A body was found in Angrignon Park on Monday afternoon. A group of friends had gathered there Sunday evening, but one friend didn’t make it back, and was found inanimate on Monday. No homicide number is out, but the death is being considered suspicious.
Tuesday morning, police think the death was accidental.
USA Today looks at our cruise ship scene which it calls a “relatively quaint cruise experience.”
Wow, I thought Post Media was a shitstorm of ads. Yikes.
Also: writer seems unaware that the Vieux Port is not the “Port of Montreal.”
Cool wet weather is dampening nationalist fervor but the parade will go on.
The cancellation of the Canada Day parade is now being given a political spin by organizer Nicholas Cowen, who alleges that authorities were messing with him because of their political bias.
The Journal also gets Aref Salem to claim it’s all the city’s fault there will be no parade, although he doesn’t go as far as Cowen in suggesting that anti‑Canadian sentiments are the motive.
Le Devoir celebrates St-Jean with a dossier on Quebec French, including a list of people’s favourite words from its unique lexicon.
La Presse considers all the St‑Jean place names in Quebec, although there’s only one village called St‑Jean‑Baptiste.
I like Brunante, Cossins, et ‘les mots en oune’
I can’t believe they left out our national hymn to winter
A pro-Palestinian encampment has been set up in Victoria Square.
What’s open and closed for St-Jean.
Radio-Canada has quite a long piece this weekend about the power struggles between mayors and police in the Red Light era that was ended by Jean Drapeau and Pax Plante toward the end of the 1950s.
It’s written by the granddaughter of Albert Langlois, chief of police at the time, who was accused of corruption, although she says it’s still not clear whether he can be blamed. She’s pretty sure Camillien Houde wasn’t innocent, though.
The piece is also meant as an introduction to a new podcast, linked at the bottom.
Neighbourhood resistance to homeless shelters is not acceptable, says the man who leads the Old Brewery Mission. La Presse spells his name as James Hugues throughout this piece but it’s actually Hughes.
Last month the Guardian profiled Montrealer Maxwell Smart, who survived the Holocaust as a boy and whose story has recently been made into a movie. La Presse has a dossier about Smart this weekend.
Exo unveiled its new trains from China this week on the St‑Jérôme line. Delivery of these trains was held up for years by the pandemic.
The residential sector intended to replace Place Versailles will have few of the social or affordable housing units mandated by municipal law. The developer explicitly plans to buy the city off.
But they’re not mandated by municipal law. The law explicitly gives developers a choice, to provide units or money to a trust fund for similar units. Last year the fund had $25 million and hadn’t done anything. Maybe the city could do something with it. If they really want to mandate it, they could remove the money in lieu option, but they haven’t.
Also, if you build a house it requires zero units. Maybe people could be forced to give money in this case, too.
So essentially, a bribe put on an official and explicit footing.
It’s not a bribe, it’s a legal option the city has provided when developing. If I had an event and said “Please bring food to feed the needy, or bring money so we can buy food for the needy,” you wouldn’t say those giving money instead of food are bribing me to avoid helping feed the needy. If I collected all this money for the needy and then just kept it in my bank account, you would rightly blame me for not spending it, not blame the people who gave me money for the feeding the needy instead of cans of corn.
Personally I think it’s better that the city has money to build what is actually needed, rather than trust the developers to build apartments with the right number of bedrooms, support services, whatever. But as the city is getting a lot of money through this program and doing nothing with it, if they are too disorganized or incompetent or uncaring to build housing with the money they collected for this purpose they should remove the money option. Until they do, this is 100% the city’s fault. (And yes, I feel dirty defending developers, but this was entirely predictable.)
It sounds like we all have to have a word with the mayor, or with our city councillors, about acting on this matter.
@Nicholas – It’s more like instead of bringing ten extra large pizzas, you put a nickel in the jar.
$25 million is not enough to build 100 units, when tens of thousands are needed.
This is a classic dodge. The problem is not only developers developing with greed as their only guide, it is landlords lording. The grocery chains can bullshit us with bugaboos from supply chains and oil prices. What is the excuse for charging 50% or 100% more for something that has only degraded in the last few years? What is the excuse for letting units sit idle because they can extort more profit out of the ones made available?
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices” – Smith
@Kate – The city government has no juice. They have been hobbled by the province, and they have no power against a variety of entities that need to be reined in. Plante wages a war on cars while the city remains rich loamy soil for the mediocrities of white collar crime.
Quebec cut off funding for the SPVM’s community policing (ECCR) squads earlier this year, but the force itself is going to deploy them again in nine boroughs starting in September. But this article suggests that ECCR squads have continued to work downtown past the end of the funding.
Unsurprisingly, since this is is one of the pillars of Dagher’s approach to policing – but also an excellent example of a function that would be better served by community social workers rather than the police, if only there were funding to be had. The image of the 2 cops in readiness pose, clear disdain on their faces, obviously harassing sleeping homeless people says it all.
From time to time there are reports of social workers accompanying police, as I linked here and here. I don’t know whether these reports are made after police do a PR exercise for journalists, but it sometimes feels like that’s all it is, since such reports turn up periodically yet nothing much changes.
The city has forked over millions to compensate merchants whose businesses have been blighted by construction sites, and intends to continue doing this.
Other cities don’t allow construction sites to sprawl over the entire area for the entire duration of the project. Is there anything more frustrating than seeing a blocked off area with no actual work going on for weeks at a time simply because the contractors don’t have to put away the fences and cones? In some cities they actually make work sites put everything away and secure the site at the end of each workday. Here we have entire blocks fenced off for contractor parking for the duration of the permit even when the workers aren’t on-site. I guess paying off affected businesses is more cost effective, but it doesn’t do much for hte urban landscape – and definitely drives people away from downtown.
Dogs and bicycles are to be allowed on the REM as of Monday in a pilot project to last till mid‑August. After that time, they will be excluded during rush hours.
Bicycles, great. But wtf is it with dogs on public transit?
I can’t say I like the idea, but I suppose some people at least need to bring their dog to the vet by public transit, or take it to a dog park that’s at a distance. I haven’t yet been faced with dogs on the metro and would tend to move away from them if possible.
(One of my favourite local cafés is very dog‑positive. It’s a small place and I tend not to go in when there are dogs present. I don’t know whether they’re aware that allowing dogs might keep some customers away. They might not care. The STM evidently doesn’t.)
I am fine with the existence of dog friendly cafes because it means there are also dog unfriendly ones and we can self select.
See also cats in bookstores, where I come down on the other side.
I’d rather have cats in bookstores than mice, but I’m not allergic to cats. Dogs serve no purpose in a café or on a train unless it’s a service dog – and those were permitted anyway
I don’t get it either….I just came back from a trip to NYC. I hadn’t flown anywhere since February 2020. My observations include seeing a lot more dogs at the airport in Dorval. Maybe I’d just forgotten but it seemed like there were a lot more than before. But also, lots of dogs at stores, cafes, etc.
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