https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/canadas-cops-stand-on-guard-for-hamas/
Montreal. In the 1980s and 90s, when I lived in New York, I made several summertime trips to the Canadian metropolis. It was a beautiful city, pleasant and safe, with a great art museum, plenty of terrific restaurants, and fun nightlife along Rue St. Catherine. If the clerks and cabbies and waiters in Paris responded rudely to my entreaties, invariably delivered in my imperfect but earnest French, their counterparts in Montreal were as genial as could be, at least once it had been established that I was not that dreaded thing, an English-speaking Canadian, but rather an American whose French somehow came out sounding more like their distinctive dialect than like the original version of the language that was the pride of the City of Lights.
Speaking of language, I especially enjoyed walking around Westmount, Montreal’s upscale English-speaking neighborhood, where (as we all recently discovered) Kamala Harris lived when she was in high school. From there – this became an annual routine (or should I say ritual?) – I would walk up a forested slope to the immense St. Joseph’s Oratory, which loomed over the city from the top of Mount Royal. Inside the church, the air was always dense with the scent of hundreds of lighted candles. Nailed to a high wall and lit by candlelight were hundreds of crutches that had been left there over the decades by handicapped people who claimed to have been cured thanks to the prayers they had sent up from this sacred place. Leaving the church by descending its front steps, 283 in all, I would always encounter a sea of people, all of them at the ends of their pilgrimages, and all of them climbing slowly on their knees up to the great church doors, their hearts filled with faith and hope.