OTL Blog

Maybe they don’t want any record of what Time2Ad and Matthew Alzubi said to us to exist.

Montreal’s “Quartier des Spectacles” project is proceeding at a fast clip. The neighbourhood is currently undergoing major transformations as new parks are laid out, a state-of-the-art concert hall goes up, and select buildings are appropriated and destroyed to make way for “development”. Designed to transform Montreal’s old red light district and environs into a less-seedy [...]

Today is the beginning of “MainFest”, a 3 day “street fair” on St. Laurent Boulevard, or “The Main” Historic site. The boulevard will be completely closed to traffic and is expected to receive an estimated 300 000 visitors. According to The Société de développement du boulevard Saint-Laurent (SDBSL), organizers of “MainFest” and other “street fairs”: [...]

It looks like ripping up the ground to create open pit mines in places like Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala just isn’t enough for some Canadian mining companies: RoyalOr has gone local!  The Johannesburg, South Africa-registered organization has plans to turn Mount Royal into an open-pit mine. “People always talk about buying local food and local [...]

Today is May 1st, recognized in many places around the world as International Workers Day.  It traces its roots back to May 1st, 1886, when workers demanding an 8-hour work day walked out en-masse.  The police crackdown at the McCormick Reaper Works in Chicago two days later led to the Haymarket affair in where eight [...]

It took a while, but the federal government finally seems ready to invest a bit of money in the Quebec arts scene.  In fact, the department of Canadian Heritage is giving $4,222,861 to Montreal organizations like the National Theatre School, Les Grands ballets canadiens de Montréal and The Leanor and Alvin Segal Theatre.  They are [...]

In 1971, Augusto Boal started what he called Newspaper Theatre to theatrically deal with current social issues in Brazil.  The concept soon blossomed into a tree of theatrical techniques including Forum Theatre and Image Theatre called Theatre of the Oppressed.  The concept soon spread to other countries in South America and eventually around the world. [...]

The Reverend Kevin Annett knows what it’s like to be under the microscope. He was kicked out of the United Church for speaking out against what happened to native people in Canada’s residential school system. When it became apparent that he wouldn’t be silent and do what he was told, they made things very difficult [...]

While many films, along with entertainment in general, have been known to desensitize people to violence, the Bloc Quebecois hope to use the medium to sensitize Members of Parliament from all parties to the magnitude of tragedies like the massacre of 14 women by Marc Lepine at Ėcole Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989. This event, [...]

Montreal is no stranger to graffiti, in fact some of the most celebrated graffiti artists in recent memory, such as Roadsworth, call or have called Montreal their home and some walls, especially in the Plateau neighborhood, boast some of the nicest underground art around. Sadly, Montreal is also no stranger to police brutality, police repression [...]