Keep your
dwelling rights

The best way to win a fight is to know your strengths, and if you’re a tenant getting the boot from your landlord, then your strengths are your rights. You do have some, and the Comité logement du Plateau Mont Royal is holding workshops to let you know what they are.

The workshops address the complications surrounding the thorny situation whereby a landlord repossesses a dwelling (which means kicking out tenants from a rented apartment so either he, his parents or his children can live there), which is legal - when done in good faith. When it isn’t, that’s when problems arise.

“Sometimes the landlord can say that he’s taking it back but it’s not true,” says Michael Hogan, a community organizer at the Comité. “He only wants to get rid of the tenant who doesn’t pay that much rent. And when he gets rid of him, he can put the apartment back on the market and increase the rent.” That’s not legal, and the Rental Board will likely side with tenants in that dispute.

The workshops, which resume on Jan. 8 and 15, following their inaugural one last night, are essentially educational in nature and are designed to help tenants know what they’re up against and what options are available to them. They are all free, and take place at the Comité’s headquarters, found at 4450 St-Hubert, Room 324. For information and reservations, call 527-3495. : » Patrick Lejtenyi

Kick Big
Brother back

Are you tired of being under the constant eye of surveillance cameras seemingly every time you go, well, pretty well anywhere these days? Worried that hidden spy cams are documenting you on bad hair days or capturing you scratching at your genitals when you think nobody is looking? If so, you’re not alone. And this Dec. 24 is the day to you can do something about it.

Professor Steve Mann of the University of Toronto’s Humanistic Intelligence Lab has organized World Sousveillance Day, aka World Subjectrights Day, scheduled to go down at noon this Christmas Eve day. Mann, along with an international coalition of privacy watchdogs, is encouraging all those concerned with the “growing and dehumanizing effects of increased video surveillance, automated face recognition, and Coverment (Corporate+Government) tracking in public and private places” to put on a disguise, arm themselves with a camera and go out to the offending establishments and start clicking away at their surveillance equipment - just to see what happens. What will happen, Mann predicts, is that very quickly participants will find themselves surrounded by security personnel, whom Mann is asking all concerned privacy advocates to also photograph, and later enter their best shots into a global photo contest he is sponsoring.

“As high noon sweeps past various time zones on Dec. 24, the shot heard around the world will be that of clicking cameras,” claims Mann. For more details on how to participate in this worthy event, check out Mann’s Web site at www.wearcam.org/wsd.htm. : » Chris Barry

Lights still
out at PVM

Place Ville-Marie’s beacon blasting through the high-altitude darkness remains one of the city’s best-loved and most recognizable features. But city dwellers have been getting used to living without beams twisting overhead since a hairy incident on the roof of the tower November 23. That Saturday around 1 p.m., according to Julia, events organizer at the Altitude 737 bar on the building’s top floor, the winner of the European version of the TV show The Mole had just been crowned and the champagne-sipping candidates and camera crew were stunned by the scary noise. “We heard a big crack and saw the antenna fall towards us. Luckily it broke in two and got stuck in the cables,” she says.

Since then it’s been sad darkness on the roof of William Zeckendorf’s cruciform 43-storey structure. The Royal Bank owns the beacon, although real estate investors SITQ (which is made up of six financial institutions, as well as Quebec’s Caisse de dépôt et placement pension fund) own the building.

“It couldn’t have hurt anyone below because the beacon is in the middle of the building,” says SITQ rep Louis Garneau. Those addicted to the hypnotic circular motion of the turning lights will have to live without the luminary pulses for an unspecified period. The two companies hired to fix the thing are still stuck at the evaluation stage of repairs and Garneau won’t venture to provide a date when PVM will get its mojo back. : » Kristian Gravenor

Angel >> The decline of death row For the first time since it was reinstated in the U.S. in 1976, the number of prisoners awaiting execution has dropped, due partially to juries’ and prosecutors’ growing reluctance to hand down death sentences, according to a Justice Department report. A total 155 people were sentenced to die in 2001, down from 303 in 1998. As DNA evidence and closer scrutiny of trial procedures highlighted serious shortcomings in the handling of capital cases, the death sentence has come under increasingly heavy fire by abolitionists. But they have their work cut out for them: 3,581 people are still awaiting execution by their government.
Insect >> Artificial Christmas trees Kind of cheesy is a charitable way to describe artificial trees, the perfect metaphor for our convenience-minded culture. But now another description can be added: cancer-causing, as one Montreal family discovered this week. While decorating their mail-ordered tree, a sharp-eyed family member discovered that along with boughs of plastic came traces of lead and a small card inside the box warning buyers that, “This product exposes you to certain chemicals [that…] cause cancer, birth defects and other reproductive harm. Wash hands after use.” Health Canada dismissed the threat as negligible.