The weekend’s Journal history piece looks at the construction of two railway bridges and the Mohawks of Kahnawake who built them. The second bridge mentioned is the Railway Bridge that parallels the Mercier.
Updates from January, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Moisson Montréal, the city’s biggest food bank, feels it did a good job in 2018 even though it had to give out 2,000 more Christmas baskets than in 2017.
Ephraim
How do you truly measure success of a food bank? It’s definitely not by how many baskets you hand out… that’s the mark of the failure of our system to care for these people. Even the number of people who didn’t get a basket is a mark of the failure of our system. Maybe the efficiency in use of the money they collected? How many baskets that feed x meals (500 calorie meals) to y people they were able to provide with the money they managed to collect.
In any case, these food banks are homeless shelters are really doing fantastic work and deserve our help.
Kate
How do you truly measure success of a food bank?
I imagine the main number would be what percentage of requests you were able to fulfill.
Ephraim
The number of requests isn’t under their control. And if they cut down the food in the baskets and give people less food, they may fulfill requests that aren’t satisfying enough. Even the cost of food isn’t under their control.
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Kate
Three, or possibly four, snow removal trucks were destroyed in an arson attack in St-Léonard Saturday night. Nobody has been arrested yet.
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Kate
We’ll be getting some properly wintry weather Tuesday with 15 cm in the forecast.
Ian
Now they are saying 10-15 with rain in the afternoon. I bet it doesn’t even get plowed.
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Kate
In a “dog bites man” type story, it seems newcomers mostly prefer Montreal to Quebec City. Although the headline mentions immigrants, the story is more specifically about asylum seekers from Haiti who prefer Montreal because there’s a community here with organized services and immigration lawyers – a sensible choice.
EmilyG
There is a sizeable Haitian community here. And worth noting that at the Emploi-QC office in Parc-Ex, there are signs not only in English and French, but Haitian Creole as well.
Kate
Exactly. If you were coming to Canada under some kind of duress experienced in Haiti and needed a place to settle, you’d pick Montreal for exactly this. It’s no surprise people choose a bigger town where there’s already community. (And I bet it’s not easy finding griot or cabrit in Quebec City, either.)
Ephraim
Yes, but the jobs that need to be filled are mostly in the outlying regions. Which means that these communities need to step up and find a way to make these people feel welcome, if they want to survive.
dhomas
I never understood this theory that immigrants need to be sent to the regions. If I lost my job tomorrow, I wouldn’t go looking for work in the regions. Why should immigrants be asked to work in the regions if they want to stay in the city?
Ephraim
dhomas, the opposite…. the regions need them and need to entice them to move there. The cities have support systems because of the amount of immigrants, the regions need to set them up, if they want people to move there. There is no way to “force” people to move anywhere. But setting up a sort of neighbourhood adoption system works. They need people to talk to, to take them to the supermarket and explain things, etc. Without this framework, even if you get them to the regions to live, they will move away.
I’ve seen systems like this that work, with older families adopting new immigrants, others coming to help them practice the language and help with navigating the systems, like opening a bank account, learning to shop, etc.
Kevin
@dhomas
Quebec’s system for medical work permits is based on the idea of sending highly-trained people to the regions or forcing them to take pay cuts.
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Kate
Concordia is staging a play about the 1969 computer riot. The causes and fallout from that incident have been analyzed and re-analyzed in the ensuing 50 years, but the point of destroying computer equipment (expensive and scarce in 1969) because of one professor’s racist attitude has always escaped me.
There’s even a Wikipedia page about it.
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