Welcome to Metropolis, the weekly show where host Kalden Dhatsenpa brings you top level news from the bottom up in beautiful Montréal. In this program, he talks to a couple of esteemed guests on issues often overlooked by the mainstream media.

First, it's Ted Rutland,who is a professor at Concordia university. His research and activism focuses on the racial politics of urban planning and policing in Canadian cities. He is the co-author of Out to Defend Ourselves: A History of Montreal’s First Haitian Street Gang. 

Ted joins the show today to get into the nitty gritty of the public security budget which makes up 18.3% of Montréal’s 2024 municipal budget.  Ted shows us the extent of how much Montréal’s police force, the SPVM, overspends. On average they go over budget by $30 million and recently the average has increased to $35 million. Ted paints a picture of a municipal government that is afraid to stand up the the financial irresponsibility of the SPVM.

In 2024 their budget will be $821 million, $35 million more than last year. Watch our full program to hear all the details of the SPVM’s budget misuse.

On today’s segment of Hello, Good Byline we are Joined by Savanna Craig and Aude Simon, two esteemed journalists from Local514.

Savanna Craig shares what she has been seeing from the developing story around an injunction led by Mohawk Mothers against McGill University’s desired expansion of their Royal Victoria property. Mohawk Mothers alleges that there are likely to be unmarked graves of indigenous people that were experimented on during the CIA’s MKultras experiments in the 1950s.

McGill has recently attempted to continue work on the site while Mohawk Mothers wants the work to slow down so that they can perform more rigorous searches. Savanna Craig details about how some of the ways that the McGill led analyses of the potential unmarked graves have been very narrowly performed.

Aude Simon recounts the financial difficulties being faced by indigenous-led community groups like Resilience Montreal and the Iskweu project. Recently, Resilience Montréal penned an open letter to the city asking for $500,000 in emergency aid to help the organization provide services during an especially difficult holiday season. The closure of Chez Doris, a women’s shelter near Resilience, has led to an extra strain on nearby community organizations that offer support and aid to the unhoused and indigenous community members.

Aude and Kalden discuss the worrying lack of funding for such organizations from all levels of government. With the cold setting in and these organizations being squeezed of resources, the risk of deaths increases as well.

Tune in for all this and more.