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MONTREAL — Weight machines fill the space where once there were pews, and visitors sip nutritional green smoothies, not communion wine. But despite its dramatic transformation into a private gym and spa, the onetime Dominican St. Jude’s Shrine on Montreal’s St. Denis Street remains a temple of sorts.

“It becomes almost a religion for some people,” Sonya Audrey Bonin, general manager of the Saint-Jude Espace Tonus gym, said this week. “I see it with yoga, with taking care of yourself, being careful about what you eat, having a healthy lifestyle.” And in a secular age when people are more likely to hit the gym than attend mass on a Sunday morning, the upscale facility is being hailed as a model for preserving the religious buildings that constitute an important part of Quebec’s architectural heritage.

Conseil du patrimoine religieux du QuébecÉglise Saint-Eugène is now a community centre.

Quebec’s Religious Heritage Council was created in 1995 with provincial funds and a mission to repair the province’s crumbling churches. Dwindling congregations meant that parishes were having a hard time paying for repairs, so the council identified the buildings with the greatest heritage value and subsidized their maintenance.

But after 18 years and $371-million invested by the government, the council recognized that it makes little sense to repair buildings simply to keep them standing. They need to be occupied, and churches are having a harder time doing that. “The issue has changed,” said Denis Boucher, a project manager with the heritage council. “Today, we speak a lot more about finding uses for churches.” In the past, the council’s grants were reserved for churches still used as places of worship. Last year that was changed, and now the council can help non-profit organizations, municipalities and even private owners seeking to transform former churches.

When the council did an inventory in 2003, it identified 2,751 places of worship in the province, the vast majority of them Catholic churches. Since then, about 400 have closed, and Mr. Boucher said the rhythm is accelerating. “A church closes every week. It is a huge phenomenon,” he said. “Everyone needs to make a compromise so the buildings find a useful life in society and continue to convey their historical significance.”

Conseil du patrimoine religieux du Québec; Saint-Jude Espace TonuSt. Jude’s, before its transformation at top, and after.

A new publication by the heritage council highlights examples in Montreal of “useful lives” found for former churches, including the St-Jude gym, which is praised for “original architectural solutions that created a place in conversation with the site’s past, not split from it.” The architects preserved the church’s outer shell and most of the arched windows, making it impossible to forget the building’s former function. In Montreal’s Rosemont neighbourhood, the former Église Saint-Eugène is now a community centre for new subsidized housing units built around the church for senior citizens. “The church continues to play its role as meeting place,” the heritage council wrote.

Another successful transformation was the Théatre Paradoxe in southwestern Montreal, which took over the nearly 100-year-old Église Notre-Dame-du-Perpétuel-Secours after it closed in 2009. At a cost of $2.7-million, the project maintained the church’s exterior and much of its interior, right down to wood from the confessionals that was used to make the bar. But now the nave is the scene of concerts and conferences, while an organization helping dropouts find work uses part of the building to train them as video and stage technicians. Even though disco shows have replaced Sunday hymns, Gérald St-Georges, the theatre’s general manager, said there is continuity in the building’s new purpose. “Former parishioners feel a sense of pride, that the place of worship has remained a gathering place,” he said. “It’s in direct connection to what happened before.”

The push to preserve churches by giving them a new mission hit an obstacle with the arrival of Christian Lépine as the Roman Catholic archbishop of Montreal in 2012. Soon after his appointment, he declared a moratorium on the sale of churches, worried that worshippers would lose their neighbourhood church. Projects to install daycare facilities and community centres in closed churches were suddenly on hold.

Joëlle Saint-Louis/Théâtre ParadoxeMontreal's Théatre Paradoxe preserved much of the original interior, right down to wood from the confessionals that was used to make the bar.

Alain Walhin, assistant to the vicar general at the archdiocese of Montreal, said that two years into the moratorium, there is no indication when it will be lifted. First the archdiocese wants to identify the needs of its parishioners and assess the state of its roughly 200 buildings, he said. “If it takes three years, four years, that’s how long it will take,” he said.

He also suggested people have been too hasty in declaring the Catholic Church a spent force in Quebec. “Of course there are a lot of churches for the number of people who go to church, but that’s not a reason to close everything,” he said. “Yes, people don’t go, but that doesn’t mean they will never go. There are ups and downs. It isn’t always going to go down.” He pointed to the example of a former French-Canadian church in Montreal that last year was handed over to a Catholic congregation of African origin and renamed Notre-Dame d’Afrique.

Lyne Bernier, a researcher associated with the Canada research chair on urban heritage at Université du Québec à Montréal, said churches of all denominations are vital landmarks in Quebec. A 2011 research paper she wrote identified 160 churches in the province that suffered “the tragic fate” of demolition since the beginning of the 20^th century. She expects more will fall, and with each one a piece of history is lost. “Churches are important because they are intimately tied to the identity of Quebecers,” she said. She is in favour of conversions that give the space back to the public in some form. “When a church is privatized, it’s as if former parishioners who contributed to its construction are dispossessed. They are losing their own heritage,” she said.

Resisting change in the hope that pews will one day fill up again is a recipe for further deterioration of the buildings, she argued. “It just pushes back the problem. [Msgr. Lépine] thinks that Quebecers are going to return to church, which is completely out of the question,” she said. “There may be sporadic returns by certain small groups, but the loss of interest is widespread and it’s irreversible. It’s not just limited to Quebec; it’s in Europe and in all western countries in general.”

Conseil du patrimoine religieux du QuébecThe nearly 100-year-old Église Notre-Dame-du-Perpétuel-Secours before its transformation into a theatre and conference centre.

At Le Saint-Jude, Ms. Bonin, 40, embodies that change in Quebec society. Raised in a small town in the Lanaudière region, north of Montreal, she attended church every Sunday morning with her father and as a girl sang in the choir. But when she left home, she stopped going to church and now she does not practise any formal religion. When her devout father learned she was involved in a project to turn a church into a gym, he was at first horrified, but he came around, she said. “In the end, he was very proud that we were recovering the site to keep it alive,” she said.

Where once Dominican brothers prayed and welcomed the faithful, the Saint-Jude aims to build a new kind of community — with membership fees of $200-a-month — around a lifestyle that values exercise, healthy eating and stress management. “We really want to offer a way of life, and I think the church gives us this possibility in terms of the space and in terms of a place that already had this community spirit,” Ms. Bonin said.

Marie-Claire Mayeres, an art gallery owner in her 60s, said joining Saint-Jude has been a godsend. “Before, I went to mass on Sunday morning. Now I come to the Saint-Jude,” she said. She used to go to mass in the shrine occasionally, and her daughter played the organ there. But she feels no sadness that it is gone.

“People don’t go to church any more,” she said. “We have to find something to do with our heritage, or else they will all be demolished.”

National Post

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HandoutThe Saint-Jude Espace Tonus gym and spa, built located in a former church. A healthy lifestyle “almost a religion for some people,” general manager Sonya Audrey Bonin says.

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MONTREAL — To the untrained eye, the spray-painted letters look like just another of the thousands of graffiti tags that cover Montreal walls. But when Alexandre Veilleux saw the tag in the opening of the popular Radio-Canada drama 30 Vies, he recognized his own handiwork.

Now Mr. Veilleux, a graffiti artist known professionally as Alex Scaner, has gone to court seeking $45,000 in damages from Radio-Canada and the production company behind 30 Vies, Productions Aetios Inc., saying they used his work without permission.

“The plaintiff is the author of a tag, an artistic work painted in 2010 on a building located on René-Lévesque Blvd in Montreal,” his statement of claim filed this month in Quebec Court states.

Radio-Canada and Aetios “forged, modified, mutilated and broadcast the work” for commercial purposes, it continues. An image in which the tag appears below the show’s spray-painted title was reproduced on promotional billboards for the show’s first and second seasons.

In addition to the tag, a mural Mr. Veilleux painted with another Montreal artist appears in the opening of the third season of 30 Vies, which follows the lives of students and teachers at an inner-city high school. The show, created by popular Quebec screenwriter Fabienne Larouche, draws an average audience of 687,000 people.

Mr. Veilleux says the producers associated his work with the series without his consent, damaging his artistic reputation. As Alex Scaner, he has exhibited in galleries in Paris and New York and has interned in Berlin.

He could not be reached for comment Monday but his lawyer, Sophie Dormeau, said the lawsuit is a matter of fairness.

“The situation of artists is pretty unstable, and if they do not take the trouble to defend their works, who is going to do it?” she said. “It’s not fair to use the work of others for commercial purposes.”

Sébastien Pigeon, vice-president legal affairs for Aetios, referred to what Mr. Veilleux calls a work of art as “a few letters that were written illegally on a wall.” The company intends to defend itself against the lawsuit, which he said has no legal basis.

‘Everyone knows the adage that crime doesn’t pay; he committed an act that is not permitted by the law and is trying to profit from it afterwards’

“The judge will have to decide whether someone who creates a work illegally like that can then benefit from the protection of the Copyright Act to demand payment,” Mr. Pigeon said. “Everyone knows the adage that crime doesn’t pay; he committed an act that is not permitted by the law and is trying to profit from it afterwards.”

He said a ruling in Mr. Veilleux’s favour would hobble the film industry, establishing a precedent for any tagger to demand payment if his work happens to appear in the background of a film shoot. “Graffiti is a scourge, so it’s almost impossible to film without having some appear on screen,” he said.

Ms. Dormeau disputed the argument that her client’s work is unprotected because it is an illegal tag. “Whether it is legal or illegal, a tag or any other form, the criterion is originality,” she said.

Teresa Scassa, a University of Ottawa law professor specializing in intellectual property, said there are few precedents in Canada for the copyright protection of graffiti. The federal Copyright Act includes an exemption allowing people to film or photograph public sculptures and architectural works, but it does not mention paintings.

She said it is possible a judge could rule Mr. Veilleux’s copyright had been infringed upon but decide to reduce or eliminate the award of damages if the disputed work is found to have been created illegally.

There have been at least two cases in Ontario where galleries have pulled photo exhibitions of public graffiti following complaints of copyright infringement, but the cases do not usually get to court.

“It would be interesting if the film company were willing to fight it, because it’s an issue that keeps cropping up,” Ms. Scassa said.

National Post

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A passenger is facing charges for allegedly threatening to “blow up” a Panama-bound plane that was escorted back to Toronto’s Pearson airport by two U.S. military jets.

According to a video filmed by a passenger, Peel Regional Police officers shouted “hands up, heads down” as they boarded the plane shortly after it landed at about 9 a.m.

The tactical unit arrested Ali Shahi, 25. Police charged the Canadian citizen with uttering threats and endangering the safety of an aircraft. The RCMP said its national security enforcement team is assisting with the investigation.

Ali Shahi / FacebookAli Shahi, 25, was charged with with uttering threats and endangering the safety of an aircraft.

Sunwing Flight 772 left Toronto at 7 a.m. with 183 passengers — including two infants — and a crew of six.

William Alphonso / FacebookPassengers on board a Sunwing Airlines plane that was forced to turn back and land at Toronto's Pearson airport.

It was heading to Panama City, but turned back approximately 45 minutes into the flight over West Virginia “when an agitated customer made a direct threat against the aircraft,” the airline said in a statement.

The 25-year-old passenger became increasingly agitated after the plane took off, Sunwing President Mark Williams said. The man tore up magazines and the safety card and tried to rip the window shade off, he said. After the passenger told the crew that he wanted to “blow up the airplane,” the pilot decided to execute the airline’s emergency response plan, Williams said.

Two F16 fighter jets escorted the plane back to Toronto after the aircraft was forced to turn around, the North American Aerospace Defence Command said. The military planes based out of Toledo, Ohio, were in the air doing exercise flight training at the time of the incident, and the pilots were asked to shadow the Sunwing plane “as a precautionary measure,” Capt. Jennifer Stadnyk of NORAD public affairs said. After the plane landed, the F16 pilots flew back to their home base, she said.

Police searched Shahi and the plane, but did not find any weapons, or anything that would allow him to act on his threat, Constable Lilly Fitzpatrick said.

William Alphonso / FacebookPolice board a Sunwing Airlines plane that was forced to turn back and land at Toronto's Pearson airport after a passenger made a "direct threat" against the aircraft.

Sunwing said it would do a full security inspection of the plane before returning it to service. Passengers were scheduled to take a different flight to Panama Friday afternoon.

#NORAD fighters escorted civilian aircraft to Toronto, Canada. Today, NORAD F-16 fighters based out of Toledo,... fb.me/3aTSSaD1S

—
NORAD & USNORTHCOM (@NoradNorthcom) July 25, 2014

Williams said he was “very happy” with the way Sunwing’s cabin crew handled the incident.

“Crews and everyone are trained to deal with situations like that and stop them from escalating,” he said. “People should be comforted in the fact that this situation was handled without any injuries.”

He said the airline was co-operating with the police investigation.

Shahi is also facing mischief charges. He is due to appear in a Brampton court for a bail hearing Saturday morning.

William Alphonso / FacebookSunwing flight 772 left Toronto at 7 a.m. with 183 passengers and a crew of six. The aircraft turned around approximately 45 minutes into the flight over West Virginia.

William Alphonso / FacebookSunwing flight 772 left Toronto at 7 a.m. with 183 passengers and a crew of six. The aircraft turned around approximately 45 minutes into the flight over West Virginia.

US F-16s entered Cdn airspace to escort Sunwing plane after passenger made threat. Fighters were in the air for training ex, diverted—
David Common (@davidcommon) July 25, 2014

Photos de l'intervention policière dans l'avion de @SunwingVacay . Impressionnant. Crédit: Alain Alphonso. http://t.co/HUVtYwTARy—
Bahador Zabihiyan (@bahadorz) July 25, 2014

William Alphonso / FacebookPolice board a Sunwing Airlines plane that was forced to turn back and land at Toronto's Pearson airport.

National Post, with files from The Canadian Press

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