Arthur Galarneau, who killed his parents and his grandmother in a frenzy in March 2023, has been declared not criminally responsible because of mental illness. The Crown wants him also declared a high‑risk offender so his freedom can be circumscribed. Galarneau is only 22 years old.
Updates from January, 2026 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A man who watched an STM bus pass him without stopping has been awarded $2,000 – $1,000 for the inconvenience, trouble and stress, plus $1,000 in punitive damages. Obviously this plaintiff did some serious homework to bring the case to small claims court.
I assumed the incident must have happened on a cold day, as suggested by the photo accompanying the article. But no. August 2024.
jeather
Good for him. The decision is here: https://t.soquij.ca/m9AWi
I don’t know how to see the attachment with the link to the video, if it’s even been made public.
James
So every time a bus passes you without stopping, you can make a claim ?
What happens if the bus is already full ? Drivers will regularly pass by stops with people waiting as there is no point to stop if nobody else can board.Seems like STM will be hit with a lot more lawsuits. Better get yourself a body camera so you can have proof.
jeather
In this case, the driver says he didn’t see the man waiting in time, not that the bus was too full to fit another passenger, and the video (whatever it shows) confirmed that account.
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Kate
Police have determined that nobody died in the Barsalou fire this week, but how the fire got started is still unknown.
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Kate
The investigation into the cause of the fire in the old Barsalou building near the bridge has been transferred to the police arson squad.
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Kate
A good piece from The Rover examines how the city has begun to rely on developers to dig it out of the housing crisis, even though the crisis is at least partly their doing. But the three levels of government are also answerable.
Nicholas
What part of the crisis is the developers’ doing? We don’t expect businesses to sell products for less than it costs to produce them, and you can’t build housing cheaply enough for people who have no (or almost no) income. There needs to be a subsidy, and the city keeps not coming through with that. The only way to solve this problem is for government to raise revenues and build housing or for them to let others do so easily and in large enough numbers that it causes housing prices to fall. Making it harder for people to build housing, and also not building housing yourself, is not going to solve this crisis.
SMD
The current main driver of homelessness in Montreal, according to all reports, is housing unaffordability. It is not addictions, mental health crises or unemployment; rather, the majority of unhoused people have simply being pushed out of their housing by rent hikes and renovictions. Real estate promoters who buy run-down but affordable buildings in order to “optimize” their rents are part of the problem. As are the large financial firms who invest heavily in Canadian real estate as a speculative vehicle. As are the condo promoters who can’t be arsed to build the required units of affordable and social housing and just consider the fine as the cost of doing business. And of course, all three levels of government who pass the buck on the human right to housing and would like nothing better than to have the private market solve the problems that it has itself created.
su
“Social housing requirements from the city, according to Blouin, are disconnected from the realities on the ground and also demand higher standards and regulations than they do for high-end condos. ”
I am curious what exactly are the higher standards and regulations? Does he mean accessibility things like ramps, wider hallways, specific counter heights ?su
For over a decade, historically low interest rates acted as “rocket fuel” for the real estate market.
Leverage: Low rates allowed developers and Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) to borrow massive amounts of capital at almost no cost. This allowed them to outbid local families and non-profits for land and existing buildings.
Asset Price Inflation: When borrowing is cheap, the value of the asset (land/buildings) rises. Developers focused on high-margin luxury condos because the returns on “affordable” housing couldn’t compete with the yields demanded by their investors.R T
“The current main driver of homelessness in Montreal, according to all reports, is housing unaffordability. It is not addictions, mental health crises or unemployment; rather, the majority of unhoused people have simply being pushed out of their housing by rent hikes and renovictions.”
If some people don’t have homes, and the vacancy rate—the pool of available homes—is at or near a record low, how is the rent level responsible for the overall number of homeless individuals (rather than who specifically is homeless)? If rent were lower, they could afford a home, but what would happen to the person who currently lives in that home? (And how do you get the current resident to leave that home?)
There is no massive pool of available homes—vacancy rates are very low—and, even if there were, it can’t be that owners are holding them off the market because rents are too high and they’d rent them out if only rents were lower.
(Parts of the answer to “what would happen to the person who currently lives in that home?” is that young adults would live with their parents for even longer and that some people would never be able to live in Montreal at all, but these are hardly desirable outcomes. And rents are definitely a determinant of who becomes homeless—West Virginia isn’t short of addicts but it also does not have much homelessness, visible or invisible—but ultimately the math problem that x many homes can hold at most y many people is inescapable.)
SMD
The vacancy rate for the island of Montreal was 3.1% in 2025, according to the CMHC report. But as noted by CityNews, “the report highlights two concurrent trends in 2025. More expensive apartments renting between $1,900 and $2,800 per month posted a vacancy rate of around six per cent. Meanwhile, more affordable units renting below $1,300 a month had a vacancy rate of just 1.5 per cent.” As su posted above, there is a glut of over-priced high-market condos that bring in more money for developers. In short, there are lots of empty units! They just aren’t affordable.
As for the idea that owners wouldn’t leave units empty, Vancouver’s experience in the last two decades would prove otherwise. When housing is seen as a speculative investment, instead of a home, the logic of the market takes over. Why rent out low now when you can let it sit empty (maybe have a management firm run it as an AirBnB) and wait for an upturn in the economy?
bob
It is reminiscent of the classic Tammany ring cartoon: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Tammany_Ring%2C_Nast_crop.jpg
R T
“The vacancy rate for the island of Montreal was 3.1% in 2025, according to the CMHC report. But as noted by CityNews, “the report highlights two concurrent trends in 2025. More expensive apartments renting between $1,900 and $2,800 per month posted a vacancy rate of around six per cent.””
The vacancy rate for $1,900-$2,800 on the island was 4.9%; 5.9% is for the CMA. (I assume that switching from using a vacancy rate for the island when it was higher than that for the CMA to using a vacancy rate for the CMA when it was higher than that for the island without disclosing that they were not the same geography was an oversight and not a deliberate choice to be misleading.)
Moving from a 2.0% vacancy rate to a 3.1% vacancy rate (on the island; CMA: 2.1% -> 2.9%) is a substantial improvement—an over 50% increase in available units in one year and no longer near a record low—but still means only one in 32 apartments is unoccupied with no pending lease or ongoing renovations. That’s not a glut!
Tim
“The current main driver of homelessness in Montreal, according to all reports, is housing unaffordability. It is not addictions, mental health crises or unemployment; rather, the majority of unhoused people have simply being pushed out of their housing by rent hikes and renovictions.”
Do you have any data to back up your assertion? This link provides a lot of evidence how you cannot simply condense homelessness down to a single cause: https://www.dunhamhouse.ca/blog/what-are-the-key-factors-contributing-to-homelessness
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Kate
Police are seeking an unknown individual who may be an important witness in a 2018 killing – a shooting in a bar on St‑Laurent.
Since this TVA piece gives some details about the man, it seems odd they conceal the name of the bar and blur faces in the image. What’s the point, if you’re trying to jog memories from eight years ago?
Ephraim
Bigger question, why has it taken this long for them to get this lead? And what can we do to stop these cases going so cold that we have to look 8 years later for a witness? (One of the things I would like to see is responsibility for murder being SQ territory, regardless of jurisdiction, so we can centralize the expertise and access to the expertise – like getting DNA processed quickly, versus subject to the budgets of each municipality.)
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Kate
A short stop-motion animation from Montreal has received an Oscar nomination. The gala is on March 15.
mare
The article only links to the trailer, but the complete animated film has been uploaded here by the NFB:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zanj0zDKfR8MarcG
Watched this last night and the aesthetic turned me off at first but it grew on me and story was excellent. Thanks to you both.
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