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.
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Kate
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Kate
The Mount Royal cross is to go dark starting later this summer for extensive repairs.
jeather
Ah good, lots of provincial money for the giant, secular cross to be repaired, representing a secular vow to the secular Virgin Mary.
Kate
Not sure what I think about this. Like most Montrealers, I’m accustomed to seeing the cross there, but if taken down, should something replace it, and if so, what?
Here’s a suggestion: one of the elements of the Expo 67 logo. It was meant to express human solidarity, after all.
jeather
It’s not that I necessarily want it to be removed in a vacuum but in the current political climate it’s just more hypocrisy.
Ephraim
Time to put up the M and the L amd make it MtL
Joey
Unlike a lot of the ‘leftover’ Catholic symbols that populate this city (e.g., schools named after parishes), the cross on the mountain is IMO actually a legitimate part of the city’s heritage.
jeather
Right, if the government weren’t playing stupid games about no visible religion anywhere, the cross wouldn’t actually bother me. But they are, so it does, especially when they are paying for repairs (which also wouldn’t bother me).
MarcG
I was going to suggest throwing some rainbow bulbs on it and calling it a day, but I can’t help thinking about all the victims of the Catholic church having to view that symbol all the time.
Taylor C. Noakes
I’m working on something about Drapeau and discovered his plan from 1986 to build a 100-storey broadcast/observation tower atop Mnt Royal, in the shape of a cross.
It’s literally what led to the creation of Les Amis de la Montagne
Apparently it wasn’t some off the cuff idea, Drapeau was talking to SNC and a bunch of architects. Was supposed to be the city’s 350th anniversary ‘gift’. Completely self-financing!
We dodged a bullet.
That said, I’d advocate for repalcing the cross with the Expo twin rune logo, same height/consistent dimensions. The cross could be moved either to the cemetery or the grounds of the oratory. No harm no foul.
Kate
Let us know when that piece is done and posted, TCN. I want to read it.
I remember hearing that the tower was supposed to include a restaurant as well. It may have been the requirement to raze a lot of the park for parking that got Les Amis going. (If Drapeau was planning a resto, I bet it was a rotating one.)
Drapeau also wanted to persuade the French to dismantle the Eiffel Tower so he could borrow it for Expo 67.
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Kate
A third man has been convicted in the murder of Andrei Petuhov in the parking lot of the Orange Julep, three years ago. Video shows Nedjem Eddine Khirat kicking the man when he was already down.
Khirat will be sentenced later.
It was over a matter of road rage.
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Kate
Five murders remain unsolved on SPVM territory from 2025. The city had 31 homicides last year.
Nicholas
That’s a great clearance rate! And to be at nine homicides this year so far, as of today, is also great news, could be a drop of one-third.
Tim S.
I think you jinxed it, Nicholas.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-tenth-homicide-9.7223015
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Kate
Rosemont borough is planning to tweak street directions to reduce traffic around grade schools.
DeWolf
This will have much wider (and in my opinion, very positive) impacts than just around the schools. Many of the streets being targeted are known for rat running, so this will help improve safety and comfort in the entire neighbourhoods around the different schools.
I’ll be interested to see the reaction because many people seem to want traffic to flow freely more than they want children to be safe (see opposition to the plan to close 40 metres of Coloniale to traffic in front of Saint-Enfant-Jésus elementary school).
Incidentally, to see the effect that modal filters can have, just look at the reconstructed portion of Gilford around Saint-Stanislas church and Paul-Bruchési elementary. It’s blissfully calm. By contrast, Gilford east of Papineau (which was left untouched) is becoming a real nightmare as people look for alternatives to the constant traffic jams on Papineau — or to be more accurate, as people follow their GPS apps, which take them on dodgy detours down residential streets in order to shave a hypothetical 30 seconds off the commute.
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Kate
The REM blamed Wednesday’s morning service delay on the morning dew, before retracting the statement and saying otherwise was a problem with lubrication.
Taylor C. Noakes
It’s probably far closer to the truth than anyone cares to admit.
Kate
Morning dew does sound more poetic.
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Kate
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
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.
Joey
Traditionally, when Quebec has opted out with compensation it’s because it’s aleady doing the thing Ottawa wants it to do – if Ottawa wants to pay the provinces to set up $10/day daycare and Quebec already has $10/day daycare, what exactly should it need to do to access its share of the federal funding envelope?
Anyway, these announcements are different, they are about jointly funded transit projects. I assume Quebec only dragged its heels on ‘accepting’ the federal funding so that the end of the ‘negotiation’ would happen relatively close to the fall election. It’s been a long time since the federal government attached much in the way of strings to its spending in areas of provincial jurisdiction… The Liberals have power in large part because of how they are perceived of in Quebec; it’s crazy to think they would cause a ruckus if the province took some infrastructure money and spent it elsewhere (anyway, actually measuring this ‘displacement’ is way more complicated than it sounds).
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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.
Jim
Kate. I wasn’t criticizing your post, and I’m sorry if it came across that way.
I appreciate you sharing the facts as always. I was only reacting to the tragedy itself, and trying to express my gut feeling that everyone likely just wanted the kids to have a fun day.
jeather
The number of bouncy castle mishaps across the world isn’t saying major, high risk item that no one should ever use again. Not saying there shouldn’t be some further rules about safety, and this is a real tragedy, but it seems to be a fluke.
Tim
Eleven total deaths of children were noted in the article, all due to high winds. It’s not a fluke; it’s a flaw that only occurs under specfic conditions. Either figure out how to properly ground these things or come up rules that prohibit usage on days with high winds.
jeather
Eleven deaths in eleven years across multiple countries. Make new rules, sure, there is no reason not to, but there is wind a lot, even fluke high gusts.
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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.
jeather
He can be a great doctor who was feeling burned out by multiple things and then was offered a lot more money to move back somewhere he worked before and was in part compelled by the money. Note that the US measures antisemitic incidents very differently than Canada does, so the numbers are not comparable.
AMF
He has a letter in The Gazette today where he is explicit about the reasons he is leaving, and names antisemitism. He writes, “What has been most troubling is not only the rise in hateful acts, but the normalization of rhetoric and behaviour that would have been broadly condemned only a few years ago. When a community starts to feel unsafe in a city it has helped build, something has gone seriously wrong.” It’s striking how often the experience of antisemitism in Montreal is met with systemic invalidation and denial, in this case as in many others. I expect that is one reason he put himself on the record.
Kevin
bob
Well, whaddaya know.
Joey
After reading the letter I wouldn’t say that the rise of anti-semitism is the main driving force behind his decision, but it’s obviously a factor. I doubt Dr. Moss will find that the situation in Georgia is any better, but who knows.
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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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