A deer was spotted trotting along the REM tracks in Kirkland on Friday. CTV has video.
Updates from October, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A woman pedestrian was killed Friday afternoon at Crémazie and Papineau, the vehicle a Dodge Ram.
Tim S.
Not directly related, but about 4:30 this afternoon I witnessed a pickup truck driving dangerously along the de Maisonneuve bike path and through Westmount Park – dangerous, as in parents shouting at their kids to run to get out of the way. Scanning the various news sites to see if anything came of it, but so far nothing – which goes to show how much crazy stuff can happen and never get known outside the people who were there.
carswell
Today’s Guardian has a story about a cyclist killed by an SUV in Paris. The SUV had been driving in the bike lane and ran over the cyclist’s foot. The cyclist banged on the hood to get the driver to move off his foot then approached the SUV to express his displeasure, prompting the driver to deliberately run him down. The driver has been charged with murder.
Some left-wing politicians are now calling for SUVs to be banned in the city, a brilliant idea but one that will never be implemented or even suggested here because whichever party did it would be voted out of office by the many, many SUV owners and others who value cars more than the safety of others or the environment.
Ian
Carswell, you do realize a Ram is a pickup truck, right?
Kate
Ian, no need to be snide.
Orr
The correct term for today’s oversized pickup truck is bro-dozer.
Ian
Most that I see have F plates so are being used by contractors. The others I presume are mostly from off-island. It’s hard to imagine any practical use for them as a regular family vehicle in town. I can’t imagine even trying to use a regular parking garage spot let alone trying to parallel park in one.
But yes, let’s just generically make totally relevant and absolutely not-snide statements like “SUV owners and many, many others who value cars more than the safety of others and the environment”. That will definitely jumpstart the conversation about addressing the issue of oversize pickup trucks in town presenting an inherent hazard.
Kate
A lot of people are happy to drive around in vehicles far higher and larger than they need, even if it means they’re more hazardous to everyone else on the road, or crossing it. Pickups and SUVs have all been getting larger over the last few years, too. So carswell’s contribution was relevant, Ian.
DeWolf
In 2018 or 2019, I distinctly remember thinking about how Montreal didn’t have many pickup trucks compared to other cities in North America, and how nearly all of them had F plates indicating they were commercial vehicles. But something has changed since the pandemic and I now see way more vanity trucks: spotless new F-150s and Rams with regular licence plates.
There are two sides to this issue. One is that car companies make far more money from SUVs and pickup trucks than regular vehicles, and they’re doing their best to push people towards them, which means that anyone looking to buy a car is pressured into buying something larger than they might need. But consumers have also allowed themselves to be hoodwinked into thinking that bigger = better, and that buying a bloated SUV is somehow safer and more practical than an old-fashioned car even though it has less cargo capacity than a sedan or station wagon and doesn’t even handle as well on the road.
All types of cars are bad for society and the environment, and so we should be taking a harm reduction approach, but instead the opposite is happening. In terms of negative externalities, cars are worse now than they were 20 or 30 years ago, even if their tailpipe emissions are better than in the past.
We need a clear-eyed and coherent approach to transportation that acknowledges that cars have their place in the world but need to be restricted. To make that work, we need to provide abundant alternatives to driving personal vehicles. Even a right-wing business guy like Pierre Fitzgibbon understands this, based on his comments about Quebec needing to drastically reduce its number of private vehicles. But sadly we’re going in the wrong direction, to a place where everything related to transportation is mired in the muck of culture war instead of rational policy.
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Kate
The city has embarked on renovating the St‑Louis arena on St‑Dominique in the Mile End.
I remember comments here about the loss of the arena (it closed during Covid and never reopened – CBC carried a story about residents wanting it reopened more than two years ago) so when I heard this news on radio, I looked for a news link, and only found the official one.
I can’t make out why the arena was named Saint Louis, given that nothing else in the area is called by that name. There was a parish called Saint Louis, but it was not located in this part of the Plateau. Maybe the renovation would be a good time to find a new, secular name for the building?
DeWolf
Wouldn’t it have been named for Saint-Louis-du-Mile-End?
DeWolf
Incidentally, Laurier Avenue was originally called Saint-Louis Street for the same reason. There’s also a Café Saint-Louis on Villeneuve named in homage to the old municipality.
Kate
I suppose so, but nobody calls the area by that name any more. Aréna Mile End would be fine as a name.
I was thinking of the Saint-Louis-de-France parish. There was an ornate church on Roy, destroyed by a fire (there’s still a convent-style building on Laval, which used to puzzle me, as it didn’t seem to be attached to anything – but it had been part of this church precinct originally). Later, a new church was built on Roy, further south, but it isn’t operated by the Roman Catholics any more.
Benoit
What’s wrong with St-Louis?
Kate
What indeed?
Mark Côté
It was at least used for things other than hockey—I went to a roller derby game there last year. I think the league is still searching for a new home though.
Joey
The roller derby has been around for a while – certainly prior to the shutting down of the ice for the last however many years. I think there was some worry that the city would abandon plans to get the ice back.
Arena St Louis might be a good name down the road if the Canadiens win some Stanley Cups under their current coach…
Meezly
My CLSC is called St-Louis-du-Parc. It’s on neither Laurier nor Ave du Parc (though it’s right on the edge of Mile End). I wonder if its name is also a vestige/homage?
(side note: it being “my” CLSC is only a very recent thing – I finally got THE CALL that I’ve been accepted as a patient with one of their GPs after waiting for many years!)
Meezly
Just read the press release for St-Louis Arena. “Work will start in autumn 2024 and last for 2 years.”
Looking forward to see it reopening in 2030!Mark Côté
Yes for sure, roller derby games have been held there for a very long time. Just pointing out that it only remained closed for hockey; it reopened for other uses.
Kate
I’ve never seen roller derby but the descriptions make it sound like mayhem, with a good chance of broken bones or concussion.
Joey
@Mark yeah, I seem to recall some discussion along the lines of ‘maybe we don’t need an ice rink anymore’… glad to see that didn’t come to fruition.
@Kate roller derby sounds more chaotic than it is – and IIRC the participants are diligent about wearing helmets, knee pads, elbow pads, etc. But it is a fast-paced, contact sport played on roller skates, so the risk of injury is there
Ian
There’s also St Louis school. If you’re going to say “the” Mile End it seems odd to get worked up about nods to the old town… after all, it’s only “le Mile-End” in French. Don’t even get me started on Mile Ex.
Kate
My only thought was that it would be nice to chip away at the Catholic bedrock of local toponymy.
Chris
Instead of chipping away at Catholic toponymy, which would be merely superficial and not really change anything, we’d be better doing something substantive, like eliminating the tax exemptions religions get.
Kate
Bang that drum, Chris. We’ve gone around this block too many times. I’m going to point out that, like it or not, churches still provide social services which would be hard to replace, because they already exist – somewhat randomly, yes, but they already exist – and would mostly be snuffed out of existence by the kind of rent increases that would follow if the tax change you support was enacted. Snuffed out and not replaced because these are modest grassroots groups for the most part, not official bodies of the Quebec government.
Destroying that fragile web of mutual aid on a principle that “religion = irrelevant” would do more harm than good.
But I’ve said this before, and since you’re not an old lady (as far as I know) who gets a free lunch at a church hall food group, and you may not be a deaf person who gets helped by a church hall office for the hard of hearing, and you may not be someone participating in Puces Pop or Expozine, you can’t see it.
Coming back to add: somehow, also, church structures need to be maintained or they can become hazardous. Very few people are left to tithe to support the churches built at a time when it was inconceivable that most people would have ceased to attend, or to consider themselves part of a parish at all.
Ian
During covid one Sikh temple in Parc Ex organized its own free meal delivery service for shut-ins. I drove for them a couple of times to show my support. They even made halal meals for those requesting it!
I agree churches should pay taxes (or at least be forced to be accountable like other charities) but as Kate points out they do still, to some extent, fill holes the government overlooks – in part because they expect churches to step up.
DeWolf
Ian and Kate make a good point. Whatever you feel about their dogma, religious groups provide many important social services, and since OBNLs are exempt from taxes, I don’t see why churches and synagogues and gurdwaras etc. should also be taxed.
That said, tax exemption should be based on those charitable works and social services. If you’re some venal evangelical church that does nothing for the community, no tax break for you.
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Kate
The death of a woman and her adult son, found lifeless in a car Thursday, are assumed to be a murder‑suicide, although a mutual suicide pact hasn’t been ruled out. The two had lived in a house in St‑Léonard; the man owed money but didn’t have a criminal record.
If you’ve ever been, or know someone who is or has been, the sole carer to an elderly person in dementia, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that someone could be driven to this extreme.
Update: Both the SQ and the BEI are investigating the incident, the SQ querying the SPVM’s response to the initial missing persons call, and the BEI looking into how the SPVM approached the vehicle. This suggests there’s more to the story, but there’s no more information yet.
Uatu
This is the type of policing that totally warrants that pay increase they want /s
Kate
A couple of people disappear, it’s reported in the media, and a couple of days later they turn up dead.
Grim, but it’s the kind of thing that does happen. Now, what could the SPVM have bungled so badly that it needs two separate investigations of its procedures on top of the basic investigation needed into the incident itself?
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Kate
Weekend notes from CityCrunch, La Presse, CultMTL. CultMTL is already listing Halloween events, while La Presse tells us about a Beethoven marathon by the Orchestre Métropolitain.
It will be nice mellow weather all weekend, but beware the driving nightmares.
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Kate
Maxime Bergeron makes a plea in La Presse for Quebec to at least keep a count of the numbers of homeless deaths, which is done in other provinces, but not here.
The paper also talked to Lionel Carmant, minister for social services, about what could be done, and he floated the idea of more services for drug addicts, but what are the odds? A government that’s considering removing people from the care of their own doctors is hardly likely to extend services to unproductive members of society when this flurry of attention is over.
Bit of good news, as a coda: several hundred “social and affordable” units were inaugurated on Thursday. CBC has a video report on one of the projects, built for women.
Ian 13:21 on 2024-10-20 Permalink
Given how many deer I regularly see on Ste Marie I’m almost surprised this is the first one! Or one off the many flocks of wild turkeys, they just go wherever they want.