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>> Viger Park murder’s fall-out

>> Boycotting Rio+10

>> I, Single Mum : I, Sisyphus

>> The Kristian Perspective : Exotic meats of the city

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Would you like tzatziki with that? Cooks prepare a few of the estimated 35,000 souvlakis served this weekend at the Park Ex Greek festival. The five-day fest celebrates the falling asleep of the Virgin Mary and her subsequent assumption. Much food and dancing also feature prominently.

Photo by Jason Felker >>

Mont-Royal stop ’n’ go

Almost every weekday throughout the year, two attendants from the Villeneuve daycare don special crossing guard jackets and haul stop signs and walk into the traffic at Mont-Royal and Jeanne-Mance. Ferrying tiny children across the street isn’t easy at that intersection.

“You wouldn’t believe what happens. Cars still just drive by right in front of us and we scream at them and they tell us that they didn’t see us,” says Zuhal Yegin.

In the 16 years she’s worked at the daycare, she says she’s heard “constant talk” of plans to put a traffic light in at the intersection, but the good news came last November when the city started digging the holes to install the lights. After the triumphal announcement, big time oopsoopsoops ensued as city crews sheepishly filled the holes a few days later. The traffic lights got the red light because, according to city traffic official Guy Lefebvre, Hydro-Québec refused digging and access to manholes because of faulty wiring that would pose a danger to workers trying to install the necessary wires. The city is now considering a plan that would see lights hover over the intersection. “It’d be temporarily suspended over the street,” says Lefebvre, who concedes that “it might be less beautiful.”

Meanwhile, bike activists are anxious to have the lights put in, as they consider the crossing a missing link between a downtown route through McGill and a network of proposed and existing bike paths on the Plateau. :
-Kristian Gravenor

Civil suits and cover-ups

With the resumption of the civil suit against Montreal cop Giovanni Stante and his partner Sylvain Fouquette, both recently cleared in the death of Jean-Claude Lizotte, police watchdogs are hoping for a renewed debate as to what happened the night of September 5, 1999.

That night, Lizotte, homeless at the time, was badly beaten by Stante, Fouquette and a bouncer at the Shed Café on St-Laurent. He died from complications six weeks later. Stante was acquitted of manslaughter, aggravated assault and assault causing bodily harm. Lizotte’s brother Leopold then re-launched the civil suit late last week, after a two-year pause for the criminal trial. The city’s cop-watchers are hoping that the civil suit will reveal a cover-up on the part of police, as was alleged by Crown prosecutors.

“We learned a few interesting things at the trial,” says Alexandre Popovic, spokesperson for the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality (COBP). “The prosecution charged that Stante brought Lizotte to [a police station] to clean him up before they brought him to a hospital.” He also points to discrepancies in Stante’s report, enough of them for him to believe in a widespread cover-up.

However, Yves Manseau, head of Mouvement Action-Justice, believes the city will simply pay off the family to avoid more embarrassment. “We saw that in other cases,” he says. “The system is really biased in favour of the police. You can bet any other ordinary citizen would not have got away with this kind of thing.” :
-Patrick Lejtenyi

Slamming
the slums

The city’s housing supremo, Michel Prescott, is trying to figure some tactics out to go mano a mano against local slumlords. Among the ideas the Plateau city councillor is considering are a fink line to rat out landlords who allow their buildings to fall into disrepair. “We’re working on a program to become a lot more proactive and efficient than we were before, one that would really target bad and neglectful landlords who are allowing their buildings to turn into slums,” says Prescott.

“We want to know how, in spite of the city’s efforts, there are buildings like the ones on L’Acadie, where the landlords, in spite of existing laws, continue to operate their buildings in a totally unacceptable manner,” he says.
Prescott adds that it could become commonplace for the city to simply do the repairs that landlords refuse to do, rather than have residents turfed out of homes inspectors deem unsafe, as was the case in a high-profile example on De Bullion this summer. “I’m convinced that it’s the first time this city will have a real plan of action against slums and slumlords,” says Prescott, who believes it’ll take some imagination and, of course, some cash. “We’ll need a fund for the city to do the works if a landlord doesn’t do it.” Under Prescott’s plan, landlords who don’t then pay for city work will have their buildings seized. :
-Kristian Gravenor