There’s a boil water advisory for the eastern end of the island.
Update: Friday evening it’s been lifted.
Updates from January, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The MUHC has appointed its first female surgeon-in-chief and medical director.
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Kate
The proposed class action suit against Gilbert Rozon has been rejected by the court of appeal, saying it isn’t the right vehicle to settle the accusations of sexual misconduct that Les Courageuses have made. The accusers plan to take the case to the Supreme Court.
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Kate
Recycling centres are totally bogged down with Christmas excess.
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Kate
In response to a petition, the city’s going to hold public consultations on food wastage. I’ve seen a fair bit of news on this topic – not long ago, the city promised to fine businesses that were caught wasting food, and there have been stories about grocery chains donating food on the brink of best-before dates to food banks. I don’t know how well these ideas were worked out in practice, but clearly there’s more to be done.
Dhomas
Loblaw companies grocery stores (Provigo, Maxi, etc) offer a service called “Flashfood” to sell food which is coming close to its expiry date at a discount. You can consult what’s on offer via the app, order it and go pick it up, before it expires. If you fail to pick it up, it’s gone and you do not get refunded. I also wonder what happens to the stuff there that doesn’t get sold. Is it thrown out?
Ephraim
They could do a lot more. I once talked to a manager about calling me when certain foods were available near end of life or clearance, because I can use them, but can’t afford to buy them at full price. Nope. Okay… so try to clear your Christmas Pannaforte on your own. I do often buy from the 50% off basket, because I know how to use it. The flash app actually makes it more difficult for me, can’t see how much and if it is worth going down for. Like… give me a dozen Italian loafs on their last day at $1 each and I’m there!
Michael Black
A few years back it was common to find refrigerator items discounted by fifty percent a few days before expiry. More recently, there seems less, and the discount seems more often 30% off.
I don’t know if that’s the grocery stores trying to save money (so they wait longer to discount, and discount less) or if they are trying to reduce waste so less gets to the point of clearance..
I always check for reduced prices on baked goods, usually easy since many stores put clearance baked goods in a specific place, but other things you often only see because you are checking the sections anyway.
SMD
There is also an app called FoodHero (foodhero.com) that lists discounted items available at nearby stores. Seems to be mostly IGA and Metro stores participating for now. You reserve them on the app (I think you can pay directly for them, too) and then pick them up at a special counter in the store.
Ephraim
Michael Black, Maxi is 30%, Provigo is 50%. Markup is much lower at Maxi, but so are the SKUs.
Tim
I don’t shop at Provigo as much as I did 3 years ago, but they definitely stopped the 50% discount for a while. I scored racks of lamb on NYE at a Proving for 6 dollars (regular 30 dollars each). I opened them all as soon as I got home to make sure that they weren’t rotten and put them in the freezer immediately.
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Kate
A man was shot, not fatally, in Rivière-des-Prairies Tuesday night. Can’t be too serious if it’s only reported in Metro, right?
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Kate
A young man is facing charges in the final homicide of 2019, a stabbing at Guy and Ste‑Catherine on New Year’s eve. He was already on probation for weapons charges at the time.
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Kate
A Concordia engineering student is one of the 63 Canadians killed in the plane crash in Iran. 176 passengers and crew have died all told; today will probably see a sad progression of tweets as the dead are named in the media.
The Gazette names three Montrealers so far.
Seems a lot of the Canadian victims were students and professors on their way back to Canada for the start of winter term.
david100
Man, their visiting home at the exact time that Iran is launching missiles is one of those cosmic accidents that will stay with families. Being shot down by a missile is pretty much the last thing you expect on a trip back home to visit your grandparents and siblings and the rest.
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Kate
A scandal making little noise on the anglo side is l’affaire Matzneff: prolific French writer Gabriel Matzneff, who has never made any secret of his taste for under-age nookie, is under investigation after a new book by one of his long-ago victims created a stir in France. The story has resonance here because the only person to challenge him back in 1990 was Quebec’s own Denise Bombardier.
Now Matzneff’s publisher, Gallimard, has withdrawn all his books, and the Grande bibliothèque here has also pulled his works from its catalogue. Francine Pelletier asks whether the permissiveness of the 1960s was an aberration in the moral order.
Update: Radio-Canada has a thoughtful piece on the Grande bibliothèque’s withdrawal of Matzneff’s works, talking to a UdeM professor and to a couple of lawyers including Julius Grey about the pros and cons of the library having made this choice.
A good piece in the Guardian, from a France-based writer, explains the laissez-faire attitude of the French intelligentsia that at least partly explains their tolerance of a writer who made no secret of his predilections.
DeWolf
I just watched the clip from 1990 and… wow. While I have never been a fan of Denise Bombardier, I have to give her credit for putting a self-aggrandizing sexual predator in his place, even he was surrounded by sycophants who seemed to think child abuse was something amusing.
Meezly
I had never heard of Matzneff until the investigation came out. Now I have to wash myself after reading about this self-entitled wanker. But this NYT article helps explain in a nutshell why he had never suffered any repercussion for so many decades, not dissimilar to Pelletier’s article, which I’m reading slowly as my french is not great: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/world/europe/france-pedophilia-gabriel-matzneff.html.
walkerp
OMG just when I finally learned to love the French, I watch that TV show of masturbating french intellectual elites debating how many abused children can dance on the head of a needle. Insane. Denise Bombardier’s courage and strength in this situation does show a very strong side to the intellectual integrity of the Quiet Revolution.
CE
I’m not sure how I feel about the BAnQ pulling works from their catalogue, no matter how unsavoury the author might be. Is there precedent for this? Have other works been pulled when it became known that an author did something objectionable?
Kate
CE, I just checked and you can still borrow works by Claude Jutra. Jutra was credibly accused of pedophilia in a book written years after his death, after which his name was removed from the Quebec film awards, a city park and other memorials. But I gather – and this may not be the full picture, because I’ve never read a thing by him – that Matzneff has written a fair bit about his pleasure in having relations with underage people of both sexes, whereas Jutra’s work was not on that subject. I don’t know whether this is why the BAnQ made that decision, but another possibility is that Jutra was a culture hero in Quebec for a long time, whereas Matzneff is nobody in particular here. Removing “Mon oncle Antoine” and “Kamouraska” would leave a big hole in Quebec cinema history. Maybe both aspects came into it.
I agree with you, withdrawing books is a serious matter and I have not heard of it being done here under any other circumstances. (That is to say, not in my lifetime. The Catholic church banned library books here all the time before the 1960s.) But I read something not long ago – probably on Facebook, because I can’t find it again – about some Concordia students wanting to ban the font Gill Sans because its designer was a perv. Eric Gill died in 1940. I don’t know what kind of evil anyone thinks could percolate through a font 80 years after its designer’s death, but cancelling people is something of a thing now.
JaneyB
And here’s a video of the exchange. She is badass. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0LQiv7x4xs
CE
Kate
That’s it, CE. Ironic they’re using a font there that’s faux Old Church Slavonic.
Kate
JaneyB, she was badass. Now she’s writing sputtering op-eds against tattooing. Not only is her outrage on tattooing futile, it’s also coming about 30 years late.
Raymond Lutz
Pour ceux qui veulent en apprendre d’avantage sur le grenouillage de l’intelligentsia française et lire du bout des doigts quelques extraits de Matzneff en dégustant leur croissant dominical (beurk!) Il y a ceci: https://www.les-crises.fr/quand-bhl-soutenait-le-pedocriminel-matzneff-en-2018/
Je me demande quels sont (étaient?) les rapports de Bombardier avec le triste Bernard-Henri Lévy?
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Kate
The floods last spring cost the city $17 million including a million bucks in sand for sandbags alone.
Mayor Plante is appealing to Quebec for help in coping with flooding, which has become more and more damaging in recent years.
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