Our graveyard groundhogs made it into the Guardian this week, albeit from a Toronto stringer.
Updates from September, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Public health chief Mylène Drouin says the city’s Covid numbers mean it will likely stay on yellow alert for the next week, but we still can’t foretell whether a second big wave is coming, or a series of smaller ones. At least the border with the United States is closed till October 21 and may stay closed till the end of the year, even if Donald Trump claims Canadians want it reopened (we don’t).
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Kate
It looked for awhile as if gentrification was going to disqualify many grade schools for cheap lunches, but they’ve been revived by new funding. Headline here says Sud-Ouest but the affected schools are all over town.
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Kate
Dawson College says it has fired Winston Sutton, the drama teacher accused of sexual misconduct and bullying.
Ian
Whether he was fired or resigned is now unclear, CTV corrected their original story.
Kate
Yes. Thanks for the update, Ian.
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Kate
Police are going to be patrolling bars and restaurants, looking out for pandemic infractions.
The legal limit for gatherings still holds at 250 people but the authorities are asking leaders of the Jewish community to keep numbers below that in the synagogues for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Emergency wards are overcrowded, a situation partly blamed on so many nurses having quit, and others taking delayed vacations or sick days.
A chunk of money is going into enlarging the Verdun General and renovating the existing buildings. Meantime, the premiers are asking Justin Trudeau for more money for health care.
dwgs
Mark my words, if we have another surge similar to the spring the nursing shortage will become acute or worse.
Kate
I don’t doubt it.
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Kate
Things can’t be very merry at the Museum of Fine Arts these days: its board chairman has just turned in his resignation. I never thought about it much, but as a casual occasional visitor, I always thought that museum was a success. Who knew what internecine conflicts were going on behind closed doors!
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Kate
A proposal to make the the public consultations of the permanent agglomeration committees bilingual has put the cat among the language pigeons, with the Mouvement Québec français absolutely en tabarnak about it.
Jack
This dude is quitting his job and moving to England. Max I hate to tell you …you’ll be hearing a bit of english there. Best of luck.
Kate
What are you talking about, Jack? The French took over England in 1066! Of course they speak French there now!
Ian
Some say it was only because the plague affected the royal courts and monasteries more than farmers n the field that English (the farmer’s language) even survived in the British Isles – for a while there it was slowly dying out. Funny how pandemics can change things, eh?
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Kate
Construction continues on the REM and trains will stop running on the Deux-Montagnes line sooner than planned. Commuter workarounds will come into play, although without the high demand that was initially expected.
Meantime, the STM’s 300 new hybrid buses won’t all be delivered this year, but are expected by next year.
Max
Sorta related: Major work on the West Island branch of the REM is crossing highway 40 starting this weekend. Should be something to see.
Tim F
If there was ever a time to move these projects forward, I’d think it’s now. Go go go!
Ian
I absolutely agree! I am very thankful not to have to be commuting through there, I hope it’s done long before I have to go back to work in person.
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Kate
Ottawa and Quebec have finally reached a deal on social housing but haven’t given out much detail. Mayors are shown to be pleased about it, and they can’t work fast enough with homelessness said to have doubled during the pandemic.
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Kate
Quebec is handing off nearly a billion dollars to schools in Montreal for new schools and renovation of old ones. The money is going to three francophone service centres (once known as school boards).
Speaking of school boards, Superior Court has ruled that, temporarily at least, Quebec’s Bill 40 won’t apply to the old English-language boards, which were also supposed to be abolished. They’re being upheld, for the moment, as part of linguistic minority rights, and may be holding old-style school board elections on November 1.
The CAQ continues to maintain that abolishing the anglo boards does too respect anglo rights.
walkerp
Well a priori that is good news on the money. I hope we see increase in support and money for teachers as well as some serious innovative building design for our zootropic future.
I have mixed feelings about the english school board. It is clearly a total shit show and needs to be reformed almost entirely, with some new governance system that does not allow for little fiefdoms to be built and that prioritizes teaching over administration and bureaucracy. On the other hand, these “service centers” utterly failed their first test when it came to distance learning. Our school was paralyzed with the principal getting mixed messages and no real support for setting up classes remotely and supporting families with tech challenges.
Tim F
In defence of the service centres, it must be total chaos going through these organizational reforms while also having to adapt to COVID, all on a shoestring budget. Our kids’ school’s principal was pregnant and needed to be cycled out; the time it took to select a new principal made their ability to prepare and effectively communicate changes to families a real challenge. I can only imagine with all of these school board/service centre reforms, too.
nau
There are several English school boards. The EMSB is a shit show, yes, but are the others?
Ian
Lester B Pearson is much, much bigger but we don’t hear as much about it. There was a minor ethics scandal in 2016 but a bunch of people got fired and since then that’s about it.
Max 09:56 on 2020-09-19 Permalink
With 900,000+ interments at NDN, it’s surprising that this doesn’t happen more often.
Kate 10:23 on 2020-09-19 Permalink
I would’ve expected them to have a minimum burial depth. People with excavators can easily dig deeper than animals, pretty much. Bury a coffin down the conventional six feet, and groundhogs shouldn’t be getting that far.
You’ll notice that the same thing is not being reported of the adjoining Mount Royal cemetery. Unlike them, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges has temporary graves, which are plowed up from time to time. I’ve seen bones in charnel heaps up there, once saw a femur and a few vertebrae lying around. This was some time ago, but as far as I know the temporary grave thing is still being done. If NDN was a little more respectful of burial depth, I don’t think this would be a problem.
dwgs 11:46 on 2020-09-19 Permalink
Am I the only one admiring the gophers’ get up and go?
Ian 14:33 on 2020-09-19 Permalink
Not to be pedantic but gophers aren’t the same thing as groundhogs.
I noticed NDN usually has more groundhogs than MR but I have no idea why that might be.
Raymond Lutz 15:02 on 2020-09-19 Permalink
I thought Gopher was a client/server protocol! One of its subsets was Archie, developed here by McGill and Concordia postgraduate students (for the Montreal angle).
Michael Black 15:12 on 2020-09-19 Permalink
The Peter Deutsch mentioned in that Archie entry is not the one in “Hackers” by Steven Levy. He was credited with bringing the Internet to McGill (which I think means “to Quebec”).
McGill used Gopher for at least a classified ad system. I guess it’s been gone for a long time now, but it lasted well into the Web age. People would talk about Gopher in the past tense, and I’d mention McGill. I forget when it ended, but it was definitely still there in 2001, I bought a computer off one of the ads.
But yes, groundhogs are big, gophers are small.
Kate 15:45 on 2020-09-19 Permalink
I looked it up, and while our animal is marmotte in French, the official translation seems to be woodchuck.
Ian 16:46 on 2020-09-19 Permalink
Groundhog and woodchuck are synonymous, at least according to WIkipedia…
“The groundhog, also known as a woodchuck, is a rodent of the family Sciuridae, belonging to the group of large ground squirrels known as marmots. It was first scientifically described by Carl Linnaeus in 1758”
…which also explains where “marmotte” comes from. In English, “marmot” includes all the large ground squirrels.
I guess this is another one of those things where in French species are sometimes fairly generic, like how “faucon” includes falcons, hawks, ospreys etc. or “pingouin” includes both Arctic and Antarctic species.
Ian 16:48 on 2020-09-19 Permalink
…bt now I just remembered the French word “siffleur” and frankly I think in English we should start calling them whistlepigs because that is a WAY better name.
dwgs 17:49 on 2020-09-19 Permalink
There are arctic penguins??!
Ian 20:54 on 2020-09-19 Permalink
Puffins, auks and penguins are known in French as “pinguoin”.
Ian 19:29 on 2020-09-20 Permalink
Related linguistic nerding out: https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-french-gained-lost-and-then-regained-the-word-for-1595024185
tl;dr: in France “pingouin” only refers to Arctic birds, the penguin is a”manchot”. It’s only Quebec French that conflates the two.