Quote of the week

“It has its own beauty and should be left as is.” —Dimitri Zoumboulakis, owner of the Café Cleopatra, on refusing to sell the building to make space for the proposed Quadrilatère Saint-Laurent project at St-Laurent and Ste-Catherine.

Turcot demo

A growing umbrella group of residents and their supporters have been pressuring the Quebec Ministry of Transport for the last year and a half to alter their plans to replace the 1960s dystopian Turcot Interchange. Now a bunch of environmentalist organizations are adding their voices to the mix. Greenpeace, Equiterre, QuebecKyoto, Earth Day, the Conseil regional de l’environnement en ENvironnement JEUnesse are all sponsoring the next demonstration organized by Mobilisation Turcot against the plan, which foresees the construction of a new ground-level highway beside the crumbling one in the sky and includes the razing of 150 units of housing.

“Bringing the highway down to street level is not only dangerous, but it would cut the neighbourhood in two,” says Mobilisation Turcot spokesperson Geneviève Locas, comparing it to the train tracks that splice NDG into two parts.

“Since we’ve been organizing, the ministry has modified some things, adding some social housing units, but they are not willing to consider the possibility of reducing circulation,” she says. “It’s a good time to rethink transport and come up with long-term solutions.”

The demo takes place Sunday, April 19, 1:30 p.m. with two starting points that will converge: metro Lionel-Groulx and 780 St-Rémi. Info: mobilisation-turcot.info.

by Matt Jones

Bikes for the Point

The Centre Social Autogéré (CSA) of Pointe St-Charles is gearing up for an elaborate launch of their free bike rental program, Vélo-Libre, this Saturday, April 18. The group will make over 20 bikes available for free at self-serve stations around the neighbourhood. Organizers say it’s a good alternative to the city’s Bixi program.

“There’s a certain control [with Bixi], not only in the sense that the bikes are locked up and you have to pay, but it’s also only available downtown and in hip neighbourhoods,” says CSA member Marco Silvestro. “We see it as a way to recycle, reuse and re-appropriate. It’s completely free and there’s no social control attached to it.”

The painted-on orange and black tiger stripes will be a theft deterrent, says organizer Anna Kruzynski. She says a similar project in Buckingham, Quebec in 2004 saw general bike theft decrease by about 60 percent.

“We just want people to have a sense of collective responsibility, that the bikes belong to everyone,” she adds.

The parade takes place Saturday April 18, 1 p.m., but will be moved to Sunday if it rains. The meeting point is at Parc St-Gabriel, two blocks south of metro Charlevoix. Info: centresocialautogere.org.

by Lina Harper

Talking
infotainment

While it’s hard to argue that Britney’s mental health issues and the Utah goat who recently shat out quintuplets aren’t crucially important news items, some insist there are more relevant issues media outlets could be covering. Some even go so far as to claim that a healthy democratic society actually depends on it. With traditional media in crisis mode, scrambling to find workable business models in the digital age, the hypothesis that hard news is increasingly being sacrificed in favour of the trivial is causing concern among academics and media watchdogs.

“When we see media as business, and news as a commodity, we’re talking about entertainment, not information,” says McGill Communications professor Marc Raboy. “With newspapers closing and public broadcasting shrinking, where does this leave the citizen?”

On Friday, April 17 and Saturday, April 18, Media@McGill and le Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de Montréal (CRÉUM) will be gathering Raboy and a host of leading communications specialists for “a free public colloquium aiming to explore the tensions of a free press in a free market and the ethical dilemmas and responsibilities arising as a consequence.”

It all goes down at UdeM’s Pavillion J-Armand Bombardier (5155 Decelles, room 1035). Info: media.mcgill.ca/en/node/1390.

by Chris Barry

Helping
out Haiti

Activists from the local Haitian community are seeking donations to help realize their twin goals of building a community centre for the island nation’s Vieux Bourg d’Aquin district, in the country’s southwest, as well as a youth centre here in Montreal.

“Those of us who live abroad have to be more active in the lives of the people of Haiti,” says Chavannes Clerveaux, a local musician and secretary-general of Haiti-Quebec Canada. “It’s a project of recovery, designed to show young people that we can pull ourselves up.”

In addition to financial contributions, desired items include office supplies, computers and electronic equipment, footwear and linens, musical instruments, sports equipment, toys, cooking and agricultural tools, and educational materials such as notebooks, textbooks, pens and pencils.

Perhaps more important than donations, Clerveaux and company are looking for individuals who share their desire to help by getting involved.

“Money is our second priority,” he says. “The first thing we’re looking for is like-minded people.”

Donations can be dropped off on Saturdays and Sundays from 3–8 p.m. at 3757 Monselet (corner Rome) in Montreal North. For more info, call (438) 777-8461, or visit haitiquebeccanada.com.

by Christopher Hazou

Rear-view mirror

14 YEARS AGO - APRIL 13–20, 1995

On the cover: The Snitches’ Mike Webber. He says playing local warehouse parties allowed the group (including future Mirror writer Chris Hazou) to “put the power in our hands in terms of our representation…. We could do a lot of parties and have a lot of people see us over the course of a year, which wouldn’t have happened at all if we’d had to rely on just the Woodstocks and Jailhouse Rocks.”
• West Islanders are in denial about their teen violence problem, writes former West Island Chronicle crime reporter Frederic Serre, following another fatal home invasion attack on a senior. “For years, whenever a serious crime was committed in a West Island municipality, the knee-jerk reaction among residents and politicians was the same: it’s those damned Montreal kids again. Not this time, West Island.”
• Two historical dramas, Rob Roy and Jefferson in Paris, are reviewed, both negatively. Roy is “too mechanical,” Jefferson “a colossal drag.”
• Six months before the referendum, a Mirror editorial declares Quebec’s separation movement “dead.”

Angel >>Getting saner on Cuba With the U.S. ever-so-slightly easing its crippling embargo against the last Communist redoubt in the Western Hemisphere, the influx of Cuban-American relatives and their remittances will doubtless make the average Cuban’s everyday life a little less difficult. Most of the rest of the world, including Canada, has long known that four decades of trade and travel bans have done nothing to soften the Castro boys’ grim grip on power, and may indeed have strengthened it. This first thaw won’t change much, other than stoking pasty Canadians’ dread of someday sharing Cuba’s pristine beaches with dumb, fat and loud yanqui tourists. But anyone who’s been there knows that more money coming in can’t hurt

Insect >>Dow AgroSciences When Quebec banned synthetic pesticides way back in 2003 and expanded its prohibition against 200 products containing hazardous materials in 2006, pesticide makers vowed to continue the fight. And they did, with U.S.-based Dow AgroSciences taking on the feds over the province’s ban. (Under NAFTA rules, corporations can only sue federal governments.) At issue is 2,4-D, said by environmentalists to belong to a family of known carcinogenic chemicals. Dow, however, disputes this, saying the province has no scientific basis to support the ban. To its credit, the federal government has said it will back Quebec.