Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez .
Martin C. Barry
In an interview published this month last year in The Laval News, Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez (who is the Trudeau government’s pointman for Quebec) said Ottawa was focusing on affordability issues for families across the country as it unveiled details of the budget for the year ahead.
Among the elements was the Canadian Dental Care Plan, due to be fully implemented by 2025, providing dental coverage for up to nine million Canadians. “No one should have to choose between taking care of their teeth and paying their bills,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said about the plan in an earlier statement.
As reported in our April 5 issue, elected officials from three levels of government gathered at the war cenotaph near Laval city hall to pay respects alongside residents of Hellenic origin to Greek veterans and soldiers on the occasion of the 202nd anniversary of Greece’s independence.
“We are all proud Greeks,” Laval city councillor for Chomedey Aglaia Revelakis said in an interview with The Laval News. “You have to remember our history. It’s because of the heroes of 2021 that we were liberated and we’re here today.”
If male attendance during an event held recently at the Laval English Speaking Senior Wellness Centre was somewhat higher than it usually is, this was perhaps not completely surprising, since men do tend to have a greater appreciation for sports heroes like legendary former Montreal Alouettes quarterback Anthony Calvillo.
Perhaps in anticipation of the Als’ surge later in 2023 when they won the Grey Cup, Calvillo predicted to the audience of seniors that there was “a lot of excitement” under new Als owner Pierre Péladeau, because he was going to let general manager Danny Maciocia “do his job” without owner interference.
An ice storm that raged through the Laval region in early April made a devastating impact on trees in neighbourhoods like Chomedey – although not to the same extent as the far more disastrous 1998 ice storm.
If anything, older trees with brittle trunks and limbs seemed to have been more susceptible to shearing off and falling. In Chomedey, on 90th Ave. near the corner of 7th St., one of the neighbourhood’s oldest and stateliest trees fell halfway across the road.