Another drowning happened Monday afternoon at Verdun beach. CTV’s headline says “possible drowning” but the article goes on to say that “the man’s body was recovered Monday evening” which is pretty definitive. TVA is less tentative.
Updates from June, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The heat record for St‑Jean eve has been broken, with a recording of 34.9° at 3 pm.Ian
Montreal in a summer heatwave is when it’s at its sexiest and weirdest.
Robert H
One humid night, you walk down a leafy street in the Plateau and expect to see some guy in a sweat stained t-shirt standing at the foot of some winding stairs looking up at a balcony and yelling “Stellllaaaaaah!”
Janet
I passed through Quebec City in ’78 in the midst of the Festival d’été. It was steamy hot, people were dancing in the street and love was in the air. Down chemin St-Louis came a calèche with a drunk guy in a tuxedo standing up and bowing to the crowds. Not long after, another guy came flopping down the middle of the street in flippers and a snorkel and not much else. My kind of town. I had been heading to Halifax but decided to stick around for the summer and eventually moved here for good in ’84.
Ian
Montreal in the 80s was pretty wild, I can only imagine Montreal in the 70s!
Tee Owe
It may be a case of, if you can remember it, then you weren’t there
Ian
I barely recall entering Thunderdome and Foufounes for the first time in 1986, and certainly nothing at all of the rest of those nights.
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Kate
A man has died after a stabbing in Montreal North on Monday morning. It’s the 17th homicide of the year.
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Kate
Amherst Street was renamed Atateken in 2019. Now the last remnant of the British general, La rue du Square‑Amherst – a one‑block street north of Ontario, running behind the old Marché St‑Jacques building – is to be renamed la place du Pain-et-des-Roses.
EmilyG
I wonder if Beaconsfield will ever change the name of Amherst Street in Beaconsfield.
Expansion-mania
Beaconsfield has no incentive to do this.
The suburbs owe their sprawling size to the deployment of smallpox blankets by men like Jeffrey.
MarcG
TIL that suburbs are settler colonies but cities are not.
Ian
It’s the smoke trees, if I recall Qatzi’s reasoning correctly.
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Kate
An Outremont school got permission to close their street to traffic in May and June, but Hasidic operators of a school bus are not happy.
jeather
It seems like it was closed because it’s on the same block as a private school, where all the parents drive their kids. I don’t entirely understand the complaint that this is too difficult because there are lots of children going on lots of different buses and they can’t all be sent out alone to walk half a block (as only half the block is closed) BUT that it would be okay if it were just during school dropoff/pickup hours. (Mornings must overlap, even if afternoons/evenings don’t.)
I do see the issue with trucks having to do a u turn on this street, though.
Nicholas
Kids can’t walk half a block alone on what has become a dead end street? Kids can’t be alone at home with siblings for 5 minutes while the parent walks half a block away? Throw my parents in jail!
Kate
Nicholas, I think the general feeling about guarding kids has changed since we were small. Also – and I don’t know whether this comes into it or not – the Hasidim may feel that, with their kids a visible minority by choice, they might be targets for bullying or worse.
Chris
“with their kids a visible minority by choice”. By their *parents* choice you mean.
Hassidic kids are outside a lot generally, I don’t think walking half a block more will open them to “bullying or worse” anymore than they are already.
Nicholas
I agree with Chris, they’re out a lot, including without parents, based on what I’ve seen when in the area. Non-Hassidic kids near me are out a lot too. Each kid is different, and parents get to decide who’s mature enough to be out on their own, whether 5 or 8. But if a single kid is going to a bus without a sibling and also no other sibling is at home to watch their siblings for a few minutes, I guess you take that sibling over too. I remember my sibling or me having to dress up to go out for the other’s trip somewhere.
I should add it’s also the parents’ choice to not send their young kids to the elementary school on their block.
Joey
I don’t know how many times I’ve watched the school bus drop kids off along the one (admittedly long, but not dangerous) block of Jeanne-Mance between Fairmount and St-Viateur – the bus stops every few meters to ensure that kids are dropped off in front of their door. I have no idea why they wouldn’t just drop some of the kids off at Fairmount, some at the midpoint of the block (Groll) and some at St-Viateur. Why each kid has to get off literally in front of their house, prolonging the drop-off, is beyond me. And these are kids who, unlike non-Hasidic children, are constantly playing all over the block.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like the parents of kids at the private school, many of whom drive from all over to bring their kids to school, are overwhelming the block and making things dangerous for the kids who get to school on foot to by bike, with or without parents – many of whom are likely enrolled at the local alternative school on the block. The decision to close the block to traffic, I guess, has irked the Hasidic families who rely on bus access to whisk their kids off to school.
I can sympathize with the folks who are inconvenienced by this decision – but convenience should not come before safety, and as we’ve seen, the areas directly around schools tend to attract the worst kinds of driver behaviour.
walkerp
Seems like they should be able to block it off for all traffic except school buses.
Ian
Hm Joey, looks like you & I were close neighbours, are you secretly the Joey who lived above me?
As Joey points out, these kids get dropped off at their door – and part of the reason for that is that they start school as soon as they’re capable, and go to school 5 days a week with no summer break. We’ve also seen these same kids get run down even by bicyclists right in fronto of their own houses going to take the bus, it’s no wonder the parents are concerned.
I see the commenters saying “it’s the parents’ choice” but let’s be real, this community represents close to 30% of the population of Outremont, it’s not exactly an obscure minority asking for accomodation here…
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Kate
The seven self-cleaning toilets the city installed starting in 2018 mostly don’t work, but the city is considering buying more of them.
DeWolf
It sounds like a problem with the specific model the city chose for Ville-Marie, because the article notes that another type of self-cleaning toilet is working well in other boroughs.
Which of course raises the question of who is going to pay to fix these defective toilets… and when.
Joey
Too bad they didn’t get the OQLF to weigh in on the toilets having Italian-only signage.
Robert H
Of course it’s not Italian that really concerns the OQLF.
Kate
Remember Pastagate?
Robert H
Right, I stand corrected. L’Affaire Pasta was just nuts.
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Kate
A man who burned a red, crashed into a car containing two eighty‑year‑old people while driving the wrong way on an Outremont street at 73 km/h in a 40 km/h zone, while holding no driver’s licence, has been sentenced to serve a year at home and not drive for a whole year! How could the judge be so heartless?
Tim S.
I don’t know how to wrap my head around the absurdity of someone without a licence being sentenced to not drive.
Also, at 30 years old his young age was considered a reason for clemency. if you’re too old, of course, that’s also a reason to be spared the rigours of jail. What’s the unfortunate age range for drivers to actually be held responsible for their actions?
Nicholas
I’m curious if the organization was investigated. My previous employer asked for a copy of everyone’s driver’s licences and checked their validity with SAAQ. There’s a reason these organizations exist, but they’re not first responders, and I’d also be investigating training procedures so people are trained how to drive legally.
DeWolf
Sometimes I see drivers doing things so mind-bogglingly stupid, I wonder how they got a licence in the first place. And increasingly it’s clear that they probably just don’t have a licence at all.
(One example: a 30-something woman who seemed utterly confused by the concept of a red light and kept trying to go through the intersection, stopping twice when cars on the green slammed on their brakes and honked. Another example: a young guy in a beat-up hatchback driving fast down Drolet the wrong way, two of his wheels *on the sidewalk*, in order to bypass a construction detour.)
Blork
I’m just going to toss this out there, and it shouldn’t be seen as a defence of this individual or his actions.
I think intention plays a role in how incidents like this are perceived in court and how the sentences are determined. On the one hand you might have some irresponsible idiot driving like a maniac without a license because he hates authority and he doesn’t give AF about anybody else, and when something like this happens his only regret is that he got caught.
On the other hand you have a someone like this guy, who thought he was doing the right thing and was — in his mind — a hero going to save someone. The fact that he comes from a pretty insular community that tends to see itself as a bit apart from the mainstream means the incidentals of his driver’s license not being valid probably didn’t mean much to him. (What does that even mean? Did he simply neglect to renew it, in which case it’s a minor issue unlike if it had been taken away because of drunk driving for example.)
The fact that he wasn’t a cop or any sort of emergency response worker, and presumably had no training along those lines, also might have meant little to him because of his place in the insular community, where no one bothered to tell him that it doesn’t work like that.
And finally, it seems that he is deeply remorseful for what happened, which matters a lot if it’s sincere. I expect his self-appointed bubble of being the John McClane of Hutchison Street has been severely and permanently burst.
Does that mean it was OK to do what he did? Not at all! But it’s not the same as if he did it out of active disrespect and delinquency and was inclined to do it again.
Fortunately no one was killed (that would have been a whole other matter). But that doesn’t mean the chaos and injuries were not real and not significant. For all we know there is a second level of punishment and restitution also taking place within the community. Bottom line is that he is (probably) very unlikely to do anything like that again.
Tim S.
Fine Blork, but does this send a message that the next person shouldn’t do it either? I don’t really get that vibe, though of course I’m only going by the article. The justice system cannot simply be about rehabilitating the individual, it’s about enforcing the social contract that most of us abide by and that we trust to keep us safe. In driving especially, this has to be THE basis for punishments.
Ian
I find it weird that they don’t say what capacity the “patrouilleur” was operating under… the Chaverim, for instance, are all licensed & certified as emergency responders, and have a good relationship with the SPVM. The Chavivim might help you get unstuck from a snowbank, but it’s usually younger guys. 30 is not that young in a community where people get married at 19. I mean, I get it, “community patroller” says enough for most people, but there are whole categories involved here that it’s just confusing to leave out. It also seems weird to me that he didn’t have a license, yet had access to a vehicle. Why? Almost all adult men in the community drive, there’s more to this than is being said.
Blork
Ian, the article doesn’t say he doesn’t have a license. It says he doesn’t have a VALID license. It could be (and probably is) as simple as he didn’t renew it. Maybe he forgot, maybe he didn’t think he needed to.
MarcG
Free niche movie idea: Bumbling Hasidic wannabe superhero community member keeps trying to do good and fucking up, causing harm and annoying the police.
Uatu
Don’t give Adam Sandler more movie ideas lol
Ian
Not entirely unlike the premise of the old TV show Car 54 Where Are You
… but Hassidic
MarcG 07:30 on 2025-06-24 Permalink
I went by yesterday evening around 8pm after receiving an email at 5:30pm saying that the beach was closed because of an incident and there were still lots of cops on the scene and a search boat out on the water. I guess the police protocol for a missing person and a dead person are quite different because 2 weeks ago there were way fewer police around and the taped off area was much smaller.
There would have been lifeguards on duty, but I wonder if it was so busy they couldn’t do their job properly. I imagine they’re going to need some counselling.
Blork 11:50 on 2025-06-24 Permalink
I think the “possible” in “possible drowning” isn’t a reference to the uncertainty of the death, it’s about the uncertainty of the CAUSE of death. After all, the person might have died of a heart attack or a brain aneurysm or some other sudden event that happened while he was in the water. In that case it’s definitely a death but not a drowning.
In any event, my condolences to the family.
MarcG 12:45 on 2025-06-24 Permalink
I passed by this morning and the “safe swimming area” demarcated by rope and floating buoys was reduced to about half the size.
Nicholas 02:01 on 2025-06-25 Permalink
Another missing swimmer, at Cap St Jacques, and after two hours of searching they suspended the water search for the night. Whether swimming inside or, in this case, outside the area monitored by lifeguards, people really need to be careful. This is not a lake, this is a major river of the world.
Ian 10:29 on 2025-06-25 Permalink
People seem to forget that the river has a current. I feel like water safety should include more emphasis on what to do if a current seizes you, ie, don’t fight it, go low.
MarcG 09:58 on 2025-06-26 Permalink
They installed some decent signage yesterday. I find it a suspiciously fast turnaround, though, is it possible to have the graphic design and printing done that quickly? The pessimist in me thinks that they had the signs made when the beach was first created but decided not to put them up because of bad vibes.