The case against billionaire Robert Miller, charged with paying minors for sexual services, has been halted as the Crown has agreed that Miller is unfit to stand trial. The judge will rule Tuesday on a stay of proceedings.
Tuesday, the judge confirmed that the billionaire will not face trial.
Taylor C. Noakes wrote about Miller in The Walrus last year.
The city is stopping new road construction downtown and tidying up existing sites to make the city nicer for the Grand Prix.
It’s also promising that things will be super nice and no mishaps will occur as – apparently – made last year’s event into a notorious worldwide fiasco.
The STM strike is on, and is having an impact on the city.
La Presse has a guide to coping and various media have summaries of what you should know. The Gazette talked to some commuters who were out of touch with the news.
24hres lays out the metro schedule in detail.
Anecdotally, I noticed a lot more cars on the road today. Luckily, I was on my bike, so I wasn’t impacted by the traffic, but there seemed to be a lot more of it at least in the east end going into town.
Considering school is still on and high schools are in exams, there are a LOT more cars out in the mornings.
Have high school hours changed that much? Because the hours as scheduled seem to work ok for going to school and back (limited activities before/after).
Well, just using one of my kids and her friends as an example … At my kid’s high school (EMSB) grade 8 exams start at 9, finishing just before noon. There is no metros at her stop until 4. Since high schools have no cachement area, lots of kids come in from all over. All EMSB high schools have the same schedule for grade 8 exams.
Given the metros start back up at 2:45 and the last train leaves the terminuses around 5, it seems odd that there are none until 4. But I did not consider half day schedules for exams, 3 hours is a long time to wait around.
I’m just taking the word of an 8th grader haha – but yeah, she has to get the orange line to the blue line, there’s no direct bus. Her exam today was at 9 and she called me at 11:30.
Ok I interpret that as “I can only get home at 4”. So this does entirely seem fine for most full day school schedules, which I am sure what was considered.
The thing that got to me is that the CBC said last time it took 170 meetings to get to an agreement, and this year they have only had 70.
Taylor C. Noakes 21:19 on 2025-06-09 Permalink
So you can be credibly charged with numerous counts of paying to rape children, over several decades, and never have to even show up to court in person?
Call me a cynic but I suspect poor people aren’t allowed to phone in to their trials
Ian 21:54 on 2025-06-09 Permalink
Actually being declared unfit is no small thing, and they do it for poor people, too.
If you want to be class conscious about it, the bigger issue is that people with class power can get away with it a lot longer so in that sense they do have better chances of sliding into frailty and dementia before their abuses go to trial.
Taylor C. Noakes 22:06 on 2025-06-09 Permalink
@Ian
Fair enough, but he *never* set foot in court, right?
How does anyone facing that many serious charges never set foot in a courthouse?
Kate 22:15 on 2025-06-09 Permalink
Check out the final sentence in La Presse’s piece, though: “Le milliardaire souhaite congeler sa dépouille dans l’azote liquide après son décès, dans l’espoir d’être ressuscité par une technologie futuriste un jour.”
If he wakes up in 2225, will he be back on trial?
Taylor, as Ian says, the wealthy can stall. The very wealthy can apparently stall indefinitely.
walkerp 07:47 on 2025-06-10 Permalink
Can they not still sue his estate at least?
Taylor C. Noakes 07:57 on 2025-06-10 Permalink
@Kate – excellent point. Also wtf?
Also – the old Future Electronics campus in Vaudreuil is a *weird* building (it gets weirder the longer you look at it… it’s for sale, apparently and has a wide variety of features I never would have associated with an electronic components reseller… i.e. it’s not a warehouse, features an auditorium and lab facilities and considerable security, as well as an indoor parking garage on its expansive campus setting. I can’t find any info on it ever operating as a place of business though… it’s as mysterious as Miller, apparently).
Kevin 08:21 on 2025-06-10 Permalink
I believe Miller did make a few appearances via videoconference, but the trials against Miller were in the early phases and dealing with motions regarding his health.
Almost a dozen doctors have testified on this one issue.
Justice is exceedingly slow in Canada.
Jim 08:33 on 2025-06-10 Permalink
Indeed, that campus looks like something right out of ‘Stranger Things’. https://maps.app.goo.gl/mspPKaMr4oBFJck56
Kate 09:01 on 2025-06-10 Permalink
Taylor, I suspect some VX research may have been going on there.
Joey 09:58 on 2025-06-10 Permalink
I’m pretty sure that in the 90s the ice cream store I worked for catered an office party there… seemed like a regular place of business at the time, but who knows.
The CBC piece I saw last night indicated that the medical evaluation has determined that Miller is in the final stages of Parkinson’s (he was diagnosed in 1995) and struggles to stay alert and is in constant pain, making it basically impossible for him to participate in court proceedings – the prosecutor basically said it wouldn’t be worth the expense to bring him to court every day, implying that even if he’s convicted he won’t be around much longer.
@walkerp this is the criminal trial, the multiple civil suits are ongoing and will presumably outlast his lifetime.
Good riddance.
Taylor C. Noakes 13:11 on 2025-06-10 Permalink
@Kate – I mean, it really does doesn’t it
Perhaps that’s the next shoe to drop… we’ll find out he was shielded from accountability because he masterminded Canada’s secret chemical weapons program
dhomas 16:27 on 2025-06-10 Permalink
So I worked at Future Electronics in the early 2000s. I believe I stopped working there in about December 2001. I don’t remember ever hearing about the Vaudreuil building, though it seems to have been built in 1972 (according to Evalweb). I only knew of the building in Pointe-Claire on Hymus. It was a bit of strange place to work. I worked in the HR department at the time. Since HR folks were not always good at IT tasks at the time, I was hired as the “techy” guy in the office. My official title was “Resume Sourcing Agent”, since I would get resumes from online sources (think Monster.com). I automated the whole task to download and filter the resumes by certain criteria. The main criteria was that they had to have a university degree, no matter what field. They hired mostly young people fresh out of university, and gave them pretty decent training. Employees would very often use it as a stepping stone to other jobs. The Christmas parties were pretty wild. A bunch of young kids partying in a huge building with lots of nooks and crannies. There was always gossip after those parties. Now I wonder what was going on at the Vaudreuil building.
Andrew 16:30 on 2025-06-10 Permalink
So at a previous job in the early 2000s, we worked on plans for some renovations at Future, the building on Hymus though. It was a big private office, but the only reason I remember it at all is the plan showed a bedroom connected to the office, and we made some jokes about “they must work late nights or something” Took 20 years to realize how skeevy it was.
CE 16:56 on 2025-06-10 Permalink
That’s what that place is?? I’ve biked to Oka a few times over the years and always go past that building and always wondered what that big building in the middle of a field with no sign was. From the beach at Oka, you can see it in the distance.
MarcG 17:25 on 2025-06-10 Permalink
I’ve also always wondered from Oka beach what the hell that downtown-office-building looking thing was doing over there in the middle of noplace. My guess was CSIS.
GC 18:51 on 2025-06-10 Permalink
Add me to that list. I remember seeing that thing from a distance and being curious, but always kind of forgetting about looking it up after I got home.
As far as Miller is concerned, at least he shouldn’t have any new victims in his current condition?