A house was set on fire Monday afternoon on St‑André downtown.
Update: CTV says it was an apartment building and a young woman was arrested.
Shots were fired Monday afternoon in Montreal North, but no one turned up injured.
Updates from February, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Kate
-
Kate
A minor story from last week has made it to the Guardian, about a teacher in a St‑Lazare high school accused of selling students’ art for personal profit.
Update: This story has legs. It’s now in the Daily Beast.
Further: The parent who twigged about this is Joël de Bellefeuille, the activist behind the Red Coalition antiracism group. He and other parents are suing teacher Mario Perron for $350,000.
Ian
And mocking their work too from the looks of it. A real gem, this guy.
Blork
The guy’s page is still up, and it contains hundreds of pictures for sale including photographs and other items. I’m sure 99% or more is stolen (i.e., lifted from the web). What a POS this guy is. How can such a crap human become a teacher?
dhomas
It’s reprehensible what this guy is doing. That said, I don’t think he’s mocking the students’ work. I believe the “creepy” tag on the artwork is more about the art class assignment. It looks like the students were asked to produce “creepy” artwork. One of them even has the word “zombie” written on it.
Still, the guy is pretty shitty.Ian
Ah fair enough, I didn’t notice that detail.
-
Kate
A recent survey found that only 63% of Quebecers feel that a kid’s place is in school. Doesn’t say what age of kids was under consideration.
This might dovetail with the recent “discovery” that a lot of kids work, and the passage of a law last year that a kid has to be 14 before taking a job.
Ian
Interesting that this percentage is a mirror of the functional illiteracy rates in Quebec.
jeather
“Le sondage a été mené sur le Web auprès de 1004 Québécois, entre le 28 novembre et le 3 décembre dernier.”
It also seems to be confounding “a kid’s place is in school” and “a kid’s first priority should be school”, and I’m curious if those are disaggregated in the data anywhere.
Blork
That article is really hard to follow. It feels like it was written by an off-brand A.I. bot.
-
Kate
Ted Rutland points out on X that the current car theft crisis is a statistical anomaly. If anything, car theft is returning to its average over the last 23 years (see graph in his post).
Joey
I am not a statistician, but I don’t think it’s accurate to call it a statistical anomaly (I am also fan of Ted’s work). Yes, obviously things aren’t as bad as they were in 2000. However, the number of thefts (even adjusted for population growth) has about tripled in four years – it’s at its highest in 15 years. How bad should we let things get before taking action? Why should this kind of crime be permitted to grow rapidly? The readership here is pretty anti-car (that’s even the case for hypocrites like me who drive cars regularly). Does that mean we just ignore a rapid spike in auto thefts? Meanwhile, insurance companies are replacing one $60K car after another – sooner or later the bill comes due.
Put it another way – what is the maximum number of car thefts we should tolerate before doing something about it?
Blork
The other thing to consider is that the nature of car thefts is changing (according to a recent CBC report). The numbers are going up presumably because it’s becoming more lucrative, and as such, nastier criminals are getting involved. And there’s a component of violence creeping in (making it not just a property crime).
CBC was talking about home invasions to get car keys, car-jackings, etc. (They were referring to the situation in Toronto, but that doesn’t mean the local nasties won’t pick up on the idea.)
Kate
Please don’t think I was implying the surge in car thefts is no big deal. It was more that Rutland’s brief analysis was pointing out that the current situation isn’t all that unusual. He’s also very alert to the kind of spin the police use to get even more funding.
Joey
Fair enough, but he’s wrong – a tripling of thefts in four years is hardly a statistical anomaly.
Ian
It really does make you wonder what the point if the grotesquely inflated police budget was if they were actually doing a better job with less budget.
PO
Would need to see if the data is for thefts where the car is never seen again, or if it includes the surge of Kia break-ins where teens break in, drive it around for fun, trash it and dump it.
DeWolf
From what I understand, there’s a lot of new model cars that are easy to steal because of various technological defects. And on top of that, the port is poorly secured, and with easy access to high-value markets in West Africa, it’s very lucrative to steal cars here. About 2/3 cars stolen in Quebec are recent models compared to 1/3 in BC.
Rutland has an axe to grind with the police, which I understand, but he’s definitely trying to minimize a worrying trend in property crime. The SPVM is incompetent but that doesn’t mean a huge surge in car theft isn’t a big deal.
Maybe if the SPVM starts to care about car theft they’ll give a fuck about bike theft? Maybe?
Ian
LOL no, unless it’s an 9k touring bike stolen from some rich dude’s garage.
That KIA/ Hyundai flaw is pretty hilarious though, I wasn’t aware that you could just steal them with a USB cable. I remember in the 80s you could start some cars with a screwdriver in a pinch but c’mon. A pretty egregious oversight. Apparently in some parts of the US insurers won’t cover car theft for these models.
-
Kate
As La Presse announced a week ago, there’s a plan to build a new prison for women where the old Tanguay Jail stood till 2016 – within sight of Bordeaux Jail and on the same huge lot. Nearby residents don’t want another jail in their neighbourhood and are organizing to make their resistance felt.
Ian
It might be worth it investing in signal jammers to catch the smuggling drones over your backyard.
-
Kate
With the housing crisis continuing, some people are forced to live in substandard housing. La Presse’s Katia Gagnon visited a couple living in a decrepit triplex flat with a lot of problems. A second piece in the dossier asks whether the same landlord is running an illegal Airbnb next door.
Later thoughts: Dollars to donuts, within a couple of days QMI will run a piece on a bad tenant damaging a landlord’s property. They often do this in response to stories about delinquent landlords.
-
Kate
Work being done to limit the noise from the REM between Central Station and Nuns’ Island, in Griffintown, is being delayed till spring because of the weather, although it isn’t made clear why having a milder winter makes it harder to get the work done. Residents are divided on whether the measures taken so far have done any good.
Blork
After AI sends us knowledge workers to the unemployment lines, it will be good to know we can always find work in “meulage acoustique” (“accoustic grinding”).
Reply