Your forecast
Mainly cloudy, with 30 per cent chance of flurries early this morning; risk of freezing drizzle. Wind from the northwest at 20 km/h becoming light early this morning. High -5. Wind chill near -13.
What’s happening today
Polytechnique Montréal will pay tribute today to the 14 young women who were murdered at the engineering school 35 years ago.
Vigils and other events are scheduled in Montreal and across the country to mark the anniversary of the Dec. 6, 1989, anti-feminist mass killing. The Canadian Press has more here.
Fourteen beams of light are projected into the sky during a vigil to honour the victims of the 1989 Polytechnique massacre in Montreal last year. (Graham Hughes / The Canadian Press files)
A regular on Winnipeg stages since he was a teenager, Sam Fournier has built a reputation as one of the city’s strongest up-and-coming instrumentalists, a U of M jazz school-trained bassist as comfortable navigating traditional Métis folksong as he is performing his own modern variations on the otherworldly output of Thelonius Monk. Fournier releases his first EP tonight at The Handsome Daughter, 61 Sherbrook St., at 8 p.m. Tickets: $18.
Today’s must-read
Eddie Calisto-Tavares vividly remembers making numerous phone calls to demand that her elderly father, who lived at the Maples Personal Care Home, no longer be given antipsychotic medication.
“I would phone the Maples daily,” said Calisto-Tavares on Thursday about her late father. “He was prescribed the medication when he was at Poseidon (Care Centre) by a doctor who never saw him, but that was when he was in a shared room and paranoid about the person he was with.
“When he went to the Maples, he had his own room and bathroom and we had things from his home there so he was calm. He didn’t need to be drugged up, but I had to fight with a doctor I never met. I would say he is an 87-year-old with better blood pressure than I was at that time because of this stress, so he didn’t need any drugs.”
A national report released Thursday found about 43.2 per cent of seniors who lived at Deer Lodge Centre, and 37.6 per cent at the Holy Family Home, were given antipsychotic medications in 2023 even though they hadn’t been diagnosed with a psychosis. Kevin Rollason has the story.
The report found about 43.2 per cent of seniors who lived at Deer Lodge Centre were given antipsychotic medications in 2023. (Phil Hossack / Free Press files)
On the bright side
Five years ago, Notre-Dame Cathedral erupted in flames. A column of smoke rose above the Paris skyline as the historic cathedral, which took 182 years to build between the 12th and 14th centuries, was reduced to a smouldering shell.
Yet against all odds, the Gothic masterpiece is reopening its doors on Saturday — and two Canadian blacksmiths played a role in its restoration.
Montreal blacksmith Mathieu Collette won’t be able to make it to Paris to see the resurrected church before the summer, but he said he is grateful for his small part in the cathedral’s history. “I believe I have a little place in paradise now,” he said in an interview Thursday. The Canadian Press reports.
Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral seen ahead of Saturday’s reopening ceremony. (Christophe Ena / The Canadian Press)
On this date
On Dec. 6, 1980: The Winnipeg Free Press reported Quebec and British Columbia were joining Manitoba in its challenge to unilateral federal constitutional reform proposals. In Winnipeg, a 21-year-old man who had robbed six banks and then gave the money to needy friends and strangers was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The University of Manitoba bookstore expected to lose nearly $200,000 worth of business in the coming year after university administration ordered it to stop selling sporting goods. Read the rest of this day’s paper here. Search our archives for more here.
Today’s front page
Get the full story: Read today’s e-edition of the Free Press.
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