Updates from November, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 23:55 on 2023-11-01 Permalink | Reply  

    Three people were hurt, one critically, in a fire Wednesday evening in the Village.

     
    • thomas 13:04 on 2023-11-02 Permalink

      The fire was at GI Joe.

  • Kate 18:33 on 2023-11-01 Permalink | Reply  

    Concordia says the tuition hike for out-of-province students will be devastating – which means it will be working as intended.

     
    • bob 19:20 on 2023-11-01 Permalink

      And incompetent, like all their big ideas. A collection of opportunist mediocrities whose only skills are in the fraud that manipulates our crooked mess of an electoral system into giving them 70% of the seats with 40% of the vote.

    • Michael 20:12 on 2023-11-01 Permalink

      They want to get re-elected and this is what will get them to pull in all the zero english speaking population.

    • Kate 21:45 on 2023-11-01 Permalink

      I don’t believe there’s much chance the CAQ will be at any risk in the next election.

    • DeWolf 08:51 on 2023-11-02 Permalink

      That’s what I thought until very recently, and yet the way they’re behaving feels desperate. A full-on plunge into electoralism with three years to go until the next vote. They were obviously spooked by the by-election but everything they’ve done since then, including the heavy-handed tuition business and the resurrection of a troisième lien that was dead and buried, feels like they’re running scared.

      The economy is getting worse. Healthcare is getting worse by every measure. The CAQ doesn’t have much to show for their time in power. And unlike some other parties, nobody is a dyed-in-the-wool CAQiste. It’s a party of convenience. In a place with such notoriously fickle voters it might not take much for people to swing somewhere else in 2026.

    • Joey 09:07 on 2023-11-02 Permalink

      Too soon to tell, but it seems many of the PQ base that shifted toward the CAQ in the last decade are being wooed back. As DeWolf explains, the CAQ support is a mile wide but an inch deep. And Legault is a long way from the ‘confident patriarch’ from spring 2020.

    • Tim S. 09:14 on 2023-11-02 Permalink

      PSPP seems to be really having a moment. History may have changed significantly when that QS candidate decided to rip his flyers out of a mailbox.

    • walkerp 10:46 on 2023-11-02 Permalink

      Quebec voters can switch on a dime. You never can tell.

    • Uatu 10:41 on 2023-11-03 Permalink

      Pspp is having a moment because he’s not actually doing anything except talking about his imaginary country where nobody pays taxes and to paraphrase a character on the TV series The Expanse, everyone gets a pony and a blow job.

    • Ian 13:37 on 2023-11-03 Permalink

      A pony and a blow job? Considering how badly the government screws up everythigng else I’ll take the pony but I’m kind of scared of what they might try to pass off as a blow job.

  • Kate 18:14 on 2023-11-01 Permalink | Reply  

    The REM has had 41 service interruptions since it opened at the end of July.

    When the REM is down, shuttle buses don’t appear by magic. Drivers are pulled off regular bus routes, leaving their passengers waiting in vain.

     
    • Uatu 10:29 on 2023-11-02 Permalink

      One of my colleagues who lives within walking distance of the REM has given up and will be travelling downtown via metro Longueuil. He doesn’t want to be late again and get his pay cheque docked for being late. Just like I had on REM opening day. Maybe a little extreme, but when you’re actually losing money you don’t want to take the risk.

    • Ian 21:41 on 2023-11-02 Permalink

      If it’s not reliable, people won’t rely on it.

      If it’s not the first and best choice, public transit isn’t serving its purpose. The REM has been a gigantic failure so far.

  • Kate 13:16 on 2023-11-01 Permalink | Reply  

    Ebamba Lufiau was handed a life sentence Wednesday morning in the shooting death of Angelo D’Onofrio on a north end café terrasse seven years ago.

    I’ve always been struck by this incident, for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s too easy to handwave violence among gang members, thinking nobody gets hurt except the people voluntarily in the game. Except sometimes a random bystander like D’Onofrio gets plugged by mistake.

    The other is that media jumped too quickly to the assumption D’Onofrio was a mobster himself. There was a lag before journalists clarified that D’Onofrio had no criminal history. In fact, Global still has a piece from 2016 up, headlined “Presumed mobster Angelo D’Onofrio killed in Ahunstic‑Cartierville.” [sic]

    Update: CTV has a more thorough account. Both the shooter and the driver were sentenced to life on Wednesday.

     
    • Kate 13:08 on 2023-11-01 Permalink | Reply  

      Police have made 17 arrests in a network of real estate fraudsters whose game was to take out loans against properties they didn’t own.

       
      • Ian 18:51 on 2023-11-01 Permalink

        Now to arrest the loan officers that enabled this.

      • JP 19:04 on 2023-11-01 Permalink

        I guess the loan officers are people at banks, like the major ones (RBC, BMO)? A lot of the stuff in the “how to prevent” section of the article is stuff the loaners should be doing….if they’re not already doing that…that’s just disturbing…

        On a separate note, my dad recently went to RBC to do something in person and the teller gave him a little snarky spiel about doing it online…sigh. Like, would you even have a job here if everyone did every aspect of their banking online.

      • Mozai 09:53 on 2023-11-02 Permalink

        “little snarky spiel” Last three times I went to my local bank and they told me to attempt it online, the people behind the counter and behind the desk were apologetic — they weren’t given the tools to do their jobs. And not just websites: I remember earlier when I had questions about my RRSP and the lady gave me the phone on her desk and said I had to call a phone number. Maybe your teller’s snark was because they were embarrassed.

      • Orr 12:58 on 2023-11-02 Permalink

        Do not hesitate to take your money out of any institution that tells you this. Do not hesitate for a second.

    • Kate 10:06 on 2023-11-01 Permalink | Reply  

      Patrick Lagacé writes about the police “thin blue line” patch and how Fady Dagher has to decide whether to allow his men to wear the American right‑wing symbol, or forbid it with SPVM uniform.

      Lagacé explains the history of the symbol and its racist connotations. But he doesn’t get into how the history goes back to the metaphor of the British army as the Thin Red Line.

       
      • jeather 12:02 on 2023-11-01 Permalink

        So you need to be more neutral than neutral as when it comes to (non-Christian) religious symbols, but neutrality is entirely unnecessary on any other front. Another example of Joey’s comment that the CAQ considers freedom to be “say the n-word whenever and wherever you want”, and anything else is unnecessary.

      • jeather 12:03 on 2023-11-01 Permalink

        I know this isn’t specifically the CAQ, but they didn’t make up their beliefs from whole cloth.

      • steph 12:21 on 2023-11-01 Permalink

        When I heard about cops wearing the patch ‘under their vests’ to make sure the public didn’t know – it rings all the bells about racists only be racist in the company of other racists.

      • jeather 12:29 on 2023-11-01 Permalink

        Making my way through the article. Lots of symbols have gotten coopted and are no longer neutral (I will take it for granted that the term thin blue line was not political in this way 20 years ago). The swastika is, of course, the common example.

        “Accusés de racisme et de brutalité policière à tout vent, ils se sentent rejetés.”
        I guess the solution isn’t “stop being racist and violent”, but rather to not allow people to call them racist or violent.

      • steph 14:24 on 2023-11-01 Permalink

        The entire Blue Lives Matter campaign was tone deaf. Like being black was a choice.

      • Ian 15:28 on 2023-11-01 Permalink

        I would have thought a “uniform” precluded personal items

      • Kate 22:04 on 2023-11-01 Permalink

        Exactly. Like, why is it even a story that the police chief can’t decide whether to order his people to remove unofficial insignia?

      • Ian 09:39 on 2023-11-02 Permalink

        Maybe it’s like in Office Space, you’re required to have a minimum of 15 flair items on your work uniform.
        I imagine that if an officer wanted to sew on an anarchy badge instead of copaganda dogwhistles this hesitancy would evaporate quickly.

    • Kate 09:51 on 2023-11-01 Permalink | Reply  

      The homeless shelter in Guy‑Favreau can stay open for another month while a new shelter is prepared in Verdun – the one that has room for only two thirds of their number.

      Quebec is being pressured to keep statistics on deaths among the homeless, a stat that other provinces look at, but we don’t.

       
      • Kate 09:49 on 2023-11-01 Permalink | Reply  

        The REM was down again for a time on Wednesday morning, so buses went into service.

        A computer control failure is being blamed again. You know, there might actually be some value in having a human being driving the trains.

         
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