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Serial matrimonial citizenship sponsor sees plans shot down
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| Ailin Silva Nates |
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| Rodrigue seen cuffed in 2010 (La Presse) |
I have a soft spot for people who sponsor poor folks to move to Canada through marriage or other means, as many worthy people around the world are unfairly denied their dream of moving abroad.
Now Rene Rodrigue of St. Denis de Brompton appears to share that view, as he sponsored one young Cuban woman and practically minutes after she arrived, was already commencing the two-year process to ditch her and get another Cubana here.
Rodrigue, by the way, is a man with a history as we shall explain later down in the article.
His plan, however, went awry when Canadian courts refused to recognize his divorce, registered by a Cuban court.
Rodrigue had a habit of going to Cuba about once a month. He'd hang out in Holguin and get friendly with people in the area.
Rodrigue, who was in his 60s, married a 19-year Ailin Silva Nates on September 24, 2005. He applied to bring her to Canada and she arrived legally 23 months later.
But within three months he asked for a divorce, citing her alleged infidelity.
The two returned to Cuba in November and got a divorce, as he explained that it was a technicality and nothing would change.
However when they returned they drifted apart and she moved to Montreal and then Quebec City.
Rodrigue continued visiting Cuba and tied the knot with another Cuban woman with the same plan of bringing her to Canada.
However that plan doesn't look viable for the time being, as about a week ago Superior Court Judge Pierre Boily decided to uphold the marriage in spite of the Cuban document annuling it. So the two are still married.
As for Renrigue, he had other problems to deal with since then, as police announced on Dec. 23, 2010 that they had uncovered a $245,000 in 100 dollar bills buried in the ground of his home, in what was suspected to be the proceeds of drug production.
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Child drowns baby in toilet
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When the baby, Royal Gariepy, started screaming, the five-year-old drowned him in the toilet to shut him up.
The baby's mother Irenee Gariepy was at the post office with her three other kids Gabriel Gariepy, Michel Gariepy and Carol Gariepy, at the time.
She had asked a neighbour to look in on the baby if she heard him crying.
Now aren't you glad you know about that incident?
The perpetrator would be 68 today.
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Gaston Ethier: "I'm the boss, I'm hot"
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| Gaston Ethier |
Here's the ghost in the machine that has perhaps cursed the locale: on 29 Nov 1979 at 1:30 a.m. Gaston Ethier man walked into Le Fief bar at 294 St. Catherine E.
He screamed at those assembled: "I control the lower city. The Italians, Greeks, there’s nobody that’s going to boss me here, I’m the boss. I’m hot.”
He then pumped four bullets from his Magnum .357 into the crowd .
One of his bullets hit Alain Saint-Pierre, 24, in the midsection. He was killed and another man named Gaston Simon was injured by another bullet.
Ethier - the son of a policeman and part owner of another bar - was trying to display a show of force for his little protection racket.
He had also been recently cited for trying to kill Dr. Rene Croteau at 2539A Belanger E. Not sure why he'd want to do that though.
So on New Year's Eve, his brother Jean Ethier went to his place at 2135 Dollard in Longeuil and found him dead on the ground.
He had been shot about a week earlier in the brain with a .38 bullet.
Police concluded that Gaston Ethier was Fief Bar madman shooter because witness Lise Dumoulin fingered him from a photo lineup and the same clothing and weapons were found at his home.
Not sure if his killer, in turn, was ever apprehended.
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| Alain Saint-Pierre, 24, killed by bullet |
So on New Year's Eve, his brother Jean Ethier went to his place at 2135 Dollard in Longeuil and found him dead on the ground.
He had been shot about a week earlier in the brain with a .38 bullet.
Police concluded that Gaston Ethier was Fief Bar madman shooter because witness Lise Dumoulin fingered him from a photo lineup and the same clothing and weapons were found at his home.
Not sure if his killer, in turn, was ever apprehended.
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Claude Gariepy, child killer
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| Claude Gariepy |
He took her by the hand and walked her through a laneway and rode with her on three buses, the 27, 94 and 25, to the Jacques Cartier Bridge.
He was seen carressing the child's thighs but nobody stopped him in his deadly trip.
He then tossed the crying child off the bridge and her body was washed down river and never found.
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| Mother Nicole Bourdon |
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| Yannick Geoffroy, 5 |
After killing the child, which took about one hour, Gariepy went bowling with his parents and other family members..
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| Shirley Bourdon, 4 |
Gariepy was seen by a bus driver, CBC employee Pierre Caron and another passenger tossing the young Bourdon into the icy waters on the St. Lawrence River.
Gariepy, who lived in Rosemont, had previous run-ins with the law. He had been charged with stealing $328 from a passerby one night and tossing the person to the ground, that took place on Frontenac, not far from where Geoffroy lived.
He was also charged with other thefts but repeatedly missed his court dates, for which the court was remarkably tolerant.
Gariepy, who had difficulty expressing himself, was deemed able to tell right from wrong.
Nonetheless he was deemed insane and placed in the Pinel Institute. He would be 54 today.
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Quiz - where in Montreal was this?
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Judge slams City of Montreal for racist promoting practices, gives man $30 k
Tanisma, to his credit, took 'em to court and won a $30,000 judgement last week, which went unreported elsewhere.
Tanisma is from Haiti and came here in the mid-80s and has worked for the city of Montreal since 1988.
He had played a bit of pro soccer in Port au Prince before arriving here.
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City Council's latest dumb idea: create new provincial lease registry bureaucracy
Politically speaking you fall either into the conservative or liberal categories. PoliSci profs will define the two as roughly this: lefties believe in the concept of revolution, righties in reform.
I'm not sure which I am because I basically don't even really want anything reformed, as new rules just bring a new set of problems.
Marijuana? I don't want to see kids blatantly smoking dope in the park, too many young people waste too much of their life stoned anyway, let's not encourage this.. Prostitution? Keep it as it is, tolerated when discreet, but police should have tools to respond to complaints that a hooker is standing in front of their front door. Gay marriage? As long as gay couples are able to have legal rights and recognition, I'm ok with traditional marriage, (but if it's such a big deal to folks, then go ahead and allow it, don't really care much either way). I'm almost even ok with the language laws: if the French speaking majority wants to make their folk unable to cope in the larger stream of international communications, that only makes us anglos more special and gives us a greater advantage living here.
Wow, sorry for the long, boring preamble.
So when I heard that Montreal city council recently passed a new motion urging more meddlesome bureaucracy, urging the creation of a lease registry, I thought it'd be fun to know exactly which councillors supported this dumb idea.
The idea of a lease registry is that a landlord has to supply a copy of every lease to the province, which will then be able to intervene when a person pays a rent that has been hiked up from the previous lease more than some particular percentage.
This latest artificial intervention into the residential rental market is as misguided as the city's many previous ones, which have all coincided only with a massive hike in rents around the city.
Not only would this require the creation of a new bureaucracy to rule, but it would be futile.
Firstly, the rent hikes have already taken place, so most people are already paying market value.
Many landlords around the city have a unit or two that is massively underpriced for various reasons and are waiting for that tenant to leave so they can bring it to market value.
So for example, if some guy is paying $300 in a building where everybody else is paying $700, why would the landlord not have the right to put it at that price after the guy moves out?
What would be the philosophical argument to force a landlord to keep a unit artificially underpriced?
Of course the landlord wouldn't rent it out at all.
He would turn it into storage, or do a airbnb thing with it, let his sister move in and just wait it out until the rule no longer applied. Nobody would win in that scenario as that's one less apartment unit available.
An of course such an attack on landlords doesn't go unnoticed by investors, who would then have a further reason to not build rental units.
As for who voted for this motion to meddle in the pricing of apartments.. they didn't actually take a vote, they only asked who objected, and the only person who did was councillor Dominique Perri of St. Leonard.
I'm not sure which I am because I basically don't even really want anything reformed, as new rules just bring a new set of problems.
Marijuana? I don't want to see kids blatantly smoking dope in the park, too many young people waste too much of their life stoned anyway, let's not encourage this.. Prostitution? Keep it as it is, tolerated when discreet, but police should have tools to respond to complaints that a hooker is standing in front of their front door. Gay marriage? As long as gay couples are able to have legal rights and recognition, I'm ok with traditional marriage, (but if it's such a big deal to folks, then go ahead and allow it, don't really care much either way). I'm almost even ok with the language laws: if the French speaking majority wants to make their folk unable to cope in the larger stream of international communications, that only makes us anglos more special and gives us a greater advantage living here.
Wow, sorry for the long, boring preamble.
So when I heard that Montreal city council recently passed a new motion urging more meddlesome bureaucracy, urging the creation of a lease registry, I thought it'd be fun to know exactly which councillors supported this dumb idea.
The idea of a lease registry is that a landlord has to supply a copy of every lease to the province, which will then be able to intervene when a person pays a rent that has been hiked up from the previous lease more than some particular percentage.
This latest artificial intervention into the residential rental market is as misguided as the city's many previous ones, which have all coincided only with a massive hike in rents around the city.
Not only would this require the creation of a new bureaucracy to rule, but it would be futile.
Firstly, the rent hikes have already taken place, so most people are already paying market value.
Many landlords around the city have a unit or two that is massively underpriced for various reasons and are waiting for that tenant to leave so they can bring it to market value.
So for example, if some guy is paying $300 in a building where everybody else is paying $700, why would the landlord not have the right to put it at that price after the guy moves out?
What would be the philosophical argument to force a landlord to keep a unit artificially underpriced?
Of course the landlord wouldn't rent it out at all.
He would turn it into storage, or do a airbnb thing with it, let his sister move in and just wait it out until the rule no longer applied. Nobody would win in that scenario as that's one less apartment unit available.
An of course such an attack on landlords doesn't go unnoticed by investors, who would then have a further reason to not build rental units.
As for who voted for this motion to meddle in the pricing of apartments.. they didn't actually take a vote, they only asked who objected, and the only person who did was councillor Dominique Perri of St. Leonard.
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Quebec's wine industry: almost non-existent
Here's a staggering statistic: in Ontario, about half of all booze sold at the liquor outlets is made within the province. In Quebec, that figure sits at a mere one percent.
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| Winemaker Anthony Carone has slammed Quebec's approach |
The Quebec liquor monopoly doesn't much care where the booze its sells is from because it has been making massive profits of about 74 percent on resale of anything it gets.
In some cases, it buys a bottle of wine for $3 and sells it for $15.
One consumer has even tried to launch a class action suit against the monopoly for abusive pricing practices and hopefully it will eventually result in the privatization of liquor sales in the Kweeb.
The last such attempt in 2008 was shot down by a judge who said pricing was a political issue.
Profits at the SAQ have been shooting through the roof, as Quebecers turn from beer to wine, so their gain is your corner store's loss, more proof that government does little to help the little entrepreneur.
Sales at the SAQ have been rising about 10 percent each year, and now sit at about $2.8 billion and I believe the new earnings to be revealed within a few weeks will reflect similar growth.
Quebec has recently tried to reward its rural base by going on a food independence publicity campaign but has totally ignored the almost non-existent alcohol-producing sector in their blitz, a sector that has been cultivated in other provincial governments.
Sherbrooke MNA Stephane Billet has even brought a motion to the National Assembly to force the SAQ to promote more Quebec wines as part of its official mandate but the PQ government says it's not ready to sign on to make it law.
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| Other provinces are even greedier when it comes to booze profits |
Now, we're not expecting Quebec to rival the more temperate B.C. and Southern Ontario for wine sales but the province could surely ramp up its production to something more than the piddling market share it currently holds.
Local winemaker Anthony Carone has offered a series of scathing, and rather entertaining, analyses of the problems caused for and by the 150-or-so licensed Quebec winemakers in their frustrating quest to grab a larger market share. From one such tirade: "The current strategy seems to be that we bicker and we are so pleased with three-page spreads in industry publications. We are vain, we are narcissistic, we are hopelessly poor."
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Joey Saputo not hitting the right notes
Joey Saputo, the heir to a cheese-making company, has done it again.
The owner of the local MLS team has simultaneously criticized both the ban on turbans in organized soccer in Quebec and the Canadian federation's suspension of Quebec's soccer federation.
Talk about taking a stand while on the fence.
This is not his first misguided public stand.
Last year he canned handsome Colombian Miguel Montana from his Impact team for getting frustrated with a metro booth attendant and then tweeting about it, calling Montreal a racist city because a ticket taker taunted him for being unable to ask for a ticket in French. "If you live in Montreal, you need to speak French," the ticket taker told him.
Saputo, not only failed to ease the tensions, he inflamed them by not only dumping the player, he showboated about the issue with a ..this-is-unacceptable type of press release.
Now dumping your employee for getting frustrated with a metro ticket taker is like firing a guy for farting on the elevator. Everybody does it from time to time (Actually I don't - Chimples) and it only suggests that Saputo might never have taken a metro in his life as nobody who has ever encountered a Montreal metro ticket taker would leap to their defence, especially over one of their own employees.
In a third example of judgment I would deem questionable, Saputo was repeatedly pro-active against a pest from Bulgaria who defamed him on the internet a few times. Rather than simply ignore the guy, Saputo went to court many times against the fellow who was clearly a crackpot and now the guy is living off the taxpayer for two years in jail.
So all of this suggests to me that the cheesemaker might not have the best judgment on all of the lower loop of Redpath Crescent.
I will admit that I've got a bit of a grudge because Saputo bankrolled a soccer team just at the moment when the Expos needed a hero to save our long love affair with nos amours.
Giving us a pro soccer team when the whole city is crying out to save the Expos is is replacing our annual international tennis tournament with a ping pong tournament.
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| Photoshop re-enactment of the Montana affair |
Talk about taking a stand while on the fence.
This is not his first misguided public stand.
Last year he canned handsome Colombian Miguel Montana from his Impact team for getting frustrated with a metro booth attendant and then tweeting about it, calling Montreal a racist city because a ticket taker taunted him for being unable to ask for a ticket in French. "If you live in Montreal, you need to speak French," the ticket taker told him.
Saputo, not only failed to ease the tensions, he inflamed them by not only dumping the player, he showboated about the issue with a ..this-is-unacceptable type of press release.
Now dumping your employee for getting frustrated with a metro ticket taker is like firing a guy for farting on the elevator. Everybody does it from time to time (Actually I don't - Chimples) and it only suggests that Saputo might never have taken a metro in his life as nobody who has ever encountered a Montreal metro ticket taker would leap to their defence, especially over one of their own employees.
In a third example of judgment I would deem questionable, Saputo was repeatedly pro-active against a pest from Bulgaria who defamed him on the internet a few times. Rather than simply ignore the guy, Saputo went to court many times against the fellow who was clearly a crackpot and now the guy is living off the taxpayer for two years in jail.
So all of this suggests to me that the cheesemaker might not have the best judgment on all of the lower loop of Redpath Crescent.
I will admit that I've got a bit of a grudge because Saputo bankrolled a soccer team just at the moment when the Expos needed a hero to save our long love affair with nos amours.
Giving us a pro soccer team when the whole city is crying out to save the Expos is is replacing our annual international tennis tournament with a ping pong tournament.
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Q-where is this?
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Oh to be in Montreal in the summertime
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From Montreal's first anglo Jewish mayor to first anglo Pakistani mayor?
The anti-corruption squad has stomped the game board with their arrest of Mayor Michael Applebaum, so the upcoming city elections need a rethink.
Applebaum had planned to return to the CDN/NDG borough to return as mayor of that area. But that appears to be no longer possible.
So the NDG/CDN district will need a new borough mayor, and running for borough mayor is a tough proposition, as only someone with some established credentials would be thought to have a chance and many of those people would usually rather stick with the good thing they've already got rather than risk going for the big ring. Also, many possible candidates have moved on, or been discredited, or both.
Jeremy Searle might switch from trying for the Loyola city councilor seat to make another run at borough mayoralty while "Concrete" Pete McQueen would surely be thinking about trying for borough mayor as long as he could find a supportive flunky to run in his eastern NDG district. Him sitting as the sole west end Projectionist was not a good experience for anybody involved.
And as for Applebaum, I like to think that I was the first one to publicly call him out for his suspicious behaviour in print, at least, as the suspicious phone pole scandal that I first raised here five years ago kept on stinking and might well be part of the charges he now faces.
Significantly, former city councillor Marcel Tremblay hasn't had his name raised anywhere, even though his hand was on many projects in the same area, which is nice to see.
It seems ridiculous in retrospect that not only was Applebaum the borough mayor, but he was also a real estate agent and chief of the zoning committee.
From my experience you can only walk by an open box of cookies so many times before grabbing one to munch.
He made sure both his real estate interests and his zoning committee business were kept ultra-secret. And that's a red flag. Indeed Applebaum could keep a secret, when his brother died, some in his inner circle said that they didn't even know Applebaum had a brother, as he didn't mention the guy once ever.
I have conducted considerable amounts of research on Applebaum and his affairs but I will not speculate on what issues he will be charged with, although the obvious ones would be the Vista project and the Wilson/Upper Lachine housing project, both being large-scale developments done with some involvement of certain individuals said to had ties to the local Mafia.
Applebaum is considered innocent until proven guilty and we make no assumptions of guilt but keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of people charged with crimes either plead guilty or are found guilty in a court of law.
So why on earth did Applebaum make such a brazen grab for the mayoralty if he had so much to hide? He likely believes himself not guilty, so whatever the charge he is being slammed with, he's probably got some other optics, one in which he doesn't seem guilty.
On the other hand, a former veteran cop told me that he could tell just by Applebaum's eyes that he was up to no good.
So now that he is gone, the city will need a replacement mayor for the replacement mayor and perhaps the likeliest contender is Alan DeSousa, borough mayor for St. Laurent.
DeSousa, who could talk an angel down from heaven, would be the natural choice because he and Applebaum didn't see eye-to-eye one bit, particularly near the end when Applebaum narrowly beat him for the job of interim mayor.
And if DeSousa becomes interim mayor, I'd very much like him not to publicly announce that he won't run for mayor in November. If someone asks, he should simply answer, "let me see if I like the job first."
Applebaum had planned to return to the CDN/NDG borough to return as mayor of that area. But that appears to be no longer possible.
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| Alan DeSousa as seen portrayed in a future biopic acted by Waheed Murad III. |
Jeremy Searle might switch from trying for the Loyola city councilor seat to make another run at borough mayoralty while "Concrete" Pete McQueen would surely be thinking about trying for borough mayor as long as he could find a supportive flunky to run in his eastern NDG district. Him sitting as the sole west end Projectionist was not a good experience for anybody involved.
And as for Applebaum, I like to think that I was the first one to publicly call him out for his suspicious behaviour in print, at least, as the suspicious phone pole scandal that I first raised here five years ago kept on stinking and might well be part of the charges he now faces.
Significantly, former city councillor Marcel Tremblay hasn't had his name raised anywhere, even though his hand was on many projects in the same area, which is nice to see.
It seems ridiculous in retrospect that not only was Applebaum the borough mayor, but he was also a real estate agent and chief of the zoning committee.
From my experience you can only walk by an open box of cookies so many times before grabbing one to munch.
He made sure both his real estate interests and his zoning committee business were kept ultra-secret. And that's a red flag. Indeed Applebaum could keep a secret, when his brother died, some in his inner circle said that they didn't even know Applebaum had a brother, as he didn't mention the guy once ever.
I have conducted considerable amounts of research on Applebaum and his affairs but I will not speculate on what issues he will be charged with, although the obvious ones would be the Vista project and the Wilson/Upper Lachine housing project, both being large-scale developments done with some involvement of certain individuals said to had ties to the local Mafia.
Applebaum is considered innocent until proven guilty and we make no assumptions of guilt but keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of people charged with crimes either plead guilty or are found guilty in a court of law.
So why on earth did Applebaum make such a brazen grab for the mayoralty if he had so much to hide? He likely believes himself not guilty, so whatever the charge he is being slammed with, he's probably got some other optics, one in which he doesn't seem guilty.
On the other hand, a former veteran cop told me that he could tell just by Applebaum's eyes that he was up to no good.
So now that he is gone, the city will need a replacement mayor for the replacement mayor and perhaps the likeliest contender is Alan DeSousa, borough mayor for St. Laurent.
DeSousa, who could talk an angel down from heaven, would be the natural choice because he and Applebaum didn't see eye-to-eye one bit, particularly near the end when Applebaum narrowly beat him for the job of interim mayor.
And if DeSousa becomes interim mayor, I'd very much like him not to publicly announce that he won't run for mayor in November. If someone asks, he should simply answer, "let me see if I like the job first."
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Saulie Zajdel busted for corruption - here's what we know about him
Longtime former Cote des Neiges-area city councillor Saulie Zajdel was arrested on corruption charges this morning but no details of the charges against him have yet been made public.
Zajdel gravitated toward power, serving under the ruling MCM under Jean Dore, the Vision Party uner Mayor Bourque, where he served a powerful role in the executive committee and finally under the Union Party with Gerald Tremblay.
In an effort to try to establish what he might have done, here is a basic biographical summary on his career in city politics.
Saulie Zajdel, 57, entered politics in 1986, jumping from a job at the Bank of Montreal as a computer analyst. He managed to sign up 250 supporters to Jean Dore's MCM near the deadline - many of them from his Lubavitch Hasidic sect - to edge out lefty-lawyer Kevin Cadloff, 35, who appears to have since moved to Winnipeg, by 36 votes to become the MCM nominee for the Victoria district of Cote-des-Neiges.
Zajdel was able to get 90 percent of the members he got sign to the party to also come out to vote, quite an achievement considering that in politics that number is usually around 33 percent.
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He said that his main concern was to help out poor people with their housing issues and increase street lighting to allow the elderly to walk without fear at night.
Zajdel then became city councillor by beating incumbent Sam Berliner, 36, a lawyer specializing in entertainment law, longtime Drapeau critic and Alliance Quebec volunteer, by 400 votes.
A year later, however, he was openly criticizing Mayor Dore for renaming Dorchester to Rene Levesque and for buying an expensive $63,000 Fazioli piano for the Bon Pasteur Monastery on Sherbrooke, where Dore lived at the time.
He was re-elected in 1990, as three black candidates, including Jamaica Association President Noel Alexander, then 57, posed little serious threat to his return. His 73 percent support gave him the highest majority of any MCM candidate.
Zajdel soon found himself near such big-money undertakings as the city's SHDM housing authority bought 49 apartment buildings on Barclay and put in $11 million to renovate those places for the poor.
Although part of the MCM, Zajdel frequently criticized his own party's leadership, urging a harsher stand against blue collar workers in their contract negotiations and in November 1991 Zajdel sided against his own party's transit budget, which was part of an overall 17.5 percent budget increase for the island's Montreal Urban Community.
Zajdel, by the way, has at least five children, the last of which we know about was named Atara, born in February 1992.
Ninety-one sidewalks in the west end were replaced under his watch in 1991 at the cost of $511,600 and his management of such issues became increasingly commonplace.
The Jewish Hospital of Hope purchased and evacuated six duplexes on the north side of Cote. St. Catherine near Victoria and sought to tear them down for a larger building. Zajdel refused permission to demolish and the buildings sat empty for some time.
In November 1992, Zajdel was in the mix for some big money projects: $3.7 million was granted to renovate 11 apartment buildings on the south side of Barclay Ave. The city's housing and development corporation bought the properties for $2.6 million in 1990 and gave them to the Office Municipale d'Habitation. In a separate project the city renovated 49 other buildings on Barclay with $20,000 to $30,000 going into each unit.
At the now-famous tax protest at city hall in March 1993 Zajdel showed his ambiguity again towards his own MCM. As the other councillors sat terrified as a pack of howling business leaders tried to break down the doors of city hall, Zajdel went out front to talk to the shopkeepers, some of whom he knew. Zajdel also split with his own party on a deal to rent space in the World Trade Centre for $1.4 million per year.
Zajdel was described in an article at the time as "works in real estate." (11 Aug 1993 Gaz. A1) but that appellation was not seen again, so that element of his story remains unknown.
In the Spring of 1994 Zajdel quit the MCM to become an independent and soon joined the Vision Montreal Party under Pierre Bourque.
That November Zajdel won re-election in a 36 vote squeaker over David Ly Lac Huy. (In that same election Michael Applebaum beat Vision candidate David Mowat by 31 votes and Helen Fotopulos beat Jean Roy of Vision by 29 votes.)
Zajdel found himself for the first time on the high-paying executive committee under Bourque, who had beaten Dore largely thanks to a publicity stunt in Zajdel's area, where he slept in a poor family's apartment for a night to see what it's like. Zajdel was rewarded with a room at the top of the Bourque administration, where he managed a ton of money.
"Not every decision in a $1.8 billion budget is perfect," he said about some issue or another, a phrase he would repeat in essence about several issues over the next few years.
Zajdel oversaw the sale of the Jean Talon Station and the St. Michel baths. He travelled with Bourque on a trade mission to Turkey, Israel, Greece and Lebanon.
He then gained a reputation for helping sell off city properties very little money, which is unfortunate because property in Montreal was dirt cheap during that time and the city could have earned hundreds of millions more had it held off for a few more years.
Opposition councillor Marvin Rotrand blasted Zajdel and Bourque for selling off the land on which the Complexe Desjardins sits for $16.5 million to the Caisse Desjardins. Montreal had paid $54 million for the property when it expropriated it in 1970.
Zajdel was also involved in such mid-90s doldrums files as the attempt to get the then-empty Simpson's department store building rented out. In Oct. 1996 Zajdel found himself defending a $5.5 million contract given to CGI, with whom Bourque had previous ties and some called out a conflict of interest.
Zajdel's power further increased when Bourque kicked Sammy Forcillo and Pierre Goyer off the executive committee and gave Forcillo's real estate responsibilities to Zajdel. Zajdel was also put in charge of solving the city's "millennium bug" issue, which he estimated would cost the city between $5 and $8 million. Of course it cost $8 million.
In Dec. 1996 Zajdel oversaw the city's sale of its interest in the World Trade Centre, which they peddled off for $31.7 million, a staggering $59 million loss for the city. A few months later, the city sold part of the Blue Bonnets site to the province, which caused a big ruckus and Bourque lost his majority in council due to the deal, which was said to have cost the city $12 million.
In June 1997 city auditor Remy Trudel pointed out $17 million in inappropriate expenditures and suggested certain financial officials be fired but Zajdel said that they would not be fired. That same month Zajdel defended the city's purchasing of 6,800 raincoats for its 4,000 blue collar workers but when quizzed on details of what the $670,000 clothing purchase, he confessed he didn't know key details.
Zajdel started suggesting that he might quit the Bourque team, as it appeared that his leader was increasingly battered by scandal. As some sort of fluke, Bourque was asked to pick a stub from a charity draw at a Jewish religious centre for a 1998 gold Nissan Maxima worth $38,000 and guess who won? Zajdel, who purchased two $100 tickets, out of the total of 1,300 sold.
In June 1998 Zajdel said he would not run for a third mandate but changed his mind in September as Bourque - who had been shaken by 193 convictions of illegal fundraising in his first mandate - developed a big lead over challenger and former mayor Jean Dore.
Zajdel, still under the Bourque banner, bagged his third straight electoral victory, beating Michael Polak by 500 votes. "I thank my people and I thank the Lord, who gave me one more victory," he said after the votes were tallied.
Zajdel was soon defending Bourque again, as per custom, saying that there was nothing wrong with the city giving $1 million to Canderel to build a shrine to the Canadiens at the old Forum.
But in Feb. 1999 Zajdel was caught flat-footed when his claim that the city had never been given a chance to buy a property off Atwater above Sherbrooke, was proven untrue by correspondence. Developer Rene Lepine had been seeking to build condos on the site of the project which had hitherto been zoned institutional. Lepine was, of course, granted that zoning switch and built condos on the green space as promised.
In September 1999, also under Zajdel's watch, parts of the downtown Faubourg St. Laurent were sold by the city for $1.7 million - a $10-million loss for the city of Montreal.
In the same month, Zajdel salivated as the federal Liberals needed a man in Mount Royal but he withdrew when the then-massively popular human rights figure Irwin Cotler chose also to seek the seat.
There was additional fury about other Zajdel dossiers such as the Redpath Mansion, condos on Cote-des-Neiges where the Christian Science church had sat as well as a failed attempt to expand a synagogue.
In 2000 Bourque's administration took over two buildings owned by Claudio Di Giambattista (who, rather amazingly has still not been put under public curatorship in spite of his obvious mental incompetence) specifically the 40 apartments at 3330 Bedford and the 32 units at 4711-4715 Plamondon.
The 250 mostly-immigrant residents of the 72 units were temporarily relocated because the apartments were unlivable. Rather than do the repairs and bill the landlord, the city allowed the buildings to remain in a state of disrepair and hoped the landlord would just fix them.
A housing activist group called OEIL got $600,000 together to buy the Plamondon building to repair and allow the tenants to return. The handshake deal was nixed though when Howard Rossdeutscher paid $1.5 million for the two properties and the new owners were given $200,000 to renovate them. They were turned into condos, and the residents - who should have been allowed to return - were out in the cold. A rental board judge (regisseur) agreed that the city was wrong but the tenants were stiffed nonetheless and many were placed at the front of the line into public housing units to quieten them up.
In Nov. 2001, the first megacity election, Zajdel beat Aline Malka by 200 votes to retain his seat, now called Darlington but his longtime Bourque had been defeated in favour of Tremblay and Zajdel's time on the high-paying executive committee was done too.
In July 2002 Zajdel faced heat when his wife received a $44,000 grant to fit up their NDG home from the Revitalization of Central Neighbourhoods Program. He was earning $58,000 a year at the time after losing his six-figure salary under Bourque.
In February 2005 he joined up with Tremblay's Union Party. This allowed him to collaborate and advance projects, as other could help support his initiatives, so he recovered at least part of his influence and power but whether he abused that power in those years remains to be seen.
That November he won his final election, beating Kashmir Singh Randhawa by 400 votes.
He was snubbed from the executive committee once again and after an uneventful few years as city councillor, where he seemed to have lost his focus and preparedness, he chose in June 2009 to not run again.
After quitting city politics he ran as a federal Conservative against Liberal incumbent Irwin Cotler but lost. He was criticized for taking a salary from the Conservatives for some time after in a role that aimed to undermine Cotler.
Zajdel gravitated toward power, serving under the ruling MCM under Jean Dore, the Vision Party uner Mayor Bourque, where he served a powerful role in the executive committee and finally under the Union Party with Gerald Tremblay.
In an effort to try to establish what he might have done, here is a basic biographical summary on his career in city politics.
Saulie Zajdel, 57, entered politics in 1986, jumping from a job at the Bank of Montreal as a computer analyst. He managed to sign up 250 supporters to Jean Dore's MCM near the deadline - many of them from his Lubavitch Hasidic sect - to edge out lefty-lawyer Kevin Cadloff, 35, who appears to have since moved to Winnipeg, by 36 votes to become the MCM nominee for the Victoria district of Cote-des-Neiges.
Zajdel was able to get 90 percent of the members he got sign to the party to also come out to vote, quite an achievement considering that in politics that number is usually around 33 percent.
He said that his main concern was to help out poor people with their housing issues and increase street lighting to allow the elderly to walk without fear at night.Zajdel then became city councillor by beating incumbent Sam Berliner, 36, a lawyer specializing in entertainment law, longtime Drapeau critic and Alliance Quebec volunteer, by 400 votes.
A year later, however, he was openly criticizing Mayor Dore for renaming Dorchester to Rene Levesque and for buying an expensive $63,000 Fazioli piano for the Bon Pasteur Monastery on Sherbrooke, where Dore lived at the time.
He was re-elected in 1990, as three black candidates, including Jamaica Association President Noel Alexander, then 57, posed little serious threat to his return. His 73 percent support gave him the highest majority of any MCM candidate.
Zajdel soon found himself near such big-money undertakings as the city's SHDM housing authority bought 49 apartment buildings on Barclay and put in $11 million to renovate those places for the poor.
Although part of the MCM, Zajdel frequently criticized his own party's leadership, urging a harsher stand against blue collar workers in their contract negotiations and in November 1991 Zajdel sided against his own party's transit budget, which was part of an overall 17.5 percent budget increase for the island's Montreal Urban Community.
Zajdel, by the way, has at least five children, the last of which we know about was named Atara, born in February 1992.
Ninety-one sidewalks in the west end were replaced under his watch in 1991 at the cost of $511,600 and his management of such issues became increasingly commonplace.
The Jewish Hospital of Hope purchased and evacuated six duplexes on the north side of Cote. St. Catherine near Victoria and sought to tear them down for a larger building. Zajdel refused permission to demolish and the buildings sat empty for some time.
In November 1992, Zajdel was in the mix for some big money projects: $3.7 million was granted to renovate 11 apartment buildings on the south side of Barclay Ave. The city's housing and development corporation bought the properties for $2.6 million in 1990 and gave them to the Office Municipale d'Habitation. In a separate project the city renovated 49 other buildings on Barclay with $20,000 to $30,000 going into each unit.
At the now-famous tax protest at city hall in March 1993 Zajdel showed his ambiguity again towards his own MCM. As the other councillors sat terrified as a pack of howling business leaders tried to break down the doors of city hall, Zajdel went out front to talk to the shopkeepers, some of whom he knew. Zajdel also split with his own party on a deal to rent space in the World Trade Centre for $1.4 million per year.
Zajdel was described in an article at the time as "works in real estate." (11 Aug 1993 Gaz. A1) but that appellation was not seen again, so that element of his story remains unknown.
In the Spring of 1994 Zajdel quit the MCM to become an independent and soon joined the Vision Montreal Party under Pierre Bourque.
That November Zajdel won re-election in a 36 vote squeaker over David Ly Lac Huy. (In that same election Michael Applebaum beat Vision candidate David Mowat by 31 votes and Helen Fotopulos beat Jean Roy of Vision by 29 votes.)
Zajdel found himself for the first time on the high-paying executive committee under Bourque, who had beaten Dore largely thanks to a publicity stunt in Zajdel's area, where he slept in a poor family's apartment for a night to see what it's like. Zajdel was rewarded with a room at the top of the Bourque administration, where he managed a ton of money.
"Not every decision in a $1.8 billion budget is perfect," he said about some issue or another, a phrase he would repeat in essence about several issues over the next few years.
Zajdel oversaw the sale of the Jean Talon Station and the St. Michel baths. He travelled with Bourque on a trade mission to Turkey, Israel, Greece and Lebanon.
He then gained a reputation for helping sell off city properties very little money, which is unfortunate because property in Montreal was dirt cheap during that time and the city could have earned hundreds of millions more had it held off for a few more years.
Opposition councillor Marvin Rotrand blasted Zajdel and Bourque for selling off the land on which the Complexe Desjardins sits for $16.5 million to the Caisse Desjardins. Montreal had paid $54 million for the property when it expropriated it in 1970.
Zajdel was also involved in such mid-90s doldrums files as the attempt to get the then-empty Simpson's department store building rented out. In Oct. 1996 Zajdel found himself defending a $5.5 million contract given to CGI, with whom Bourque had previous ties and some called out a conflict of interest.
Zajdel's power further increased when Bourque kicked Sammy Forcillo and Pierre Goyer off the executive committee and gave Forcillo's real estate responsibilities to Zajdel. Zajdel was also put in charge of solving the city's "millennium bug" issue, which he estimated would cost the city between $5 and $8 million. Of course it cost $8 million.
In Dec. 1996 Zajdel oversaw the city's sale of its interest in the World Trade Centre, which they peddled off for $31.7 million, a staggering $59 million loss for the city. A few months later, the city sold part of the Blue Bonnets site to the province, which caused a big ruckus and Bourque lost his majority in council due to the deal, which was said to have cost the city $12 million.
In June 1997 city auditor Remy Trudel pointed out $17 million in inappropriate expenditures and suggested certain financial officials be fired but Zajdel said that they would not be fired. That same month Zajdel defended the city's purchasing of 6,800 raincoats for its 4,000 blue collar workers but when quizzed on details of what the $670,000 clothing purchase, he confessed he didn't know key details.
Zajdel started suggesting that he might quit the Bourque team, as it appeared that his leader was increasingly battered by scandal. As some sort of fluke, Bourque was asked to pick a stub from a charity draw at a Jewish religious centre for a 1998 gold Nissan Maxima worth $38,000 and guess who won? Zajdel, who purchased two $100 tickets, out of the total of 1,300 sold.
In June 1998 Zajdel said he would not run for a third mandate but changed his mind in September as Bourque - who had been shaken by 193 convictions of illegal fundraising in his first mandate - developed a big lead over challenger and former mayor Jean Dore.
Zajdel, still under the Bourque banner, bagged his third straight electoral victory, beating Michael Polak by 500 votes. "I thank my people and I thank the Lord, who gave me one more victory," he said after the votes were tallied.
Zajdel was soon defending Bourque again, as per custom, saying that there was nothing wrong with the city giving $1 million to Canderel to build a shrine to the Canadiens at the old Forum.
But in Feb. 1999 Zajdel was caught flat-footed when his claim that the city had never been given a chance to buy a property off Atwater above Sherbrooke, was proven untrue by correspondence. Developer Rene Lepine had been seeking to build condos on the site of the project which had hitherto been zoned institutional. Lepine was, of course, granted that zoning switch and built condos on the green space as promised.
In September 1999, also under Zajdel's watch, parts of the downtown Faubourg St. Laurent were sold by the city for $1.7 million - a $10-million loss for the city of Montreal.
In the same month, Zajdel salivated as the federal Liberals needed a man in Mount Royal but he withdrew when the then-massively popular human rights figure Irwin Cotler chose also to seek the seat.
There was additional fury about other Zajdel dossiers such as the Redpath Mansion, condos on Cote-des-Neiges where the Christian Science church had sat as well as a failed attempt to expand a synagogue.
In 2000 Bourque's administration took over two buildings owned by Claudio Di Giambattista (who, rather amazingly has still not been put under public curatorship in spite of his obvious mental incompetence) specifically the 40 apartments at 3330 Bedford and the 32 units at 4711-4715 Plamondon.
The 250 mostly-immigrant residents of the 72 units were temporarily relocated because the apartments were unlivable. Rather than do the repairs and bill the landlord, the city allowed the buildings to remain in a state of disrepair and hoped the landlord would just fix them.
A housing activist group called OEIL got $600,000 together to buy the Plamondon building to repair and allow the tenants to return. The handshake deal was nixed though when Howard Rossdeutscher paid $1.5 million for the two properties and the new owners were given $200,000 to renovate them. They were turned into condos, and the residents - who should have been allowed to return - were out in the cold. A rental board judge (regisseur) agreed that the city was wrong but the tenants were stiffed nonetheless and many were placed at the front of the line into public housing units to quieten them up.
In Nov. 2001, the first megacity election, Zajdel beat Aline Malka by 200 votes to retain his seat, now called Darlington but his longtime Bourque had been defeated in favour of Tremblay and Zajdel's time on the high-paying executive committee was done too.
In July 2002 Zajdel faced heat when his wife received a $44,000 grant to fit up their NDG home from the Revitalization of Central Neighbourhoods Program. He was earning $58,000 a year at the time after losing his six-figure salary under Bourque.
In February 2005 he joined up with Tremblay's Union Party. This allowed him to collaborate and advance projects, as other could help support his initiatives, so he recovered at least part of his influence and power but whether he abused that power in those years remains to be seen.
That November he won his final election, beating Kashmir Singh Randhawa by 400 votes.
He was snubbed from the executive committee once again and after an uneventful few years as city councillor, where he seemed to have lost his focus and preparedness, he chose in June 2009 to not run again.
After quitting city politics he ran as a federal Conservative against Liberal incumbent Irwin Cotler but lost. He was criticized for taking a salary from the Conservatives for some time after in a role that aimed to undermine Cotler.
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What you must know about towing companies in Montreal
One recent example: the city housing project known as the Habitations Jeanne Mance has 150 parking spots, which they rent out subsidized housing tenants for $5 a month.
There are about 20 spaces advertised on a sign on Ontario St, however, that the public can use if they pay by putting coins into a meter. If a driver mistakenly puts his car into a the wrong spot in the parking lot, the SBM Remorquage a vos frais tow truck company quickly hauls it off.
When a motorist returns, he can recover his car by phoning a number posted on the sign. Coolopolis has received a detailed report of one recent incident in which the tow truck driver asked for $95 up front in order to reveal the location of where the car was towed. The tow truck driver said it had been a busy night and at least five others had been towed that evening from the same lot.
The motorist complained but paid the $95.
SBM Remorquage a vos frais manager Mario Bergeron told Coolopolis that company policy is to offer the motorist a choice of paying up front or receiving a bill in the mail and he said that he had received no complaint about the issue.Such companies will insist that they didn't demand cash up front, as the penalties for doing so are very severe, so a recording-device could come in very handy in such moments.
A rep from the Habitations Jeanne Mance subsidized housing project eventually returned a message and confirmed that the SBM frequently tows cars from the site upon call and that the housing project does not pay them for the service.
In fact, drivers have absolutely no obligation to pay cash up front to get their car back, or even show identification to a tow truck company employee.
Here is a link, in French, that I would highly recommend that you bookmark on your smartphone, as you will need it in a particular situation.
It was provided to Coolopolis by the local police and I have roughly translated it below:
For many years towing companies have caused misery to drivers who park their cars on private property without permission from those responsible for the land.
In many instances the towing company refused to return their owners without paying the towing and other costs up front.
This practice lasted until November 5, 1992 when the Supreme Court of Canada ended the judicial saga launched five years earlier by Contempra Investments, LTD, better known as Remorquage Quebecois a vos frais. By refusing to hear the appeal lodged by the company, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court decision that concluded that towing companies have no right to hold a car that they towed. Since then, no tow truck driver or parking lot owner can can demand immediate payment before returning a car to his owner. They now only have the right to return the car and give a bill that the motorist can pay in due course.
The towing companies have since modernized their practice. These days rather than towing a car to a garage, the cars are parked, often illegally, on a nearby street. When the owner doesn't see his car, he dials a number on a sign.
A clerk comes invites the owner his identify his car and demands cash to tell him where his car is hidden.
This is also illegal.
Owners of private property have the right to remove a car from their land. It's a right that cannot be abused however, for example, the car cannot be towed to the other side of town.
The driver who parked without permission of the owner has committed a civil infraction and should, in theory, pay for the costs of towing that he has incurred.
Back when they would bring the cars to a lot, the towing company could ask for identification because they need to return the vehicle to the correct person. The towing company then took the name and address for the purposes of billing as well.
However now that cars are simply displaced into city streets, the towing company cannot claim to be the guardian of the vehicle.
The motorist could simply walk around and find the car himself, as it's usually parked nearby. Nothing in the law authorizes towing staff to ask the car owners for identification. The towing company staff does not have the right to refuse to reveal the location of the vehicle even after the person has refused to show identification.
Obviously the towing companies complain that they'll never make their money back if they don't know the owner of the vehicle. That's one of the downside of this business unfortunately.
Article 45 of the Montreal's Reglement sur la ciruclation and security publique bans people from parking without permission on private properties. An officer can fine a motorist who does this but cannot reveal the identity of that motorist to an employee of the towing company.
A towing company that refuses to tell a motorist where his car is located without up-front payment or demands identification can be deemed in contravention of the Reglement sur le remorquague des vehicules en stationnement ou en arret interdit (RRVM c. R-4) as well as the law on recovering certain goods. (LRQ c. R-2.2.)
The first one prohibits a tow company to move a car more than 5 km away and fixes towing costs at $50. They can add a maximum cost of $10 per day for storage and obliges parking lot owners to install clear indications on signs.
Towing company owner Robert Salois challenged the city's bylaw but the Supreme Court upheld it in 1994.
So an tow truck employee contravening the law can be fined as can the business, between $100 to $1,000. The fines increase upon further offence.
The law on recovering certain goods is a provincial law preventing anybody from using unusual methods to recover their debts, outlawing behaviour that is "harassing, threatening or intimidating."
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| SBM towing sits on Bridge just south of Wellington |
To apply that law, the motorist must make a complain with the office of consumer protection.
Employees can be fined between $300 and $6,000 when the complainant is a person and $1,00 to $40,000 when the accused is a corporation. Fines double upon recurrence.
A tow company or employee who refuses to reveal the location of a car can be accused of intimidation and mischief. (art. 423 1 d c cr. art. 430 c.cr) or even of theft (art. 322 c.cr).
Demanding immediate payment can be considered a contravention of article 423. He can also be charged under 430 when he refuses to reveal where the car is located.
There are many court judgements from around the province recounting horror stories that people have suffered at the hands of towing companies. A couple of people have had goods stolen from within their car after it was towed indoors and one even said that she went a whole year without ever finding out what happened to her car.
I once had my car towed about 10 years ago from a lot downtown and when it was brought to an indoor lot on Young St., the company refused to release it without immediate payment. I called the police and they forced the company to return my vehicle and send me the bill. "Tell them to send you the bill and then don't pay it," I heard a cop say, or perhaps I imagined it. Either way, it was good advice.
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60 years ago, seven men survived for 39 days lost in northern Quebec
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| Montrealer Everitt |
Several members of the stranded team were experienced in the bush so the group managed to endure difficult conditions, rain, snow and near starvation to persevere.
Jim Vanstone, 20, a student from Toronto described it as a "wonderful experience," and told reporters, "I wouldn't have missed it for anything." In fact he said he'd do it all again if he knew it'd end up with a rescue.
The group agreed at the start that they would not quarrel and managed to share a tent of five-feet by nine-feet.
When the rescue team finally found them, part of the group had split off to find an Indian village, so they had to be found about nine hours away deep in the forest.
The men were: prospector Victor Abel of Seneterre, mining engineer Karl Koeten of Rotterdam, Jim Vanstone, who had been hired to do a government survey job, the men who left to hike to search for he other village were geologist Dr. Rolf Theinhaus of Seingen Germany, Flight Engineer Richard Everitt of Montreal, Andre Levesque of Rimouski and Pilot R. J. Mullin of Kenora Ontario.Everybody had lost between 25 and 40 pounds and death was staring them in the face, as their last bits of food were almost done.
The group had been lost on August 25 and were found October 2. Their flight was from the Fenimore Iron Company property at Fort Chimo near Ungava Bay and was flying to Roberval.
The men, if still alive, would be at least 80 years old now
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The new, new mayor will be....
Laurent Blanchard and Harout Chitilian are expected to be the top two vote-getters Tuesday with Alan DeSousa possibly winning if the candidates split.
All of five candidates are boasting that they have 20 votes each but, of course, there are only 62 councillors, so someone's math is wrong.
I'd like to see DeSousa win because I like a politician who knows how to talk.
Chitililan, whose name I had never heard until a couple of weeks ago, looks a bit like Lurch from the Adams Family.
I'm predicting a Blanchard victory, but hope that DeSousa pulls a Tommy Carcetti and edges him out.
Blanchard, 60, doesn't like to wake up early, we know that about him.
We also know that he is from the east end and tried to run a community paper for a while. Community papers invariably start as ambitious attempts at acting as watchdogs but quickly get hooked onto the city-borough advertising revenues and never publish anything critical again, leading to an erosion of democracy.
I don't know if that's what happened to his paper but he eventually joined as a Dore staffer, which tells you something.
He was elected in 2005 to the Tremblay team and might be best known for his bathrobe protest, in which he expressed opposition to a 6 a.m. council meeting by showing up in a bathrobe. Yeah I never heard of it either. We give Alex Norris a hard time for not wanting to wear a tie (btw, he apparently has been converted and is seen wearing a tie all over the place these days) but this guy's sartorial challenge might've been a lot more terry-clothy.
As for Chitilian, he can't talk clearly at all and is very tall. If you're over 6'1" you've probably floated higher than you should have up the ladder because bosses tend to promote tall people based on subconscious reptilian reflex, so I demand immediate proof of ability when I see someone hovering above.
The other two candidates, Poitras-hyphen and whoever the fifth one is, don't stand a chance.
(We need to enact a bylaw very fast to prevent anybody with a hyphenated last name from entering politics).
You'll note that outgoing mayor Michael Applebaum wrote his resignation own speech, the one where he said, "I never took a cent."
He also said, "I understand your deception." (In English.)
He understands out deception? WTF? He understands our deception.
He is saying that we have been deceived. Is he admitting that he deceived us?
Seriously, that was a pretty nasty mistake.
Applebaum, allegedly an English speaker, apparently thought that the French word deception, ie: disappointment, is the same as in English. So perhaps he didn't write his own speech after all.
All of five candidates are boasting that they have 20 votes each but, of course, there are only 62 councillors, so someone's math is wrong.
I'd like to see DeSousa win because I like a politician who knows how to talk.
Chitililan, whose name I had never heard until a couple of weeks ago, looks a bit like Lurch from the Adams Family.
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| Blanchard in Pixlr re-enactment expressing his grievance at an early morning meeting |
Blanchard, 60, doesn't like to wake up early, we know that about him.
We also know that he is from the east end and tried to run a community paper for a while. Community papers invariably start as ambitious attempts at acting as watchdogs but quickly get hooked onto the city-borough advertising revenues and never publish anything critical again, leading to an erosion of democracy.
I don't know if that's what happened to his paper but he eventually joined as a Dore staffer, which tells you something.
He was elected in 2005 to the Tremblay team and might be best known for his bathrobe protest, in which he expressed opposition to a 6 a.m. council meeting by showing up in a bathrobe. Yeah I never heard of it either. We give Alex Norris a hard time for not wanting to wear a tie (btw, he apparently has been converted and is seen wearing a tie all over the place these days) but this guy's sartorial challenge might've been a lot more terry-clothy.
As for Chitilian, he can't talk clearly at all and is very tall. If you're over 6'1" you've probably floated higher than you should have up the ladder because bosses tend to promote tall people based on subconscious reptilian reflex, so I demand immediate proof of ability when I see someone hovering above.
The other two candidates, Poitras-hyphen and whoever the fifth one is, don't stand a chance.
(We need to enact a bylaw very fast to prevent anybody with a hyphenated last name from entering politics).
You'll note that outgoing mayor Michael Applebaum wrote his resignation own speech, the one where he said, "I never took a cent."
He also said, "I understand your deception." (In English.)
He understands out deception? WTF? He understands our deception.
He is saying that we have been deceived. Is he admitting that he deceived us?
Seriously, that was a pretty nasty mistake.
Applebaum, allegedly an English speaker, apparently thought that the French word deception, ie: disappointment, is the same as in English. So perhaps he didn't write his own speech after all.
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Quiz - what happened here in 1977?
The answer is that William Robert Scully, 35, was blown up in the basement apartment at 5575 St. James St. W., an apartment in which anti-separatist newspaper clippings had been taped to the walls.
The presumption being that he had been amassing the explosives in order to perpetrate a political attack on the then-Rene Levesque-led Parti Quebecois government of the day.
Upstairs neighbours Gloria Fiorentino, then 17, said that she didn't know Scully much and he hardly talked to anybody and seemed depressed.
The bomb was powerful and killed Scully instantly but a neighbour named Donald Ouellette, then 25, still rushed to his aid, putting out his flaming hair.
Coolopolis reader Mark F commented on this site that he knew the guy a little and he speculated that it might have been a suicide. Another neighbour I contacted through Facebook lived two doors down at the time but had no other insight into the affair other than that it caused a stir at the time.
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Montreal's invisible mood borders
People moving to Montreal need to know that there are divisions between areas that they should be intuitively tuned into because it can dictate their enjoyment of living in any given area.
Every city has these swift changes in atmosphere, one minute you're walking amid a lively streetscape of new boutiques and cafes and suddenly you're in an area of sketchy dilapidation wishing you had packed your numchuks.
One example in Montreal that always strikes me is Dorchester Blvd.* which offers a different feel on each side. The south side feels strangely detached from downtown even though it's just feet away. It feels like it's already part of the downhill, more attached to Griffintown than the city.
I know this because I lived for seven years just south of Dorch and five years just north of the same artery.
Of course you could just cross the street but there's a psychological barrier involved in conquering that wide boulevardarian obstacle. So if you want to get thyself to Peel and St. Catherine you'll only feel that you're on your way once you cross the busy boulevard and you're not in the GSM** land of fun.
Living on the north side of Dorchester is better, which is why I'd opt to buy a condo at the Icon rather than the Canadiens Tower if I was on the market for a condo.
The first time I became attuned to the concept of this invisible separation in a city was when I was in grade 10 doing some sort of enumerating task for Elections Canada, delivering flyers around NDG. Suddenly on Decarie below Sherbrooke the familiar middle class homes gave way to sloppy apartments with the smell of desperation, no more brazen soccer moms asking what you're doing, instead reclusive people watching Soul Train on a rainy Saturday afternoon.
Naturally St. Catherine west of Guy will see a subtle change of mood and another occurs around St. Matthew where the sheen and ambition has rubbed off and has a more run-down look.
The Main above Pine is another obvious one, where the emotional dropoff is impossible to ignore. St. Catherine from Place des Arts east is the end of the party as well.
I'll try to add more examples and possibly even create a mood map in time but meanwhile please add your suggestions to any such geographically-dictated mood borders that you've encountered in this city so we can collaborate
*aka Rene Levesque, I still call it Dorch cuz of historical reasons and the fact that 2 of the 3 municipalities retained the original name.
**Golden Square Mile
Every city has these swift changes in atmosphere, one minute you're walking amid a lively streetscape of new boutiques and cafes and suddenly you're in an area of sketchy dilapidation wishing you had packed your numchuks.
One example in Montreal that always strikes me is Dorchester Blvd.* which offers a different feel on each side. The south side feels strangely detached from downtown even though it's just feet away. It feels like it's already part of the downhill, more attached to Griffintown than the city.
I know this because I lived for seven years just south of Dorch and five years just north of the same artery.
Of course you could just cross the street but there's a psychological barrier involved in conquering that wide boulevardarian obstacle. So if you want to get thyself to Peel and St. Catherine you'll only feel that you're on your way once you cross the busy boulevard and you're not in the GSM** land of fun.
Living on the north side of Dorchester is better, which is why I'd opt to buy a condo at the Icon rather than the Canadiens Tower if I was on the market for a condo.
The first time I became attuned to the concept of this invisible separation in a city was when I was in grade 10 doing some sort of enumerating task for Elections Canada, delivering flyers around NDG. Suddenly on Decarie below Sherbrooke the familiar middle class homes gave way to sloppy apartments with the smell of desperation, no more brazen soccer moms asking what you're doing, instead reclusive people watching Soul Train on a rainy Saturday afternoon.
Naturally St. Catherine west of Guy will see a subtle change of mood and another occurs around St. Matthew where the sheen and ambition has rubbed off and has a more run-down look.
The Main above Pine is another obvious one, where the emotional dropoff is impossible to ignore. St. Catherine from Place des Arts east is the end of the party as well.
I'll try to add more examples and possibly even create a mood map in time but meanwhile please add your suggestions to any such geographically-dictated mood borders that you've encountered in this city so we can collaborate
*aka Rene Levesque, I still call it Dorch cuz of historical reasons and the fact that 2 of the 3 municipalities retained the original name.
**Golden Square Mile
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Corey Crawford tells crowd: "we fucken worked our nuts off"
Congrats to Chateauguay's Corey Crawford who has become the first anglo-Montrealer to goaltend his way to a cup since the Gump Worsley (Point St. Charles) Charlie Hodge (LaSalle) duo bagged it in 1964-65.
Franco Montrealer Martin Brodeur won the cup in 2000 and Marc-Andre Fleury (from Sorel, not really a suburb of Montreal, or perhaps with urban sprawl it has become one) bagged it in 2009.
Crawford, proved that Chateauguay-folk are the most articulate of all Montreal-area residents by telling a crowd, which undoubtedly included countless formative-aged children. "Fuckin right Chicago... inaudible...we fucken worked our nuts off for this trophy no one will ever take this away from us. We're the champs!"
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