A car was torched in Cartierville early Saturday, and another in the same location early Sunday.
None of the reports of the second incident state clearly whether both cars belonged to the same address.
There are so many arsons now that I mostly don’t blog about them, although I pin them on the incident map.
Saturday had such great weather that hundreds of people flocked to Mount Royal, and it looks like Sunday to Wednesday will be as pleasant.
I was out walking around Saturday. Streets were crowded too, and when I took a bus, it felt like traffic was also nuts for a Saturday. I guess we all know we’ll be cocooning soon enough.
I was on the mountain on Friday. I had a good time.
I was there on Friday as well and was surprised at all of the blocked paths due to work being done. Not exactly a relaxing atmosphere but the colours were nice. Looking at the mountain today from Verdun it looks like there’s a lot more red even a few days later.
They’ve been fighting a losing battle against erosion for a long time. People persist in barging off paths and through fragile undergrowth so they need to block access to some areas till plants regrow.
At least in one case they were building a bridge/walkway over a mucky area.
As of last winter they were still cutting down ash trees. Wood chips and sawdust are really not great on a cross-country ski track, especially downhill.
MarcG, there are wooden walkways over wetlands in some of the more far-flung nature parks on the island of Montreal, and on Île Bizard. Here’s a photo I took in the Île Bizard nature park a few years ago. That’s all rushes and marsh around the walkway. So maybe they can arrange something similar for parts of Mount Royal.
A wooden bridge was already built over part of the Mount Royal wetlands, replacing a section of one of the main paths that lead to the part of the park below the east outlook. About a decade ago IIRC.
On the east side of the mountain, there’s really only one wetland for most of the year, The water comes from a spring at the very foot of the east face, visited by wildlife, police horses and the occasional hiker.
The fences are necessary because the environment has been severely degraded over the years by a number of factors, such as Drapeau’s clearing of undergrowth in former gay cruising areas, heavy off-trail foot traffic, mountain bikes and “gatherers” (have seen people descending the mountain with huge bouquets of wildflowers, including trilliums, a threatened species).
A study of historical records by a McGill environment professor shows that Montreal is one‑third less snowy now than it was in the 19th century.
Just checked and the group doing the transcription of historical weather data mentioned in the article is asking citizens to help do the transcription. Apparently machines can’t do it and it will take forever so they need legions of volunteers. Here’s the website: https://draw.geog.mcgill.ca/en
If citizen science is your thing, you can create an account and contribute an hour or more to make vast archive accessible to meteorological scientists. An interesting project in the service of climate crisis knowledge!
The CSSDM has suspended eleven teachers at Bedford School, where a journalist’s inquiry turned up the initial evidence of a toxic climate.
Although the story involves a bullying clique that imposed outdated ideas about student discipline, refused to accept current concepts like learning difficulties and ADHD, and didn’t want to teach science or sex ed, most comments I see lean hard on the fact that the teachers, or most of them, were from a majority Muslim country – although nobody has claimed they were proselytizing to the students.
Jean‑François Roberge, who glories in the title ministre responsible de la Laïcité, even blames religious values, although I suspect it’s quite easy to have old‑fashioned ideas about education without religion being the reason. But in Quebec, it’s probably natural to equate old‑school educational methods with religion, since they were synonymous here for so long. Whatever Roberge says, most of what’s reported at Bedford School isn’t religious values.
It sounds a bit more than old-fashioned values though…eg: intimidation, humiliation, and physical violence. If that’s (still) normal for Muslim countries (or any of the old countries including France), then teachers who want to replicate that here are going to face censure – as they should, imo. Good for the press for bringing this to light; what a surprisingly quick response from CSSDM.
I totally agree that their methods were bad and the situation had to end. But I’m not buying that these methods were based on Muslim values, any more than the harsh treatment my parents reported from their teachers (nuns and brothers, for the most part, in public schools in Montreal) had anything to do with Christian values.
Some societies believe in harsh treatment for kids with various kinds of troubles. The Bible has “spare the rod and spoil the child” (Proverbs 13:24, according to Google) but I don’t know what, if anything, the Quran has to say about it.* I’m simply suspicious of the tendency to dogpile on Islam.
My father had a story about a teacher he admired, a Christian Brother, who grabbed a classmate by the shirt front and dangled him outside the second-floor window while haranguing him about some small infraction in class. And that was typical. In grade school myself, we were warned about the strap (I don’t think anyone actually received it in my time) and certain teachers were known to fling chalk or board erasers at kids for chatting or misbehaving in class. I only saw this happen a couple of times. I don’t think this could be blamed on Christianity.
*Later, I consulted Ali at the fruiterie, who often reads the Quran between customers. He assures me there’s no equivalent to “spare the rod and spoil the child” in Islam, but it does instruct Muslims to teach their kids the elements of the religion.
I unfortunately spent my high school years in small town Oklahoma. Paddling male students was common. The shop teacher, also the football coach, had a “board of education” until he broke a student’s hip using it. The school took away his paddle but I don’t believe he suffered any other repercussions.
I finished the report: the only claims about religion were that there were a lof of Muslim teachers and there may have been some favoritism about how they decided among themselves who would request specific days off. And I suppose some thought that maybe the refusal to teach some subjects was related to this — but that included science and music, not just sex ed. (Note: I am told that sex ed is fairly regularly just left out of the curriculum, often due to parental pressure.)
The most iinteresting part really is how many levels of dysfunction there are in the education system, and how hard it is to actually do anything to teachers. Some excerpts:
1. Sans faire un portrait exhaustif des divers processus, il faut savoir qu’il existe différents types d’employés au CSSDM. Il y a d’abord les employés réguliers et les non réguliers. Une fois qu’un enseignant avec brevet obtient un emploi à statut régulier, aucune évaluation de rendement n’est prévue pour la suite de sa carrière.
7. Dans le cas du MEQ, en ce qui concerne l’autorisation d’enseigner, s’il existe bel et bien un recours sur l’autorisation d’enseigner par l’article 26 de la LIP pour les enseignants qui commettent une faute grave dans l’exercice de leurs fonctions ou un acte dérogatoire à la profession enseignante, il n’existe pas de processus prévu pour évaluer la compétence d’un enseignant. En effet, une fois que l’autorisation d’enseigner est accordée à un individu, seul le processus prévu à l’article 26 de la LIP ou l’émergence d’antécédents judiciaires peuvent faire en sorte de remettre en question cette autorisation,
Thank you for going through the report and finding those key sections, jeather.
So once a teacher has permanence, it’s hard to get rid of them.
I can’t say that I recommend reading the report, but I will say it was fascinating and informative and very long.
Yes, essentially once you have a brevet, it’s forever, and once you have permanence you can’t be made to leave a school. (Note that some of this is specific to the union rules, though I assume it is much the same for all teachers whichever union.) There’s no professional order and no real follow up on continuing education requirements.
I know the EMSB has a similar arrangement.
JaneyB 11:22 on 2024-10-20 Permalink
That’s a great map. Thanks!
Kate 20:52 on 2024-10-20 Permalink
It’s interesting to see it build over time. I suppose I could use the same impulse to do some work on the historical records you link two posts below.
walkerp 08:58 on 2024-10-21 Permalink
It’s quite interesting, now that you have so many data points. Does the island of unburnt cars that is the Plateau/Parc Ex/Little Italy reveal a pattern of behaviour? Are they protected areas because it would bring to much heat to burn cars and buildings in these tony neighbourhoods? Or is there just less organized crime there?
Kate 09:58 on 2024-10-21 Permalink
Or fewer cars?
DeWolf 10:17 on 2024-10-21 Permalink
I see four incidents on the Plateau so it’s not exactly arson-free.
There are a lot of incidents in VSL/Cartierville and St-Leo but aside from that, I don’t think you can draw any conclusions. There aren’t enough arsons in other neighbourhoods to draw a pattern.
And that’s the first time I’ve ever seen Park Ex described as “tony”!
Joey 11:44 on 2024-10-21 Permalink
@walkerp there was a story a few years back about the guy who owned a patisserie on Jeanne-Mance/St-Viateur – the owner went to the press instead of paying protection money. I notice that this shop has been replaced by a new (chain, obvs) Italian bakery. Anyway, I suspect that the commerces in the Plateau/Little Italy/etc pay what’s demanded and move on. Maybe it’s just that the OC in these areas is better established.
DeWolf 10:58 on 2024-10-22 Permalink
The story of the bakery at St-Viateur and Jeanne-Mance is telling because it proves my point that the protection racket here usually isn’t random, it’s based on existing connections to the mafia. The bakery was originally a franchise of Pagel, which was owned by a mobbed-up guy who testified before the Charbonneau commission. An employee bought two franchises from that mobbed-up guy, then when the whole Pagel business went bankrupt, the mafia came calling for the money they were owed.
https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2013/02/18/lenfer-dun-patissier-intimide
We’ve discussed this before, but the idea that every retail business pays protection money to organized crime in Montreal is ludicrous. In Palermo, an estimated 80% of businesses pay protection money, and if you’ve ever been to Palermo, the mafia presence is noticeable even to a casual visitor. So Montreal is on par with the most corrupt, mafia-ridden city in Italy, but somehow the gangsters here are so sophisticated they’ve managed to keep it extra hush-hush?
Last time I brought this up all the uncles on this page tried to gaslight me into thinking that somehow every friend I have who has ever owned a retail business in Montreal has been lying to me about never having to pay protection money.
Ian 13:50 on 2024-10-24 Permalink
Ah yes, your friends we hear so much about. Clearly representative.
I guess all those business owners that get shaken down are crooks, eh? Sounds suspiciously like victim blaming. “Bad things only happen to bad people” is such a sheltered, elitist perspective 😉