CTV tells us that five teenagers were arrested in Snowdon on Wednesday morning with incendiary materials in a car. La Presse expands on the story, saying cops stopped another car in Côte St‑Luc, and both were found near synagogues.
Updates from October, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
La Presse’s Maxime Bergeron ponders the personalities who might step up to face Valérie Plante in the mayoral election of November 2025.
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Kate
McGill University is shutting its gates to all but students and employees from Saturday till Monday, October 7 being the anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel.
CBC also says synagogues are increasing security for the high holidays, although no threats have been received.
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Kate
A woman who “used her car like a weapon” to kill a fellow motorist in 2022 has been sentenced to five years and can’t drive for six years, although she’ll be behind bars for some of that time.
Tim S.
Among the reasons for not giving a more severe sentence, “son faible danger pour le public.” I dunno, I think a murderous driver poses the maximum danger to the public, but that’s just because I’m one of those rare people who goes near a road on a daily basis.
Nicholas
Why would anyone think she won’t reoffend? I understand not sending her to jail for life, but we’re restoring her privilege to drive a year after she gets out of prison? Would we restore someone’s right to own guns a year after they leave prison for intentionally murdering someone?
GC
Interesting that the judge seems to have concluded she hit him very deliberately and she called garages within minutes to fix the damage, but she also somehow had “remords sincères”. How did that come up? While she was at the garage, trying to cover up her crime?
What wasn’t super clear to me, from the article, was if they had some history of violence between them or if he was just a stranger who she encountered on the road.
Kate
Can we take a person’s licence away permanently?
Meezly
What is it about being a driver getting light sentences for taking a human life. She was even sober! The judge even admitted she hit the victim quite deliberately. Would the sentence be harsher had she used a hammer or a knife??
Blork
GC, it’s quite possible she showed sincere remorse. Just because she didn’t show it in the minutes and hours after the event doesn’t mean it didn’t settle in later when the immediate panic had dissolved. After all, it’s been two years since it happened, and that’s plenty of time for remorse to set it.
That said, to Kate’s question I’m pretty sure it is possible to permanently revoke a driving license. Most jurisdictions specify a difference between a SUSPENSION (temporary) and a DISQUALIFICATION/REVOCATION (permanent). But I don’t know what the criteria is here.
I’m pretty sure I saw that causing injury or death due to criminal negligence only qualifies for SUSPENSION, but is this a case of criminal negligence? I don’t think so. It sounds like she deliberately chose to hit the guy, although I think her defence lawyer argued that she was somehow “triggered” to do so from some trauma or other. (I admit that I’m getting tired of hearing about trauma and the way people use it to justify getting away with all sorts of things.)
Personally, I’m surprised that she got less than the maximum sentence and only a suspension.
Tim S.
I think it was on here that I read that judges do not have the authority to suspend a license, only to impose a driving ban as a probation condition. I could be wrong, but if this the case, it seems to me that the solution is to set up a SAAQ tribunal that automatically reviews any driver accused of a driving-related crime.
H. John
I’m not sure it answers all the questions, but Justice Eric Downs went into a lot of detail in his decision to explain how penalties are arrived at, and, more importantly, exactly what he considered in this case (starting at para 73 of the decision).
The decision:
Kate
Thank you, H. John.
GC
You raise a good point, Blork, about later remorse. I sometimes forgot how much time passes between an arrest and a sentencing.
Kate
But at that point, GC, is the remorse for the life taken, or for one’s own blighted prospects?
GC
Hard to say, Kate, from my sofa. The judge, um, judged it “sincères”. So, I guess there’s that… At least he didn’t say she was active at her local church or some other bullshit that is really irrelevant to someone’s character.
Ruin
Why is that when a car is involved, the driver is treated like a victim instead of a perp?
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Kate
Musical equipment can come with a lot of labels, and they tend to be in English. This will not be allowed under provisions of the strengthened language law, so music stores may have to close if they cannot provide equipment labelled in French.
We all have to suffer to save French, so I don’t know what they’re whining about. They could go teach French in the Eastern Townships, right? Except oops, the funding has been cut! Too bad!
rob
The musicians will just order from out of province stores that will only charge the 5% gst. (does anyone self declare the PST?). Bottom line is quebec that loses.
Robert H
Right. So now there’s another French tax and one more reason for people to avoid it in favour of English. French again becomes the language of inconvenience, prohibition, red tape and No-You-May-Not. The authors of language policy in La Belle Province don’t give enough consideration to unintended consequences. Défense de penser.
EmilyG
As a musician, this worries me. Me and a lot of my colleagues and friends could be affected by this.
And combined with the tuition increases at McGill possibly threatening McGill’s music program, among other things, I worry about the future of music in Montreal.Kate
The CAQ are philistines. As an anglo, while I may not thrill at the idea of the resurgence of the PQ, historically the party has been relatively generous with funding for cultural things. At least some of their people have understood that if you want to support a language, you need to allow for some amount of creativity in it.
The CAQ really could not care less whether there’s any music or books or Quebec‑made movies. They’re brutes.
Annette
Ok, if you actually enjoy PQ-approved cultural output, let the Bloc party commence:
Kate
Not sure how relevant that is, Annette.
Meezly
The CAQ want to run the province like a big business, but they really don’t give a f**k about small local businesses. Just hoping the more voters they can antagonize for the next election, the better.
Kate
But they’ve given millions to Northvolt, a firm that’s not doing very well at all, and probably going to allow it to damage the environment here. That’s not good big business, it’s crap (and probably why Pierre Fitzgibbon “lost his taste for politics”).
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Kate
I don’t like to victim-blame, but the Gazette has a story about a man who spent five years taking photos in remote parts of Canada, then left two laptops and three hard drives in a minivan downtown. They’ve been stolen, along with years of his work.
First, he didn’t back up his work offsite, ideally to the cloud, and second, he left irreplaceable valuables in a vehicle. Third, he didn’t have the Apple “find my” feature turned on.
Yes, it’s a sad story, but these are simple things he should have done, none of which are mentioned in the story. I suppose the journalist didn’t want to sound like she was wagging her finger at him. So I’m doing it.
Ricardo
“I don’t like to victim blame” and then goes on to blame victim. That said I appreciate and enjoy your blog.
Blork
There’s nothing wrong or hypocritical about saying “I don’t like to victim blame” and then proceeding to do so. That’s just presenting a preface that what follows is distasteful to the speaker/writer but the message conveyed trumps that distaste.
It’s not the same as saying “I’m not going to victim blame” and then proceeding to do so. These are two completely different things. Unfortunately some people don’t see that very obvious difference.
dhomas
You’re not alone, Kate. I saw his story on Reddit last week, and everyone said pretty much the same thing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/montreal/comments/1fpd42z/reward_up_to_2000_for_return_of_photos_items/Kate
I found it disingenuous to frame this as a story about robberies from vehicles only. Obviously that’s one aspect of the incident, but to spin it as a personal tragedy and loss without raising the issue of what measures he had taken to secure his work makes the newspaper sound naive too.
If the guy had the means to jaunt around for five years taking pictures, he had the means to subscribe to a backup system – maybe even a satellite link, if he was, as the article suggests, sometimes out of range of cell service. If you value your work, you put a belt and suspenders on it.
Kate
I didn’t see that, dhomas, but yes!
Blork
It sounds like this guy fell into the trap of thinking the only risk was failure or loss of his laptop. The article says he also had hard drives stolen, so he was probably backing up to those hard drives thinking he was safe. But if the hard drives are together with the laptop then the whole kit is only safe from SOME of the dangers.
Specifically, they are not safe from theft, if the theft also includes the goddamn hard drives. Nor are they safe from fire and floods, etc.
Even people who keep their computers and backups at home should learn from this. If you don’t have off-site backups (which can be cloud-based or other), you are not protected from theft, fire, etc.
That said, backing up loads of photographs to the cloud can be daunting. If you’re doing serious photo work there’s the complications of needing to keep RAW and/or DNG or sidecar files alongside the JPGs or TIFFs, plus no end of possible synchronization problems with your file management/organization system. The guy claims to have had more than a million photos, so that can easily be a terabyte or more, which might be slow on a laptop with a wifi link.
But FFS there are other ways! Have multiple hard drives and keep them in different locations. If you live on the road maybe make a SSD backup every few months and just mail it to someone you trust (you can get a tiny 1TB SSD drive for well under a hundred bucks). Keep a rotation going so there are always three or four backups out there in the world in case you have a disaster. Or just simply and get a cloud-based account.
Joey
The fact that he turned Find My is especially egregious. Not hard to imagine someone who would not want to take advantage of that feature (which keeps track of your Apple devices’ locations, with the default sharing option turned off, obviously) would also not want to backup his life’s work to the cloud. But for god’s sake, get yourself some backup drives and a safety deposit box or something.
Still not sure how this is news, but whatever.
Blork
And BTW, no matter what you use, it’s useful to have a few dormant backups. As in, SSDs or HDDs that you no longer back up to and just keep aside in storage. I actually had a hard drive corruption problem once that went unnoticed for a while, and when I replaced the drive and restored from my backup I discovered that the corrupted drive had also corrupted my backup. So I was basically backing up corrupted files that were overwriting the good ones. (Same could apply to cloud-based backup; if your source is corrupt it could be corrupting your cloud backup.)
Fortunately I had an older HDD that had 90% of the files on it. The corrupted HDD had only corrupted some random files, not everything, so I was able to restore everything but maybe a dozen unimportant files from the old backup and by carefully checking and migrating over the un-corrupted newer files from the iffy backup.
dhomas
The golden rule of backup is 3-2-1:
3 copies of your data. This could include your “production” data plus 2 copies.
2 different media types (this terminology is a little outdated, but it still applies). This could be a NAS or DAS RAID (replicated hard drives) array + cloud.
1 copy off-site. This is important and what bit the fellow in the article. You can have 3 (or 4 or 12) backups of your data. If they’re all in the same spot, fire, flood, theft, a meteor, could all wipe out your data.As Blork hinted at, you should also check up on your backup every so often. “Cold storage” can sometimes go bad. Off-site hard drives that are not spun up regularly can suffer head crashes; DVD can get disc rot; etc.
It can quickly get expensive to keep off-site storage in the cloud, especially for photographers or video editors. For them, I would recommend something like Backblaze or Amazon Glacier. These services provide relatively cheap upload fees, but expensive retrieval fees. So, in the case of catastrophic failure and you lose every other copy, you can still retrieve it from the online cold storage. It’s like insurance. You hope you’ll never need it.
If you’d like to read more, you can check out articles like this one:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/Chris
Forget about “cloud”… it’s slow and expensive. Just buy a big ass hard disk. If he’s a photographer, he probably has a Mac, and Time Machine is easy.
Kate
Chris, according to the story, this guy was on the road a lot. He wasn’t sitting at a desktop computer. And, given his nonchalance about protecting his files, he probably would’ve done best with something he could set and forget, and that could not be stolen. Giving him a big ass hard disk is just asking for something else to be stolen.
dhomas
Well, he DID have external hard drives. But those too got stolen. Because he didn’t apply the “off-site” principal of the backup strategy. Everything was in one place.
Cloud is indeed expensive. Personally, I’m trying to rid myself of cloud service dependence, and associated subscription costs (which can and do increase at any moment, once you’re already hooked on the service). I backup everything important to a secondary server I keep running at my parents’ house, so I still get off-site storage, but with very little cost. If you have a tech savvy friend, you can also apply a similar strategy where you store their off-site backups and they store yours. I’ve considered this in the past, but decided keep everything in the family since I already had the extra hardware ready.
But this is not feasible for everybody. If you want a solution that doesn’t require you to manage it, you can opt for those cloud services I mentioned above.
Chris
Kate, big ass hard disks aren’t so big physically, and so not a problem even if he is on the road, they easily fit in a car. Being on the road also means your internet speed sucks. No desktop computer is needed, disks can easily connect to a laptop. As others said, he just needed to keep multiple disks in multiple places.
Kate
Chris, sweetheart, I’m well aware that a big ass hard disk is not a large object.
But this guy doesn’t need internet speed. He can take a bunch of photos then relax while they upload. Then he doesn’t have to arrange to leave disks somewhere if he’s living a peripatetic life on the road. He’s clearly not the kind of guy who would remember to do that anyway. He’s a total example of someone for whom you set it up so it’s seamless – set and forget.
Faiz Imam
I pay $90USD a year for backblaze, which backs up my 8TB local external drive.
And I make sure everything is backed up to that.
If my house burns down I don’t lose anything.
Joey
@Faiz and @Kate exactly, plus it’s a business expenses, so basically negligible. The annual cost would be a tiny fraction of one day of one of those trips.
Blork
One of the things that kills me about FB comments is the way people comment without reading the previous comments. Like someone will post an old photo of an intersection in Montreal asking where it is and a comment will contain absolute proof that it’s the corner of (for example) Sherbrooke and Guy with supporting evidence, comparison photos, etc. Then the VERY NEXT COMMENT is some idiot saying “Sherbrooke and Atwater!” Not to refute the previous comment, but just a random dumb-ass guess because he didn’t READ the previous comment.
Chris’s comments in this thread are like that.
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Kate
Bixi is preparing better winter arrangements, intending to boost winter stations from 150 to 200 and do more snow removal. An average of 3,727 trips were taken daily through last winter.
DeWolf
Excited by the prospect of 50 new stations. I used Bixi enough last winter to make the monthly subscription worthwhile, but I would have used it even more if there weren’t so many gaps in the coverage.
It’s also great that winter cycling has finally become accessible for anyone who can’t be bothered with the extra gear and maintenance required to do it with your own bike.
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Kate
François Legault is pondering creating
campswaiting zones for asylum seekers.He also wants Ottawa to forcibly relocate half of the asylum seekers in Quebec.
AMF 19:34 on 2024-10-05 Permalink
Two of the arrests are of men in their twenties. Thursday and Friday were Rosh Hashana, when thousands of Jews go to synagogue. 213 hate crimes have been recorded against Jews this year by the SPVM, a huge increase. And Monday will be a nightmare.