Bike locker sheds have been installed downtown near the École de technologie supérieure, and are free for users at till mid-November. After that, whether they’ll be taken away or start costing money is not made clear.
Updates from October, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Protesters in Park Extension held a demonstration Wednesday in support of a bylaw blocking landlords from converting multiple rental spaces (typically duplexes) into single-family houses, but the Villeray-St-Michel-Parc-Ex council failed to pass the bylaw. Tenants’ rights groups fear more renovictions if living spaces are removed in this way.
Ian
Giuliana Fumagalli spoke out against this getting blocked – for all that she got thrown under the bus by PM just like Sue Montrgomery it looks like she’s on the right side of history. I know a lot of community activists in Parc Ex and it’s getting ugly. Landlords are now simply harassing tenants into leaving, not even the pretense of renovictions.
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Kate
The Gazette says a woman pedestrian died when she was hit by a car in St‑Léonard Wednesday afternoon. Strangely, this Gazette piece has Thursday’s date on it, and TVA has a piece describing the incident as a collision between two vehicles but doesn’t mention any pedestrian, but rather a man being ejected from a vehicle. Puzzling.
Update: The TVA link now goes to a story, like the others, about an older woman pedestrian being killed, and not the initial version at that link. I should’ve taken a screenshot.
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Kate
Ten of the city’s 19 boroughs do not fully respect the Charte de la langue française and Simon Jolin-Barrette is cracking the whip.
Kevin
My pearls! Where are my pearls?
steph
Many towns across the province are losing their bilingual status, to have it they need a 50% anglophone population. Even Westmount is avoiding a new census, they were at 54% in 2011. Which politician is going to put their foot in their mouth to proclaim “Cest la faute des immigrants”?
JaneyB
How could RDP and Lachine be non-conforming, I wonder. They’re almost entirely Francophone.
@steph I did not know this. Could Westmount really lose its ability to operate in English?
Kevin
Quebecor is losing its mind over a “certificate of francisation” which requires, among other things, changing the labels on tools and equipment to be in French, sending out emails reminding employees that we speak French in Quebec, and taking part in Francofetes.
So if every employee is mother-tongue francophone but the new microwave says “start”, or the TV remote in the break room says “on/off”, or if there’s an English-language manual in the glove compartment of a company vehicle, you can lose your certification.
Kate
It can be very counterproductive. I know graphic design software, and it has a lot of terminology that’s widely used and understood in English. If I need to find out how to do something I haven’t done before, I Google for it – in English. If you’re forced to use that software in French (as the government wishes) it cuts you off from making easy quick searches for solutions, because most of that help is out there on the web – in the English terminology.
I have one old client who’s from Europe and his stuff’s all in French. Now and then he calls on me to fix things that have gone weird on his ancient crock of a Mac. I like him, so I go around and have a look at it – or I did, pre-pandemic. I learned that the first thing I need to do is switch the OS to English because it was impossible trying to work the problems out via French.
I’m sure this kind of thing extends into other fields.
JP
Science and things that are medicine-related are English-heavy. It sucks for all languages, not just French.
I used to work for a company that changed everything to French (computers, printers, vending machine, etc.) for the visit, and then changed it all back to English as soon as they were gone.
Now that we’re working from home, I wonder if they’d want to go into people’s homes to see if people’s computers are set to English or French…I sure hope not…ugh.
For the record, I do speak French relatively well, and enjoy speaking it. But the language of my work (science/med-related) is English.
Kate
This reminds me of an anecdote about a small graphic design studio that used to exist downtown. I didn’t work there but I knew the people, a man and woman from here who owned the studio, and their designer, a unilingual anglo who’d grown up out west. This would’ve been late 1980s, early 1990s.
They had bid on a design contract – some tourism PR magazine type thing funded by the Quebec government – so an inspector came around to assess their grasp of French. He spoke to the couple for awhile, the designer working away in the background. Then the inspector turned and addressed a question to the designer, who simply didn’t register he’d been spoken to.
Thinking quickly, the woman said, “Oh! It’s no use to speak to him, he’s a wonderful worker but stone deaf, poor thing.” (He wasn’t.)
They got the contract.
Ian
Don’t tell them HTML tags & CSS attributes can only be written in English (with American spelling!) or they’ll ban the internet.
Michael Black
Be quiet or they’ll decide Quebec needs its own markup language, websites online in Quebec.
Or some retrofit that auto translates, and adding overhead to every transfer.
Ian
LBHT – langage de balisage hypertexte
FSC – Feuilles de style en cascadeor they can just browse in Chrome with auto translate on – look, everything is in French now! haha 😉
Jaye
Can municipalities still lose their bilingual status? I don’t think that ever passed…
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/pq-government-officially-drops-bill-14-1.2427829jeather
I spoke to a design agency who had had meetings with the provincial government to create a whole secondary internet design/programming language in French, but that idea has been laid to rest, thankfully.
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Kate
The lookout chalet is going to be spiffed up to the tune of $7 million. It dates from the 1930s, so I suspect it was one of the Depression-era projects led by Camillien Houde. But the structure needs work and needs to be made more accessible. The bathrooms in the basement are, if I recall, of their time, down some steep stairs and featuring stone partitions and wooden doors.
DeWolf
Biggest surprise from the article is that the chalet is still heated using oil. I thought it would have been changed ages ago because that can’t be cheap.
Ian
I wonder if they will keep the extremely politically questionable paintings up – DOLLARD DES ORMEAUX MEURT À LONG-SAULT POUR SAUVER LA COLONIE in particlar… . The maps by Paul-Émile Borduas can stay I’m sure. I’ve often wondered how much painting maps influenced his later abstract work.
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Kate
Real estate prices are still rising in the Montreal region.
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Kate
A quarter of the Covid cases in Quebec this spring were in health care workers, of whom eleven died. This includes orderlies, nurses and doctors. I don’t know whether they included cleaners and others working in CHSLDs.
In other potentially Covid news, 250 people crammed into a bingo hall in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu last Friday – and this was not a young crowd. Brilliant.
DeWolf
St-Jean-sur-Richelieu is considered part of Greater Montreal by Statistics Canada, but because it is not in the CMM it gets a pass on being in the red zone – even though it takes only 25 minutes to drive from the northern edge of St-Jean to the middle of downtown Montreal. Doesn’t make sense to me.
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Kate
CBC radio has been talking to Omer Juma, who’s been studying the relative accessibility of our metro stations. Lots of photos, lots of questions: “What was the decision process in designing one exit to be more accessible than the other?” Good question.
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Kate
Following a recent notion to name the Place des Festivals after Oscar Peterson, a group of cultural honchos is proposing naming the REM station at McGill and Ste-Catherine after him.
Maybe they should name the Griffintown station for Peterson…
Jebediah Pallindrome
Ah yes, what better way to honour a great cultural icon than by naming a soon-to-be much-maligned transit station set amidst a canyon on office towers quite literally devoid of culture!
The important thing is that we keep the symbols of white supremacy
/S
/S!
/SSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!
Kate
At least Griffintown is a little closer to where Peterson grew up. But your description could cover any of the three locations in question.
Jebediah Pallindrome
I think they should name a city-wide publicly-subsidized piano instruction program, and/or the free public piano program after him.
Commemoration can be so much more than just naming infrastructure after people (as a bandaid solution to systemic racism).
That said, I’d love to see a transit station named after some really long-serving, totally unknown transit employee…
…and a lifesize robotic statue of The Great Antonio pulling a bus by his beard in front of Berri-UQAM.
JaneyB
I bet the McGill REM station will be the one. Sure, it’s surrounded by office tours but it is the most important non-nodal station so…goodish. Also, tourists use it so higher visibility for…whatever is being displayed by this gesture.
I like the subsidized piano instruction program, the unsung transit employee station and the Antonio statue. Let’s do it!
JS
Question for the cultural honchos: what’s your favorite song by the guy?
Kate
Max
This one. Sublimely groovy.
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Kate
Publisher Michel Brûlé – who made a very marginal run for mayor here in 2013 – has been found guilty of sexually assaulting a writer who met with him about a book. Ironically, his publishing company is called Les Intouchables.
Meanwhile, Gilbert Rozon – who founded the Just for Laughs festival – has taken the stand at his trial for rape. The defendant in this case has been kept anonymous. Rozon is also suing media personalities Julie Snyder and Penelope McQuade for describing him as a sexual predator on TV. I don’t see how he could win: it’s a matter of public record that (quoting Wikipedia) “In 1998, Gilbert Rozon received an unconditional discharge from the Quebec Superior Court after pleading and being found guilty of a sexual assault on a 19-year-old woman, because a criminal record would have made it difficult for him to travel internationally for his work.”
1998 seems like a long time ago, in some ways.
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Kate
A man who made a fortune in cranberries has given a nice endowment to McGill to support its environment school.
As far as I’m aware, McGill has still not divested from fossil fuels – at least, that was the case as of January this year. Doublethink unplusgood.
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Kate
The city has added another five-day block to the ongoing state of emergency.
Quebec screwed up its case count over the weekend. That apparent dip in new cases over the last few days was a mirage.
Meezly
OMFG. Is this, like, another typical example of “only in Quebec…”??
Kate
I diagnose a case of “the regular guy took the long weekend off.”
Kevin
Ontario and other provinces have had to adjust the daily figures.
Some places get results quickly, some you have to wait a few days.
The trend is important, not the exact daily numberMeezly
There were 359 uncounted cases in the span of 3 days that had to be retroactively added. That’s a big number. Legault had even publicly expressed ‘cautious optimism’ based on the erroneous numbers which resulted in a false 3-day trend. Daily numbers don’t have to be exact, but they should be close, wouldn’t you think?
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Kate
A stolen car was found in the river off Verdun overnight, and another stolen vehicle was torched in Villeray. Nobody got hurt in either incident.
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Kate
A contractor who was supposedly cleaning city sewers and sending the resulting gunk to be properly processed at an Ontario site was actually dumping it on agricultural land outside town. The company has now been blacklisted by the city.
jeather
I always wonder how this works, every cheating construction company folds and reopens under a slightly different name every few years — what does the blacklist look like, or is this a very obvious way around it?
Ephraim
They open new shell companies with someone else as the owner. Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see that the city is suing them for violation of the contract. And I didn’t see that the Quebec government is forcing them to detox the dump site. So unless this happens and unless their was a financial guarantee, they are going to get away with it and the politicians aren’t really challenging it. And that’s the problem… you sue them for every last cent and you hold the executives personally for their actions. So, after all the money from the company is gone… so is the money of the executives. And you go through their accounts to see where and who they gave money to and go after that as well. You make their lives a misery, so that they think about it a second time before trying it, and so does anyone else.
Kate
Ephraim, Radio-Canada has the story on Thursday, but it too only mentions blacklisting by the city. If the company has been fined or otherwise penalized for breaking environmental laws, it isn’t mentioned.
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Kate
There’s now a timeline for the gradual demolition of the old Champlain Bridge, a project already delayed by Covid. Now the target is to have it down by January 2024 with a minimum of environmental damage. Some of the steel pieces will be reused elsewhere.
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