Mathy

DAVID JOHNSTON, The Gazette

Rural Montreal, an endangered species, hangs on precariously at the far western tip of the island. One of the heritage homes in Senneville, Montbriant, was featured in the movie The Aviator.
Photograph by : GORDON BECK, THE GAZETTE

Next spring, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada is planning to hold a ceremony to mark recognition of parts of the West Island around

Senneville as a national historical district.

While the board’s decision in 2003 was based in large part on the distinctly sub-rural character of Montreal Island’s most western end, it was also made with its building heritage in mind.

Along Senneville Rd., in particular, there are many examples of architectural magnificence that are at least equal to anything that can be found on the upper reaches of Westmount or Outremont.

One of the most impressive properties is the so-called Montbriant estate at 180 Senneville Rd., which is owned by Robert Bazos, former owner of the defunct Perrette chain of depanneurs.

Built in 1913, it featured prominently in the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, as the grand Connecticut estate where young Katharine Hepburn brings Hughes home to meet her family.

One of the most historic sites is the ruins of old Fort Senneville, built by the French in the 1690s to ward off Iroquois incursions.

In 1776, it was torched by infamous General Benedict Arnold to free American prisoners held there during the Revolutionary War.

Sonia Venne tours the remains of Fort Senneville, built around 1693 and razed by U.S. invaders during the 1776-1783 war.
Photograph by : GORDON BECK, THE GAZETTE

Today, the fort can be found on a 35-hectare private lakefront lot north of Highway 40, where Montreal cardiologist Yannick Beaulieu lives with his wife, Sonia Venne, and one-year-old son, Emanuel.

Like her husband, Venne is a native of the Lanaudiere region. She frequently sees deer walking along the lakefront or standing in the middle of the fort ruins, where the land is clear of trees and mosquitoes in summertime.

The deer also like to sleep on the property’s many beds of tiger lilies, she says.

“I can’t believe I’m living in Montreal,” Venne said of her rural surroundings. “It feels like back home for me.”

DAVID JOHNSTON, The Gazette

An ecologically protected corridor, mainly secluded woods, flanks the small Anse a l’Orme River.
Photograph by : GORDON BECK, THE GAZETTE

The prospect of a return of commercial agriculture to the western end of Montreal Island has given local conservationists some new arguments in their favour.

The fledgling agricultural revival is, in fact, just one of several developments that bode well for the preservation of the sub-rural character of the region.

Behind the scenes, the city of Montreal, with input from neighbouring suburbs where required, has begun quietly negotiating with private developers to buy back large tracts of ecologically significant land.

In lieu of cash, developers are being offered inner-city vacant lots, as well as zoning concessions.

Among other things, the city is offering developers the right to build more densely along existing suburban train lines, Helen Fotopulos, a member of the city’s executive committee, said in a recent interview.

At the same time, the Nature Conservancy of Canada, which is supported by some of Canada’s richest families, has begun buying selected lands and rights of way on some undeveloped properties to increase the prospects that they will never be developed.

“A lot of this has to be done on the QT to keep speculators at bay,” said Liz Morgan of Senneville, great-granddaughter of James Morgan, who in 1891 with his brother Henry created the downtown Morgan’s department store, which currently houses The Bay’s flagship Ste. Catherine St. W. store.

In negotiations with private landowners, the city is trying to increase its ownership stake in properties lining Anse a l’Orme Rd., which traverses Ste. Anne de Bellevue and Pierrefonds.

The four-kilometre road, which runs from Highway 40 to Senneville Rd., and which has absolutely no development along it (except beware-of-deer signs), crosses the last remaining river on the island of Montreal that hasn’t been built over yet - the Riviere a l’Orme.

Were it not for the fact that the river runs mainly through secluded forests and fallow farm fields that can’t be seen from any road, the river wouldn’t be what it is - Montreal’s best-kept ecological secret.

DAVID JOHNSTON
The Gazette

Alison Hackney and Claude Gemme prepare to till a winter crop into the fields to prevent winter soil erosion. Hackney figures she’ll finish for the season around Nov. 15.
Photograph by : GORDON BECK, THE GAZETTE

Of all the things people on Montreal Island go to bed worrying about, how to stop deer from eating the leaves on a commercial beet crop shouldn’t be one of them.

But precisely such a dilemma has been bothering Alison Hackney of Senneville in recent weeks as she wraps up her autumn harvest after the wettest growing season in 60 years.

Hackney is a farmer - a farmer on the island of Montreal, no less. That’s rare enough in itself; but so, too, are those deer that have come to regard her 15-hectare farm as their own private fast-food outlet.

“They can be pesky,” Hackney said.

On the other hand, they are not as rare as they were 30 years ago, when galloping urbanization wiped out the last cluster of family farms and alleged deer sightings were often more urban legend than reality.

Today, the farming way of life is sowing the seeds of an agricultural revival on the western end of the island, thanks to growing demand for organic produce.

Created in 1996, Hackney’s Ferme du Fort Senneville has helped pave the way more recently for Stephen Homer’s 25-hectare Ferme du Zephyr and David Merson’s two-hectare Ferme Mange-Tout. Collectively, these three organic farms

in Senneville, population 864, produce a wide range of vegetables and fruits without the

use of artificial herbicides or pesticides that are common in mainstream commercial agriculture.

The principal customer base for organic farms are individuals who pay between $300 and $600 at the beginning of the growing season for a weekly basket of produce. In addition, Hackney sells at the Saturday produce market in Ste. Anne de Bellevue that ended its six-month season yesterday. Homer, meanwhile, supplies two Notre Dame de Grace specialty stores as well as 357c, a private club in Old Montreal founded and owned by high-tech entrepreneur Daniel Langlois.

“Montreal Island is one of the best places for an organic farm to be, because the customer base is so handy,” Homer said.

Together, the three organic farms in Senneville represent the future of farming on the island, if, indeed, farming is to have a future.

Elsewhere, there’s a 100-hectare apple orchard in Senneville that exists primarily as a municipal tax writeoff, and a farm in Pierrefonds - involving the Bibeaus, one of the West Island’s oldest farm families - on land leased by the Transport Department that is slated to be used for road-network expansion.

The three organic farms occupy 42 hectares of land, or the equivalent of 20 Canadian football fields.

That’s a lot, or not very much, depending on one’s perspective. But with organic farming, you don’t need a lot of land because it’s not how much you can grow, but how you grow it that counts most with customers, who are willing to pay a premium for organic products. The traditional economy-of-scale advantages of large-scale commercial farming don’t apply across the board, as they once did.

Whether this budding agricultural revival in Senneville leads to something bigger might depend, of course, on whether demand for organic produce continues to grow. But if it does, there will be no shortage of farm land on the western end of the island to accommodate agricultural growth.

For one thing, the western end of the island still has agricultural land, albeit fallow land, that continues to be protected from development under provincial law. Those lands, totalling more than 1,000 hectares, are in Senneville, Ste. Anne de Bellevue and Pierrefonds. There are also substantial tracts of farmland that have long since been rezoned for residential or industrial use, but lie dormant today.

The image of abandoned farmhouses and crumbling barns is common in the northwest part of the West Island. A good example is the landscape along Ste. Marie Rd. in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, north of Highway 40, east and west of Morgan Blvd.

Rusted garden tools, tattered mail-order encyclopedia volumes and pairs of ancient leather shoes lie scattered on these properties as evidence of a West Island that has long ago disappeared.

Hackney has been seeing deer all season. They ate the hearts out of her lettuce heads during the summer, and more recently they have been eating the leaves on her beets. That’s a pain, because without the leaves it’s hard to find the valuable vegetable roots hidden in the soil.

So that got Hackney thinking, and she came up with this idea: “A single strand of electrified wire with some tin foil on the wire and some peanut butter on the tin foil; the deer puts its tongue on the peanut butter, then runs away.”

She used it, and it seems to be working very well.

These days, Hackney has been using her two Belgian horses, Fanny and Fine, with help from an off-island farmer, Claude Gemme, to till a winter crop into her fields to prevent winter soil erosion. She figures she’ll finish for the season around Nov. 15.

The horses are led out of a stable a few metres from Highway 40, near the mouth of the Ile aux Tourtes Bridge. The audio backdrop of Canada’s second-largest city gearing up for work is the only sensory indication to suggest this pastoral scene is anything but classically rural.

A.J. Canagaratna
26.08.1934-11.10.2006
ALOSIOUS JEYARAJ CANAGARATNA

The Power of A.J.Canagaratne

A Great Scholar of the Thamils of Sri Lanka Mr. A.J. Canagaratne was passed away on the early ours of 11th of October 2006 in his early seventies. He was a person who had functioned like an alternative Institution for generations of scholars who are marginalized by the ‘powerful people’ within the ultimate higher institutions among the Thamils of Sri Lanka.

A.J.Canagaratne never posed himself as an utmost Intellectual but generations of intellectuals and artists not only from Thamils of Sri Lanka or all the other nationals of Sri Lanka but also from people outside Sri Lanka will always respect his caliber.

The power and beauty of AJ is his genuine intellectual characteristic. He is always conscious of his words and the correctness of the information. He took much effort to share authentic information.

AJ is very strong enough to share new things to others and push them to new frontiers to bring fruits of knowledge and skill to the people who nourished the intellectuals with their hard earned money for the free education system.

The sharp and subtle arguments and interpretations of AJ are the fruits of his deep knowledge.

AJ is an intellectual of the people but he seldom uses the word people.

Brevity is the essence of AJ but he is an epic!

Sivagnanam Jeyasankar
http://thirdeye2005.blogspot.com

My Tamil post on A.J. Canagaratna

A Mindboggling Masterpiece!

Martin Scorcese was on his familiar turf. Gangsters. Just take into account all the movies, this New Yorker has directed. You would agree and Scorcese excels in this genre. Yes, this ain’t the ‘Goodfellas’. And this is an Hong Kong Chinese remake.

Martin Scorsece, Jack Nicholson, Leonardo Di Caprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin & Ray Winstone.

There must be something in the story to attract all these people. The story in barebones.

The turf is Boston. South Boston to be exact. Jack Nicholson is Frank Castello, the Boss. Matt Damon is a Southie on Castello’s payroll. He had been groomed by Castello. Damon joins the Police force and becomes Castello’s mole. Leonardo Di Caprio, meanwhile joins Castello’s gang as the police mole. As the movie proceeds, each side becomes aware of the rats in the ship and tries to flush them out. What happens is what keeps all our attention glued to the screen for about 2.5 hours.

I will safely say that this is the best movie, I’ve seen this year.

There’s something about Jack Nicholson that puts me off. Yes! I agree, that he is this great actor. But, I just cannot stand him. So much so I’ve only seen a handfull of his movies and that’s not by choice either. But, I’m going to source out the rest of his movies over the winter. That’s the sort of the effect Nicholson’s acting on ‘The Departed’ had on me.

Di Caprio. What can I say? It’s claimed that he is the best actor of his generation. And it is so true. Lets forget Titanic, which damaged his career more than helping him. He showed his talent early in his career against Robert Di Niro in ‘This Boy’s Life and against Johny Depp in ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape’ and he was in his teens at that time. He was also memorable in the ‘The Quick and the Dead’. Then came Titanic, which could have sunk Di Caprio’s career. It almost did. But, he pulled up after a few mishaps. The movies he has done since 2002 could all be classified under ‘modern epics’. There’s ‘Gangs of New York’ with Martin Scorcese, first in a series of collaboration. ‘Catch me if you can’ with Steven Spielberg, ‘The Aviator’ again with Martin Scorcese co-starring the talented Cate Blanchett. And there’s the ‘The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt’ again with Scorcese. You would be blown by Leonardo Di Caprio, in ‘The Departed’.

The rest, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin & Ray Winstone are no slouches with it comes to acting. That’s a fine ensemble brought together by Martin Scorcese.

Do see the movie. If you liked any of Scorcese’s movies. You would LOVE this.

My Tamil Review

[Note: This article is written by Janet Bagnell of Montreal Gazette.]

Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen wrongly suspected of terrorist sympathies, was arrested in a U.S. airport, illegally detained, sent to Syria, a country notorious for its human-rights abuses, tortured and held for a year in a cage no larger than a coffin.

Back home in Canada, through the Herculean efforts of his wife and supporters, he succeeded in having a public inquiry into his case. This week, Arar was exonerated, totally and absolutely, of being any kind of threat to Canada’s security.

It seems, in fact, that if there’s any threat to Canada’s security, and the security of its citizens, which should amount to the same thing, it would be from Canadian government agents - doing, in the case of the RCMP, the bidding of the government of the day.

Canada’s anti-terrorism law, passed in a state of post-9/11 panic, encouraged the RCMP to look at the most banal activity as potentially terrorist-related - if it was carried out by Muslim men.

Even given that latitude, however, the RCMP’s performance was hair-raising. The Arar inquiry found that the RCMP supplied unsubstantiated rumours to the U.S., calling it information, an act of stunning irresponsibility that set Arar’s nightmare in motion.

The inquiry also found that officials within the Foreign Affairs Department showed scant regard for Arar’s well-being. Worse, officials in both organizations deliberately tried to cover up their failings, trying, it seems, to sully Arar’s reputation to protect their own.

It is, in other words, largely the fault of agents of the Canadian government that Arar has gone through hell.

This is a torment that shows no signs of ending. Arar suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. He is unable to get a job. An engineer in the much-in-demand field of telecommunications software, he cannot find a job because potential employers don’t want “the publicity” that follows him.

I am sorry about what was done to Arar. I want my government to try to make amends. That means apologizing to him, providing compensation and making sure no one else will be treated as he was.

Instead, we have Prime Minister Stephen Harper making sure everyone remembers he was not prime minister when Arar started his descent into hell. Fine. But he is prime minister now and, as such, he represents the country.

It is up to him to do what is right for Arar and his family. Harper must also take steps to ensure that the country’s federal police force is no longer free to make false accusations against innocent people and that Foreign Affairs understands that its one function of any consequence is to protect Canadian citizens.

What happened to Arar is an outrage. Canadian officials were implicated in that outrage. Why is showing compassion for a fellow Canadian who suffered at the hands of his own government so difficult for Harper? Where is his heart?

A leader must be more than someone who can draw up a plan of action of five promises. Competence is a managerial skill of undoubted use. But it is not to be compared, much less confused with compassion. Compassion is a life-affirming force. Its absence in government is a terrible thing.

It was left this week to the Bloc Quebecois to propose a motion in the House of Commons saying, “in the opinion of this House an apology should be presented to Maher Arar regarding the treatment he has been subjected to.” The Liberals and NDP joined in the motion.

The Conservatives followed. But whatever their point in adding their names to the motion was undercut by Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon’s cowardly distinction that he and other cabinet ministers were not speaking for the government, but simply expressing their personal feelings.

This is not what a government that is prepared to fight for Canadians’ rights under domestic and international law sounds like. The Harper government should long ago have fired off a protest to the U.S. government and Syria.

The U.S. seized Arar and sent him to Syria, knowing he would likely be tortured. Syria tortured him, wringing a transparently false confession from him.

I’m sorry about what happened to Maher Arar. I’m also sorry I’m represented by a government that can’t bring itself to show basic human feeling, much less any sign of understanding how serious this case is.

jbagnall @ thegazette.canwest.com