A man who produced and sold fake parking stickers has been sentenced to probation and community service, but no jail and no criminal record.
Updates from June, 2026 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Quebec had proposed a law giving it direct control over housing co‑ops, but has let it drop, preferring to focus on a law to bar 27,000 students from vocational training in English.
Ephraim
Yup, because 27000 people a year not getting a new job seems like a priority. The voc ed system also has French courses that they need to pass for proficiency in their new vocation…. because everyone needs to know that it’s a UCT instead of a CPU.
RE
It’s ridiculous. They emphasized all the English institutions when bidding for that bank but when push comes to shove…this is what they care about…
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Kate
Robins des ruelles have struck again, but this brief report doesn’t say what value of goods they made off with from Metro Bigras in the Plateau.
Nicholas
That is a very small store, barely smaller than larger fruiteries. 50 people would be a lot! There is only one Metro Bigras, so the franchisee isn’t spreading the losses around. When I’ve been in there there were just three or four employees. I wouldn’t be surprised if this theft cost them a week’s worth of profits.
Kate
They do seem to have picked on a store that was probably too small to have much security.
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Kate
Zi Rui
wait this is awesome
MarcG
haha love it. now can you do this one? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
GC
Works for me!
Ephraim
Can we make the arms sway in the wind?
Taylor C. Noakes
I’d pay good money for this.
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Kate
Two tenants of a building in either Ville‑Marie or Hochelaga‑Maisonneuve have received $160,000 after it was shown that they were evicted on false pretenses.
Nicholas
It’s Ville-Marie; de Maisonneuve doesn’t continue through to Hochelaga. The details from the group helping them sue the landlord are here. The new landlords, Gabriel Fortin and Jacob Frappier, decided to merge two units on each of the two upper floors, so they could kick everyone out. But the reno was very small, $14,000, and would keep a kitchen in each side. The tenants complained to the TAL, who said they doubted the landlord, who contradicted himself, but said there wasn’t enough proof. The landlord put a door between the two halves but put a lock on it and when a friend asked once it went back on the market the new tenant said it was always locked, meaning they were kept as separate units. At the TAL again the landlord said oh while it seems they’re separate they’re actually joined, the two half tenants sign a joint lease. So the judge said let’s take a look, in three days. The day of the visit the landlord went in and removed the lock before the judge and other parties arrived to trick them. Later a current tenant spilled the beans. The landlord finally realized the game was over, and admitted it was all true, and so the judge found the landlord lied and tried to trick the court while acting illegally, and lifted the corporate veil so that the people are personally jointly liable.
The group claims they found similar fake merges to renovict in Rosemont, though no word if there are lawsuits.
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Kate
Quebec labour minister Jean Boulet was beheaded in effigy during a May Day demonstration downtown, and the cops want to identify the perpetrators.
Mock executions have been a thing lately, with investigations as well into pretend hangings of Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Donald Trump during a protest last month.
Nicholas
Why do the cops care about this? What law did these people break? I can’t imagine how any interpretation of the criminal code or human rights law could be applied to these facts and result in a Charter-proof conviction. Is it possible they just want to harass these people for their constitutionally protected speech, maybe retaliate against them to get them fired from their jobs? Dear cops: get back to solving the few murders still unsolved.
jeather
A house near a friend always has a (generic) body hanging in effigy before Halloween and despite multiple complaints, it is legal.
Chris
>What law did these people break?
I believe death threats are a crime. One could interpret these that way.
Nicholas
Chris, beheading a puppet is not a death threat. It is longstanding political speech to make effigies of people you disagree with politically and burn or behead them; a quick google finds cases back to the 14th century burning an effigy of the Pope. To be a crime in Canada it has to be meant seriously as a threat to intend to harm or kill someone. Is it ambiguous whether these people seriously intended to kill the minister? Was this just bluster and political theatre? Reasonable doubt. That it’s unclear if these people said any words, rather than just beheading a puppet, further muddies the waters as to whether a threat was uttered; non-verbal actions are often more ambiguous. Did the people intend to intimidate the minister, or did they just disagree with him? Whether the minister felt intimidated or he took the threat seriously has no effect, legally speaking.
The most recent Supreme Court case on uttering threats is when a guy called his ex-girlfriend from jail and repeatedly said if she went through with her planned abortion of their child he would kill her. She testified that he always talked like that and it wasn’t serious. He was acquitted. So long as these guys here can claim they were just making political bluster, that this was just a crude expression of their political ideals, and that they had no intent of seriously harming anyone, they just wanted to harm the political ideals of the government, there’s no way they can get a conviction because the crown needs to show they knowingly intended to go through with this or intimidate.
But if you want further proof this is a sham, here is the chief inspector at the SPVM describing this situation: “It’s not black or white, but definitely one thing is for sure, using a simulation of a public execution is not a good way of doing things, and the Montreal police will have an eye on that, and we will warn the protest organizers that they should not be using that type of means to express themselves, and if they do, they are walking on a fence, and they can quickly fall on the side of becoming a criminal offence.”
It’s not black or white? Reasonable doubt. Not a good way of doing things? Not how cops usually describe crimes. Warn protestors they should not do this because they are walking on a fence? Come on, he knows this is bogus! This isn’t a serious murder plot, it’s a bunch of dummies trying to act edgy to impress their friends at a freaking May Day celebration: look at me, I burned an effigy of someone 99% of the population can’t recognize, and then I’ll go home to my parents’ basement. The minister or the premier or someone high up in the chain feels the sads for being mocked and instead of sucking it up like the powerful person they are, they want the police to waste time making a show of these people so they can scare them or maybe even use the power of the state to retaliate against them. Everyone involved here should grow up.
Chris
Nicholas, no need to argue it to me (I wasn’t taking any position), argue it against the other side’s lawyers. 🙂
Tim S.
I look at it this way: in a democracy, everyone should be able to participate without fear – and participation means voting and protesting but also running for and serving in office. Criticism of actions and policy positions, sure, but not threats of personal violence. If it was me, or someone in my family, who was caricatured on a beheaded puppet, then yes, that would make me much less likely to participate or continue in elected positions. And fewer people being willing to participate in democracy, I think, would be bad for everyone.
So yeah, I’m ok with the police investigating this. Should it be a criminal offence? A bylaw violation? I dunno, but the act is not OK.
And Nicholas, has your research told you what happened to those 14thC people who executed effigies? Because medieval governments – ones that lasted – were not particularly tolerant of public disorder and threats to governments (of course, it also matters which pope, the 14thC being the time of the Schism).
bob
It was also often the case that effigies were hanged and burnt because the crowd simply did not have access to the person they wanted to lynch.
RE
@Jeather there’s a house in my area that hangs a seemingly generic one at the start of the halloween season and then keeps it there all through winter on the front of their tempo…it’s more like just a head or something. I avoid passing by that house even by car and feel for their immediate neighbours, especially across the street who have to see that daily. I’d wondered if anyone had ever complained.
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Kate
A young man was shot dead Wednesday night in Turin Park in Villeray. The tenth homicide of the year, one day after the ninth.
Four teenagers have been arrested in the fatal stabbing in the Montreal North Walmart on Tuesday. There was also a fatal shooting in Laval Thursday morning.
(Has anyone ever plotted homicides and other violent attacks on a graph vis‑à‑vis temperature? My impression after years of doing this blog, and the incident map, is that hot weather gets people riled up. Or is it just that folks are out and about more, carrying knives and guns, and things happen?)
Nicholas
Studies have found this correlation all over the place. The possible direct causes are unclear, posited as the heat–aggression hypothesis, where it being hot makes people more irritable and violent, the routine activity theory, where people are out and about more, and the economic theory of rational criminal behavior, where people do fewer property crimes when daylight is longer.
Ephraim 09:50 on 2026-06-05 Permalink
And now. the new for a new security system. May I suggest a validating QR code that ties back to the database to issue tickets that prevents the agent from issuing a ticket based on GPS data. So if the QR code is fake, the printer will still issue tickets, but if it’s real, it just validates and says “NEXT”
Joey 10:26 on 2026-06-05 Permalink
Not sure I understand but the issue is that the ticketing agents can’t be expected to verify that every sticker is legit – there’s just far too many. No word about any kind of consequences for the buyers of these stickers, which feels like a huge failure for the cops.
Nicholas 12:53 on 2026-06-05 Permalink
The buyers absolutely should get it trouble too, as Joey says.
I bet there are a few ways you could do validation. A QR code, if large enough, could be scanned by a parking inspector vehicle without having to stop, just as it can scan for parking spots with vehicles that the system says hasn’t paid. But it’d have to be pretty large I’d think, or you’d have to get out in person. Another option is an RFID, but though it’s low power, it’s not no power, so you’d have to get out of the car and apply the reader to it within a centimetre, the same way OPUS cards can be read without the card itself having power, but inducing it from the reader. Maybe there’s some way to make it work without getting out of the car, but I fully agree it should be validated before printing a ticket.
Joey 14:26 on 2026-06-05 Permalink
They can already just check the database to see if the license plate is registered – the thing is that there’s no reason for agents to do that, unless the assumption is that there are many, many cars with counterfeit stickers. I guess with the automated camera system now in use it’s conceivable that you could scan a QR code on each sticker, but I would assume you’d get too many false negatives to make it worthwhile (my sense is the current system can quickly determine if there are any cars parked in a sticker zone without a sticker, without the agent needing to do anything other than drive down the block; validating that each sticker is legit would be a bigger task, though I suppose you could try a system whereby license plates are scanned, which might trigger fewer false negatives). Anyway, massive fines for the counterfeit ticket buyers would go a long way to preventing this kind of thing.
Metered spots are different, because the agents know which spots are not currently being paid for, and they can easily tell if car is parked there.
Ephraim 14:28 on 2026-06-05 Permalink
@Nicholas And how do they read the transponders on the A30 and A25? Obviously they can be read at not just a distance, but at speed.
Ephraim 14:32 on 2026-06-05 Permalink
You should try metered parking in Dubai and Abu Dhabi…. you better be quick and pay those meters or you will receive the ticket. Don’t even THINK of walking away for a minute…. or sitting in the car without paying.
mare 23:14 on 2026-06-05 Permalink
Umm, doesn’t every sticker has a license plate number on it? The parking agent car can just use a license plate scanner and check the database to make sure that every car has a valid parking permit, if they have a sticker on their windshield or not (or when it’s covered my snow).
Of course that’s an expensive solution if the parking permits are so cheap. (The most expensive permit is $217 in my street, for I think 9 months. Compared to the cost of renting that amount of space for say, a garden, or to pitch a tent to live.)
Ian 23:14 on 2026-06-06 Permalink
One distinction is that it’s not rent, it’s just a permit. You don’t get an assigned spot or any guarantee that there will even be a spot. Private parking spaces cost considerably more for a reason
Joey 09:55 on 2026-06-08 Permalink
@mare it’s impractical to think that the agents will check every seemingly validly parked car for a counterfeit sticker – they look for cars with no stickers, print tickets, and move on