Montreal’s Haitians have already begun to organize relief efforts in response to this afternoon’s massive earthquake just south of Port-au-Prince; many folks living here are concerned for family and friends unreachable since the disaster.
Updates from January, 2010 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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If you want to show support for the locked out folks at ruefrontenac.com you can send in a contribution of $25 or more and they will send you a hat.
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Hearings begin tonight on the soi-disant Quartier Bonaventure project which will hear about ideas for taking down the autoroute, building a bus corridor and other features. Projet Montréal has some more radical ideas how to reuse the resulting space, if the autoroute really is demolished.
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Montreal hotels faced a 16-year low in occupancy rate last year, a slump being blamed on the convergence of the bad economy, the loss of the Grand Prix, and the trend for Americans to stay home.
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Profile of Cardinal Hardy, not a church prelate but a high-profile architectural firm.
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The STM has no formal contract with metro musicians and doesn’t want to; musicians, for their part, are trying to regain some of the marked performance spaces they’ve lost in recent years.
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Even though the new city budget doesn’t come down till tomorrow, various groups are already prepared to fight tax increases, island suburb mayors (led by the mayor of Westmount, whose residents can clearly not spare an extra cent) and shopkeepers dreading higher business taxes.
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National Post commentary on the Halle Berry story misses the point. First, other passengers were not annoyed by seeing the actress escorted past the line: the incident was spotted by one alert journalist, and any outrage was expressed after the fact. Second, nobody had noticed Berry and her family in line: commentators seem to forget that, dressed down, most stars can pass unnoticed. An airport queue is hardly a red carpet. The story does not involve fans mobbing the actress or causing her distress.
The point is this: it was a security line. An airport cop made a reasonable judgement that this famous actress was not packing explosives in her pants. I strongly suspect this kind of VIP treatment happens all the time but is done discreetly and is rarely noticed. If irked at the idea, people should remember that if a famous person gets escorted away, that’s one more party that doesn’t have to be processed in the long, tedious security search line.
I’m not defending the idea that fame should let you jump every queue, but in this case, and in the more recent case of Gildor Roy, it’s a reasonable assumption that the famous and successful have no reason to sow terror on airplanes. Also, a large part of security processing involves simply checking identity, and a famous person’s identity is already established, as is their bona fides. Let them clear out of the way so the rest of us can inch a little closer to our destination.