The suspect in a hit-and-run that injured two Canadian soldiers in Quebec — an incident identified as a possible terror attack — is fighting for his life in hospital after being shot several times by police.
The shocking incident, which occurred at about noon Monday in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, also sent the two Canadian Armed Forces personnel to hospital with one fighting for his life and the other having suffered minor injuries, according to the Quebec provincial police.
The two soldiers were reportedly walking through the parking lot of a shopping centre located less than three kilometres from the Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean, the French-language university run by the Department of National Defence, when they were run down by a driver.
A police chase ensued and the car drove into a ditch after the driver lost control of the vehicle, police said.
Witnesses who spoke with the TVA network Monday afternoon said they saw a man emerge from the flipped vehicle that was lying in a ditch on the side of the road. The man had his hands in the air and was walking toward police when at least one officer opened fire on the suspect. The witnesses said they heard up to seven gunshots.
TVA also showed images of a knife with an elaborate handle lodged into the ground near where the incident occurred.
Two Amish families are heading back to southern Ontario Friday morning after spending most of the week on P.E.I., looking for a new place to live.
Anthony Wallbank is a friend of several members of Ontario's Amish community, and drove some of them to the Island to look at farm properties. Wallbank said many younger Amish men are looking to start up their own farms, but affordable, fertile farmland is scarce in Ontario.
On P.E.I., he said, there's lots of land at a tenth of the price.
"Twenty or 30 or any number of Amish families could come here and they could find farms the size that they're looking for," said Wallbank.
"The farmland is nicely sloped, well drained. They could come here and they could farm the way they're used to farming in southern Ontario."
In the gentle hills of northern Maine, far from the rocky coastline and lighthouses, teenagers trade warm classrooms for cold potato fields every fall, just as they have for generations.
Schools shut down — sometimes for weeks at a time — while their students haul in the harvest or monitor conveyor belts for potatoes that don’t measure up as farmers rush to fill their stores before the ground freezes.
But as farm operations consolidate and heavy machinery make them more efficient, farmers wonder how much longer there will be a place for the harvest breaks that as little as 20 years ago saw kids hand-picking potatoes for 50 cents a barrel.
“Eventually it’ll probably fade away,” said Wayne Garrison, the 72-year-old co-owner of Garrison Farms, which hired eight high school students to help harvest its 280 hectares of potatoes. “I’d hate to see it go, I really would.”
Up until the 1940s, Maine was the United States’s potato capital and Aroostook County — a place so vast that it’s more than double the size of Greater Toronto — is still home to roughly 20,000 hectares of potato farms. Nearly a dozen high schools here emptied for this year’s harvest — fewer than the old days, when virtually all schools shut down.
This year, only a handful of high schools have closed for the entire three-week harvest. And school boards are continually grappling with whether or not to continue the tradition as modern farming reduces the need for large numbers of labourers.
Seventy years ago Czech and Slovak Roma embarked on a grim path to nearly complete annihilation. In the spring and summer of 1943, 4,500 Roma were shipped off to the so-called Gypsy camp in Auschwitz: one-third were from camps in Lety and Hodonin, in the south and southwest of the country, and two-thirds were taken from their homes. The fates of local Roma remain one of the least investigated chapters of the war, and one part of this story is completely unknown – that some Roma survived the Nazi attempt at extermination thanks to the help of “white people.”
Even after decades 87-year-old Emilie Machalkova’s voice shakes and tears fill her eyes when she recalls those scenes. The spring sun was not yet very warm when one Monday afternoon she stood, a 16-year-old girl, at the railway station in Nesovice, a village 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Brno. She, her parents, two brothers, grandmother, and 3-year-old cousin were waiting for a train to take them to the stables of the protectorate police in Masna Street in Brno, where they had been told to report. Nearly all their neighbors accompanied them to the station, Machalkova recalls: all her childhood friends and family friends came. Someone brought a traditional Czech pork dish, others bread. “All of us were crying a lot because we thought that we wouldn’t come back.”
They were right to be afraid. A few weeks earlier much of Machalkova’s extended family in Moravia had been summoned to Masna Street. Lugging a suitcase, her grandfather Pavel had left, along with three of her uncles, some cousins, and other relatives – all together 33 members of the large Holomek family, a known clan of Moravian Roma. Even though it was not until after the war that they found out the whole truth, at the time everyone suspected that Roma, just like Jews, were being sent to their deaths. “In ’42 they took away the entire Jewish Fischer family, who had an estate and a restaurant in Nesovice. We knew our time was coming too,” Machalkova says.
Last year Machalkova and her husband, Jan, celebrated their 50th anniversary in a comfortable apartment in Brno. On the walls and shelves is a flood of smiling photographs of their three daughters, son, grandchildren, and great grandchildren – reminders that thanks to the bravery of some, they were among the few protectorate Roma who escaped the extermination machine.
When Christian Faure moved to Montreal last summer, the renowned chef saw a chance to start fresh in a new city, freed from the constraints of his native France.
Faure opened a pastry shop and cooking school in a renovated 300-year-old greystone on a busy street in Old Montreal.
“It would be totally impossible to open a similar patisserie in a historic quarter in Paris and Lyon,” said Faure, who had a stint as director of the Cordon Bleu chef school in Ottawa before moving to the city. “In Montreal, it’s still possible. It’s a city of arts and theatre, and it encourages young people.”
Faure isn’t alone. Faced with a slumping economy and high unemployment rate back home, the number of French citizens in Montreal has soared in recent years, particularly among the 25-40 age demographic.
These days, the unmistakable accent of the Old Country echoes through the bars and cafés of the city’s trendy Plateau district. Specialty stores offering made-in-France delicacies and pubs that televise French rugby and soccer matches have also recently popped up.
[. . .]
A consulate spokesman estimates only about half of the French in Canada register, putting the estimated number of French citizens in Montreal at about 110,000. Toronto and Quebec City are the next most popular destinations, each home to about 10,000 registered French citizens.
Rob Ford might have thought it would be easy to slip back into his old Ward 2 council seat, but it appears his closest rival, Andray Domise, is making up ground, possibly even leading, in the race to succeed incumbent Doug Ford.
An internal poll conducted by the Domise campaign earlier this month put their candidate on 53 percent, eight points ahead of Ford. However, Andrew Young, Domise's campaign manager, says the figures should be taken with more than a pinch of salt.
The informal, live-caller telephone poll was conducted between the October 7th and 10th with "about 4,000" decided voters, he says, as part of regular canvassing. Voters were asked how they would cast their ballot after some "persuasion and discussion."
"We had a fundraiser coming up, which we were inviting people to, and so we initially gauged support to figure out if we should be offering the invitation."
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