In another school board related story, the EMSB is getting federal funds to fight the secularism law. And boy is Simon Jolin-Barrette mad.
That law is bound to be tested. François Legault knows this, even if his attack poodle doesn’t.
Update: The EMSB has renounced the funds offered to it by the feds under the Court Challenges Program.
It is not only the anglo boards that are against Bill 40, the school board abolition bill, which is bound to be pushed through by the Legault government on Friday. It’s also the teachers’ unions, telling the government it’s doing a stupid thing. They held a big protest Wednesday in Montreal.
The Alouettes have cut their cheerleaders as a cost-saving move.
That’s a pretty cheapskate move consider the cheerleaders get paid just a smidge over 8k a year each.
Consider that The CFL salary cap is set at $5.3 million for the 2020 season and teams must spend a minimum of $4.7 million on players’ salaries.
All day I’ve been hearing how the city’s going to ban all plastic bags after this year, but nobody is saying shopping bags. Garbage and recycling will presumably still go out in plastic bags.
It’s a gesture, but I’m not sure it’s the most significant we could be making.
I think the distinction here is that it’s not just grocery bags, it’s bags from all retail. I’m not sure if that includes the thin produce bags used in the fruit and vegetable sections of grocery stores but I guess we’ll see soon enough.
About a week ago I heard a person getting interviewed on CBC radio and the interviewer brought up the example of the Montreal bag ban that just made stores switch to heavier bags that still ended up not getting recycled. The person being interviewed responded that if the plastic bag ban was put in place and people simply switched to heavier plastic bags that still end up not getting recycled, that’s a flaw in planning on the part of the government.
I guess somebody mentioned that interview to Plante, and since the city clearly can’t get recycling figured out, the only solution she and her team of experts could come up with was a total ban. It’s better than nothing and is kind of an obvious response to the problem of too many plastic bags… but I’m with the person on CBC – the first “ban” wasn’t really thought through very well.
I just retweeted Tim Forster’s tweet that what Plante should ban next is the sale of bottled water.
If we had free actually cold water fountains everywhere instead, maybe (though if you’re certain kinds of immunocompromised you can’t use water fountains [because of other people, not because of the city water] and need a factory packaged drink, and even people who bring their own water bottles can spill or just run out and need more).
The problem is not that individuals use plastic straws, but we continue to pretend it is.
Plateau borough is loosening business regulations on St-Denis, intending to reduce the number of empty storefronts. A denser number of bars will be allowed, and new rules may make more Airbnb conversions possible – even, it sounds like, on the ground floor, which I think would be a mistake.
Discussions are even being held in St-Léonard over Jean-Talon East, which has also been suffering from empty storefront syndrome.
I’m curious why they are allowing this on St-Denis but never allowed it on Parc or St-Laurent. On Parc they aren’t even allowed to put in a new terrasse let alone a new bar.
The guys who keep the STM “branché” on social media keep an eye on web trends so their communications don’t sound like 2010.
I don’t need them to follow the Dolly Parton meme, I just want them to update the metro status twitter accounts in real time. Please.
I kind of trolled you there, jeather. I was thinking of that…
I so often hear “service is slowly resuming” but there was no info about anything online. Just this morning in fact.
In St-Michel there’s a high school with no windows. Some folks want this to change.
Wow how awful. Imagine teaching there for 25 years of your life.
Aéroports de Montréal is agitating to get the REM that goes to the airport to extend to the Dorval VIA Rail station.
I noticed that this is a line for line translation of the article in L’Actualité, or vice versa. I’m wondering if it’s based on a PR…? Either way more evidence that journalism is dead in Quebec.
…I mean the Gazette article is a line-for-line translation! Sheesh it IS a PR.
I’m not sure where you’re getting Gazette and L’Actualité, but the CTV News and La Presse articles linked here are both credited to “The Canadian Press / La Presse Canadienne”, so yes, they’re from the same source – but that source isn’t a company press release, it’s a news feed, which is standard practice. You’ll see stories credited to “Canadian Press” or “Associated Press” with only minor rewrites all the time.
I sometimes do that, linking CP stories in English and French that are substantially the same (sometimes edited differently) so people can read it in whichever language they prefer. When i’m really on, I’ll point it out. But thanks for this, JoeNotCharles.
We really do need high school classes on how mass media works.
It should go along with how elections work, what are the different levels of government and what they do, etc…
What Kevin said. I can’t believe this stuff isn’t included in the curriculum already. (Or is it? Isn’t there some kind of “civics” class in schools?)
When I was 12 and growing up in Nova Scotia we had a class on media. I think it was built-into a larger class (“social studies” or whatever) and I think it was somewhat experimental. Anyway, it was great! It was all about mass media (print, TV, etc.) and it covered all the angles including different types of media bias and all that. Sounds complex but it was designed for 12-year-olds and it was really effective. It gave me both a skeptical eye on media as well as an appreciation for its social value.
Why don’t all kids get that?
Maybe there’s no mass media studies in elementary & high school in part because one of the most biggest and oldest elementary and high school textbook publishers in Quebec is owned by Quebecor (Les Éditions CEC). Don’t teach your grandma to suck eggs, as the saying goes.
The Gazette tries to make a scandal over how many city employees are making more than $100,000 a year. If this is a problem, how do you fix it? Demand they accept radical cuts in salary? Or fire them and hire people with no experience at $35K?
Actually, some group keeps track, and they are most likely the ones “trying to make a scandal”.
For a long time Ben & Jerry’s had a rule not capping senior executives but giving a ratio of their pay to the lowest paid. If the expensive cutives got a raise, so did the lowest employee.
The important part of the story, which was in both the headline and the first paragraph of the Gazette article, and which Kate should have included in the summer – is “according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation”. In other words, yes Libertarian ideologues think it’s a scandal that city employees make money. The obvious way to fix the problem is to fire them and NOT hire replacements – the Canadian Taxpayers Federation wants government to not receive or spend any money, ever..
Interesting story about how crooks managed to sell someone else’s house using a bare-faced method of fraud. But they were caught.
What the hell happened to that notary? The story doesn’t say. But a notary should know better. And I assume that the owner knows that he has to sue the notary for making the transfer illegally…. because they are supposed to be the gatekeepers. The notary’s insurance company will likely just pay the whole legal bill, just to get it taken care of.
We don’t need title insurance in Quebec. That’s the job of the notary. That’s why you are paying the notary. The failure here is… the notary. And they aren’t named, they aren’t discussed, they are the centre of the crime.
We should be getting some snow and freezing rain starting early Thursday.
qatzelok 08:11 on 2020-02-06 Permalink
I hope they get permission to stop teaching about the lie that is “evolution.”
What an affront to our Lord. and Second Amendment rights. : )
Chris 09:40 on 2020-02-06 Permalink
This CTV paragraph bugs me: “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has repeatedly said he doesn’t agree with a government telling people how to dress…”
They’re not actually quoting Trudeau, but…
If he really thinks that, why hasn’t he got rid of Criminal Code section 174, where there the government literally tells people how to dress? “Every one who, without lawful excuse, is nude in a public place, is guilty of an offense punishable on summary conviction”. And that’s a _criminal_ offense, not just a firing offense!
Government tells us how to dress in other instances too. Cooks must cover their hair. Construction workers must have boots. Motorcyclists must have helmets. etc. etc.
Clearly Trudeau thinks governments _sometimes_ should tell people how to dress, just not in this instance.
Kate 14:13 on 2020-02-06 Permalink
Chris, as is your wont you’re mixing apples and oranges and making a mess. For whatever reason – and it’s more deeply rooted even than religion – we’re widely agreed, across nations and faiths and cultures, that people need to be clothed in public. You can discount that one. Justin Trudeau is not oppressing us by heading a government which includes, in one or two lines, the requirement that people not be nude in public.
The other matters are for safety and cleanliness as you well know. Again, we’re mostly agreed that my right to wear my hair loose is reasonably curtailed by your desire not to find hairs in your food.
But the secularity law doesn’t touch on either of these things. There’s no longtime, well understood common belief that it’s important not to show signs of one’s faith. In a city absolutely studded with crosses and saints’ names, that’s even more ridiculous. That law is absolutely CAQ pandering to people who’ve never met a Muslim in their life and are panicking from things on TV. Some day it will be repealed and everyone then will say “what WERE they thinking?!”