The Corporation of Spanish and Portuguese Jews is the oldest Jewish institution in Montreal, in Quebec and in Canada. It traces its history back to the first Jewish settlers who began to arrive in 1760. The few families met for prayer in private homes until the Congregation was formally established in 1768. In 1993 there were an ongoing series of celebrations to mark the 225th anniversary. The Congregation is as old as Quebec itself.
From The Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue website
We put up with--endure--a lot of cold weather for a few mild months, for a few perfect summer days, for the way we'd like to live year round.
This cemetery is located in Ville St-Laurent, adjacent to Montreal, with the elevated Metropolitain Expressway just outside the front gates. A few years ago I tried to find this cemetery, no GPS back then, but I did find the Robert Mitchell Company which is where my great grandfather (Thomas Morrissey) worked for many years; after he retired in the early years of the 20th century, my Auntie Mable, who was still a child, would pick up his pension from them on Saturday mornings and deliver it to his home only a few blocks from where she and her family lived in St-Henri. As the English-speaking population has declined so have the number of English-speakers interred in this cemetery; it used to be an affordable place of burial; the English-speakers buried here are largely working class folk; of course, through legislation our numbers have declined everywhere in this province and the Federal government has completely sold out the remaining million English-speakers still here. The French language is thriving here but the excuse for some very fascistic and racist legislation is the on-going decline of French; it's an artificial crisis but politicians love a crisis, it's a great way to motivate people to do your biding and vote for their party. BTW, Urgel Bourgie is a chain of funeral parlours and they've extended their services to include this cemetery, it used to called Memorial Park Cemetery.
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| Bessie Richards Parker is my great grandmother, born in Blackburn, Lancs |
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| Grave of my mother's parents, John R. Parker (a fireman), and his wife, Bertha Chew Parker, both born in Blackburn, Lancs |
Hold the Line, My story from the heart
of the Freedom Convoy
Tamara Lich
Rebel News Network, Ltd., 2023
ISBN: 9781990583025
If you don't write down your story, no one will write it down for you,
or if they do they might leave you out or change what really happened. Tamara
Lich's Hold the Line is both her story and the story of the
Freedom Covoy, it's about her participation in organizing the Freedom Convoy,
travelling across Canada in winter, the arrival in Ottawa and several weeks of
demonstrations against Covid-19 mandates, then being arrested and incarcerated.
This is Tamara Lich's version of what happened; it isn't the mainstream media's
version of this historical event, or the government's version, or Justin
Trudeau's versio, they all vilified the Freedom Convoy from the
beginning.
What was the Freedom Convoy protesting? It began by
opposing vaccine mandates and vaccine passports but, I suspect, it soon grew to
opposing Justin Trudeau and how he was transforming the country into something
unrecognizable to average Canadians. Among other things, Covid-19 mandates
restricted our freedom of movement, promoted mandatory vaccinations, required a
vaccination passport if you wanted to travel by air or rail, and required a period of
quarantine when returning to Canada from outside of the country. In Quebec
Covid-19 mandates included a nightly curfew, the streets were deserted between
8 p.m. and 5 a.m. the following day; what did Quebec's curfew achieve? Nothing
at all.
The day after the Freedom Convoy arrived in
Ottawa the mainstream media began demonizing the Convoy. The Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation began its daily misinformation about the Convoy; this
included the alleged "desecration" of the Terry Fox statue that Tamara
Lich mentions in her book. On the second day of the protest the CBC interviewed
various people on what they thought the Convoy was all about. One elderly man
was on the verge of supporting the Convoy until the announcer said that members
of the Convoy had "desecrated" the Terry Fox statue and that they had
Nazi flags, none of it true; of course, he then opposed the Freedom Convoy.
This is only one example of how the mainstream media let us all down with their
biased reporting. Tamara Lich writes:
We exposed the Liberal friendly
mainstream media for its agenda and its lies. People across Canada, and around
the world, could see how the CBC, the Toronto Star, CTV, The Globe and Mail and
many others were working to vilify peaceful protesters in servicc to a corrupt
prime minister who writes their bailout cheques. For every honest journalist --
and there were some -- there were a dozen or more who were out to call us Nazis
or violent criminals, or claiming we were foreign agents or trying to overthrow
the government. (218)
Every evening during the Freedom Convoy I watched
live streaming of the demonstration on YouTube; I wanted to know as much about
it as possible. Every evening I watched as someone walked the downtown streets
of Ottawa interviewing people, and what I saw didn't correspond with what the
legacy media was reporting; but it did give an idea of what the truckers and
the Convoy were all about. The first night there were perhaps a few hundred
viewers of these live streams, by the end there was a nightly audience of fifty
thousand, that shows the scale and importance of the Freedom Convoy; it was an
event of worldwide interest. I was very impressed by what I saw; I didn't see any
violence, I didn't hear much or any horn honking by truckers, I saw what I came
to think of as a Freedom Festival. And where was Justin? He was hiding in his
country home north of Ottawa.
I wonder what would have happened had Justin walked
among the protesters? This is not a rhetorical question or an attempt at
humour. I doubt Justin would have been physically accosted, he would have been
yelled at, but after the Emergency Act was enforced protesters were physically
accosted and knocked to the ground by police officers on horseback. The police
were following orders. Maybe, in the early days of the Convoy, Justin could
have shown some courage and people would have been truly impressed -- go out
and meet citizens with a grievance against the government -- but he doesn't
have it in his makeup, and no one is impressed by Justin's relentless publicity
seeking, his dancing onstage in India, his black face, his costumes, his bungee
jumping, his relentless selfies, his singing a Queen song the evening before
the Queen's funeral, his apologies, his taking the knee, his inviting illegal
immigrants to enter Canada at Roxham Road, and lots more. It's disingenuous,
it's all fake with this man, and it's obvious to the average person how false
it is.
I always thought one of the hidden reasons for enacting the
Emergency Act were the Fuck Trudeau flags; I even saw them in
Montreal. Justin is narcissistic and the Emergency Act was his revenge for
these many flags. It's not as though there was rioting in the streets as we saw
recently in Paris after a young man was killed by the police; the demonstration
in Ottawa was inconvenient for many local residents of Ottawa, but there was no
violence. And then things got worse, despite their peaceful assembly, the
police attacked the demonstrators; they broke car windshields with impunity,
they arrested people, including Tamara Lich and others. The government froze
people's bank accounts, and this is one of the most egregious acts committed by
this bogus use of the Emergency Act; how are mortgages and rents to be paid,
groceries purchased, life to be lived with no money? We also saw the banks
colluding with and supporting the government. The Emergency Act was as bogus
and unnecessary as the Covid mandates were, all a scam testing the public's tolerance
for government intervention and control of average people's lives. All of it a
scam.
Hold the Line is an important book and I recommend
it, buy a copy and read it! Tamara Lich is not self-promoting, she is giving
us, the reader, her true story, and I believe her. On one of the night's of the
live stream the man behind the camera entered a tent where a meeting of Freedom
Convoy members was just ending. And at the end of the meeting the people
assembled stood and said a prayer. I can tell you it was unexpected and deeply
moving; these demonstrators that the media and politicians demonized are our
fellow Canadians. I doubt there were any meetings of Justin, Freeland, Lametti,
Joly, and Mendocino, all government ministers, who have lied to us, betrayed us
(especially the English-speaking population of Quebec) that ended with a
communal prayer and a statement affirming what they were doing and looking for
guidance other than the shallow leadership of Justin Trudeau.
Notes and After Thoughts:
1. The other event that is similar to the Freedom Convoy is the 1935
protest against Depression conditions and the Trek across the country from
Vancouver where unemployed men boarded freight trains; they were stopped in
Regina and negotiations with Ottawa began but when the RCMP tried to arrest the
leaders they were met with protesters and the Regina Riot began. The site of
the Regina Riot is now a historic site. One day the Freedom Convoy will be similarly
looked upon and Tamara Lich and the other Freedom Convoy organizers and participants
will be recognized as national historical figures; there will be a plaque or
statue located on the site of the demonstrations.
2. Tamara Lich is an intelligent and articulate woman; listen to Jordan
Peterson's podcast interview with her; she is brilliant! She could run for a seat
in the House of Commons for the Conservative Party of Canada, but it may
be a big mistake.
3. Who opposed the Convoy? It
included the Liberal and NDP supporters, it was the mainstream media, and it was the managerial class of
Canadians who are quick to protect their elite position in society. As an
example of this, Tamara Lich's Hold the Line is not for sale
at Indigo Books, whether online or in their stores: this is more evidence for
why we need to write down or record our own story and publish it online or in
print, if you can't read about the Freedom Convoy then it's as though it never
happened. Indigo, their book stores and online, a failing business, were quick
to cancel Hold the Line by not selling it; but it is not up to
a company selling books to decide what we can or cannot read, and the Canadian
book industry should be ashamed by their silence on this issue of censoring a
Canadian book. However, Tamara Lich's book is for sale on Amazon, a highly
successful American company these same liberals love to condemn, in fact it is
a bestselling, number one, book; to be a best seller on Amazon requires selling
3.5 thousand to five thousand copies of a book in a twenty-four hour period,
and Holding the Line did this despite fake negative reviews on
the Amazon website, they were fake because these negative reviews were written
before the book was even published. Hold the Line has mostly
five star reviews, this is based on over one thousand reviews and book sales.
It is still the number one best seller in Canadian biographies on Amazon. I
would estimate, conservatively, that Amazon has sold over 25,000 copies of the
book. It is a best seller in Canadian publishing despite the haters,
those in the liberal media who pretend the book doesn't exist.
4. In a blog post (31 January 2023) on defunding the CBC, I wrote:
CBC's biased reporting can slip over
into being reporting of even greater dubious value; that is, news has become
interpretation, bias, and even falsehood. An example: the second day of the
Freedom Convoy in Ottawa, in January 2022, CBC announcers would mention that
two monuments in Ottawa had been "desecrated" by the demonstrators
and they've kept repeating this story; among other things, it effectively cowed
people they were interviewing into opposing the Freedom Convoy. It was ammo
they could use against the Freedom Convoy. But the CBC has a double standard,
it has never referred to beheading, toppling, or throwing paint on statues of
our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, or Queen Victoria, or Egerton
Ryerson as "desecrating" these statues because the CBC sympathizes
and agrees with the demonstrators who defaced, destroyed, and desecrated
statues of these historical figures. The use of the word
"desecrate" is also interesting, it is loaded with innuendo and
exaggerates the demonstrators' action which was to drape a Canadian flag on the
shoulders of the statue of Terry Fox. The CBC assumes an agreement in
values between itself and its audience but I suggest that most Canadians are
good and fair-minded people who don't identify as much with the values CBC
promotes as the CBC thinks. The CBC wasn't always this way; the CBC used to
help unify the country and be known for excellence in broadcasting. Now it's
come to the point that the sooner they are defunded the better for the country.
5. Back in 1968, some people at the St. Jean Baptiste Parade
in Montreal threw bottles at Justin's father, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott
Trudeau; what did Pierre do? The other politicians ran but Pierre stayed on the
podium; he had some courage while his son, years later, had no courage; during
the Convoy Justin was like Waldo, he couldn't be found, he was in-hiding in his
country home.
6. Those who supported the
Freedom Convoy have been demonized by Justin Trudeau and the mainstream media
as ignorant, extremist, racist and biased, but to read Tamara Lich's book is to
find a voice speaking the truth about the Freedom Convoy. We now live in a
country where to say you are favour of freedom is to be labelled an extremist; in
fact, Justin Trudeau is the extremist.
7. Cancelling someone used to be called character assassination; you can
see the CBC and other media doing this regarding Premier Higgs of New
Brunswick.
8. My family was always Liberal; in the 1920s two relatives were Members
of Parliament from New Brunswick; as a family we always voted Liberal, never
Conservative. It was only when Justin Trudeau became prime minister that I
began thinking outside of the Liberal box. The years of his administration have
been a disaster for Canada and I am not sure we will recover as a nation from
what he has done.
10
July 2023
These photographs were taken in early July.
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| Day lilies |
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| Phlox |
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| Lupines |
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| Foxglove |
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| The sumac seeded itself a few years ago |
