In July 2025, Frank Paris, a 52-year-old Black man raised in Montreal, was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to trafficking cannabis and hash. However, with the help of his lawyer, who submitted a report outlining Paris’s experiences with systemic racism, the judge reduced his sentence from[Read More…]
Commentary
Without race-based data, racial inequities in youth protection persist
In November 2025, the McGill School of Social Work published a study examining racial disparities in child welfare interventions across Canada, finding that Black children were investigated for maltreatment at 2.27 times the rate of white children. When researchers matched cases with similar clinical and socioeconomic profiles, out-of-home placement rates[Read More…]
Black History Month should go beyond mere acknowledgement
Black History Month in Canada is a celebration of Black people and their cultures, the diversity of Black communities, and the contributions and legacies of Black Canadians throughout the country’s history. However, Black History Month is often viewed purely as commemorative, intended to spotlight Black historical figures for the sake[Read More…]
Safety isn’t one-sided when harm reduction saves lives
McGill University researchers from the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health recently found that overdose prevention and supervised consumption sites in Toronto were not associated with long-term increases in local crime, with rates remaining stable or even declining over a decade. Yet fear about public safety continues to shape[Read More…]
Montreal’s public transit is in crisis due to underfunding
Lost jobs, accumulated tardies, and expensive Ubers are just some of the effects of the Société de transport de Montréal (STM) strikes that froze public transit from 2025 until the beginning of 2026. On four separate occasions, bus drivers, train operators, and maintenance workers, led by their respective unions, went[Read More…]
Quebec language laws over-police bilingualism instead of protecting the French language
Since the Legault administration adopted the 1977 Charter of the French Language, only students possessing a Certificate of English Eligibility can attend anglophone elementary and high schools. Not possessing the certificate has further limited access to anglophone education at the Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel (CEGEP) level since the passage[Read More…]
Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada is not serious about fighting homelessness
This past week, Montreal’s new mayor, Soraya Martinez Ferrada, announced her first budget, in which she plans to triple spending on homelessness initiatives. Her new Tactical Intervention Group on Homelessness (GITI) commits $29.9 million CAD to policing infrastructure, surveillance in public places, and social workers. Despite the increase in allocated[Read More…]
Keeping Montreal alive means letting shops stay open late
It’s 7 p.m. on a Saturday night, and you have nothing to wear. Rushing out the door, you take to St. Laurent in search of the perfect, innovative solution to a closet lacking inspiration: Another black top. Yet, no matter where you look, every store is closed: La Caravane, CUL-DE-SAC,[Read More…]
The Big O could be more than a costly relic
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1976 Montreal Olympics. To this day, the Olympic Stadium, also known as the Big O, remains one of Montreal’s biggest architectural and cultural landmarks. Featuring the world’s tallest deliberately leaning tower and over 50,000 seats, the stadium is impractical to maintain from[Read More…]
New Year, same (institutional) burnout
January, colloquially known as the month of new beginnings. Planners for the calendar year fill the bookshelves, wellness advice on how to ‘improve’ flood TikTok and Instagram For-You-Pages, and even McGill sends out communications encouraging students to return to campus with better habits and a renewed zest for academia and[Read More…]
