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Although this was not the first year that overnight camping was reported for certain desirable schools, the EMSB has now promised to revise the process to make the uncomfortable and possibly even dangerous practice obsolete.
Still, imagine losing the leverage. “You’re flunking from a school we got frostbite to get you into, you ungrateful little $%&@!!”
The recent contretemps between TMR and Glenmount has been settled with the Montreal residents paying more for TMR’s services. This affects 1,800 people who live in the little enclave nestled into TMR’s southern flank.
TVA says a lot of the city’s visible-minority workers are in temporary jobs connected with snow removal even though the city has vowed to hire more nonwhite employees, a plan originally mentioned during the Coderre era.
A woman was stabbed in an apartment in Rosemont overnight, not fatally, supposedly by someone she knew. (TVA says VSMPE but it’s nowhere near.)
A second minor stabbing happened in RDP.
From third grade on I took the STCUM to and from elementary school. It was good prep for commuting.
With schools overcrowded these days, there are often traffic jams outside them morning and afternoon. Statistic here says three quarters of grade school kids are now driven to and fro.
There’s a huge gap between “close enough to walk to” and “far enough that you get to take the bus”; I know of kids who are entitled to the bus picked up more than an hour before school starts, and if that’s a choice, you’d probably not choose it; you can’t easily carpool anymore because kids are in booster seats until grade 3. A lot of things act in concert to encourage parents to drive their kids to school individually. I’m not sure if you can take the bus to school in the mornings only, either, for kids who need to stay in the afterschool care.
I blame the helicopter parents, a lot of those kids are perfectly capable of walking to school just as generations did before them. I live near LCC and the traffic jam to get there in the morning is ridiculous, cars backed up onto Sherbrooke St. for a half hour every morning. You would think they could at least drop the precious cargo at the corner of Sherbrooke or Monkland and Royal and let them walk the last block or two but no… I personally know at least one kid who is 16 years old and his mother has driven him to school every morning since kindergarten.
It is all yet another example of the many downsides of car culture. Cars make streets “too dangerous” for kids to walk to school, so they too need to be in cars, and the cycle amplifies. 🙁
Cars are no more dangerous now than they ever were. You could make the argument that things like ABS, better handling, mandatory winter tires, backup cameras etc make cars safer now than they were a generation ago.
Yeah I’m thinking of elementary age only. Once you’re in high school you can take public transit or walk (or, indeed, carpool).
@dwgs: objectively, and narrowly viewed, you are correct; cars are safer now than they were a generation ago, and dramatically safer than they were two generations ago. However, there are additional factors to consider:
(1) There are many more cars on the road now than there were a generation or two ago. So while individually, cars are safer, collectively there is likely a net loss in overall safety.
(2) Drivers are possibly less safe now than a generation or two ago. The two main factors are mobile phone distraction (texting, phoning, tinkering with the music player, tinkering with the navigation app, etc.) and possibly an overall sense of complacency among many drivers due to a false sense of security from driving safer cars.
Thirty years ago lots of parents would wait for their kids outside Ecole Internationale in Westmount by parking with one set of wheels on the sidewalk. It was common, then made worse because they’d then move by driving with those wheels on the sidewalk.
Those parents were done of the worst drivers I saw, if they didn’t hurt their own kids, they were a danger to the other kids.
So it’s very recursive.
I have no idea if it still happens.
Michael
One of the things that did my heart good was looking at Ste. Cecile in Villeray last fall. Their had to be a 100 bikes locked on the fences, both sides. Kids rode their bikes to school, why? Because de Castelneau was made a single lane with traffic calming on all four corners.
Parents realized that with that level of car protection along with the critical mass of kids on bikes, they would be safe.
Where else can this be done….everywhere.
Know this, parents will lead this change teachers will not. When my daughter attended the school 15 years ago the teachers tried to take a part of the school yard to expand their parking space. Parents pushed back… hard and those cars were removed and the space went back to the school yard.
From third grade on I took the STCUM to and from elementary school. It was good prep for commuting.
More firefighters than ever are afflicted with PTSD, a trend ascribed to their secondary role as first responders to medical emergencies, which exposes them to far more disturbing scenes than most of them ever experience in fires.
I don’t doubt there are *some* firefighters and other first responders who legitimately suffer from PTSD. However…..this is an entirely unverifiable condition. 15 minutes on Google is all that’s necessary to learn certain phrases and terms to repeat in a doctors office and *poof*, your job is now sitting at home and hammering checks for as long as you like. Remember the paramedics who (successfully) claimed to be permanently disabled because someone blew the horn on a metro train while they were under it?
Anyone who thinks there could not possibly be a significant number of people who could lie and misuse the system in such a craven way…. I direct you to any airport in North America that will be full of “medically necessary emotional support animals”.
I’d rather have a system that cares for people who legitimately have PTSD, even if it allows for some bad apples to abuse it. I’m quite certain the good outweighs the bad here.
Perhaps firefighters shouldn’t be first responders. Paramedics that I spoke to have only derision for the role of firefighters in this role. Describing a situation where the firefighters typically arrive first (because they have nothing to do) and then proceed to wait for the paramedics to do the work. Plus they take the closest parking space with their firetrucks that it adds extra work to get the patient to the ambulance. Of course, some of this might be jealousy due to the huge wage disparity.
I assume most people who get into this line of work do so because they want to do it and like their jobs. Maybe you’re miserable in your work Bill and would prefer to sit around watching TV but I think the majority of people want to work and get some kind of satisfaction from having something to do. From personal experience, any time I’ve found myself without work, I’ve been pretty unhappy with the situation mostly because I felt useless.
@CE – I don’t really disagree with your comment other than the word “majority”. I am admittedly an edge case of extreme laziness but I would bet my left hand that if the “majority” of people were offered their same salary and allowed to show up at work only if they really felt like it (even if it meant never showing up again), that there would be very, very few people who would turn it down. The people who would turn it down are the type that keel over dead 6 months after they retire because their entire identity was wrapped up in their job. I have more than a few of those folks in my family but it is apparently not an inherited condition.
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