Longshoremen at the Port of Montreal have voted to strike. It seems they’ve wanted to strike for awhile but have to wait till it’s decided how much of their labour falls under Essential Services.
Updates from February, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Descriptions of three of the city’s nature parks in winter go from one end of the island to the other, although he doesn’t mention Île de la Visitation, which is more accessible by transit from the midst of town than the ones listed.
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Kate
The smog days we just had added up to the worst smog event in eight years.
Also, temperatures never got below –20°C in January, although they got close a couple of times.
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Kate
Plateau tenants visited the borough’s council session Monday night to demand a moratorium on renovictions.
Ian
That sounds like my upstairs neighbour who refused to tell her kids to stop jumping off the furniture because they might say no. I mean yeah I get it, the city can legislate all they want but unless it’s upheld by the courts it’s not a solution… but the first step is to pass legislation!
This is even worse than the usual “we would love to help but our hands our tied”, this is more like “we would love to help but maybe our hands would be tied so we’ll have to get back to you later”. At least PM usually talks a good game against gentrification but this is next level.
“Nous sommes tous animés par un sentiment d’impuissance, d’indignation et de l’urgence d’agir”, what an utter joke.
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Kate
Sue Montgomery has been put on formal notice by the city to stop questioning the integrity of the administration of the borough. Mayor Plante is accusing her of making false statements.
Dominic
This seems like a big escalation. I hope we get more details on this story, cause its putting two of my favourite local politicians at odds.
DeWolf
Montgomery was saying the NDG/CDN civil service has a problem with corruption and now the city is telling her to shut up. Sounds fishy.
Spi
Well you can’t go around insinuating that the civil service is corrupt based on nothing more than overlapping years of employment. That is damaging to morale and probably opens you up to lawsuits.
What I find interesting is how decisive and strong the actions from city hall/Projet Montreal have been in regards to harassment both in the Fumagalli and Montgomery’s Chief of Staff, the same can’t be said about their general handling of local affairs. Makes you wonder if there isn’t a deeper problem with harassment that they’ve managed to bury that they really want to stamp out.
Ian
Sounds like Montgomery is onto something Plante doesn’t want made public. Does anyone really think corruption ended just because Applebaum finally got called out? One can at least hope under the new administration that the brown envelopes are recyclable.
walkerp
This is outrageous. Montreal is corrupt as hell. Now Plante is pulling the lawyers out if anybody says it? I am really disappointed.
Tim S.
I’m willing to believe that there’s still some corruption in Montreal. I’m not ready to believe that Valerie Plante, Lionel Perez, Marvin Rotrand, Peter McQueen, Magda Popeanu, Christian Arseneault, the comptroller, and all the borough employees are part of it, and only Sue Montgomery and Anna Lisa Harris have stumbled upon the truth. I suspect the truth is that this is a dispute among employees that has been unnecessarily personalized by Sue Montgomery, who, let’s remember, had no political or even management experience before being elected borough mayor.
I should say, that having followed local NDG politics fairly closely, I’ve been fairly unimpressed with Sue Montgomery. In all the events and stump speeches I’ve attended, I’ve never heard her articulate a specific policy or ideological position, beyond an extremely vague and ill-defined feminism. Even during this whole episode, she hasn’t some up with any intention or project that’s been thwarted by these bureaucrats, apart from some hand waving about the Empress theatre. If she could articulate a specific policy or project that she wanted to get done but was being prevented from doing so, I might change my opinion.Tim S.
That said, if anyone has a more positive take on Montgomery’s vision, I’m happy to hear it.
Ian
This isn’t about vision. Montgomery was a star candidate despite her lack of experience. She and Plante were good old pals right up to this point, there are lots of media appearances over the last 2 years with them grinning side by side like old buddies.
We will probably never know what happened but saying somehow Montgomery’s lack of political platform is the real reason she is now persona non grata is ludicrous. I do hope you aren’t attempting misdirection, Tim, because that’s pretty heavy-handed.
This is clearly a cover-up of something – what, exactly, we may never know.
Kate
I can see from the commentary here just how murky this business has become.
Tim S.
Hi Ian, I don’t think I’m trying to misdirect anything, I’m just trying to articulate the idea that, based on my observation, there’s a good chance this crisis occurred because, well, maybe she’s not very good at her job and mishandled the situation. But it’s just my guess, you can take it or leave it. As you say, we’ll probably never know.
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Kate
CEGEP de la Gaspésie has provoked a response from not only the CAQ government but also the opposition parties since it’s come to light that it holds classes in Montreal in an unmarked building, in English, to international students, and for profit. The government has rushed in and demanded more of the classes must be held in French.
Where there’s demand there will be supply. But instead of commending the CEGEP for responding to market forces, the CAQ’s going to have to bow to Quebec sensibilities and close this loophole down.
Daisy
Is the mission of cegeps to respond to market forces in India and China?
Kate
I don’t think it matters where the students are from. They are people who want education, and what this CEGEP has done is similar to the EMSB’s adult ed services – they raise money by teaching skills or knowledge in demand, which will tend to make the students more employable while bringing in funds for the overall operation.
I’d say it’s win-win unless the CEGEP is shortchanging its main student body in the Gaspé, but I doubt they are, because teaching people in Montreal in English is unlikely to affect teaching in French hundreds of miles away. In fact, the revenue from the Montreal operation probably benefits those students.
The government should investigate to make sure nobody’s pocketing the profits personally, but they’re not interested in that, they’re only interested in the scandalous issue of teaching people in English.
Ian
I find this all very peculiar. I know a thing or two about how CEGEPs decide what to teach in their Cont Ed classes, and they need approval from the Ministry of Education for curriculum, staffing, program approval, everything…
It’s not like a couple of kids decided to set up a lemonade stand on the wrong block…
Ian
…the scandal expands: https://www.ledevoir.com/societe/education/572223/cegep-anglophone-la …clutch your peals, Marie-Victorin is doing it too. Apparently there are some loopholes around being considered bilingual and providing an AEC instead of a DEC.
I bet these folks don’t even have to take gym to graduate! Shocking! /s
One of my favourite quotes from the article –
« Il faut qu’ils [les étudiants aux programmes en anglais] soient en contact avec le français, c’est important, sinon ça crée un ghetto », a réagi Pascal Bérubé, du Parti québécois.Hear that kids? English leads to ghettoization. Imagine, slums of downtrodden English speakers, crippled by their linguistic error, unable to get along with the rest of the world. They probably even wear whatever kind of hat they want, the poor fools.
…and in case anyone was wondering what Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois thinks about people that speak English:
« Quand on laisse le réseau collégial se développer de manière désordonnée et chaotique, quand on laisse des logiques de compétition, de marchandisation, s’installer dans le réseau collégial, […] ça ne sert pas les intérêts des Québécois et des Québécoises », a insisté Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, de Québec solidaire.«
I guess it’s like that old Mordecai Richler line, “…when thousands of flag-waving nationalists march through the streets roaring ‘Le Québec aux Québécois!’ they do not have in mind anybody named Ginsburg. Or MacGregor, for that matter.”
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Kate
Brief light piece on origins of metro station names including why we have one named after the savannah.
Blork
There’s also a “de la Savane” in Longueuil, near the St-Hubert airport (in that case it’s “chemin” not rue). I’m in the habit of calling it “de la banane,” because Blork.
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Kate
A brief description of Monday night’s borough council meeting in CDN-NDG leaves us none the wiser about the behaviour that has led to the standoff between Sue Montgomery and Projet.
Su
Borough council meetings in Montreal can be viewed online and are also archived. Many interesting questions were raised by citizens at last night’s meeting.
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Kate
We have a lot of phones. 514 and 438 are almost full, so we’ll soon have 263 in Montreal and 354 in the suburbs as well. But this was first reported more than a year ago.
Ephraim
It was assigned about 2 years ago, but the CRTC just posted https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2020/2020-37.htm about it, which is likely why it’s popped up. They think it will need it by 2024. See http://www.cnac.ca/npa_codes/relief/438-514/relief_438-514.htm for the documentation.
Raymond Lutz
IPv4 exhaustion!
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