While the Tory minister admitted she hadn’t read the full piece, and couldn’t pinpoint a fact she disagreed with, she felt it was in bad taste.
“One thing I take personally is the use of Bonhomme Carnaval to illustrate the province. Frankly, it’s insulting and inappropriate to use an icon like that. He’s one of our great ambassadors.”
In fact, many politicians seemed deeply miffed by the expropriation of the jolly white snowman, who sports a traditional Quebec belt and a jaunty red tuque.
Liberal MP Denis Coderre was incensed at the twisted likeness of the Bonhomme, saying he was “disgusted.”
And hardline Quebec sovereigntist Gilles Rheaume said the cover was an affront rarely seen in what he dubbed the “long history of francophobia” in English media.
“It’s like putting on the front page of (Quebec news weekly) L’Actualite a picture of the Queen of England dressed as a prostitute,” he sniffed.

See the full article from “Toronto Sun”

But the portraits and studies of soldiers he did during wartime are realistic, and this is closer to the style Dix used in the War series of 1924: 50 etchings and drypoints that he modelled after Goya’s Disasters of War. They are finely detailed, and the titles describe the soldier’s reality: Gas Victims, Buried Alive, Shot to Pieces. The 51st print, Soldier and Nun (The Rape), was excluded by Dix’s publisher, because it was “a slap in the face of those who have a bourgeoisie conception of the front-line soldier.”
The Weimar Republic was Germany’s first democracy. But it was weakened from the start, as the government that had accepted defeat and by the economic collapse after 1929. Legions of war cripples, beggars and prostitutes shared the streets of Dresden, Dusseldorf and Berlin, ignored by a citizenry revelling in nightlife and trying to forget the humiliation of defeat. Not Dix. Men without legs and arms and women worn out by prostitution crowd into his paintings …

See the full article from “Montreal Gazette”

… Sometimes they damaged ties neighbourhood officers had with the youths; they didn’t know them and their approach was different.
“Sometimes we are anchored in our old ways for too long. We have to think about that.”
Faced with belt-tightening that has seen the department’s half-a-billion dollar annual budget cut by $35 million in the past two years, Parent said careful redeployment of resources will address shifting crime patterns and a backlog of cases without the need for significant new hirings. Street gangs, while still a force to be reckoned with, are on the decline, he noted. The force will now pay more attention to battling sexual assaults, juvenile prostitution and domestic violence, Parent said. Yet the police force will not neglect non-violent crimes like theft, he added. “It’s 80 per cent of our work.”

See the full article from “Montreal Gazette”

MONTREAL – T.O.W. seems to have found a winning recipe to attract today’s wrestling fans, as indicated by the 1,500 or so that showed up at the Centre Pierre Charbonneau Friday night.
The recipe is a little like this: Mix in a few of yesterday’s stars, sprinkle in some local strippers and a few Hooters girls, add in many of the best and well known local talents, a pinch of television personalities, pour in the financial backing of many big name sponsors, use Centre Pierre Charbonneau as a venue with great view for all, whether you have a general admission ticket or a VIP table, complete with snack food and lots of free-flowing thirst quenchers, just feet away from the Olympic Stadium and finally have an homage to a world-famous retired Montreal based wrestler.

See the full article from “CANOE”

The demonstrators stop in front of a well known strip tease bar call “Gentlemen’s choice” do denounce what they call sex exploitation.

See the full article from “Demotix”

Hubba Hubba: Montreal Hearts is a sleazy escort service run out of a divey Bishop street bar. Big deal, right? But wait! Montreal Hearts is also a zany, wacky, sexy web TV series, starring a bevy of local beauties, a bunch of guys who act all crazy for your amusement, a soundtrack full of local bands and cameo appearances by some familiar locales of our fair city. Dial up a new friend at montrealhearts.com.

See the full article from “Montreal Mirror”

The Otto Dix exhibition is not just the history of a painter, but about the atrocities of World War I, life in the streets of the Weimar Republic and the censorship of the Third Reich. Otto Dix described this with some cynicism, yes, but he’s not just sarcastic. He had a deep empathy for borderline people, the marginal. His work can appear very casual, but if you go deeper within the work, there is deep humanity. And he talks so much about what humanity can do about war, prostitution, human slavery, our human condition.
…
Dix paints the trenches, the streets in Weimar, he shows the beggars, but also the glamorous girls, the prostitutes. He wanted to show how desperate the women were, the widows who had to feed their children. He made extraordinary portraits of his time.

See the full article from “Montreal Gazette”

Then they heard about government plans to invest about $150 million to convert what was once the heart of Montreal’s red-light district into the Quartier des Spectacles – the city’s theatre district that mixes existing businesses and offices with new residential developments and public spaces like the Place des Festivals.
Trunzo and his partners ended up buying the 7,000 square foot site and are breaking ground Wednesday on their 33-unit Dell’Arte condo development. It’s one of a growing number of residential projects in the sector that stretches from City Councillors to St. Hubert Sts. and between Sherbrooke St. and René Lévesque Blvd.
Both Dell’Arte and the 100-unit Loft des Arts condo project on St. Laurent Blvd. and Ontario St. have plans for further developments and new projects are expected to be announced in the area.
Indeed, developers of projects like Dell’Arte are counting on the flurry of activity – that has turned parts of Ste. Catherine St. into a blocks-long construction site – to makeover certain areas better known for prostitution, cheap electronics and hot dogs.

See the full article from “Montreal Gazette”

Human trafficking is the buying and selling of people, most often for sex or forced labour. Since human trafficking became a separate offence in the Criminal Code four years ago, just five people have been convicted of it in Canada. All of those cases involved Canadian victims, most under 18, who were forced into the sex trade within Canada.
There are another 32 cases before the courts now, at least 14 of which include victims who are Canadian girls under the age of 18.
The U.S. State Department estimates 800 people are trafficked into Canada each year and another 1,500 to 2,200 are smuggled through Canada on the way to the U.S.
Smith’s plan calls for Canada to study ways to adopt a decade-old Swedish policy that considers prostitution violence against the sex trade worker and makes it illegal to buy or attempt to buy sex either on the street or in a business such as a brothel or massage parlour.

See the full article from “Montreal Gazette”

The basement cells are all that remain of a three-storey building on the site that housed local evildoers until the Pied-du-Courant prison opened at a site now owned by the Societe des Alcools de Quebec beneath the Jacques Cartier Bridge. Unlike the cells beneath city hall, tours are offered to that newer prison, with a lot of discussion of the Rebellion of 1837.
The prison near city hall had room for 300 prisoners, but the tiny windowless basement cells are hardly evidence of the supposed progressive rehabilitative notions that went into its construction.
Onlookers praised the new prison when it opened but within two years critics lambasted the lamentable conditions.
“The Montreal jail, like that built around the same time in Quebec City, was supposed to alleviate the insecure conditions and overcrowding in the makeshift buildings previously used as prisons,” says Donald Fyson, history professor at Universite Laval. “But Montreal’s rapid population growth, combined with a shift toward using imprisonment more and more to punish petty offenders such as prostitutes and vagabonds, meant that by the 1830s, the prison was already overcrowded and inadequate.”

See the full article from “Montreal Gazette”