There’s been an arrest of an 18‑year‑old man in the stabbing death of an older man on Thursday.
Updates from October, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A march to mark the 34th Nuit des sans‑abri on Friday started at Phillips Square and moved along Ste‑Catherine to Émilie‑Gamelin square to express support for the homeless. I seem to recall that some participants used to stay outdoors all night in solidarity, but I’m not seeing that mentioned now.
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Kate
Frank Zampino will have to go to trial after all for fraud and corruption that – allegedly – took place during the Tremblay era at city hall, when Zampino was chairman of the executive committee.
A judge had thrown out the case in 2019 because of doubts over some of the evidence, but the Court of Appeal has reversed that decision.
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Kate
Barron’s has a piece on the repurposing of Montreal’s churches it says comes from Agence France-Presse. There are a few nice photos with it.
The Journal has the French-language version of the same piece, with a few more photos.
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Kate
Since the outbreak of the latest skirmish between Israel and Hamas, 16 hate crimes have been reported here – seven against Muslims and 13 against Jews – and 20 other incidents which aren’t quite crimes but have nonetheless been reported.
bob
Math crime! With primes! Prime math crime!
Chris
Isn’t ‘skirmish’ an understatement? (alas)
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Kate
Someone overheard Mayor Plante speaking English to a café employee. It’s worth a jolty little headline about the outrage of Martineau and Dutrizac.
Kevin
Poor them. They should move to Montreal if they want it to have more of a French presence.
Ian
And risk hearing English spoken?
Je serre mes perles.
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Kate
The homeless shelter closing at Guy‑Favreau is to move to Verdun into a disused home for the elderly, but they’ve got 85 people to house, and this building only has room for 50.
MarcG
Strange that when the city bought the building they said it was to create 96 affordable housing units but now there’s only room for 50?
Kate
The journalist should have asked about that. It’s quite a discrepancy.
I wonder whether the extra space will be devoted to administrative and operational needs.
DavidH
That 85 person capacity at Guy-Favreau is for 65 beds and 20 sitting people according to the article. I wonder how much of that projected capacity of 50 is actual beds.
The ‘up to 96 affordable housings’ planned was probably exaggerated to make the former project look better. They had 99 individual rooms in the old building and have to add a private bathroom and kitchen to every final unit. Hard to imagine that can be done by sacrificing the equivalent of only 3 rooms and communal space. The new shelter does not need individual kitchens though, so that reduction is strange.
The real question is how does a refuge outside of downtown actually meet the needs of the current clientele. The new center will likely be full, but will it be by the people currently at Guy-Favreau? Downtown and Verdun do not have the same appeal. The metro is next door but no food courts, cafes, crowds, etc..
nau
I read that article as saying that the city originally bought the building to convert it to up to 96 units of affordable housing. Not having found anywhere else to accommodate the 85 people from the shelter, the city has turned to this building in Verdun to shelter at least 50 of them. Presumably this is not a permanent vocation for the building as apparently the city still plans to convert the building to “several dozen” units of affordable housing. Perhaps in the building’s current state, they figure that providing shelter for 50 is the best they can do given how soon the other shelter is closing. It may well be that large portions of the building are not in a habitable state.
It does seem an odd locale for a shelter. I’m inferring that for the city this move isn’t so much about does this location meet all the needs of the shelter’s clientele but rather is it better than closing the current shelter and having nowhere else for these people to shelter at all. Better in that building than on the street, basically.
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Kate
Weekend notes from CityCrunch, Montréal Secret, 24Heures, Sarah’s Weekend List, CultMTL.
Highways to avoid this weekend.
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Kate
La Presse has a dossier of four articles on the hard knocks of practical police training. The Gazette is also starting a series on the same topic.
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Kate
Concordia is worried about the tuition hike and McGill has cancelled an extensive French program it had been planning. Meantime, Quebec is being very stingy with English eligibility certificates.
Toula Drimonis writes about the CAQ’s motivations.
Taylor C. Noakes thinks the cruelty is the point.
Ian
I find it alarming that the PQ, QS, and CAQ all seem to agree that it is fitting to punish universities for what programs they decide to offer or not.
Is our government seriously saying that higher education should not be the final arbiters of academic decisions? Are universities no longer independent, but to be regulated by political whim?
Others have already pointed out the hypocrisy given how many MNAs graduated from English universities, but this is a whole new level of hostility toward education that I find far more telling than the standard ethnonationalism we can typically expect from all three leading parties.
Meezly
“All it does is make Quebec appear insular and sectarian, uninterested in outsiders. Perhaps that was the goal after all.”
That IS the goal – Drimonis didn’t need to pull any punches. The CAQ has clearly never cared about how they appear on the world stage, esp. when nationalism and far-right conservatism has been on the rise in other parts of the world.
@Ian, the hostility toward education definitely seems to be a motivating factor. We all know the pattern of governments who want to keep the masses mis-/un-educated…
steph
Do they have a neoliberal agenda to privatize the universities? ((as private entities, without a government penny, would they have the autonomy to do what ever they choose?))
Joey
The CAQ concept of academic freedom seems to mean “anyone anywhere can say the N-word as much as they want”; everything else is up for debate.
Ian
Vous utilisez le mot “n” ? Pourquoi détestez-vous la langue de Molière ? Quelle tristesse de voir notre peuple se salir en parlant anglais.
Meezly
Thanks for sharing the Noakes dead-on article, but cruelty is not the point, though it’s more of a side bonus of yet another strategic move to minimize future anglo/immigrant voters. Noakes actually states, “This is about cesspool politics. This is about the CAQ losing a by-election to the Parti Québécois.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if the CAQ has a list of power moves, I mean, bills, they could pass for various contingencies. Yikes, we lost a by-election in our home city? Let’s pull out strategy no.5 – not only will it appeal to our supporters AND distract from the real work we have to do (like public education and healthcare), it’ll be another nail on the coffin for those Anglos!
Ian
..and now Plante is on record saying she doesn’t think tuitions should be raised for Anglo universities, but that instead tuition should be lowered fro Francophones. So still supporting isolating and punishing the English, just in a different way.
These are our so-called “progressives”.
Uatu
Shouldn’t they improve the francophone high school graduation rate first?
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