The ruling Union Montreal party looks back at the first year of its third mandate and feels pretty good about itself.
Updates from October, 2010 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Is anyone keeping count? Two more cafés were firebombed overnight. What always kills me is these little places have folks living in apartments upstairs, and it’s only a matter of time before lives are lost because of one of these stupid attacks.
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Ian
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Kate
Meant to thank you for the tally, Ian.
Also, the Gazette has been compiling a Google map of the firebombing locations.
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Yes it’s true. First snow was last night, and some still lingered this morning.There were some road incidents in the night because of the two-centimetre fall.
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I know I have some readers who will appreciate this piece on Vladimir Guerrero’s role in the current World Series and the accompanying look back at the Expos by the same writer.
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Richard Bergeron says he will resign from the city’s executive committee if the next iteration of the plans for the Turcot exchange are not up to scratch.
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Three young men were killed by a passenger train in the Turcot yards today around 3 a.m. Two others in their party were unhurt but badly shaken up.
La Presse added a creepy note later: this train usually gets in around midnight, but had been delayed by another death on the tracks back in Toronto.
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Hamza
no-one seems to have the victims names yet. this bothers me seeing as how I know plenty of people who do graffiti around the tracks
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Kate
It takes time to identify people, and then they usually have to inform families before the names can be given out. I hope you haven’t lost any friends.
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zach
@hamza Im not trying to lessen the tragedy whatsoever…but perhaps your friends should stop trespassing and vandalizing property.
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Kate
Oh, don’t be pissy. It’s so much more serious that the concrete is falling down than that it’s being painted on by midnight artists. Anyway, the whole thing is supposed to be replaced within the next few years – as you see, the main hazard to the trespassers is to themselves.
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A.
Right on, Kate. I so agree.
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Tux
Speaking as a recreational trespasser and someone who spent half his childhood wandering railroad tracks, I just want to say that there is no one to blame here. Adults in possession of their faculties know the risks when they wander the rails. Trains are big and move really fast across land which, while legally private, is in reality semi-public. That’s why they kill people sometimes. I emerged from my criminal youth unscathed and overall I’m thankful that instead of drinking and smoking pot in high school I got to know my neighborhood in a way that few people ever do. Unfortunately for these poor people, trains on the VIA rails move at blinding speed. You need to see them coming from a long way off to get out of the way. I recommend that other rail tracers stay on the commuter tracks and away from VIA/CN tracks, and when walking the rails, try to walk off to the side and not right down the middle.
Oh, and I’ve seen some breathtakingly beautiful graffiti along the tracks too. Sure, some painters are just dumb kids scrawling illegible names, but some of these people are real artists, and their chosen canvas is the urban environment. They’re a sign of a healthy free-thinking society. Cherish them.
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Ian
Well, English CBC finally has an article up naming one of the writers (Jays) who is probably the best known, and a comment from Omen… The ctv article actually says the train was only going 10 kmh.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2010/11/01/graffiti-montreal-train.html
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Canada/20101031/montreal-train-accident-101031/ -
Kate
Ian, that 10 kmh thing is astounding. But they’re saying the acoustics of the area make it hard to hear a train. And I guess even at 3 a.m. there would still be enough roar and shake from traffic that the oncoming train sound and vibration wouldn’t stand out.
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Although the leaves are getting thin, there’s still a flourish of festivals before the year ends: the Festival du monde arabe opened last night and continues till mid-November; Image + Nation opened Thursday and runs all week – picks from the Mirror and from Hour – ; there’s a stop motion animation festival this weekend at Concordia – Hour also covers this; there’s a Sephardic festival also on, and Cinemania and the documentary festival are in the offing.
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Carlos
This is probably not appropriate since this is a plug but I have a list of these events on my weekly events list with links to websites, facebook pages, twitter accounts, etc. Here it is: http://bit.ly/bsMWun
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admin
If so, then I have to push my own festivals list and the montreal.com events page managed by Janet Coutts.
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Saddish piece about the loss of natural wetlands around Montreal, a process that has gone on for centuries as we landscape ourselves into a corner. It’s part of a series that included a piece on invasive species in the river and how human damage, including climate change, is affecting the great blue heron.
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Odd that it was only this week that some francophone media ran the story that the American Public Transportation Association said the STM is the best transit company in North America – this happened at the start of the month and the Gazette and Metro had the news then.
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Henry Aubin writes about the stifling effect of the city’s party system on political initiatives here.
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Alanah
Rather depressing outlook… although Aubin raises some valid points, I think its a mistake to put so much emphasis on the financial side of things. Projet Montréal invested a fifth of what the other two parties did for every vote they received. Spacing Montreal calculated:
– Union Montréal: $9.35 per vote
– Vision Montréal: $10 per vote
– Projet Montréal: $2.30 per voteIn short, a person or a party with solid ideas doesn’t need to invest millions to make them catch on.
http://spacingmontreal.ca/2010/02/11/city-hall-update-campaign-expenses/
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jeather
On the minus side, we won’t get a mayor like Calgary has; on the plus side, we won’t get one like Toronto has, either.
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admin
Good counterpoint, Alanah – thanks for posting that.
jeather: also a point!
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There’s to be a mondo mass today at the Olympic stadium to celebrate the canonization of Brother André, with 50,000 people expected to pony up $5 a head for the event (2 p.m. on RDI). But the victims of predatory priests who petitioned to receive some of the profits have been stood up at the altar. The New York Times has a look at the phenomenon.
Gazette piece says “Rev. Claude Group” is the rector of St. Joseph’s Oratory. Memo: don’t leave it to the spell check. (His name is Grou.) There’s also some awesomely nutso commenting on the Gazette article.
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An Adelaide paper writes on Montreal geotourism and of course makes several quaint missteps (you can’t blame them if they’re basically writing to a tourism-dictated script, but it amuses me).
The notion that Schwartz’s is in “the Jewish area” is at least four decades out of date. I can just remember seeing the last kosher butcher shop close on that stretch, and that was some time back. It was in the 1950s that the Beth Jehuda synagogue on Duluth was converted to apartments – how long since the more religious groups went north to Mile End and Outremont, and the more secular Jews fled for Côte St-Luc and beyond? Besides, Schwartz’s is not kosher, and doesn’t pretend to be.
Does anyone but tourism writers call Old Montreal/Vieux-Montréal “Old Town”? I see this all the time in tourism writing and never anywhere else.
Also: the Biodome is closed till December 4 – and no mention of Bixi?
Finally, Kathy Reichs wrote the intro to the map guide? No slight to Ms. Reichs, but they couldn’t've found someone from here with something to say?
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Kevin
At least she lived and taught here.
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Pretty Sure
Pretty sure she moved away several years ago.
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Depends whose news you read – CTV reported 18 between Sept. 2009 and Jan. 2010, which, including the 2 in august and the 2 we just had is 22 in all – but the Gazette “only” counts 14 in total since October 2009.
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Montreal+store+Molotov+cocktail/3440380/story.html
(CTV archives appear to be messed up right now so I can’t give a viable link)