This is Montreal

At a meeting at city hall on Tuesday night, Montreal police chief Fady Dagher spoke publicly about an internal investigation into allegations of racist, violent acts by police officers at Station 39 in Montréal-Nord. While Dagher is proposing internal reforms, columnist Noémi Mercier believes we also need to examine bigger questions about the place of police in Quebec. She crunched the numbers for L’actualité magazine and found that Montreal has more police officers per capita than any other major Canadian city.

While the Island of Montreal is projected to lose nearly 10 per cent of its population in the next 25 years, some other nearby regions like the Laurentians are growing. CBC’s Aatefeh Padidar spoke with some new Laurentians residents — including some former Montrealers — about what prompted them to move. And we’ll hear what this population shift could mean, both for the regions that are losing residents and those that are gaining them.

July is peak season for biking in Montreal. It’s also one of the months when the most cyclists are hit by cars. The numbers show that a handful of intersections account for a large number of collisions involving bikes. CBC reporter Patricia Kozicka breaks down what makes these intersections so dangerous and what can be done to fix them.

A teenager from Blainville is asking international groups to investigate the environmental impact of Stablex, a US-owned hazardous waste site in his community. 14-year-old William Guindon argues that Canada and Quebec have failed to apply their own environmental protection laws, so now he’s taking his fight global by filing requests to the United Nations and to an environmental watchdog under the Canada-US-Mexico agreement (CUSMA). CBC journalist Sarah Jesmer looks at the controversy around the site, and what power these international bodies have to respond, particularly in the midst of trade tensions with the US.

In the lead up to the fall election, CBC Montreal host Sudha Krishnan is launching a series of conversations on Quebec identity — from two women with South Asian roots talking about how they’ve seen identity issues evolve since the 1970s, to young supporters of Quebec independence, to anglophone Montrealers defending their linguistic institutions.