Volunteers came out and cleaned up parts of the city’s shores as part of World Cleanup Day.
Updates from September, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Protests were held Saturday in several Quebec towns against the CAQ’s Bill 31, the law against lease transfers.
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Kate
The owner in the fatal Place Youville fire is suing the city for $7.5 million over claims that he faced too‑stringent requirements for upgrading the heritage property and that they didn’t send enough firefighters. Families of the victims are suing the owner over the building’s lack of fire safety measures, so I suppose he’s trying to balance his books.
The city is also included in a lawsuit from a family that’s alleging negligence.
Ephraim
You would think that he sort of proved the point of requiring the stringent requirements. I wonder who will represent him in court, isn’t his licence pulled?
Meezly
Various reputable journalists and accounts by former tenants have shown that Émile B*** engaged in shady landlord practices and tactics, fraudulent behaviours, ie. tax evasion, etc. And he still has the gall to sue the city. Has he even expressed any remorse? Could he really be this astonishingly narcissistic?
steph
His law licence was pulled in June 2021 https://www.barreau.qc.ca/media/wozkdfpz/avis-limitation-emile-haim-benamor.pdf
Kate
Meezly, I don’t want his full name on my blog, for googling/legal reasons, hence the asterisks.
H. John
@Ephraim. I don’t understand your question: “I wonder who will represent him in court, isn’t his licence pulled?”
His licence wasn’t pulled (as is clear from reading the notice linked to by steph); it was limited, or as The Gazette wrote “the Barreau du Québec delivered a decision that “provisionally limited his right to practise as a lawyer by prohibiting him from practising in the field of tax law.””
You don’t need a licence to be represented, and you don’t need one to represent yourself.
But beyond that, the article states he’s being represented by two lawyers from Gowling WLG, a very large multinational firm: “la poursuite, rédigée par les avocats Charles Daviault et Mathieu Papineau, du cabinet Gowling.”
Ephraim
Yes, you can represent yourself, but you are usually foolish in doing so. But his law licence is very specific in it’s scope. Also, if the building was his is different than if the building was owned by his corporation. And of course, who owned the corporation.
But in his case, you would have expected any reputable lawyer to tell him NOT to sue (but to still fight the lawsuits), because it sort of proves the point that you knew about it and you made the decision to not conform with the law and do the require upgrades. Which of course compounds the crime. It’s one thing to be ignorant of the needs of these safety upgrades, it’s another to know and not do them. The only reason that I can think of any lawyer agreeing to represent him is enriching themselves, because I can’t really see a world where he is found not guilty, even in the best of cases he will still be found partially guilty and unless you of course, it increases the bill.
And when you need to do upgrades to a building, there are calculations at the TAL to recover the costs. Okay, the calculations suck, especially those related to a roof, because the roof needs to be replaced more often than the depreciation at the TAL is over. But still, in the end, the great part of the cost is covered by the tenants. But of course, he wanted to profit from running it illegally as an AirBnB and therefore not have tenants. But also to run at the cheapest of costs even if knowingly endangering the lives of people.
The only bright spot he may see is that the fire department calling it arson. Of course, that still doesn’t exonerate him from ensuring that the building was safe and in particular the death of the girls in the rooms with no windows. (The only rooms allowed to be built without a window in Montreal are bathrooms and kitchens, from my understanding of the law.)
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Kate
Police chief Fady Dagher’s plan to restructure the police service to bring it closer to people has been endorsed by the city.
I’ve now seen a couple of cycles of this: smaller police stations are established in neighbourhoods, on the theory that this will make cops work better on a local scale. Then a new broom comes in with a mission to save money and centralize, the local stuff is cut and the number of stations reduced, and the force is centralized. A few years later, a new decentralization phase hits again, as it’s doing now under Dagher.
It will only take a more right-wing city hall and a tightening of belts for the centralization pendulum to reverse again. Not taking bets yet on when.
Ian
Regardless the only source cited here is Dagher and the SPVM. This isn’t journalism, it’s dialled-in copaganda.
Police announcements about themselves, really? Who cares.
walkerp
I hate the police (as they are currently structured in our society), but why so much knee-jerk cynicism here. This is something that could lead to some minor improvements and maybe pave the way for a more integrated, community-oriented police force.
Things do improve in society sometimes.
Ian
I don’t believe for one second that this will lead to any improvements. The police still refuse to acknowledge systemic racism and still intend to do “random” ID checks.
You want to improve society? Stop making the police do every public facing job short of trash collection, and rejig the funding appropriately.
walkerp
We know, Ian. Continue wallowing in your bitterness.
Ian
I’m not bitter, I’m progressive. Why do you insist on being a shill for cops and pulling ad hominems instead of questioning cop press releases being reported as “news” or at least considering how police budgets might be better allocated to improving public life? Systemic racism aside for a second, it doesn’t make any sense to have cops be the answer for everything any more than it makes sense to solve all our problems with clowns.
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Kate
A brawl in St-Léonard ended with shots fired Friday evening, but no shooting victims. Police rounded up a couple of the participants.
A teenager was stabbed early Saturday at the corner of Georges‑V and Hochelaga, which TVA says is Montreal East (it’s on the border with MHM) and CTV says, mistakenly, is Rivière‑des‑Prairies–Pointe‑aux‑Trembles.
There were arrests in the incident last month in which shots were fired at a car with a woman and kids in it. By luck, nobody was hurt.
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