Montreal

Montreal City Hall: MONTREAL - Different levels of government have agreed to offer several perks to keep the headquarters of the only United Nations agency based in Canada. , according to Winnipeg Free Press. The agreement, signed late Monday afternoon in a ceremony at Montreal City Hall, will keep ICAO in Montreal until 2036. Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, left, and ICAO Secretary-General Raymond Benjamin, right, exchange documents as they sign an agreement to keep the International Civil Aviation Organization headquarters in Montreal Monday, May 27, 2013 in Montreal. Looking on are Montreal Mayor Michael Applebaum, back left, ICAO Council President Roberto Gonazalez, back center, and Quebec International Affairs Minister Jean-Francois Lisee, Back right,.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz A background document says the federal government will spend $1.4 million to modernize the International Civil Aviation Organization's conference facilities and add extra security equipment. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.

U.S. Immigration And Customs Enforcement ICE Dept: The 66-year-old Montrealer, reputed to be the head of the Montreal Mafia when he was extradited to the U.S. in 2006, stepped out of the Florence Federal Correctional Complex in Florence, Colo., a little after 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time Friday and was immediately turned over to officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE , who whisked him away to prepare him for a flight to Canada, where he is a citizen, according to Montreal Gazette. Everything he has is in Montreal. Everyone he knows is in Montreal, one police source told The Gazette, regarding the support Rizzuto is believed to still have in the city, even if the organization he controlled for roughly two decades has been significantly weakened by a major police investigation and a subsequent series of murders. There's no reason for him to live in Toronto. MONTREAL Vito Rizzuto returns home seeking answers to a long list of questions compiled during the last several years he spent behind bars, police sources say. Officials in the U.S. provided no more information about how Rizzuto was to be removed from the country. But late Friday night reports out of Toronto said he landed at Pearson International Airport just before 11 p.m., and according to passengers on board he had a heavily armed police escort. While there has been some speculation in the media over the past two weeks that Rizzuto would settle in Toronto, police sources in Montreal believed he would transfer to Montreal, the city he has lived in most of his life. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.

montreal canadiens: The 38-year-old said on a conference call on Thursday that he will play in the KHL and possibly the Winter Olympics next season after failing to reach agreement on a new deal with Montreal, according to Toronto Star. Markov said he was not interested in skating for any other NHL club than Montreal, where he played 990 games and put up numbers that placed him among the best defencemen in the storied club's history. David Zalubowski / The Associated Press By The Canadian Press Thu., July 27, 2017 MONTREAL After 16 seasons with the Montreal Canadiens, defenceman Andrei Markov is heading back to Russia. And he did not rule out returning to the Canadiens or to the NHL one day. I made it clear at the end of the season that I wanted to stay with the Montreal Canadiens for the rest of my career. It is tough, he said. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.

Immigrant Youth Dept: Members of Mener Autrement Lead Differently , a volunteer-run sports club of about 215 children and youth from a multitude of ethnic backgrounds that include Haitian, Arab, African and Latino, will march through the streets of Montreal North on Saturday, according to Montreal Gazette. The neighbourhood march - which is being billed as the first in a series of 10 such events - is expected to last two hours and make a stop at Montreal North's city hall building on Charleroi St. Relations between the youth club and borough officials have been strained for years and a club that provides free sports and educational activities to disaffected, poor and immigrant youth in Montreal North is demanding local authorities provide it with better indoor soccer equipment and a bigger gym. Parents, children and organizers of the club with which local youth Fredy Villanueva played soccer occasionally before he was shot in August 2008 by a Montreal police officer, are expected to gather at noon at the Culture and Community Centre at 12004 Rolland Blvd. As reported in the news.
@t montreal north, streets of montreal

Montreal: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Morgan LowrieMONTREAL - Many of the people taking the Victoria bridge in or out of Montreal may not realize they're driving over a mass graveyard.A 10-foot tall engraved stone, placed on a median between the lanes of traffic, announces that the site is the resting place of some 6,000 Irish immigrants who died of typhus in 'fever sheds' along the riverbank in 1847-48 after fleeing famine in overcrowded ships, according to Brandon Sun. The stone, stained black from exhaust fumes, sits in a little-visited industrial zone near the foot of the bridge, and some members of the Montreal Irish community say the city needs to do a better job of honouring the chapter of Canadian history it represents."This is the largest single burial site of the Great Hunger in the world outside of Ireland itself," said Victor Boyle, one of the directors of the Montreal Irish Memorial Park Foundation."It also the first memorial to that event outside of Ireland."But he says that while cities such as Toronto have prominent memorials to their Irish ship fever victims, Montreal much-larger number of dead are going unrecognized. The stone commemorates the deaths of some 6,000 Irish immigrants who died of typhus in Montreal in 1847-48 after fleeing famine overseas. On Sunday, about 100 members of the Irish community took part in an annual walk to the site. Now, Boyle foundation is trying to get permission to transform a parking lot adjacent to the site into a memorial park in time for Montreal 375th anniversary in 2017. The ceremony, led by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, has taken place in some form or other since 1865 -- six years after the stone was erected by mostly-Irish Victoria bridge construction workers who stumbled across the graves. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.

English At Home Dept: A lucid reading of the statistics in this report indicates that the French language itself is not actually in danger of disappearing in Quebec. This includes the island of Montreal, where the majority of citizens speak it in the public domain, regardless of their linguistic or cultural background. Although critics have expressed concern that these numbers are not high enough, that the project of francization is not happening fast enough, it is nevertheless happening. There is good reason to respond positively to these numbers; that francophones could become the minority in Montreal shouldn't necessarily matter, according to Montreal Gazette. Instead of celebrating the steady rise in the use of French among anglophones people who speak English at home and allophones people who speak languages other than English or French at home across Quebec since 2001, the statistics are persistently interpreted in a way that incites alarm over the possibility that francophones are endangered; not the French language, but the people. There is an important difference here, and I think it warrants a closer look and like Jack Jedwab "Despite dire warnings, the future of French on Montreal Island is not a gloomy one," Opinion, Oct. 28 , I have been trying to interpret reactions to a recent report issued by the Office qu b cois de la langue fran aise that suggested that francophones people who speak French at home may drop below 50 per cent of the population on the island of Montreal by 2031. Yet gauging by the intense public response to the OLF report, it appears to matter very much. For example, a La Presse poll in September found that 75 per cent of respondents feel we should be worried about the possibility of Montreal becoming a city with a minority francophone population. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.

Island Population Dept: But if Montreal francophones become the island's minority, who will be the majority? That question is not directly addressed, which leaves the misleading impression that "non-francophones" will assume that role. The problem is that "non-francophones" are not a language group. No Montrealers refer to themselves as non-francophones. Lumping anglophones and allophones into an imagined category often appears designed to encourage francophones to wrongly associate the "ethnics" with the English language. However, the first language of most Montreal Island nonfrancophones is not English. Identifying with more than 100 groups, allophones simply don't have a common language to impose on the island's francophone population, according to Montreal Gazette. While Quebec demographers insist that a reduction in the share of the island's francophones will inevitably result in fewer allophones acquiring French, they rarely apply that logic to argue that a reduced share of Montreal anglophones will diminish their capacity to get allophones to adopt the English language and a report recently issued by Quebec's Office de la langue fran aise warned that by 2031 the share of people speaking mostly French in their homes on the island of Montreal will fall below 50 per cent. Such dire forecasts tend to attract considerable media attention, along with a predictable reaction. Opposition critics insist that Montreal is being anglicized, that the government is insensitive to the dangers facing the French language, and that it is urgent to introduce new or tighter language laws to curb any further decline. The demographic projections for 2031 would see the share of the Montreal Island population that speaks mostly English at home fall to about 23 per cent; in 2006, it was 25 per cent. In other words, 75 per cent of the island's population will not speak English at home - though one never hears the term "non-anglophones." If the principal danger to the French language on the island is anglicization, one would assume that it is relevant to look at the actual percentage of English-speakers. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.

Montreal Dept: It was a total surprise, said Novakovich on his reaction to the news while returning to Montreal from a writing retreat in the Florida Keys, according to Montreal Gazette. Awards in general suck, as they seem to be designed to hurt people who don t get them, Novakovich said. I ve had a few awards, but none, for example, for my novel April Fool s Day, which I think is my best book. So they are arbitrary, whimsical, not to be relied on. On the other hand, I seem to have gotten a few just when I needed them most. So they are also great, of course and mONTREAL - Montreal writer Josip Novakovich scored a prestigious coup Thursday when it was announced that he is a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize for 2013. A popular and active figure in the local literary scene, Novakovich has taught creative writing at Concordia University since 2009. Born in the Croatian part of what was then Yugoslavia, he emigrated to the United States his mother is American-born at age 20 in 1976 before coming to Montreal. The author of novels, and story and essay collections, and a bestselling guide to creative writing, his career has been marked with such distinctions as an American Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship; his main subject has been the experience of exile, often given a darkly comic treatment. His newest published work is the 2012 essay collection Shopping For a New Country. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.

pilot project: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz OTTAWA - A cargo-security pilot project run in Montreal as part of the new Canada-U.S. border pact was almost cancelled early because there was "little value" in continuing, an internal memo reveals, according to Brandon Sun. The marine-to-highway project began in January 2013 with the aim of easing the entry of cargo into the United States through the Port of Montreal. A cargo-security pilot project run in Montreal as part of the new Canada-U.S. border pact was almost cancelled early because there was "little value" in continuing, an internal memo reveals. The idea involved the customs services of the two countries working more closely to eliminate duplication under the notion of "cleared once, accepted twice." The Montreal pilot was one of four projects initiated under the Integrated Cargo Security Strategy, a pillar of the Canada-U.S. deal signed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. President Barack Obama. The Montreal project targeted high-risk cargo arriving in Montreal by sea that was ultimately bound for the U.S. by truck. The countries agreed to share information on in-transit containers through the strategy to allow for early detection of security threats, illicit goods and items posing possible health hazards. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.

Montreal: Montreal ranked 13 out of 15 on the "human capital" index, a yardstick for such categories as education and innovation, according to CBC. On mobile Tap here to see the chart ranking cities in terms of human capital. Montreal economy: what wrong, and what can we do about it Montreal worst city in Canada for entrepreneurs: study The study, published by the Institut du Québec, compares Quebec largest city to 14 others across North America in 29 different categories. In the category of university graduates per capita, Montreal ranked 14 out of 15 cities, with only Phoenix, Ariz., ranking lower. The city fared worse when it comes to integrating immigrants, placing last among the 15 cities. Montreal fared slightly better among the 25-to-34 demographic, placing 11 of 15. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.