Details in this piece on two recent homicides including one in which a body was left on the steps of Place des Arts, opposite police headquarters, including arrests.
Updates from May, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Kate
-
Kate
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon is keen on Alberta possibly holding a separation referendum soon.
Don’t these politicians realize what would happen in five minutes if their provinces were to separate? How naive do you have to be? Can they really want to walk open‑eyed into the dragon’s mouth?
bob
Smaller fish seek smaller ponds.
Kevin
These are the same people who are convinced what remains of Canada would immediately sign a free-trade agreement and there would be no disruption of the tourist industry.
Joey
I can see PSSP’s logic for two reasons. First, the Alberta government’s legitimizing of the province’s separatist movement (which, unlike Quebec’s, seems to lack any kind of intellectual/policy underpinning and is just about angry men being angry) reinforces the legitimacy of Quebec’s. Second, if Alberta did indeed split (which, you know, could happen), the appeal to Quebec of staying in a Canada that just lost a huge chunk of its natural resource economy would diminish. Good times!
roberto
Well, since Canada won’t lift a finger to build pipelines for Alberta the province, maybe Alberta the country can finally stop asking permission. /s
Robert H
Isn’t the independence movement in Alberta already divided between those who’d like Edmonton to become the national capital of a sovereign country and those would-be MAGAs who’d like to become the 51st state?
Ian
Wait until they find out they’re landlocked
Kevin
Ian
Those would be extranational pipelines after separation.
Aso worth noting, it violates treaty. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-indigenous-leaders-warn-that-alberta-separation-would-violate-treaty/
GC
While you’re probably correct, Robert H, can’t you see both groups voting yes under the assumption they’ll get their own way?
Robert H
Yes, that’s plausible.
-
Kate
Gérald Tremblay testified Tuesday at the trial of Frank Zampino on corruption charges. Tremblay denies having deliberately turned a blind eye to the complicated system of payoffs that existed at city hall during his administration, and continues to insist he did a good job as mayor.
DeWolf
He would have had to be astonishingly, magically ignorant not to know what was going on right under his nose. But he’s also right that he wasn’t a bad mayor, he actually accomplished quite a bit that we still benefit from today, like the Quartier des spectacles, Bixi, the first (rudimentary) expansion of the protected cycling network…
DeWolf
It might also be too much to give him credit for all the good stuff because the things I mentioned were actually the result of enlightened people working for his administration. Maybe he just had a very light touch, for better or for (much) worse.
bob
Are you serious? He is as corrupt as the day is long, but it’s all water under the bridge. Our taxes should indeed just be paid directly to crime. At least the gallant purveyors of cones are well compensated. Cones forever!
Blork
It occurs to me that maybe he was aware of what was going on, but he was so naïve as to not even think it was “corruption.” Maybe he just assumed that was the normal way to do things. (Mayor Chauncey Gardiner.)
walkerp
Oh please
[thousand rolleyes emojis]Nicholas
Not be it for me to defend the ex-mayor or corruption. But imagine you’re about to open your first restaurant in a few weeks, and someone shows up at your door and says “It’s dangerous out there, you wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to your restaurant. I can help protect you, and ensure that all your garbage will be picked up, and it’ll only cost you [$500 more per month than you were going to pay for garbage anyway].” You say no thanks, and then garbage starts showing up in front of your business, threatening letters, etc. And the guy comes back and says, “Man, looks like you have a garbage problem, can I help? You know, garbage men want to get paid, you don’t want them protesting out front on your opening day.” And you calculate that with expected revenues of $200,000, that extra is only 3%. So maybe you let Mr. 3% take his money and you actually get some stuff done, finish your project, people are proud of you.
It’s impossible to have zero corruption in a large organization like a city of two million people. You want it to be low, but zero is never going to happen, someone will steal a post-it. So now it’s just a matter of degree: if you’re going to have to accept some corruption, maybe a bit more than you’d hope is ok. Maybe you don’t look too hard, you let people know what big projects you want done and say so long as they get done you’ll be happy. Maybe you realize if you spend all your time fighting it, all the people skimming money off the corrupt system will find a way to stop everything you want do, you’ll have nothing to show for your work, and you’ll get thrown out of office a failure.
Is this moral, just? Absolutely not. Corruption is corrosive to democracy in so many ways. But I can understand why someone who thinks they can’t beat them will just ignore it and try to get some things done. Even if in hindsight it turns out UPAC did an awful lot and maybe good people could have fought it and won. I wish this wasn’t the case, but I think a lot of people running large organizations or companies know there’s fraud going on and they figure they can’t stop it all, concentrate on their big goals. No idea what happened in this specific case.
Ian
Is it wrong for a man to steal bread for his starving family? No. Let’s say his family don’t like bread, they like cigarettes, and instead of giving them away for free, he sells them at a price so low it’s practically free?
Joey
Well played, Ian…
-
Kate
The 100 Best Restaurants list – a brainchild of Jacob Richler and just as subjective as any list of the kind – includes a reasonable selection of Montreal establishments, although – typically – decades after the existence of the web, the Gazette does not link to the site it’s reporting on. However, that’s moot, as the Canada’s 100 best site doesn’t resolve anyway.
La Presse also covers the story.
This will probably fall into the memory hole when the Michelin stars are announced on May 15.
MarcG
canadas100best.com works fine for me
Kate
For me it now spits out a “This site could be risky” warning in four languages.
Blork
Definitely could be risky to your wallet.
Kate
The kind of food being praised on that site – showtime food with elaborate plating – doesn’t tempt me at all, luckily.
-
Kate
After public outcry Quebec has found the funds to begin work at Maisonneuve‑Rosemont Hospital. Work should start this year.
Chris
And the first priority: a new parking lot! Unbelievable.
Ian
The quote seems pretty clear …
“In particular, the funds made available would enable construction of the new multi-level parking lot to begin, which must be built first so that work can start on the space occupied by the current parking lot.”
Why would you expect a hospital not to have functional parking, even if only for staff and emergency vehicles… and why build parking just for that if you already have plans to replace land-inefficient parking lots with more efficient multi-storey parking?DavidH
The current parking situation is a mess. There are a bunch of separate parking lots, each with a different gate. It is all surface parking which takes up lots of real estate. It make sense to build a multi-level parking lot to take the current lots back first.
Kevin
Hospital staff in Halifax have been having severe problems because they tore down parking garages a few years ago, and now that the Nova Scotia government has implemented free parking for patients, cannot find anywhere to park near their workplace.
I don’t know why anyone is surprised that people who are sick, injured, or have mobility issues get driven to hospitals by family members.
Blork
…and people who work at the hospitals. Especially ones who work odd shifts.
Chris
Improving parking is fine, my beef is that it’s *first* on their list. I’d rather they start with, I dunno, making backup generators work in the face of a little wind and rain.
Kevin
My former workplace had two generators in the parking garage.
Sometime you gotta build something new so you can step by step and demolish the rest.
-
Kate
Having just discontinued its bus shuttles, the REM was down on Tuesday morning. After all, it’s raining.
-
Kate
Donald Trump’s recent announcement of a 100% foreign film tariff will be bad for the local production industry.
Ephraim
About 70% of the gross revenue of films, worldwide is from American films. So if they put on a reciprocal tariff, that will hurt US industry more. Not to mention 50 U.S.C. § 1702(b)(3) which specifically excludes films from presidential authority, so officially it would need to go through both houses. But let’s be realistic, the largest part of foreign films aren’t getting to the US anyway… or are Americans now watching Bollywood and Chinese films? (Kungywood? Mandrywood? Hannywood?)
Blork
While it’s hard to say for sure, because nobody ever really knows WTF Trump is talking about (including Trump) most people seem to think the focus of the tariffs is on US productions that outsource part of the production to companies in other countries. Many US films are shot in Canada (and other places) standing in for US locations, and a lot of post-production work (editing, special effects, color balancing, etc.) is done by companies here and in other countries. Typically this is done because those other countries offer tax incentives that make it less expensive to do the work there than it would be to do it domestically in the US.
So from a purely “protect our home workers” point of view you can see how it fits into the protectionist mindset that Trump puts forward to prop up support among US working people. (There are a lot of un- and under-employed production and post-production workers in the US because of these tax incentives from other countries.)
But how do you enforce that? And at what cost?
Joey
Blork, I don’t think you can enforce it – at any cost. There’s really only three things that the US can do. First, establish federal subsidies for film production, though that will just contribute to the race to the bottom that has drawn production away from the US (and even then you have intra-US competition with states like Georgia luring productions away from California). Second, you can ensure that American production facilities are state of the art – if you can’t compete in subsidies you have to find other ways of generating value for producers. Third, build housing! Make it affordable to live in California – no easy feat, especially after this winter’s fires.
But the idea that you would somehow impose tariffs on films – which will only lead to reciprocal tariffs around the world that will destroy American film production and cultural heft – might be the most insane of all of Trump’s foolishness.
Reply