The landlord who owned that building in Old Montreal where seven people died in a fire in 2023 has had his law licence suspended. He’s facing manslaughter charges.
Updates from April, 2026 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
An amateur boxer who killed a man with a single blow
twothree years ago at the Orange Julep has been sentenced to five years, the judge having felt that Ismail Karaoui’s training meant he knew what he was doing.Update: Although Radio-Canada says the incident happened in 2024, I checked my map and find that it was 2023.
Second update: A second man, who kicked the victim after he was down, was found guilty of manslaughter in June 2026. Adding this here for later reference.
bob
Life is cheap in Canada.
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Kate
Patrick Lagacé writes about how Montreal dodged a bullet when Quebec decided not to back a bid for some of the matches in this summer’s FIFA World Cup.
Bert
RadCans Enquête had a full-length report on this subject a while ago. That said, I am happy to see Quebec and Montreal dodging this bullet.
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/tele/enquete/site/episodes/1158856/fifa-la-machine-a-sous
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Kate
New federal money is coming to support a legal clinic in St‑Michel meant to support Black people fighting systemic racism, which is interesting given the official Quebec position that there is no systemic racism in Quebec.
Blork
Is that the official position though? Or is it just Legault-my-Eggo’s personal opinion posing as official position? (Asking sincerely, as I don’t actually know…)
bob
Oh great. More Quebec money appropriated by Ottawa for nothing!
Kate
bob, I can’t tell whether you think that, or whether you’re mocking people who would think that.
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Kate
Alexandre Boulerice, MP for the central Montreal riding of Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, and sole remaining NDP MP in Quebec, has announced he’s switching to provincial politics and joining Québec solidaire. QS had to make an exception to their rule about only women or nonbinary persons being accepted as candidates in ridings they currently hold. He’ll be running in Gouin, which more or less overlaps his federal riding, currently held by Gabriel Nadeau‑Dubois, who announced last year that he wouldn’t be running again.
Chris
Thus confirming that stuff is but woke virtue signaling.
Kate
What does that even mean, Chris?
bob
If the NDP does not retain the seat there will be no NDP MP east of Winnipeg.
Ian
I’d ask about all the Montreal conservative ridings but there are none.
bob
@Kate Equity rules have been dispensed with simply because they have a star candidate. There has been much discussion about this within QS and QS-adjacent circles.
Nicholas
Also the sole remaining NDP MP east of Manitoba, which will be the second time this has happened since the NDP’s founding, after 1993-1997.
What Chris means is that the party has firmly held principles that they stand by until it’s inconvenient.
Ian
Is it? He says “woke” a lot when talking about anything left of Nixon.
Kate
If someone claimed they were nonbinary, would there be any way of proving them wrong?
Chris
Nicholas, yes that’s what I meant.
Kate, what was unclear? The “that stuff” I was referring to?
Ian, I don’t decide what words mean. Many don’t like this neologism, but my usage fits with Merriam-Webster’s 1st definition: “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues; often used in contexts that suggest someone’s expressed beliefs about such matters are not backed with genuine concern or action”. We may not like it, but that’s what this word now means.
I used to vote NDP, I liked them back when they cared about class issues, instead of equity cards and the like. From the look of their seat count, I’m not alone. It’ll be interesting to see how few seats the NDP is down to by 2029.
Chris
Heck, if someone claimed they were a ‘woman’, would there be any way of proving them wrong? It’s not a new argument against these kinds of quotas.
Tim S.
Chris: you may then be interested in Avi Lewis’s press conference last week, when he flat-out refused to discuss intersectionality and insisted on focusing on algorithmic pricing, certainly a class issue for 2026.
Kate
Chris, at the risk of opening this two-litre can of worms I’ve got here, you can test someone for whether they’re a man or a woman. You can’t test them for an attitudinal stance.
Harvey
Umm… forget the politics. GNP has his ass covered. Their offices were on the same floor of the same building. Obviously Soulerice’s retirement planning was not completely well thought out.
Conservative, Liberal, NDP, CAQ, BQ, PQ, Green (it would be nice if someone came up with an LGBTQ similar acronym to be inclusive of all the political parties here.)
Back to the point; they are people, they have children, they want their children to be left in a better situation then they were.
Being a politician is no longer a calling to make your territory better. It is only a way to make you and your family richer.
In the 60s, it was engineering, banking, or becoming doctor. In the 70s it was IT.
Ian
@Chris I get it, Alexa McDonough’s NDP pissed me off, too. But now that we are here so many decades later, I am curious – if not the NDP, what party do you think represents the interests of class equality, especially as the Overton window has shifted so far right and neoliberal?
Ian
@Harvey in the 70s it was still doctor/ lawyer. IT/ CS didn’t become a GOOD job until the 80s.
But let’s be real, if you just want to make money, becoming a plumber or electrician is your best bet nowadays. You never hear the Minister of Health complaining how lazy plumbers are.Becoming a politician, well, if you;’re successful that’s still a pretty cushy job for all their complaining. The benefits package, salary, and pensions are unequalled in the civil service.
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Kate
The Boston Globe looks admiringly at the ways Montreal has repurposed so many churches unwanted for their original purpose.
Josh
archive dot ph links haven’t loaded for me in months. I guess it’s just me?
MarcG
Works for me. Do you get a specific error message? Do you use a VPN? Have you tried clearing your cache?
Meezly
Maybe you’re a robot?
Josh
Not a robot, I promise! It just times out for me and I’ll get a message saying the site can’t be reached.
John B
Are you using an alternate DNS provider? I think they don’t work with 1.1.1.1 or something like that.
bob
Try a mirror:
archive.today
archive.fo
archive.is
archive.li
archive.md
archive.ph
archive.vn
archiveiya74codqgiixo33q62qlrqtkgmcitqx5u2oeqnmn5bpcbiyd.onion (that’s for TOR)Chris
Josh, it’s been intermittently flakey for me too.
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Kate
CDN-NDG borough planned to add parking meters around Sherbrooke Street, but an angry backlash from motorists forced them to scale back the plan.
Joey
A backlash championed by Projet Montréal! There was an American bureaucrat named Rufus Miles, who in the late 1940s who coined the phrase, Where you stand is where you sit – i.e., your role in a system largely determines your point of view. When you sit in opposition, you wind up standing up for free parking, even when your political identity is disproportionately informed by your deeply held belief that civic life has already ceded far too much power and subsidy to drivers.
Anyway, this sounds like the right call.
Mark Côté
As noted earlier in this blog, Councillor Peter McQueen, an avid cyclist to say the least, really whipped up opposition here, which is very interesting.
Also interesting, I live near the Terrebonne bike path, and fear of loss of parking sparked my neighbour to start a petition to get permit parking for our street. After the bike lane was added, it in fact did not turn into a parking apocalypse… but there’s now permit zones on our street a few thousands more dollars a year in city coffers.
Joey
When I lived in Griffintown 20 years ago, the residents started to mobilize for permits, since parking was pretty sparse and lots of people would park for free and then walk downtown, especially when events were happening at the Bell Centre. From what I recall, the city has a pretty comprehensive process to determine whether permit parking is appropriate for a neighbourhood, involving some fairly significant data collection. I’ve wonder if given the ‘parking catastrophe’ overreaction to the Terrebonne bike lane, the city fast-tracked the process.
Ian
I heard McQueen talking on the radio and his angle did not seem “angry backlash from motorists” in the least, he was more concerned with people parking on the main strip of Westmount for too long, limiting parking availability for the people just trying to go to shops or whatever which is what that strip’s parking is meant for – and these meters would not help that issue at all, represents unithinking overreach, and a one-size-fits-all attitude that McQueen does not want to be associated with. Citing “angry backlash from motorists” is reductionist and does not do justice to the issue at all.
Joey
Huh? If people are parking on a busy commercial stretch of road for too long the solution is 10000% to charge for parking. Is McQueen arguing the opposite? My understanding was that there actually isn’t too much of a short-term parking crunch in that area and that this was just clearly a cash grab from the borough.
Ian
I expressed that poorly, he meant on the busy strip of Sherbrooke between Decarie and Victoria there SHOULD be these parking meters but the rest of the strip didn’t need them, and putting meters along the rest of the strip is the part that doesn’t help and is overreach etc. And yeah, a cash grab especially on the residential streets.
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Kate
The clock is ticking to pass a law to allow for the development of the Blue Bonnets site into 20,000 residential spaces, half of them social or “affordable”.
jeather
Has there been a related update in Cavendish? I’ve been told that the initial agreement required opening up Cavendish before they were allowed to build residentially.
dhomas
I remember reading about the Blue Bonnets development and Cavendish extension. Somehow, they were lumped together at the time. But I don’t really see why the Cavendish extension should be a prerequisite to building out the Blue Bonnets site. It seems to help Cote-St-Luc more than any future residents of the Blue Bonnets site.
jeather
I think it had to do with reducing traffic on Decarie. We know that extra highways doesn’t reduce traffic, but I think that was the argument when they were tied together.
Kevin
The Cavendish connection is required because the Jean-Talon/Decarie intersection operates at somewhere around 400% capacity.
The rail lines force all traffic between Highway 13 and L’Acadie-Park to funnel through Decarie.
The idea is that Cavendish would allow heavy trucks to make more than one trip per day.
jeather
Ok I searched there’s a petition that says:
WHEREAS, in 2017, the Quebec government transferred the Hippodrome lands to Ville de Montréal for $1, in order to build housing on the following condition: Art. 5.2.3 The Cavendish-Cavendish link is a road that falls under its [Montréal’s] responsibility, and it undertakes to include it in the agglomeration’s transportation plan and its three-year capital program;Fun detail is that Martinez Ferrara was pro opening up Cavendish when Projet stopped moving forward on that, so I’m looking forward to all the angry responses from supporters when they also don’t do it.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/federal-government-invests-hippodrome-housing-2026-1.7633967Chris
> The Cavendish connection is required because the Jean-Talon/Decarie intersection operates at somewhere around 400% capacity.
and it will go down for a little while, then be right back up at 400% before you know it.
Kevin
There is induced demand, latent demand, transportation changes caused by improved individual economic situations, and then there are poorly designed roads.
The Decarie-Jean Talon interchange is a chokepoint because of the train yards, as anyone can see by looking at a map. That is aggravated because it’s a region with three competing jurisdictions, and choices made by the city of Montreal interfere with choices made by the province. It’s not helped by choices made by TMR.
Things can be built better, as we’ve seen with Turcot: Decarie south to the Ville Marie used to have bumper to bumper traffic all the way back to Queen Mary but that was eliminated by doubling the lanes on the ramp going to downtown.
Decarie and Jean-Talon needs another big change. (I’d go with moving the northbound on and off ramps to eliminate the criss-cross of people trying to turn right on Jean-Talon blocking people trying to get on the highway, for starters. Until then a Jersey barrier isolating the righhand lane on Decarie Blvd. from under the tracks to Jean-Talon would be awesome!)
But the first thing is to bite the bullet and spend hundreds of millions on an unsexy connection so that people in Montreal West, NDG, Hampstead and CSL can go north without being forced onto Decarie, and so big trucks can make the round trips from their factories to Blue Bonnets multiple times a day without being stuck in the 24/7 jam that is the Decarie Circle.
Then the city can spend an equal amount of money on building a sewage system, and then build houses and even a tramway to Namur metro if they so desire.
But we’ve been through 4 mayors since everyone was told that nothing happens without Cavendish. Nothing else is an option. Quit pretending something else can happen.
Ian
All very good points.
As jeather points out “We know that extra highways doesn’t reduce traffic” but we DO know that reducing specific chokepoints DOES reduce congestion.
Reducing lane changes, normailzing exits, and improving ramp access does improve traffic flow.
Not unlike how normailizing intersections would improve safety in the city, but I digress.
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Kate
Following its decision to make workers come to the office three days a week, the city has renewed two expensive downtown office space leases, a move the civil servants’ union frowns on after they were told things are very tight, going into negotiations for their new contract.
jeather
This does seem like a great argument for the union. And though I don’t begrudge it, I resent that we’re going to pay for the rent and then the raises that will be forthcoming.
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Kate
Weekend notes from La Presse, Le Devoir, CityCrunch, the Gazette, Journal de Montréal, CultMTL.CultMTL also offers a spring arts calendar.
Weekend road closures and driving issues.
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Kate
After a long wrangle, the province’s medical specialists have approved a new deal with the government.
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