The two teenagers who killed three men in a California mosque earlier this week were inspired by, among others, two notorious Quebec murderers, Alexandre Bissonnette and Marc Lépine. Like Lépine, they suicided, leaving a manifesto.
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Kate
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Kate
CBC delves into reasons not all strippers are unified around the demands being made during this weekend’s strike.
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Kate
Complicated story here about Canadians captured in the Middle East, and a Montrealer called Wassim Boughadou who’s willing to come home even though he’s wanted by the RCMP – but Global Affairs won’t let him.
It seems like this story is mostly about a conflict between federal government departments. But I’m not impressed by how Boughadou says he wasn’t part of Islamic State but his wife was.
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Kate
Bill Brownstein writes about the team that preps the Circuit Gilles‑Villeneuve for the Grand Prix.
Villeneuve is being declared officially an historic personage in Quebec on Friday.
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Kate
Tourism businesses can expect a standout season this summer, so long as the Habs stay in the game and the weather holds.
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Kate
Putting this feature up a bit early, because this will not only be Grand Prix weekend, but will see the start of the Canadiens’ series against the Hurricanes.Weekend notes from Le Devoir, CityCrunch, Journal de Montréal, CultMTL.
Parties held in tandem with the Grand Prix. Also, Crescent Street as the place to be.
CTV warns of traffic difficulties as does TVA.
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Kate
A park in Griffintown has seen steps and sod put in, then almost immediately ripped out again and redone. Questions are asked.
James
As tax payers, we should be happy about this. The city refused to accept bad quality work and the contractor is re-doing it.
DeWolf
The article is pretty much rage bait, only if you read the story you’ll realize — as James said — that it’s not the city paying for the work to be redone. The contractor screwed up, the contractor eats the cost of redoing their own work.
If only the city was as consistent in enforcing quality across all of its projects. There are some whose finishing is excellent and others that are mind-bogglingly subpar.
MarcG
The city admin could do themselves a huge favour by improving communications. A street near me was torn up all last summer – big project, very disruptive to mobility – and in the fall it seemed to be done, everything patched up and back to normal. I went by last week and it’s all dug up and fenced off again! Surely there’s a reasonable explanation but I have no idea what it is so I just assume it’s stupidity and/or corruption.
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Kate
The mayor wants to see a parade for the victory of the Victoire.
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Kate
A fire has been burning in a recycling facility in Montreal North.
CTV calls it an abandoned scrapyard.
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Kate
Two chicks have hatched to the falcon pair nesting in the Université de Montréal’s tower box.
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Kate
Lyme disease has reached its highest rate in 20 years here, a trend blamed on climate change and the consequent presence of ticks.
Kevin
It’s a shame that we had a vaccine against this decades ago, but it fell victim to antivaxxers in 2002
Sam
I was not aware that there were antivaxxers in 2002. I thought they got made from pure cloth in 2020 because of covid.
Or was that a typo?
SMD
Montreal vaccine skepticism goes back all the way to the Smallpox Vaccine Riot of 1885 (https://www.cmaj.ca/content/193/14/e490).
MarcG
RFK Jr’s been in the game since at least 2005, and the retracted Wakefield paper about MMR vaccines and autism is from 1998. There’s a great book and podcast called Conspirituality that covers the overlap between conspiracy theories and the spirituality/wellness spheres, which is something I’ll admit to falling into for a bit as a 20-something stoner. Fun fact that the US “indefinitely paused research at one of the few institutes worldwide with the high-security facilities needed for studying Ebola” last year.
Kate
Good background, SMD and MarcG! I found out about the smallpox resistance here when researching the history of the smallpox hospital on Rachel, a few years ago. There’s also a book called Brève histoire des épidémies au Québec by Denis Goulet that outlines some of this stuff.
MarcG
The current events of people setting fire to a hospital in DR Congo because they wanted to bury their relative probably killed by Ebola, and this American getting crabby about being quarantined for Hantavirus exposure, further illustrate this tension between emergency and the desire for ‘normal’.
MarcG
Bringing this back to Lyme disease and Quebec, Amir Khadir recently had his license suspended for 6 months for using non-standard treatments on patients with Long Lyme (“Whether it be acute COVID-19 or acute Lyme disease, we know now that between 10 and 15 per cent of these patients will remain with long-lasting problems, which sometimes continue for years”).
Kevin
I was thinking of Wakefield, because his anti-MMR was cited as a reason for Lyme anti-vaxxers at the time.
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Kate
La Presse has some views of the mighty Lisette boring machine and a discussion of what they might do with it after the blue line reaches Anjou.
With the REM station at Bois-Franc it makes so much sense now to extend the orange line to connect, but it’s impossible to predict what the government attitude to public transit will be like, when that day comes.
But now Laval wants a turn.
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Kate
Thefts of copper cable are becoming more common, and can put buildings at risk when it means removing the ground wire.
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Kate
Too-strict laws about renovation of heritage buildings are actually threatening them, as they make it too difficult and expensive to do the work. So buildings are left empty until their state of deterioration makes it impossible to save them.
jeather
The problem is that they are allowed to remain empty and deteriorate without any cost to the owner.
Ephraim
The Plateau has uneven laws in place. We wanted to replace our staircase with an exact replica… not allowed, we had to go to what they THOUGHT that they were like at the time they were built. The house next door… brand new… replica of what was there before. So, who do you complain about uneven enforcement of the rules?
Kate
Get hold of Dinu Bumbaru and get him to speak for you?
Joey
That would probably be counterproductive…
azrhey
I work in one of the oldest buildings at McGill… in winter we freeze because the windows are “dépoque” and they can’t change them for newer more insulating ones even if they would like exactly the same as the older ones… no double pane glass panels for us..just the flimsy thin panes en vogue in the 1920s. So in winter it’s like working close to an open fridge… we have a schedule to move the plants away from the windows in winter because they’d freeze… )
(OTOH if they let the university change the windows they’d have to deal with all the asbestos in the walls…so maybe that’s not a good idea either….)Meezly
We had to replace the exterior wooden window sills for our unit in a 100+ yo triplex because they were rotting away. The window company recommended concrete sills, which would’ve looked fine (neutral, innocuous) and more importantly, last a long time. Not allowed! Our only option was to replace the rotted wood with new wood and cover it with plastic-coated aluminum sheets. The metal sheets over wood look ugly as hell, but it’s needed to protect from the rain. The wood will likely rot again in several years. If we had been allowed to use concrete or stone, we wouldn’t have needed the ugly covering and probably never have to replace the sills ever.
Kevin
They don’t build ’em like they used to because they used to build them like garbage.
I know from experience that every decision made by your local permit office is random, and subject to how much you can get the bureaucrat to like you.
@Meezly those covered window sills sound like they have been designed to trap water and rot. Do they have drainage holes?
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Kate
The Victoire has won the Walter Cup with a 4-0 victory over the Ottawa Charge.
MarcG
Here’s a highlight reel. That second goal was pretty awesome.
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