charles) has been on for a while now too.
Verdun beach is always packed when it’s nice. Would be great to have more spots like it.
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Kate
Despite various rah-rah attempts for getting people back to the office, office space still stands empty downtown.
Maybe it will eventually be understood that a lot of people hated office life and are relieved not to have to take on its mental load, or not all the time.
shawn
I’ve been going back a little more and will certainly be there for the A/C this week.
Kate
I never think of that but I suppose air conditioning has its attractions during a heat wave.
Par contre, if you work from home, you’re always free to duck into a cool shower if you need it, something not usually offered in an office setting.
CE
My partner goes to the office almost every day, she just likes to get out of the house and see other people she works with. She’s not obliged and has a nice home office set up but seems to like the bike ride and the social aspect of the office. I don’t have an office job but if I were required to sit around alone in my house taking Teams calls all day, I’d go insane.
JaneyB
I really think the commute is the key problem. In rush hour, that’s often close to an hour each way. Businesses could get more people back if they offered 5 hour office days instead of 7.5 or even just half-days. People could avoid rush hour making commutes shorter. Also, it would flatten the peak hours curve which is always a resource issue.
Joey
@CE sitting around a half-empty office taking Teams callas all day would also drive you insane…
CE
That is a fair assessment.
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Kate
Cooking and smoking are at the origin of most fires put out by the Montreal fire department. Item includes more statistics and observations from the SIM’s activity report for 2022.
jeather
Don’t put your cigarettes out in planters, folks.
Jonathan
People should really stop cooking in their cars
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Kate
The driver of the car that crashed into a bus shelter in NDG on Friday has died. He was 21 years old and two of his passengers are still in critical condition. The cause of the crash is still under investigation.
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Kate
A man has won a seven‑year‑old racism case against the Société Parc Jean Drapeau. Bienné Blémur was told his grievance was dead in 2017, but a new director of the SPJD reopened it and has now achieved an admission of racial discrimination, although there’s no mention here of any monetary penalty to make up for Blémur’s loss of earnings. He also has an ongoing case against the SPJD union for negligence.
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Kate
CBC reports offhandedly that the flu vaccine will “remain” free in Quebec where it has never been universally free – at least in theory. It has only been free to people with existing conditions and in certain age groups – in theory, and officially in the media.
However, as I’ve mentioned here before, I have no existing conditions and am not in the age group, yet I’ve been getting the flu shot free for years simply by asking for it. Maybe they’re making this policy more explicit now – but CBC’s oddly naive to say it “remains” free.
MarcG
I thought they explicitly made it free last year or the year before.
Kate
True, last November it was made free – but it hadn’t been, for years before that.
jeather
I also am not really eligible for it — maybe my lung issues are good enough, maybe not — but I just go to big vaccine clinics where they aren’t set up for payment and the nurses are just happy to give me a shot, they barely ask. They’re more restrictive in pharmacies.
I wonder if we’ll be allowed to get yearly covid boosters at the same time. I suppose if the WHO continues to pretend that we’ve quit getting new variants the answer will be no.
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Kate
Two cars were torched early Tuesday in Montreal East.
TVA finds a mob link to the business where this happened.
shawn
Ok well this is weird: someone fairly reliable on Mastodon just posted that there are “Unconfirmed reports of at least one explosion at École Secondaire Henri-Bourassa.” I’m sure Kate will post more info if there is anything at all to this…
Kate
Can you link me to it, shawn? I’m seeing nothing on local media sites yet.
…One guy posted around noon to Twitter the same thing you cited here but there’s nothing else on Twitter, now close to 1 pm.
shawn
Yes, there’s no link. I think it’s just a local man who heard something, and heard wrong. We’d know by now. https://mstdn.ca/@iuculano@masto.ai/110458315061159985
Kate
Same guy that tweeted.
shawn
Right. Well, I’ll certainly never amplify any of HIS tweets or post again, unsupported.
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Kate
The city starts work on 53 bike path projects Tuesday, spending $30 million on extensive work including the first section of the REV on Henri‑Bourassa in St‑Laurent.
DeWolf
Very excited about Christophe-Colomb. Now that I live a few blocks away, I can see what a real tragedy it is to have such a pedestrian- and cyclist-hostile environment on an otherwise beautiful street. The temporary arrangements in 2020 were a revelation. It will be nice to have a proper alternative to St-Denis (which already gets congested at rush hours) and the horrible Boyer, which such a narrow, bumpy, unpleasant path, I can’t believe it was the best we had until just a few years ago.
The extended path on de la Commune will be great too. The way the bike path suddenly vanishes at St-Laurent before picking up again just past the Bonsecours Market has always been such nonsense. The signage is very confusing, with bikes officially banned along one obvious cycling corridor next to the train tracks, and an uncomfortable situation passing through crowds of tourists if you want to head over to the waterfront road.
Too bad we don’t have an announcement about finishing the missing links in the REV Viger-St-Jacques-St-Antoine. So far this year, there have been some improvements to the way the existing bit downtown has been managed, but it’s still a shit show compared to anything on the Plateau or in Rosemont. There are some serious problems with the way Ville-Marie works as a borough considering it is constantly lagging behind on these sorts of things.
Kate
Not surprising, given that Ville-Marie has such a deficient governance structure. It seriously needs its own borough mayor and more councillors answerable to voters.
CE
I lived on Christophe-Colomb years ago, right across the street from Saint-Arsène school. It was a terrible street to live on and I can’t imagine it was good for the students. I used to imagine taking a lane out and putting a half lane bike path on either side (with the middle lane alternating for car traffic like on Parc). It was impossible to think that the bike path that’s being built now would ever be able to happen (let alone the same thing on St-Denis), and that was only about 10 years ago.
The Boyer/Brébeuf bike path used to be the busiest in North America until the de Maisonneuve path opened in 2007 or 2008. Now, neither of them are even in the top 10 in Montreal.
DeWolf
Ironically, the only pushback to the Christophe-Colomb plan has been from people living in that big condo complex along the highway-style section just north of Crémazie. Pretty much everyone in RPP, Villeray and upper Ahuntsic seems pretty happy about the plan, maybe because they know what a horrible place it is right now for everyone (including drivers). In 2020, I remember driving along it and thinking it was so much less stressful when there was only one lane of traffic instead of two lanes with drivers constantly trying to overtake you if you did anything close to the speed limit.
Kate
Seems a lot of people are happy as clams about the Christophe‑Colomb plans.
Of course there’s already a bike path along the west side along a bit of it, Jarry to Crémazie. North of the 40 it moves away from the traffic and becomes a separate path in the parklike space beside the road. I used to do that route occasionally when I was still cycling.
JaneyB 10:00 on 2023-05-31 Permalink
Understandably. There’s probably lots of covert burials there, both Indigenous and also white. Homes for unwed mothers were notorious for illegal adoptions and other crimes eg: Duplessis orphans here in Mtl, Butterbox Babies in Nova Scotia, etc. At that time, the federal funding was more generous for hospitals than for orphanages (I have just learned). Likely some similar admin manoeuvres were used for Indigenous women and children. Such awfulness.
Ephraim 10:07 on 2023-05-31 Permalink
The problem is that our justice system assumes innocent before guilty. So, you need more than a theory to get a judge to give you an order
Kate 11:10 on 2023-05-31 Permalink
I’m not sure what I think, although only some investigative digging is going to put people’s minds to rest either way, so they should get on with it.
I tend to wonder whether anyone expected to get away with covert burials right in the middle of the city. I had the impression that sites of discovered burials in other provinces were more rural, more out of the public eye, although I could be mistaken about that. Also, neither the Miséricorde nor the old Vic were residential schools, so the situations are different.
The Miséricorde, which was where single mothers used to go to give birth, would certainly have had legitimate reasons to bury some people – mothers and babies who didn’t survive – from time to time. They kept records of births and baptisms, but the only people recorded as buried on site were apparently nuns who had lived and worked there (I just had a look in Drouin for that info). But they must have had a burial ground somewhere else, and somebody must still know where it is, and where the records are kept.
Taylor 14:54 on 2023-05-31 Permalink
@Kate – I’m not sur if the Misericorde would have had legitimate reasons to bury people on site, though I suppose the hospital’s social function predates investigations into why people died, be it by hospital authorities or the police. And I suppose people back in the day really wouldn’t have cared about orphans or single mothers.
That said, there seems to be at least a suggestion from evidence collected by the Mohawk Mothers that the same generalized anti-Indigenous racism extended beyond residential schools to hospitals and other institutions. I don’t find it too hard to believe.
There was a Duplessis Orphans advocate from many years ago who swore there were bodies buried all over the East End St Jean de Dieu (I think that’s what it was called) hospital complex, the one that had the subterranean tunnel network and was for some strange reason its own municipality, complete with its own police force. Nothing to see here eh?
Given all the likely remains that have already been found at residential schools across Canada, the widespread stories of abuse – both to Indigenous people as much as poor whites – here in Quebec, the numerous cases of gov’t sanctioned abuse (Duplessis Orphans, MK-Ultra), not to mention the number of locations in which pre-Contact Indigenous remains have been found all over the island, I think it makes sense for the city to buy ground penetrating radar and hire a team of archeologists and simply dig everywhere until at least every public and institutional space has been investigated.
Even if no remains of illicit Indigenous burials are found, I’m sure such an operation would likely find a bunch of legitimate Indigneous burials, a lot of various artifacts from the colonial and pre-Contact era, and maybe solve a few murders too.
Kate 19:22 on 2023-05-31 Permalink
Comes a point where I wonder what use it is to disturb the dead, but death is not the end, sometimes it’s a lingering mystery.