We’re to expect a lot of freezing rain on Wednesday and Thursday.
Updates from March, 2026 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A downtown demonstration Sunday celebrated Women’s Day.
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Kate
The notion of making Montreal a sanctuary city has floated around. A rally Saturday pressed for the idea.
This piece briefly recaps the recent history: Denis Coderre announced it in 2017, but it proved to be an empty promise; Valérie Plante undid this the following year on the realistic basis that the city doesn’t have the right to defy federal government orders. Nothing has changed in that area since.
The person quoted in the current piece says being a sanctuary city “means allowing everyone access to housing, employment, health care, education, food banks, social assistance and unemployment support.” But the city doesn’t supply most of those things. Some come from the feds and some from the province, and the city has no power to contravene their rules on how they are apportioned.
The city can offer things in its remit – access to libraries and swimming pools without asking about a person’s immigration status – and I don’t think food banks turn you away if you can’t show a passport. But the city can’t give you employment insurance or health care. Quebec offers grade school and high school education to the children of asylum seekers already.
R T
I can’t think of any city-funded services that require more than proof of residency (within the city, not legal residency in Canada).
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Kate
It may be timely for some Americans to claim Canadian citizenship by descent based on ancestors two or three generations back. But in this piece, as in others I’ve seen, it’s mentioned that “Between 1840 and 1930, close to one million French‑speaking Canadians […] emigrated to the United States in a mass migration movement…”
But it wasn’t only francophones who left. Two of my great‑grandfather’s sisters, Catherine and Mary Ryan, married fellow Irish‑Canadians here, then moved to different parts of the United States in the 1880s, where they both had big families. Their numerous descendants now have Canadian rights they may not even know they have. My great‑great‑aunts and their husbands can’t have been the only anglophone Quebecers who saw a brighter future south of the border.
DeWolf
That’s a good point, although I suppose the distinction is that non-francophone Quebeckers who emigrated assimilated pretty quickly into the large Irish/Jewish/etc. communities that existed in the US, whereas French-Canadians often formed distinct communities that lasted for generations.
H. John
Tony Keller in “Borderline Chaos” citing Bruno Ramirez’s “La Ruée vers le Sud: Migrations du Canada vers les Etats-Unis 1840-1930”, writes:
“One estimate is that, between 1840 and 1940, around 2,800,000 Canadians—two-third English Canadian and one-third French Canadians—emigrated to the United States.”
In my mother’s family Julia Murphy (b. 1823) married Bartholomew Mooney and headed off for Wisconsin where she was buried in 1907.
Kate
H. John, I have a Julia Murphy in my family tree as well, but not the same one. With Irish families you have a dozen common family names, half a dozen given names per gender, and you just shuffle them and deal.
(I’m descended from two men called John Ryan – one on each side of my family. Not the same person.)
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Kate
The war in the Middle East, Trump, Carney, Trump and the sequel, were inevitably going to dominate the week.The war was also seen in terms of pain at the gas pump and impending inflation, although Chapleau used the gas pump purely as a metaphor in another story.
The state of Quebec politics was illustrated by Godin and Ygreck and, slyly, by Côté.
All told, I liked Chloé’s cartoon best this week, although Côté’s selection of possible successors to Ali Khamenei, Godin’s thoughts on the clock change, and Côté’s referencing of a famous Greek myth as a commentary on AI were all excellent.
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Kate
A man was found unconscious Saturday morning on a road near the airport, and another found in critical condition on Ste‑Catherine East on Sunday morning. Neither incident is being treated as criminal yet. (The man found downtown was reported as having died from his injuries later on Sunday.)
An SUV collided with an STM bus late Saturday afternoon in Montreal North, seriously injuring the SUV passenger, and also injuring the drivers of both vehicles.
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