Metro has a nice list of villages éphémères around town this summer. Nantha’s doing satay at the Marché des possibles this weekend, I can tell you from wandering through there this evening…
Updates from June, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Muslims have been the victims of most hate crimes so far in 2019 in Montreal, in contrast to last year when it was Jews.
Chris
Inaccurate/incorrect. The article says Muslims are the majority (58%) of *religion-based* hate crimes, as opposed to ethnic-based. Counting both types, they’re at 32%, a minority.
Considering there are about 3x more Muslims than Jews in Canada (not sure about Montreal), this change seems to be towards demographic proportionality.
Kate
The most recent numbers I could find, on the Wikipedia’s Demographics of Montreal entry, from the 2011 census, were 5.6% Jewish, 9.6% Muslim. I tried to find religion numbers from the more recent census but have had no luck. The summary of the 2016 census for Montreal on the StatsCan site has a lot of data but nothing about religion, nor does this page on the city site.
qatzelok
“Reported” hate crimes. Important qualifier.
Kate
Chris, do you have a link to the actual report? CTV is also saying Muslims have taken the worst of it this year: “In the first four months of the year, the SPVM said 61 crimes were motivated or suspected to be motivated by hate. Of those, 15 were directed towards Muslims and seven towards Jews. Another 35 non-criminal incidents occurred, with more than a third of those aimed at Muslims.” The math’s a little fuzzy.
JaneyB
I dread the effect of the new law on these numbers.
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Kate
A study done at McGill estimates that Airbnb has subtracted 31,000 long-term rental homes from the Canadian market.
When neoliberals talk worshipfully about disruption, this is what they often mean: poor people squeezed out, while someone in California makes a lot of money and parks it in an offshore tax haven.
Kevin
2 percent of all homes in the Plateau are being used as Airbnb rentals year-round.
Most of the money being earned on Airbnb is by people who have bought apartments/apartment buildings and converted them to hotels.Ian Rogers
Lots of duplexes and triplexes in Mile End are AirBnBs. Sometimes it’s just one flat, sometimes it’s the whole building.
Ephraim
Wonder what they are going to do in September, when they have to post their licence number? In the Plateau, unless you already have your Certificat d’Occupation, it’s almost impossible to get a new one, unless you are on Sherbrooke, St-Laurent or St-Denis.
Chris
Kate, it’s not just the VCs in Cali that benefit. Hosts also love it because they make an extra buck. Travellers also love it because it’s cheaper for them. Perhaps we get more tourists (I don’t know), and then business that caters to tourists love it too. Point being: many people benefit.
Tim F
Listen to WNYC’s series The Scarlet E about the housing crisis in America. It’s not the same market or regulatory scheme (it’s harder to evict in Quebec than in Indiana) but it sheds light into how the crisis is more than just Airbnb’s and gentrification.
Ephraim
@Chris – The hosts in Quebec are also supposed to declare the income on their income tax. How many do you suppose actually do? I bet that many of them don’t even know their real break-even point… what it costs in heat, electricity, laundry, their man hours, food, etc. And of course, unless they have actually set up a ENRG, they can’t deduct those costs legally anyway, so they need to pay income tax on 100% of the income, rather than deduct costs. (The same stupidity with Uber drivers who can’t deduct their gas because they don’t have F to T plates.)
While AirBnB tries to show this fake statistic that it increases tourism, it actually lowers the spend and therefore actually is less of an economic benefit to the city. For example, they may rent a place with a kitchen and therefore not eat out meals. If it competed on an even keel and benefited the industry, they wouldn’t be fighting it… it actually is detrimental to the industry and therefore, as one of the largest industries in Montreal… the city. For example, they eat out less than standard tourists and spend less money than standard tourists. It’s quite similar to cruise ship tourists… they don’t spend enough locally.
I love how AirBnB constantly tells people to lower their prices and make less money as costs constantly rise. A friend has the only listings in his area and they even send him notices showing him his other listings as proof that people are putting down their price and he needs to be “competitive”.
Kate
Chris, somehow people travelled and found places to stay before Airbnb. Like Uber, it’s a system for making some things cheap at great expense to others.
CR
“In New York, for instance, Airbnb directly accounted for a US$380 increase in median annual rent costs”
If this is also the case for Montreal, whatever you save on staying at an Airbnb is probably taken away by higher rent.
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Kate
The Gazette has a festival and street fair list but I think my lists of street fairs and festivals are more complete.
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Kate
Amherst Street has been given a new name: Atateken, which the mayor says means “brothers and sisters” in Kanien’kéha (Mohawk). Clicking on the graphic in the mayor’s tweet demonstrates how to pronounce the word.
jeather
Easy to pronounce, too, especially if you (unlike me) remember that in most cases t/k are pronounced d/g.
Blork
So it’s spelled “Atateken” but pronounced “AdaDEgon.” Given that the 26‑letter Roman alphabet isn’t “native” to Native American languages, why not spell it phonetically? Who’s idea was it to randomly use incorrect letters when applying the Roman alphabet to Native languages? What is the point of that?
EmilyG
I think that in general, many languages have sounds that aren’t heard in languages that use the Roman alphabet, so trying to use the Roman alphabet to spell words with these sounds is a bit of a compromise.
jeather
The vowels are pretty standard, no reason to use English’s weirdo vowel choices. I’m not sure why they chose t/k and not d/g when they chose an alphabet, presumably they felt the sounds that they use sounded to them like t/k and not d/g, as they are the same sound. (I believe at the end of the word or before another consonant they come out as t/k.)
It’s hard to give examples of this in English because we naturally use the same letter for something we consider the same sound, even if other languages distinguish that. T in top vs stop (p in pot vs spot, k in kit vs skit) — same letter in English, different letters in Hindi. L in long vs full, same letter in English, different in (iirc) Gaelic. Even the thing about “about” in Canadian English, same sound to us, different to other people, though again, vowel. (I was an adult before I figured out that the song wasn’t “Paperback rider” and it made a lot more sense. Incidentally that t/d sound between two vowels is ALSO a separate letter in other languages.)
david100
Pretty cool name. Will be mispronounced for eternally.
Blork
I actually like the name, but as david100 says, it will be mispronounced forever.
I understand that different letters sound different in different languages. But when applying the Roman alphabet to Native AMERICAN languages, you’d think that English (being the primary European-based language in use in Canada and the US) would be the “template” they use. It doesn’t matter if some African language or some Scandinavian language pronounces “t” differently; this is the translation of a North American language into the written characters used by most North Americans.
This is basic usability engineering. But I suspect the alphabetization of native languages was probably done by academics who had zero sense of usability engineering, which is too bad because it means FAIL over and over.
david100
*eternity
Blork
…and FWIW, “t” is basically “t” in both Spanish and French, so WTF?
Michael Black
I like it, it even invoked the song “If I had a Hammer”.
I’ve been trying to learn some Okanagan words, I’ll never speak the language at my age but I’d like to know some key words.
So while I can spell a few, I haven’t a clue how to pronounce them, because there are odd accents on them. But one thing I’m planning is to leave some money for the preservation of the Syilx language.
Hope I Is probably right, academics have tried to put the languages in a written firm, when they’ve just been oral until recent decades. I think that’s changing, lots of young bat be academics coming along to take control.
I think I mentioned in the past that in order to make the languages relevant, they have to include words that are relevant today. So they try to use traditional words to describe them, rather than just add new words.
The Cabot Square Project is running again this sumjer, starting with today’s concert, which includes Moe Clarke who just by being Metis at the Fring e Festival 11 years ago made me find family history. But weekly activities all sunner, like making researchers ( which may not be traditional for any of the people) and soapstone carvijng, and hoop dancing. Worth hanging out there, if for no other reason than it’s not just people likely to get tickets.
Michael
jeather
Google suggests that the initial latinisation was done by Jesuits (who probably used French and Latin for vowel sounds, which are incidentally shared with pretty much every other language that uses this alphabet except English, so, better choice) and that the spelling was standardised by the community in 1993. Since t/d and k/g are chosen based only on their location in a word, it would be absurd to have all four consonants such that morphemes change spelling (we don’t do it English either — cats and dogs not dogz, electric and electricity, etc etc etc; not that English is exactly the example to go to for re standardising spellings); I assume that the choice of t/k over d/g is because the base sound is t/k and it becomes d/g when too close to a vowel.
I am sure “easy to divine the pronunciation from the spelling for non-speakers of the language” was not even on the list when they were planning.
Ian Rogers
Ask a person from Mississauga, a person from Hamilton, and a person from DDO how to pronounce “Toronto” – you’ll get 3 different versions.
Bill Binns
Maybe they will hang the translation guide up there with the street sign.
qatzelok
Amherst was hard to pronounce in French as well, and plus, he was a genocidal pr*ck.
Kate
Oh come on, four syllables, how hard can it be?
Anyway, it’ll be another to add to Lionel-Groulx and Pie-IX as a challenge to tourists.
Michael Black
In somewhat related news, there’s a story at the CBC that the BMO has changed the plaque that marked the killing of an Iroquois chief to one honoring the Mohawk nation. A tweet, I don’t see a story.
Michael
Kate
Michael, I saw the story as well and it’s mentioned briefly in this piece from Turtle Island News. Also a new street in the postindustrial part of Lachine being refashioned into a residential area will be called Skaniatarati Avenue, from the Mohawk word for “on the other side”.
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Kate
As mentioned in a comment below by Kevin, there’s now a lot of talk about the Tampa baseball team sharing part of its schedule with Montreal. ESPN has answers to some questions.
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Kate
The STM is doing some stuff to celebrate the centenary of the city bus, promoting certain routes as tours of different neighbourhoods. Also a feature from CBC Montreal.
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Kate
Lionel Perez has tried this on before, but his party’s new report on the state of play says the Plante administration governs for its supporters, not for “the people”.
This is how populism works: you claim to be representing “le gros bon sens” of the people – even if they didn’t vote for you. Perez is trying to illegitimize Projet even though its principles won out fair and square over the Coderre approach in 2017, and he can say anything he likes about what the silent majority wants, because when the time came, they didn’t vote for his party, and for the most part didn’t vote at all. The only good thing is that Perez is going to lose this game, because you don’t get anywhere blandishing support from people so apathetic they can’t vote once every four years.
Perez is also claiming that his is the party of the environment, while not contributing anything of substance. It’s just a ploy to try to win back ground from Projet mid-term, and it’s not working.
Martin
It’s very hard to take Lionel Perez seriously because he plays the role of opposition in a very dogmatic way. He always seems to oppose for the sake of opposing, as if that was an end in itself instead of a means to improve the governance of the city.
david100
I’m gravely displeased with PM on a number of files, but even for me it would take an extraordinary event – complete psychological breakdown, Manchurian Candidate-style brainwashing, a full frontal lobotomy, etc. – before I would ever believe Lionel Perez represents the people. The guy is shrill opportunism in corporeal form.
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Kate
La Presse says there will be 60 infernal hours before the inbound side of the new bridge opens on Saint-Jean.
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Kate
Police were called to an EMSB meeting about sharing school space with another board; the CAQ is launching barbs at the EMSB for displacing elderly residents from two buildings it owns that have been used as seniors’ homes for years.
The question of how to enforce Bill 21 is on the boards now and they have to figure it out. The CSDM wants to delay applying it but François Legault says no way. I would really love to see him send a squad of inspectors in to Montreal’s biggest school board and see what happens.
Justin Trudeau says he will defend minority rights in the Bill 21 business, but he doesn’t get specific. Would Trudeau really want to risk going into the election with a constitutional challenge in the air?
Jack
If those inspectors walked into an EMSB school announced, they would have their asses handed to them.
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