The first ballot cast at midnight polling in the small town of Dixville Notch was cast by a McGill student, Tanner Tillotson. The town, found in New Hampshire (population approx. 75, with 21 registered voters) opened its election stations at midnight between1960-64, and resumed in 1996. Coincidentally, the town has voted Republican since ‘68. But this time, Democrat Barack Obama won 15 of 21 votes. This is by no means representative of the way the country will vote. Read more…
Julien Brault penned a biography on Quebecor founder Pierre Peladeau. Our own Leila Lemghalef sat down with him to talk about his book, Peladeau’s legacy and place amongst media titans, see the video here:
Pierre Peladeau Biography
two of Canada’s favorite rappers for the price of won:
**Classified Live in Concert!!**
Monday Feb 4th, 2008.
While You Were Sleeping Tour!
If you missed him the first time, Class is coming back to Montreal to kill it once again!
One of Canada’s biggest artists, and most slept on talent up north.. back in the 514 for one night only…
DONT MISS THIS EVENT! CANADIAN HIP HOP NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT!!
With special guests…
Shad K, J-Bru, Chad Hutcher, Mic Boyd, M.I.G..
DJ I.V & DJ Blaster on the wheels..
Saints Showbar (30 St-Catherines West, Corner St-Laurent)
Doors at 8pm, show starts at 9pm…
Tickets : 15$
Available at http://www.admission.com &
City Styles (1186 St-Catherines W) &
Off The Hook (1021 St-Catherines W)
For press inqueries, and any other questions please contact info@escapemtl.ca
This past Saturday, La Presse mentioned that Montreal had floated the notion that the UN’s headquarters relocate from Manhattan to Montreal. Even though within the article there was a small mention that the UN was seriously disinterested and laughed it off… the multi-page feature, full with plans and outlines of the compound would lead a reader to think that Kofi Annan could soon be spotted on Crescent street…
Truth is, such a thing is beyond folly, and picking up La Presse’s English counterpart would remind us all why: on the front page of The Gazette ran a story about how somewhere deep within La Province, a bunch of bigots were going on and on about reasonable accomodation.
For what it’s worth, people coming to live in Montreal and Quebec should learn to speak French (we should all have ponies, too, while we’re at it…), but everyone in Quebec should also learn to speak English because the entire world speaks some English… sit down folks: especially those who work in the fields of business and diplomacy.
In fact, even the smart ones who speak English are trying to get a basic understanding of Mandarin… but I digress…
The point is: only in a province like Quebec is the learning of English seen as a bad thing, and only here do we still have to put up with this garbage years after the world’s gone global… and yes people, if by global it means [today] English and next year it means Mandarin and the year after that it means Bengali, so be it…
The reason why the UN would never come to Montreal starts with the fact that no self-respecting diplomat would give up living and working in NYC for Montreal, but it also has largely to do with the fact that Montreal and Quebec are so stubbornly resisting to be global. Which, by of itself is awfully ironic given how European Montreal is.
I love this city, but not a day goes by where the small-mindedness of the province doesn’t make me want to hit the road.
Yes, the title of this post is ironic, but upon reading an article in The Gazette, I think Montreal is crazy for considering making squeegee-ing an accepted activity.
Chris Hohaus, 19, stood on the corner of Iberville and Ontario Sts. this afternoon, brandishing his squeegee, waiting for the red traffic light to make his move.
With a certain dexterity he moved from car to car, cleaning their windshields, until the light turned green, for $10 an hour.
But Hohaus’s livelihood is usually at the mercy of his customers’ generosity.
Today, the street youth organization l’Anonyme provided the hourly wage in return for Hohaus’ services to help launch a new awareness campaign aimed at sensitizing people to the notion squeegeeing is a job, not a nuisance.
Joining forces with Le Gang de Rue, a new documentary television show focussed on a group of youth who perform leave a positive mark on the community and hosted by the Quebec actor-singer Dan Bigras, l’Anonyme also wanted to bring attention to the criminalization of squeegeeing in the city.
Although no laws specifically forbid the act, municipal and road safety rules, give police the power to issue tickets for simply approaching a car, sitting on the sidewalk or crossing the street on a red light, said Nicole McNeil, director of l’Anonyme, founded in 1989.
Since 1989? Why don’t we spend some resources trying to get kids off street corners?
“The police give tickets to them for things ordinary people would never get tickets for,” said Genevieve Dorval, 20, a member of Le Gang de Rue, recalling her visit to Montreal youth homeless shelter, Le Refuge des Jeunes.
“They (shelter personnel) emptied bags of tickets for us,” she added, as she handed out information flyers to driver while one of the participating squeegee kids washed his windshield.
Because squeegee kids usually have no permanent address their tickets often get sent to the shelter.
When they don’t pay for the ticket or appear in court to defend themselves, the result can be incarceration when subsequently stopped by police, says Pierre Gaudreau, coordinator with the Reseau d’aide aux personnes seules et itinerantes de Montreal, a network representing 73 community organizations working with the homeless.
Maybe the fear of getting sent to jail would give a dis-incentive to young, able-bodied teenagers from loitering on the streets and dirtying car windshields, no?
It’s in jail where they get exposed to real criminal behaviour, he added.
So let’s regulate squeegeeing and make it legal so that they never end up in jail? Smart. Why not go to the source and avoid the first phase in this decline of an entire generation’s future?
Montreal police don’t keep statistics on how many squeegee kids they arrest per year.
Not enough. Nothing against these kids in particular, but come on, why are we glamorizing this?
Christian Cloutier, commander of the Centre-Sud police station, which includes the area where today’s campaign was launched, said since May they’ve only ticketed people under the road safety laws and not municipal bylaws, which carry a heftier fine. And not all of those people ticketed were squeegee kids.
Police in Centre-Sud however are much “cooler,” says Celia Moreno, a development officer with l’Anonyme.
“Cooler”? We are talking about cops, right? I expect pimps, hookers and drug dealers to be cool. The Police? Not so.
Yet most of the other downtown stations aren’t as lenient, she added.
Hohaus says he’s no stranger to police brutality or their intolerance for homeless youth.
After four years on the streets, he’s lost count of the number of tickets issued to his name.
A fast-talking, intelligent person, who possesses his own brand of eloquence, Hohaus openly admits he’s got dependency problems and that squeegeeing helps feed his addictions.
No word on addressing addiction, let’s make it legal for him to make money off squeegeeing, so he can get his high.
But it’s his way of life and begrudges those squeegee kids he calls “weekend warriors.”
“(What) keeps it going is the fact you got to make it to tomorrow,” he added.
All right, go pick up a history book and find out how Rudy Giulani cleaned up NYC. The first thing he did, he forbid it for anyone (bums, basically) to come up to you while you were in a car, at a stop sign. The rationale was simple, first you go up to cars begging for money, then you carjack someone, then you kill them etc. Let’s stop kids from coming up to you in your car and harassing you (and creating a road hazard…) at the first step people…
The Gazette’s Roberto Rocha covers online video startups and talks about WatchMojo.com’s growing video business, here.
I have no idea how long they will take to render a verdict, let alone what that verdict will be.
All I know is that it must be a very interesting vibe at some of the newspapers around the country, in particular at the Montreal Gazette, where Black was once the owner.
Read more about the end of the trial.
This week, the newspapers were all talking about Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone’s not so veiled threats that Montreal needs to invest in its racing infrastructure, not so much the track itself but the amenities surrounding it. The city was quick to point out that this falls on the shoulders of organizer and promoter Normand Legault.
Every first or second week of June, I am reminded of the fact that our great city thinks that one weekend of tourist-influx madness is worth putting up with such blackmail.
Yet, seeing 20 or so professional baseball teams parade into town for 3-4 nights for 81 home games is not, or rather, was not.
If you do the math, 50 or so people that each club brought into town x 4 nights x 81 games = 20,000 people, or 2% of the city’s population, all coming in over a period of 6 months. That’s just the club entourage, you can add out of town fans, reporters, etc. and the numbers add up.
Frankly, my dad - who owns a hotel in the city - tells me that the F1 weekend is a mixed blessing: crazy for a weekend at the expense of the surrounding days… something tells me that dollar for dollar, the economic windfall of a baseball club added a tad more than that of a weekend of hedonism.
But, maybe that’s just me…
As a multilingual, allophone businessman living in Montreal, I oftentimes blame the Separatist movement for making Montreal take a back seat to Toronto as the economic hub of Canada. Mind you, Montreal’s joie de vivre and artistic prowess might be the flip side to letting Hogtown take the business crown. But the fact remains, I always look at the skyline here, and wonder, what would have been.
Of course, with the supremacy in economy, comes social problems. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, after all.
For the past few years, Toronto’s crime rate has been spiraling out of control. Maybe it’s not the crime rate, but the types of crime. Critics would say that Toronto is really no different than the worst of American cities when it comes to crime.
Maybe. Maybe not.
But last week’s shooting of a 16 year old in a high school - at gunpoint - made one thing clear for me, let Toronto be Canada’s answer to an American city, and god bless the separatists for letting Toronto have that crown.
And seeing how separatists simply don’t have enough kids to ever win a majority, combined with the fact that Canada remains pound for pound the best nation to live in in the world and the influx of immigrants will make a Yes vote an unlikely outcome, maybe Rene Levesque and the PQ’s ultimate legacy won’t be a separate Quebec, but a distinctly safe Montreal.
Some are calling an example of professional suicide, others simply report on it, but regardless of whether or not Habs forward Alexei Kovalev said what he said, did not say what he allegedly said, there’s much truth to what the Russian media is reporting.
Let’s look at the facts: the handling of rookies Latendresse and Lapierre definitely show a bias towards them by coach Guy Carbonneau. As well, the mishandling of Sergei Samsonov suggests a bias as well.
Frankly, Kovalev is right - assuming he said it - that there are cliques in Montreal. The French press is also guilty of bias. And these are natural factors and realities in Montreal, where hockey is a religion and the Canadians are the church.
The press will have a field day with Kovalgate, but they should instead examine the arguments and consider what impact the allegations have had on the performance of the team on the ice.
