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http://www.montrealmirror.com/wp/2010/09/16/news/tacofying-city-hall/ YESSSSSSSS PLEEEEEEEEAAAAAASE!

http://spacingmontreal.ca/2011/05/01/saint-pierre-river-site-to-become-montreals-first-woonerf/ Definition of a woonerf: A woonerf (Dutch plural: woonerven) in the Netherlands and Flanders is a street where pedestrians and cyclists have legal priority over motorists. The techniques of shared spaces, traffic calming, and low speed limits are intended to improve pedestrian, bicycle, and automobile safety.

(Courtesy of The Globe and Mail)

(Courtesy of CBC News) How about stronger sentences? You get caught you get a huge fine. Second time you get caught your car gets ceased and auctioned off and you lose your license for life. If you ended up killing someone, you die in prison! WELL WILL THIS DAMN PROVINCE AND COUNTRY DO THIS!

«Montréal est l'égal des étapes du grand chelem» Mario Brisebois Journal de Montréal 05/08/2007 08h26 <SPAN class=txtnoir1> Pour la première fois en 27 ans de grands tournois de tennis à Montréal, le tableau principal en simple commence un dimanche, c'est-à-dire aujourd'hui. Roger Federer et Rafael Nadal, qui offrent la plus intense rivalité tous sports confondus, sont en ville. Les dix premières raquettes du classement mondial aussi. «Montréal a toujours présenté des tournois relevés chez les hommes même s'il nous manquait souvent un ou deux grands noms du top 10, ce qui n'est pas le cas cette année», a expliqué, hier, Eugène Lapierre, le grand patron du tennis. «Au dernier décompte, nous devions accueillir 23 des 25 premières raquettes du monde, ce qui fait que Montréal est l'égal des étapes du grand chelem cette semaine», a-t-il ajouté. Après l'hécatombe de l'an dernier, du côté féminin, le public mérite bien d'accueillir les plus grands cette année. Avant que les premières balles ne soient frappées, cet après-midi, Eugène Lapierre nous a offert son expertise en répondant à ces questions. Q Une finale Federer-Nadal, dimanche prochain, doit-elle être considérée comme une évidence? <FONT size=3><B>

Anglos key to Quebec, Weil says New justice minister discusses her political debut, her views on Quebec society and the language issue - and her other job as a hockey mom By KEVIN DOUGHERTY, The GazetteFebruary 22, 2009 12:01 Kathleen Weil, Quebec's justice minister and MNA for N.D.G., in Old Montreal this month.Kathleen Weil sees language and diversity not as irritants but as lubricants, changing the face of Quebec. "It's French here, but with a thriving English community," Weil said in her first interview with The Gazette since her political debut in the Dec. 8 provincial election. Premier Jean Charest named Weil - who pronounces her name "While" in English but "Vial" in French - as justice minister after she held the Liberal stronghold of Notre Dame de Grâce. She sees N.D.G. as a microcosm of Quebec's future, with people from English, French and other backgrounds who increasingly speak French. Michael Goldbloom, a founding member of Alliance Quebec and principal of Bishop's University, says he and Weil have been close friends since the 1980s, when she was the English-rights lobby group's legal adviser. He recently saw the justice minister and her husband, Michael Novak, when their daughter Elisabeth, 13, played in a hockey game in Bromptonville. "She really is a hockey mum," Goldbloom said. Family values and empathy motivate her, Goldbloom added. Working with Batshaw Youth & Family Services and Quebec's regional health boards, Weil established links in Montreal and across the province. "You've got to be connected," Goldbloom said, adding that her shift to politics was "a perfectly logical step." Paul Jones, who was with Alliance Quebec, as he puts it, "from its inception to its decline," remembers Weil as "very pleasant" and "very intelligent." And Jones observes that the two solitudes that once defined Quebec society are now blurred. Weil sees Quebec's English community is a " tremendous asset," plugged in to Quebec. "If it didn't exist, you would have to invent it, because Quebec is stronger because of the English community. "My best close friends are francophones," she said, adding that the shifting demographics of Montreal mean the city will be quite different in 10 years, in 20 years, with more anglophones and newcomers at ease in French. "When I was campaigning in N.D.G., I was amazed," Weil said. "I was amazed at the anglophones, how bilingual they were." Going door to door, she would greet voters in French and in English. "Anglophones would sometimes continue in French," she said. "I was meeting Chinese people, where the dad didn't speak English or French, but the child spoke fluent French." But Weil recognizes that the government has to be sensitive to English-speaking seniors and others who are not at ease in French and who have a legal right to services in English. Quoting former PQ premier Lucien Bouchard, she said: "When you are sick, it is not the time to take a language course." Running in December was Weil's first venture into partisan politics, but she said she is "very comfortable" with the Quebec Liberals. "I've always been a Liberal in my heart," she said, recalling that her mother, Mary, was an active Liberal. "I believe in their values of social justice. I believe in supporting the private sector to create jobs to better share the wealth, which is one of the fundamental principles of the Liberal Party." Weil inherited her social conscience from her parents. Her father, Dr. Paul Weil, ran the blood transfusion service at the Royal Victoria Hospital. He wrote medical research papers, but the dinner table conversation was about history and socioeconomic issues. "He cared about people who did not have advantages." Her mother worked full time in public relations at the hospital and corresponded with Dr. Norman Bethune when he was in China. Her mother, from Almonte, Ont., decided she should be schooled in French. Weil, the sixth of seven children, recalls that her father, originally from the United States, would take the younger children on house calls in the southwestern part of the city. And Verdun is where she takes her daughter Elisabeth to pre-dawn hockey games. Weil admits to being a "hockey mum," but rejects the comparison with Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Aside from impromptu runs, when she can find the time, Weil, 54, says her daughter's hockey games are important, to maintain contact with the youngest of her four children, but also to meet other parents. "Some lose their jobs and they are stuck," she said. As justice minister, Weil aims to improve access to justice, using mediation to cut legal costs and save time. She wants to reintroduce the anti-SLAPP law - to stop Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation - which died on the order paper when the election was called. As justice minister and attorney-general, she is the government's lawyer in court cases. She also follows trials in progress and bills under consideration. "You're the legal counsel for the government on all laws," she said. She is not, however, allowed to comment on cases before the courts. "The Gazette may get frustrated because probably I will be the quietest minister of all, and I have to be," Weil said. "If a minister of justice is not above the fray, that's when people lose confidence in their justice system." kdougherty@ thegazette.canwest.com © Copyright © The Montreal Gazette

Du site de BBC News - 2 articles sur la conférence à McGill en fin de semaine, in "the Canadian city of Montreal" - lol Forum tackles genocide prevention Local people in front of burnt out buildings in Darfur Delegates said atrocities continued to this day in Darfur A conference in the Canadian city of Montreal has been discussing ways to try to prevent genocide. Delegates heard from survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, as well as genocidal campaigns in Rwanda and Cambodia. Many delegates referred to the current crisis in Darfur, Sudan, which has been described as "genocide in slow motion". "It seems that for the most part the vow of 'never again' was not taken seriously," Payam Akhavan, the conference chair, told AFP news agency. Esther Mujawayo, a Rwandan woman who lost her mother, father and husband in the 1994 genocide, said she was sceptical about the world's willingness to prevent atrocities. "Don't tell me you didn't know. The world did know. The world looked away. You knew but did not have the will," said Mrs Mujawayo. "When the people were evacuating, the French, the Belgians, the Americans, all the expatriates, they even evacuated their dogs and their cats," while Rwandans were left behind, she said. 'Arm opponents' Much of the discussion at the conference, sponsored by McGill University's law faculty, has centred on how to prevent common aspects of genocides, like media outlets demonising potential victims and foreign bureaucratic inertia preventing intervention. But a controversial thesis was also presented by the French scholar, Gerard Prunier. He said the only way to stop government sponsored mass killings was to give military backing to opponents of that government. "If we decide that in fact what is going to happen is of a genocidal dimension, we have to support, including militarily, the people who are fighting against it," he said. He told the BBC that would mean arming and assisting the rebels fighting against government-backed militia in Darfur. Some two million people have been displaced and at least 200,000 have died during the four-year conflict in western Sudan. Can the world stop genocide? Can the world stop genocide? A conference in the Canadian city of Montreal has been discussing ways to prevent genocide. BBC world affairs correspondent Mark Doyle, attending the meeting, asks whether this can be done. Remains of victims of the Rwandan genocide laid to rest at the Murambi Genocide Memorial. Some 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered in 100 days in 1994 The 75-year-old woman sat on stage in front of hundreds of United Nations officials, legal experts and academics. The day before, Marika Nene had travelled from Hungary to Canada - the first plane she had ever taken on her first journey outside Hungary. She was not intimidated by the gathering. Her long hair was lit up by a stage light and her facial features were strong. But the strongest thing about Marika Nene, a Roma - or Gypsy - woman who was trapped in the anti-Gypsy pogroms during World War II, was her determination to tell her story. "I had no choice. I had to give myself up to the soldiers," Marika Nene said through a translator. "I was a very pretty little gypsy woman and of course the soldiers took me very often to the room with a bed in it where they violated me. I still have nightmares about it". Many members of Marika Nene's Roma family died in the work camps and the ghettos. She had travelled to Montreal to give a reality check to the experts and UN officials at the "Global Conference on the Prevention of Genocide". We do not need to have a legal finding that genocide has been committed in order to take preventive action Payam Akhavan Former war crimes prosecutor She was joined by other survivors - from Rwanda, Cambodia and the Jewish holocaust. They all told their horrific stories bravely. But there was something especially extraordinary about the elderly Roma who had transported herself from a village in eastern Hungary into the glare of an international conference in one of the most modern cities in the world. It was an example of what Nigerian Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka would later describe to me as one of those points where people meet each other in a spirit of "egalitarian awareness". Six million Jews or one million Tutsis are just numbers. But this strong Roma woman was a human being who was not ashamed to tell her story. Betrayal The Montreal conference drew personalities from the UN, academia and the legal profession. Romeo Dallaire Romeo Dallaire could do little to prevent the Rwandan genocide The general aim was to build pressure on politicians to take mass killings - even in far-off places about which we know little and sometimes care less - far more seriously. If that sounds like a fuzzy and vague ambition, Canadian Gen Romeo Dallaire, who commanded a UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, begged to differ. Gen Dallaire led a force in Rwanda which was betrayed by UN headquarters in New York - his mission was starved of resources and so forced to observe genocide rather than stop it. Since that failed mission, he has made a career out of lobbying politicians to do better on issues like peacekeeping, abolishing the use of child soldiers and nuclear disarmament. "This conference is aimed especially at young people," said Gen Dallaire from a hotel surrounded by the campus buildings of McGill University, which organised the conference. "If these young people became politically active," he continued, "they could dictate a whole new concept of what national interest should be and what humanity should be." What is genocide? Payam Akhavan, professor of international law at McGill and a former prosecutor at the UN war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, said defining genocide mattered from a legal point of view - but that analysing how it could be prevented was the real point. Pol Pot in the 1970s, and shortly before his death in the 1990s Pol Pot, who led Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, was never brought to justice "The legal definition of genocide is contained in the 1948 Genocide convention," he told me. "In simple terms, it is the intentional, collective destruction of an entire human group based on national, racial, religious or ethnic identity." "But the key point", Mr Akhavan continued, "is that we do not need to have a legal finding that genocide has been committed in order to take preventive action." That is because, of course, by the time the lawyers have decided a mass killing fits their definition, it is usually too late to act. The Iranian-born professor said it was necessary to think about the ingredients of genocide, which he listed as: * incitement to ethnic hatred * demonisation of the target group * radicalisation along ethnic or religious lines * distribution of weapons to extremist groups * preparation of lists of those to be exterminated Similarities As someone who personally witnessed and reported on the Rwandan genocide, I found it quite disturbing to read about other mass killings. Genocides can only be stopped by the people directly involved Gerard Prunier It was not the details which I found shocking, but the spooky similarities that kept cropping up across the world. The lists prepared by the Hutu extremists in Rwanda, for example, were mirrored by the obsessive recording of the details of victims by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The yellow identity stars Jews were forced to wear in World War II were the equivalent of the ethnic identity cards every Rwandan had to carry. This is the grim opposite of Wole Soyinka's "egalitarian awareness". It is the social science of genocide, which appears to have common features across history. The conference aimed to isolate and analyse Mr Akhavan's "early warning" factors to raise awareness. But what to do with the information? As speaker after speaker reminded the Montreal conference, the US government, among others, has asserted that genocide is being committed right now in the Darfur region of Sudan. It was continuing even as we sipped our coffee in softly carpeted rooms and nibbled our Canadian canapes. Everyone has known about it for several years but virtually nothing had been done to stop it. A dissident voice So all the talk about "early warnings" and "United Nations peacekeeping forces" and "the will of the international community" could be said to amount to little. Local people in front of burnt out buildings in Darfur The US and others have said a genocide is unfolding in Darfur At this point, a controversial scholar intervened with comments which challenged the entire conference. French author Gerard Prunier, like the proverbial ghost at a wedding, said genocides could not be prevented by the international community. "When you see a dictatorial regime heating up, everyone starts talking, talking, talking ... and by the time the talking stops, either matters have quietened down or they have happened." And that is the crux of the matter, according to Mr Prunier - it is difficult for politicians or the military to intervene in a situation that has not yet evolved into a crisis. Give war a chance? So what is Mr Prunier's solution? "Genocides can only be stopped by the people directly involved - and usually that means people involved in the war that accompanies most mass killings." And if it is the government committing the genocide, the solution is "arm the rebels", he says. "It won't be clean - it will be messy," the French author said, "but it is more likely to stop the mass killing than international intervention." To a large extent, Mr Prunier has history on his side. The Holocaust only ended when the allies destroyed Hitler's regime. The killing fields of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge were only stopped when the Vietnamese army moved in. And the genocide in Rwanda only ended when the Tutsi rebels overthrew the extremist Hutu regime. Against this, it could be argued that some interventions have worked - for example the Nigerian intervention in Liberia, which was followed up by a UN peacekeeping mission. It seems that resolving dramatic human rights abuses may require some of the diplomacy and the "international good will" that flowed so freely in Montreal. But as well as what Winston Churchill called "Jaw Jaw", some situations, it seems, may only be resolved by "War War".