Shots were fired Saturday evening in St‑Léonard, but nobody turned up wounded.
Updates from August, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
I’m a bit late picking this up, but regular and social media have all recently reported on standup comic Sonia Bélanger, added to the lineup of a comedy club in Gatineau after complaints of the constant all‑male participation there. Sonia’s image is an AI construct, though – and she never shows up to perform.
steph
As far as clever marketing goes, this caught my attention.
jeather
I guess it will turn away the people (feminists) they don’t want as clients and attract the people (assholes) they do, so it’s effective.
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Kate
Following this week’s report that Montreal leads in urban farming, La Presse asks whether there are too many urban farms now.
Ephraim
Urban farms, urban chickens, urban fishing, keith urban….
Kate
Last year Le Devoir reported that Silo No. 5 might be turned into a vertical farm, although I’ve seen nothing about the plan since.
That would be a great use for it as well as for the Canada Malting silos mentioned two posts below. The city can always use more fresh veg that doesn’t have to be transported from Mexico in the winter. And growing food is a better use for electrical current than mining bitcoin.
Nicholas
I get using empty rooftops, but couldn’t we just build some greenhouses or buildings off-island where there’s plentiful land and use the valuable urban land for people? The Netherlands is a great model for year-round produce and agriculture complementing dense urban environments, and has so much now that it’s the second largest agricultural exporter by value in the world. The Quebec agricultural zone is about 50% larger than the Netherlands in area, yet would only have to feed half the population the Dutch does.
mare
@Nicolas The Netherlands could have so many greenhouses because the industrial rates for their plentiful supplies of natural gas were super low. In the last decade many gas production fields had to be closed though, because of earthquakes (!) and damaged buildings caused by unstable soil after it was ‘hollowing out’ by the gas extraction. So the Netherlands then needed to import gas, which was expensive and now really expensive because the war in Ukraine and the attempts to limit using Russian gas.
Quebec also has cheap energy so we could do something similar, although we don’t have such a surplus capacity at times, and a lot of energy is needed when the outside temperature is 50 °C lower than the ideal growing temperature.
I read a study that shipping fruits and vegetables by plane from areas where they have multiple growing seasons is actually more ecological, even when counting transport. Higher yields, less fertilizer, faster growth. We also lack (cheap) labour for harvesting, and because all produce varieties are ready at the same time and the abundance means the wholesale prices are so low, that it sometimes is more economical to let the fruits and vegetables rot in the fields.
Blork
I wish they had included a list of the restaurants who are receiving Ahuntsic-farmed arctic char (delivered by bycycle!) that is so fresh the chefs have to let them sit for a while before preparing them. As somebody from Eastern Canada, I like my fish fresh, and finding it that fresh is rare up in this burgh.
Aineko Marcx
@Kate After reading that Silo No. 5 of you last year, I asked one of my friend who is quite into the urban farm biz. He told me that ‘plan’ is smoke and mirrors of the potential project developer, whose entire interest in urban farming is limited to facilitate the luxury real estate project under the guise of the posh concept.
DeWolf
@Blork Have you been to T&T yet? It’s one of the only supermarkets in Montreal that has a decent selection of “swimming fish” (as my mother-in-law calls them). Most places around here only keep shellfish alive, not fish. It’s a bit far for you but they’ll be opening a location in Brossard next year.
Nicholas
@Mare, I generally agree. The premise I had was mostly “If you want local food, especially all year round.” Large scale ag may have its issues, but it is much more efficient than planters on a roof. Bellies of planes may go empty anyway, and some produce can be shipped by boat, which is really efficient. There’s that image that goes around every month of pears grown in Argentina and packaged in Thailand that are sold in the US, and it uses less energy than driving two blocks to the store. And yes, our labour market is very tight now.
Jonathan
@blork Their website lists where the fish can be bought and eaten
Blork
@DeWolf, I have not yet been to T&T, but I’ve seen the “swimming fish” at Kim Phat. Pretty impressive. @Jonathan, thanks for the tip!
I haven’t had Arctic char very often, but when I’ve had it I really liked it. My first arctic char was a frozen one that I bought from an Inuk man in Cambridge Bay many years ago. It was still frozen when I arrived back in Montreal, which if nothing else was a testament to his packaging. It was big — probably 2 kilos or more — and was delicious.
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Kate
A man killed his kids and himself in a town near Joliette on Saturday. TVA asks how such dramas can be avoided but has no answers. Radio‑Canada names the man.
Odds are the couple were breaking up, and this was the man’s response – that seems to be the usual pattern. But we can’t assume that every family breakup risks a massacre.
Updates: TVA says Ianik Lamontagne was arrested for harassing his ex two days before the killings. TVA also says the man was suffering from severe depression but another headline cites a quote from a conjugal violence activist saying that conjugal violence isn’t a mental health problem – not sure what to make of that.
They also note a coroner’s report saying that 56 kids were killed by a parent between 2011 and 2020, presumably in Quebec specifically.
azrhey
the conjugal violence, or any kind of violence isn’t a mental health problem because most people with mental health issues aren’t violent and a lot of violent people do not have mental health issues. There IS a correlation, but not a causation.
Kate
Mental illness, at least in the legal sense, is about not having control over one’s acts. Of course this can never be completely ascertained, so that in court you have to take the word of the accused and his psychiatrists. Whereas conjugal violence is simply a choice to harm members of one’s household because hurting, frightening or dominating them gives you power or pleasure. Not a healthy balance but not insanity.*
Monday, La Presse has a more thoughtful piece on the personal crises that can tip an otherwise sane person to violent acts.
*I’ve been reading The World: A Family History of Humanity by Simon Sebag Montefiore and it’s an incredible recitation of the terrible things people have done, massacre and torture and murder – often to members of their own family – in the struggle for power, all over the world, in different ways, from antiquity to the present day.
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Kate
A developer wants to build condos on the old Canada Malting site, but nearby residents have had a plan for social housing for years. And the time may be ripe for just that.
The developer says here that he’s willing to include 25% of social housing. Do we believe him, given that all developers have bought themselves off the city’s requirement since the law was instituted?
Ephraim
You know, maybe it’s time for the city to just change the rule…. 25% social housing or double that amount in payment in lieu. You can even put it in the conditions of the permit. See which they choose.
Kevin
The city is going to have to build housing itself. And the province, and the feds.
Kate
They built housing when soldiers came home from World War II and wanted places to live with their new families. It can be done.
Kevin
Kate
I know! My mother grew up in one.
These weren’t large homes but they managed to have three children and a grandparent living there.Up to the 70s about one third of everyone in the UK lived in government-run housing.
Michael
When a program fails, its time to scrap it for something else.
The more costs you impose, the less housing gets built. I wonder what year the government will realize this. Most likely never.
DeWolf
This reminds of the Van Horne warehouse – it’s a highly symbolic site, but also completely inappropriate for social housing given the costs involved. Realistically, it’s a better option to go with the private developer’s approach, as long as there is a legal guarantee that the 100 social housing units will actually be delivered. But politically, I understand why a group like À nous la Malting exists, because it’s an excellent way to raise attention for Quebec and Canada’s disastrous underinvestment in social housing.
The government itself needs to be building tens of thousand of units of housing every year. It’s a model that worked well in the past, until the Thatcher/Reagan trickle-down economic cult took old, and it’s a model that still works well in places like Singapore.
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