A young man was stabbed in a Walmart in Montreal North on Tuesday afternoon during an altercation, and died in the night. There have been no arrests yet.
It’s the ninth homicide of the year. There were no homicides in May.
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Kate
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Kate
More on the federal billions coming for Quebec infrastructure projects. Makes me wonder what Christine Fréchette had to agree to, to convince her to accept this money.
Joey
I think she had to agree to being seen as doing things (what, besides xenophobic posturing, has the CAQ done in the past couple of years?) ahead of what will probably be her one chance to lead a party to electoral victory…
Jonathan
Interesting to see it that way. I assumed that the federal government would have to concede to whatever Quebec wanted in order to get the money. My understanding is that Quebec usually wants it to be no stings attached and to be free to have it displace whatever provincial funding is dedicated to those line items.
PatrickC
Does it ever happen that, if the province doesn’t use the money to add funding to a project like a new hospital instead of simply replace existing funding, and then people complain about the project not happening or being inadequate, that the federal government calls out the province?
qatzelok
@Joey: “what, besides xenophobic posturing, has the CAQ done in the past couple of years?”
They have made motonormativity great again, and snubbed mass transit.
Our current mayor’s party looks like they will do the same thing for the next 4 years.
The car and oil industries have fabulously well-paid lobbyists.Kate
PatrickC, I’ve never seen it happen. Federal governments do not want to rock the boat with Quebec, and I’d venture to guess that Alberta has learned this trick as well.
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Kate
The three-year-old girl carried off in a bouncy castle by a gust of wind on Sunday has died. CP ponders other bouncy castle mishaps around the world.
TVA says bouncy castles are a Far West.
Jim
Terrible and heartbreaking. Everyone likely just wanted the kids to have fun, and somehow it ended in tragedy. We should wait for the facts before judging what happened. My thoughts are with the family.
Kate
Generally the policy of this blog has not been to recklessly place blame. But there’s bound to be some coroner’s advice to tie or weight these things down, once a report is made.
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Kate
The city is boosting its offer of financial assistance to homeowners to add anti‑flooding improvements to their property.
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Kate
An item in Metro says our police are joining a growing tendency to check a person’s immigration status even when it’s not relevant, a trend seen across Canada – even though the SPVM has a directive that this is a question they should not ask.
Nicholas
Presumably employees not following employer directives will get them some sort of adverse workplace employment action, no?
Kate
There’s this nice bridge for sale, Nicholas.
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Kate
The Gazette is headlining the resignation of a Jewish General surgeon over alleged antisemitism. He’s going to that heartland of tolerance, the United States.
They also namecheck Gad Saad, who apparently made a similar announcement recently. This would be the Gad Saad who called Quebec French an affront to human dignity, right? Which the Gazette seems conveniently to have forgotten. Bon débarras, Saad lad.
Here’s a blog thread about Saad around that time.
Taylor C. Noakes
The big red flag here is that the individual in question refused to make any on record statement explaining his motivations.
If I pitched an article that was “person X is doing Y because of Z”, and I couldn’t get person X to explain Z, I wouldn’t have a story and it wouldn’t get published.
And for good reason: there’s no story. There’s literally nothing to report.
With all due respect to Aaron Derfel, this isn’t news. It’s ragebait.
There’s nothing of substance here (as noted by the almost immediate pivot to discussing Gad Saad, noted pusher of the idea empathy is bad – among other embarassments)
Also, as Kate rightly pointed out, leaving Montreal for the famously tolerant American South, and more specifically a state that had the Confederate Battle Flag on its state flag until what, 20-30 years ago?
Georgia still has active KKK chapters FFS.
There’ve been numerous antisemitic incidents there recently, many of which appear to be far more violent than naything that’s happened in Montreal.
I can think of a far more likely reason why any Canadian physician would move to Atlanta – or anywhere else in the US – right now. Our governments are bending over backwards to undermine public healthcare, and down there a physician can be a millionaire.
Why beat your head against the wall in a public system being undermined from within, where you get shit pay and patient outcomes aren’t what they should be – even at an exceptional hospital like the JGH – when you can get paid properly, expect better patient outcomes (for those with insurance), and get afford to live in a gated community with its own private school?
He’s a highly trained professional at the top of his game and he’s doing what’s best for his family, but I sincerely doubt it has anything to do with antisemitism.
Joey
Agreed with Taylor – there is no ethically sound reason for Aaron Derfel to grant anonymity to his source. Also it’s barely mentioned towards the end that Dr. Moss completed a fellowship at Emory in Atlanta. I suspect that his take-home pay is about to increase dramatically.
bob
“Person X is doing Y because of Z” with no comment from person Z and a bunch of information from anonymous sources is par for the course in journalism. If we had to wait for these persons Z to comment we’d get only half the news (the other half being denials and non-denial denials).
As to Saad, the US South, for all its MAGAnificence, is not uniformly retrograde, just mostly so. That said, Saad is himself retrograde, and crackpottish, and will fit right in if he keeps away from NOLA, Austin, and Chapel Hill, Gainesville, and Raleigh-Durham, among other places – like Atlanta.
Atlanta’s Jewish community is 1/3 larger than Montreal’s, and it is growing, not shrinking. Atlanta has seen some antisemitic incidents recently – flyers and graffiti, but no shots fired or incendiary devices set off. What an odd thing that more bullets have been fired at synagogues and Jewish schools in Montreal than in Atlanta. There was an increase in antisemitic incidents in Georgia in 2025, to 83. Quebec’s 2025 count went down – to 573.
So, perhaps questioning the plausibility that this is part of the reason Dr. Moss has chosen, like tens of thousands of Jews before him, to leave Quebec misses out on something that deserves to be salient. On the other hand, systemic and pervasive antisemitism in Quebec may just be a figment of the Jewish imagination, just like that imaginary racism and Islamophobia, which are not things because the government says so and the better sort of people agree.
And, of course, Quebec’s health care dumpster fire does not help matters.
Taylor C. Noakes
@Bob – not how I practice it, not how the journalists/publications I respect practice.
mare
I had two heart operations done by this guy. I know exactly how much he was paid by the RAMQ for my surgeries. For my open heart surgery it was $2,279. Much less than I expected for 6 hours of very precise surgery (plus a few hours writing surgery notes, scrubblng in etc). I’m sure he can make far more in the US, but he didn’t come over as someone who was in it for the money. I don’t personally know him and have no idea about his reasons and I can make up many other reasons why a doctor would want to leave Quebec. I just know that if he hadn’t done his work well I wouldn’t have written this.
Joey
I would like to amend my comment – I still think granting anonymity to sources happens way too often, especially in cases like this (what is the real harm in the anonymous source going ‘on the record’ here?). I find it hard to believe that Dr. Moss would leave Quebec due to anti-semitism and not take the opportunity to call out said antisemitism – after all, fighting the rapid increase in anti-semitism is a priority even for Canada’s Prime Minister.
Anyway, whatever his reasons for leaving Montreal, I regret implying he was chasing dollars… Sounds like a great physician bringing innovation to our healthcare system – a loss for all Quebecers.
bob
@Joey – Perhaps he is being discreet for the sake of his career. Not everyone wants to be labelled an activist or a complainer or whatever. Plenty of people leave high profile jobs for “personal reasons” never revealing the real reasons.
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Kate
Taxi drivers want to take a class‑action suit to the Supreme Court, saying that when Quebec deregulated their industry in 2019, it did not pay drivers anything like fair compensation for their expensive taxi permits.
DeWolf
I hope the next provincial government brings back taxi inspectors because it’s the Far West out there (as our media like to say).
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Kate
Continuing with its Airbnb theme, La Presse notes an infinitesimal fine it received for breaking the law that limits where they can be located.
But Airbnb still lists hundreds of offerings that should not be permitted, and this piece lists other illegal maneuvers being committed under its name.
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Kate
Mount Royal park marks its 150th anniversary this year.
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Kate
The REM will open late on weekends this summer, and not run at all on a few Sunday mornings, which may suck for anyone needing the REM to get to work on a Sunday.
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Kate
A ceremony was held Monday for the start of the Afro‑Canadian Cultural Centre to be located in the old École des Beaux‑Arts building on Sherbrooke Street.
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Kate
Maintenance, usually not the most glamorous of political issues, is now on the minds of the premier and the mayor as the poor state of everything from roads to water mains can no longer be ignored.
Joey
I suspect we are, collectively, underplaying the story about the emergency repairs needed to the Atwater main – I suspect there have been some very tense briefings in the last few days.
CE
A friend of mine used to work for the STM. We walked by the big construction site on Berri the other day and he said they were talking about the job over a decade ago and were dreading having to propose it to the city because it was going to be such an intrusive site that would take a long time to get done.
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Kate
Enlargement of the Palais des congrès is back under discussion, but this time the idea is to densify the existing building, or add more floors. There is a drawing of what this could look like. I do not find it beautiful.
What will happen to that very old block of buildings where Steve’s Music used to be, which was expropriated for an enlargement years ago, is not known, but this piece talks about involvement of private money both in expanding the Palais and redeveloping that block.
Zi Rui
I hope the enlargement means extra space for the conventions held at Palais des congrès. Otakuthon has been a lot more packed these past couple of years.
Taylor C. Noakes
If only there was a large venue located somewhere in this city, ideally connected directly to a subway line and paid for by taxpayers, that could accommodate large groups of people when the Palais des Congres is insufficient.
Kate
TCN, where were we discussing that big unused building located under the St Helen’s Island exit from the Jacques‑Cartier bridge? I was trying to find it in my comments, but couldn’t, because it doesn’t have a name.
MarcG
Challenge accepted! https://mtlcityweblog.com/2025/10/21/la-rondes-uncertain-future/
Kate
Thank you, MarcG!
Taylor C. Noakes
@Kate – excellent suggestion though that’s not the place I was thinking of
CE
I’d like to see the PdC expand eastward to cover up the section of the Ville-Marie trench. It doesn’t seem like anything else is going to cover it up.
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Kate
Quebec and Ottawa have finally struck a deal on federal funding for public transit. The blue line is the immediate project mentioned in this hot‑off‑the‑presses piece.
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Kate
Work started on the weekend to repair the water main on Atwater that runs from the water treatment plant in Verdun up to the reservoir on Mount Royal.
La Presse offers advice for reducing water usage.
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