Updates from November, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 20:02 on 2024-11-30 Permalink | Reply  

    Following the recent news that reporter Daniel Renaud had a price placed on his head by a gangster, La Presse talked to retired journalist Jean‑Pierre Charbonneau, who was shot in Le Devoir’s newsroom in 1973 because of his reports on organized crime. This piece also harks back to the shooting of crime reporter Michel Auger in the Journal parking lot in 2000 – still not solved – but they can’t interview Auger because he died in 2020 of an unrelated condition.

    François Cardinal writes a bracing editorial refusing intimidation, and Paul Arcand also looks back at the uses of fear.

    We’re fortunate to live in a place where events like this happen every 25 years or so and are condemned by the government. In some places, they happen all the time.

     

    • Kate 16:30 on 2024-11-30 Permalink | Reply  

      In other news: Some tents will be removed from a Notre‑Dame East encampment on Monday, but the rest will be spared by the ministry of transport for the rest of the winter • The police budget for 2025 comes in at $824 million, critics saying some of those funds could be better used elsewhere • The New York Post is slamming Montreal repeatedly as the antisemitism capital of North America – this may have consequences • Six heritage prizes have been given out for projects around town (Le Devoir lists five prizes) • Canadian Architect also awarded two other Montreal projects in its 2024 list

       

      • Mozai 18:07 on 2024-11-30 Permalink

        Is the NYPost their Toronto Sun, or Daily Mail (UK) ?

      • Joey 19:01 on 2024-11-30 Permalink

        Yes, it’s a Murdoch paper.

      • saintjacques 08:47 on 2024-12-01 Permalink

        Analogous to the Toronto Sun, with a light sprinkle of Allô Police thrown in for good measure. Editorially, it’s the apotheosis of right-leaning populism. So-called ‘common sense conservatism.’

    • Kate 12:40 on 2024-11-30 Permalink | Reply  

      The Rosemont family facing expropriation by the STM has been given more time but not a definitive decision and no offer of more money. The STM may yet find a different spot for their metro ventilation station – or not.

       

      • Kate 10:38 on 2024-11-30 Permalink | Reply  

        There was a fatal car crash in Verdun on Friday evening, and the surviving driver, who may have been intoxicated, has been arrested.

        TVA later reported some details about the suspect, including that he was already charged with impaired driving in an incident from 2023.

         

        • Kate 10:33 on 2024-11-30 Permalink | Reply  

          Housing minister and real estate broker France-Elaine Duranceau was booed on stage during a homelessness forum in Quebec City on Friday, specifically after saying that “no one can be evicted in Quebec in a context of renovation.”

           

          • Kate 10:31 on 2024-11-30 Permalink | Reply  

            Global’s headline that the new stadium roof will cost $870 million is old news, the figure having been given out, and debunked by the Journal, back in April.

             

            • Ephraim 11:27 on 2024-11-30 Permalink

              How much to fix the acoustics?

            • Kate 11:30 on 2024-11-30 Permalink

              I don’t think we’ll know the price tag until it’s done.

          • Kate 10:19 on 2024-11-30 Permalink | Reply  

            Saturday, La Presse has what it labels five chapters on the life and crimes of Frederick Silva as recounted by himself and taken down by Daniel Renaud.

             

            • Kate 18:52 on 2024-11-29 Permalink | Reply  

              Ensemble is having to extend its deadline for leadership candidacies because only one person has applied and he was judged unsuitable.

               

              • DeWolf 23:38 on 2024-11-29 Permalink

                You’re telling me that a ragtag pseudo-party with no vision and a big debt is having a hard time finding someone to lead it? I am shocked.

                I suppose all the longtime career politicians in Ensemble’s ranks are too comfortable running their little suburban fiefdoms to want to actually govern the city.

              • James 10:04 on 2024-11-30 Permalink

                Much easier to criticise everything and never offer any actual ideas to solve problems. They always get a quote in every city news article to offer “balance”.

              • Kate 20:26 on 2024-11-30 Permalink

                Ensemble is not really a party, but a loose assemblage of people who figured out how to get elected municipally, so they go on doing it. It would be better for the city if they had coherent ideas and proposals for solving its problems, but all they do is snipe from the sidelines.

                I think this is one reason I resist calling them “the opposition” because in the Westminster system the opposition usually consists of a party with a semblance of political continuity and at least an attempt at a basic political philosophy, but I couldn’t name one principle that I think Ensemble stands for.

            • Kate 17:42 on 2024-11-29 Permalink | Reply  

              Normand Guérin, convicted in the 1979 rape and murder of two teenagers – notorious for having thrown their bodies off the Jacques‑Cartier bridge – is to be allowed unescorted leaves from prison, but not parole. Guérin is now 71 years old; his accomplice, Gilles Pimparé, is still locked up.

               

              • Kate 17:24 on 2024-11-29 Permalink | Reply  

                A deal has been struck to end the Quebec-Ottawa standoff on $50 million for the homeless, but Lionel Carmant is shifty here on what the holdup was. “Il y a eu de la négociation” is not a good answer.

                 

                • Kate 14:05 on 2024-11-29 Permalink | Reply  

                  Charges have been dropped against three pro‑Palestinian activists accused of criminally harassing federal immigration minister Marc Miller at his office in Montreal.

                   

                  • Kate 13:37 on 2024-11-29 Permalink | Reply  

                    The new health bureaucracy Santé Québec is to take over management this weekend, with the mandate to cut $1.5 billion in costs. Christian Dubé has finally admitted there will be an impact on services.

                    Toula Drimonis asks how cutting services will save Quebec health care and comes to the only conclusion: it won’t.

                     

                    • Uatu 16:52 on 2024-11-29 Permalink

                      The 1.5 billion is basically to pay for setting up this new agency. What a load of crap. In the past we’ve gone through buying out doctors and nurses, austerity, setting up super hospitals to centralize specialized care and supposedly to attract top medical doctors and staff. None of it has improved the medical system. So I guess we’re going to have yet another meeting in my department about possible job cuts. Ugh. On top of that, Dube got himself a 30per cent raise last year and he doesn’t even have to show up for question period. It’s just so depressing….

                    • MtlWeb 08:59 on 2024-11-30 Permalink

                      @Uatu That is the same exact feel in my department; the uncertainty of what’s to come next, with the ‘one seniority list’ across the province, and now this latest threat of cutting hours/positions even when we have been short of staff and trying to recruit since pre-C19, has made an already difficult environment, into one filled with gloom for our younger staff. I am lucky and can sail away into retirement mid-January but I will return a week later for 2-3 shifts/week to help with team morale & prevent some forced OT, which as we constantly hear, only occurs in the francophone hospitals (sarcasm). Have seen and lived through all those promises/plans that you fondly describe above but this post-Covid daily reality should be cause for the public to stand up and scream but this government’s Wag the Dog approach works wonders until one lands in the ER and is waiting for their ortho/abdo surgery to be done.

                  • Kate 12:38 on 2024-11-29 Permalink | Reply  

                    In L’actualité, Karel Mayrand dissects the facts about bike paths in Montreal: in 2020, there were more than a million cyclists here, against 983,000 motor vehicles, while cars dominate 75% of the public roadway vs. barely 1% for cyclists.

                    He also reminds us that even though Valérie Plante is both praised and condemned for being the cyclist mayor, Bixi was started under Tremblay then rescued under Coderre, and that Plante has added 220 km to the bike path network so far – the same as Coderre. Lots of other crunchy facts and stats here that defy the complaints that bike paths cost too much money and take up too much space.

                     

                    • DavidH 19:57 on 2024-11-29 Permalink

                      Coderre’s bike path mileage is mostly paint on asphalt with no real infrastructure though, not real thought-out bike paths like the REV or the Bellechasse lanes which Projet championed.

                    • Kate 20:10 on 2024-11-29 Permalink

                      True. But they also made some people mad.

                    • CE 23:39 on 2024-11-29 Permalink

                      Tremblay actually did quite a bit for cycling when he was mayor. Bixi started under him which has revolutionized cycling not just here but around the world. The de Maisonneuve bike path was built by his administration. The de Maisonneuve path is a bit quaint and outdated now but when it was built, there was nothing really like it in North America.

                    • DeWolf 23:48 on 2024-11-29 Permalink

                      The Ford debacle in Ontario makes me nervous, but I just need to keep telling myself that we are so much further along than Toronto ever was, and despite all the moaning in QMI outlets and on social media, there is much broader political and popular support here for active transport than there has ever been in Ontario. It isn’t just Montreal making these improvements but cities all over Quebec. Check out what has been happening under Bruno Marchand in Quebec City.

                      Plante isn’t a revolutionary. Her legacy is taking things that were already underway in Montreal under previous administrations, namely public space improvements and cycling infrastructure, and making them more robust, more coherent in their implementation and much higher quality. But the framework was already in place and it will still be in place after she leaves office.

                  • Kate 11:53 on 2024-11-29 Permalink | Reply  

                    An unspecified threat forced the evacuation of Père-Marquette school Friday morning in Petite‑Patrie, but I’m mostly posting this because isn’t that an absolute gem of Quebec brutalist educational architecture?

                     

                    • Nicholas 14:15 on 2024-11-29 Permalink

                      It’s even worse than Jeanne Mance high school in the Plateau. Biking by Père Marquette on Bellechasse really is an experience.

                    • dhomas 18:03 on 2024-11-29 Permalink

                      Have you ever seen Louis-Joseph Papineau school, in Saint-Michel? They finally started adding windows last year, but until then, there was not a single window in the place. I never understood it when I lived around there. The place looked like a prison.
                      Here’s some info about the work being done:
                      https://louis-joseph-papineau.cssdm.gouv.qc.ca/notre-ecole/travaux/
                      Google Maps will still show you how it looked before. Truly atrocious.

                    • Kate 19:10 on 2024-11-29 Permalink

                      You aren’t kidding, dhomas. That’s from 2022 and the whole thing looks like a prison.

                      I suppose the theory was that windows in a classroom create a distraction?

                      Reddit had a post about that school a few months ago, in the UrbanHell subreddit.

                  • Kate 11:11 on 2024-11-29 Permalink | Reply  

                    Different media are putting subtly distinct spins on the story about Complexe Desjardins playing Baby Shark to deter the homeless from using its stairwells for shelter. Some are matter‑of‑fact like Radio-Canada but Global heads it as keeping unhoused people out of stairwells and CityNews as preventing the unhoused from loitering. (Is “unhoused” now a polite term for “homeless”?)

                    I think we can keep two ideas in our heads at the same time. One is that people simply need to shelter from the cold at times, although if you’re not shopping, you’re loitering and therefore undesirable. But the other is that nobody working for the mall should have to clean up the kind of mess that may be left by people using dangerous drugs, with all the consequences thereof. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Complexe Desjardins not to want people to camp in its emergency exit stairs. However, if there’s nowhere else for them to go, what next?

                     

                    • azrhey 11:19 on 2024-11-29 Permalink

                      From what I understand, unhoused is a subset of homeless. If you are are homeless you don’t have a physical home to call yours, but you could be staying with a friend, in a shelter, in a refuge, couch surfing…

                      If you are unhoused, you are staying outside and have nowhere to go.

                      OTOH, when I lived in the UK, support orgs would also insist on unhoused, because the concept of home can be more vague, as some people who had been living in a tent under a bridge for years would call that home, but it was not a house. So, your mileage may vary. But I am seeing more and more unhoused and personally I am ok with that.

                    • CE 11:30 on 2024-11-29 Permalink

                      I also see “person experiencing homelessness” sometimes, especially on English CBC.

                    • MarcG 11:33 on 2024-11-29 Permalink

                      My 100% unresearched impression of homeless vs unhoused is related the delegation of responsibility: ‘homeless’ implies that the person has failed to provide for themselves whereas ‘unhoused’ indicates that it’s the collective who has failed to house one of its members.

                    • Chris 16:32 on 2024-11-30 Permalink

                      Kate, ‘unhoused’ is the new PC term for homeless. “person experiencing homelessness” is even more PC. And as George Carlin observed these PC terms usually are longer and more sterile than what they try to replace. But changing the name of the condition does not change the condition.

                    • MarcG 08:35 on 2024-12-01 Permalink

                      Great piece in Esquire a few days ago by a writer who has found himself homeless, unhoused, and experiencing homelessness.

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