La Presse talks to a couple of experts who raise doubts whether sufficient traffic studies were made before construction of the Réseau express vélo Saint-Denis. A study was made comparing several other possible routes, but for some reason it isn’t considered satisfactory by the boffins.
Also, the journalists talked to the priest of St-Édouard church, at the corner of Beaubien, who’s considering taking the city to court over the inconvenience to weddings and funerals.
The STM says it won’t pay the $2.8 million demanded in the ransomware attack that took down its website. CBC says “the hackers have asked” for the cash, but who knows? Maybe someone else is asking for that money on false pretences. Grab the bitcoin, disappear, website’s still a boat anchor, wouldn’t that be a scam.
The website is still a boat anchor.
You should never pay the ransom. There is no guarantee that they’ll provide you the decryption key. Plus, you’d be encouraging them to do it again, not only to you (your IT security has already proven to be pretty crap) but to others. Unfortunately, your only viable options are to restore from backups, which is time consuming. Or start over from scratch, which is even more time consuming.
You can also check if the decryption key has been made available on the following site:
https://www.nomoreransom.org/
Apparently, some people have found success with this.
I’m curious, does anyone have any ballpark idea what it would cost to build a new site from scratch for an entity that large and complicated?
Hard to say because that system must have had a lot of legacy stuff in it that nobody would create in the same way today. The whole thing would have to be reconceived from zero. Big job.
They should have backups of the site that they can restore, unless they are really bad at IT. The issue is usually coordination and limited resources. Where do you use your IT resources first? To restore the website? Or to restore, for exampl, payroll systems that were locked due to the ransomware. My “start over from scratch” comment was more for regular home users who might have to reinstall Windows to get back up and running.
PSA: remember the 3-2-1 rule of backup. 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media, with 1 copy stored off-site.
I have a friend who lost all his family photos stored on a RAIDed storage device because he thought the RAID was protection enough. (RAID is a method of storage where you have hard drive redundancy to protect against any one or even 2 hard drives might crash, you don’t lose any data).
@dwgs, ultimately, it probably would be better to rebuild it from scratch. However, with real-life systems like that which have been stapled onto existing analog systems, the jobs of either rebuilding or restoring it are, as we say in the IT world, “non-trivial”.
The problem is not so much the main system, but all the sub-systems and services connected to it. Each one of these would have to be redesigned from the ground up and that work involves every level of the system, right down to people’s jobs. For all we know, the master list of buses is updated on a spreadsheet by some person at the depot. Then you get into labour issues and unions…
I have no idea what the costs would be for building from scratch, but beyond the actual money, which would not be cheap, the other major cost is in time, including potential downtime which you cannot have with a transit system. Sometimes it seems really appealing to rebuild a system from scratch, but when you start weighing the pros and cons, just continually patching and adding on starts to seem the more realistic and sensible route.
Sometimes it really does take a crisis to move these large systems to change. Look at the federal government bureaucracy and many companies so adamantly resistant to anybody working from home for all kinds of reasons that suddenly have no value when a pandemic hits and they are able to switch to an entirely new way of working in a month. Maybe this is an opportunity for the STM…
Now there’s a story that the Jewish General has similarly been attacked. But no ransom de!anded yet (or at least announced).
Thank you for the excellent response walkerp.
And Michael, my wife works in the Ministere de la Sante (indirectly) and she says that a lot of things are under attack.
Building on Michael Black’s comment, there has been some noise on security blogs about potential attacks being prepped on healthcare infrastructure. The Jewish could be part of that.
It shouldn’t surprise me, but it’s perverse that anyone gets satisfaction out of trying dismantle our healthcare system in this way.
If the STM has backups they’re probably scrambling to figure out how the system was breached and plug the hole before restoring them. No sense in putting things back together if they can just pull them down again.
Police will be patrolling more diligently around schools and daycares in Montreal North because an unknown person fired off some shots in a location near its schools recently.
The mayor said Thursday that she didn’t want to be harsh, but that she wouldn’t let the Notre-Dame tent city continue if it became dangerous for its inhabitants. She has offered to talk to the remaining residents and help them find places to go as the weather turns too cold to safely camp outdoors.
Seven hundred new shelter places are being added, making for a total of 1650, plus various halte-chaleurs in different parts of town. (Anyone got a good English translation for halte-chaleur?)
Warming station.
Hot pocket
A good response to my question, asked months ago, if people really wanted the new progressive position to be that living in tent, in a road median or abandoned lot, was serving some sort of positive goal.
Radio-Canada has a sharp piece Thursday on internal tensions in Projet Montréal. It’s a sprawling mess, but the key problem seems to be that city hall is in disagreement with many boroughs over issues, wanting to impose uniform policies in order to maintain electability.
Just a thought: could the underlying problem be that the borough system is fundamentally flawed?
Also Thursday, a report on efforts to return a nominal borough structure to Ville-Marie, which lost its mayor and fully elected council after Gérald Tremblay had a spat with Benoît Labonté in 2007. As things stand, the city mayor is also ex officio mayor of Ville-Marie, whose council is also partly directly appointed by the mayor. That’s a lot of folks who don’t get as much democratic participation as other residents of the city.
Interesting article. I appreciate the effort by the journalists. I wouldn’t say it is conclusive. Are we seeing a “when you gaze into the abyss/power corrupts” situation or just the normal growing pains as a grassroots party “matures” in power? My feeling is that it is more the latter, but some suggestions that Plante can be “hard” suggest that she may have leaned towards a bit of the former, which is worrisome. Also, the inner circle is not a good sign and I wonder how much influence (and which players) contributed to her incoherent position on Sue Montgomery.
A side note as well, is that while quite progressive, the article does make you remember that still most of Projet Montreal is educated white men over 50. It sounds like they are being fairly aggressive about changing that and I welcome that. It will cause some anger and backlash as it has everywhere else.
I don’t think the borough system is fundamentally flawed. It’s a bulwalk against the kind of centralized power wielded by Jean Drapeau because, in principle, boroughs allow for fine-grained local governance that addresses citizens’ needs more flexibly and more directly. The problem in Montreal is that City Hall still wields a lot of power so we end up with an awkward kind of Frankenstein’s monster in which the boroughs have a lot of power but City Hall also has a lot of power, and there’s a lot of overlap and waste and tension.
If we had a true City Hall-oriented system like Toronto, we’d likely have less conflict and waste within the civil service, but we’d end up with the problem of suburban areas holding disproportionate influence over central areas. If somebody wants to do traffic calming and bike paths and wider sidewalks in Parkdale, for instance, some councillors from Scarborough and North York will block it on principle. Imagine if Francesco Miele and Lionel Perez were able to block the Luc Ferrandez from all of his traffic calming and greening measures – the ones that have proven effective at reducing traffic and which got him re-elected over and over again.
The other alternative is London, on which our borough system is based, but the difference there is that the Greater London Authority only handles big-picture policy issues and all of the day-to-day governance, like social services, libraries, social housing, schools, parking enforcement, etc. are all handled by each individual borough – and they’re the ones that collect taxes, too. The city’s overall policies guide what each borough does, but the details of how that policy is implemented is up to them. It’s radically decentralized compared to what we have here.
Actually, I should say that our borough system is based on French arrondissements, which as far as I can tell have a similarly awkward relationship with the city government. But I don’t follow Paris politics enough to know the details of how it plays out.
Haven’t read it yet, but didn’t PM and Plante specifically make decentralizaiton a priority during the campaign?
“most of Projet Montreal is educated white men over 50”
If that’s in reference to their elected representatives, it’s false. PM has 51 elected representatives: 26 are female, 25 are male. Perhaps they photograph young, but people over 50 don’t obviously dominate, though there’s no lack. They are overwhelmingly white, that’s for sure, and, I hope this doesn’t shock anyone, people with “French” first and last names are, shall we say, well represented. How educated they are isn’t readily available.
>still most of Projet Montreal is educated white men over 50
Trashing old white men is fashionable, I understand; but “educated”? Would you rather uneducated representatives/administrators?!
I think that line is about defining a monolithic group.
Going to university is still a new thing in terms of it being universal. And it still falls off if you’re talking diversity.
Yes, leadership should include some level of capability, but it doesn’t have to be defined as “gone to university”. And for all the people “left out” from making decisions, decision making often leaves them out too. How would decision making change if elected officials included the homeless, and people who never went to university, and everyone else who doesn’t fit that line?
Besides, “educated” comes to mean going to university, but not going to.university doesn’t mean “uneducated”.
A couple of thoughts about this article:
1) They should be very careful about getting rid of existing councillors; local councillors have their teams of volunteers and donors and are known in the community, and those allegiances aren’t easily transferred, even to someone of the same party. On election day, local candidates and volunteers will move more votes than a central party organization, I’m sure.
2) Quite simply, the majority of people willing to run for office, or get involved in politics at any level, are white males (I say this having made a few tries to recruit people into political orgs). Trying to change this is a worthy goal, but it comes with trade-offs. Prioritizing the recruitment of an individual because they tick certain boxes means sacrificing other aspects, like ideological agreement and personal compatibility. I’m pretty sure this is how Project got into trouble with Montgomery et al. Recruitment will be a little easier because they’re the incumbent party, but they’re really handicapping themselves for something with limited electoral resonance, especially among people who aren’t already their supporters.
3) I wish people who run political coms would stop spending so much time stressing over the opinions of traditional journalists/columnists. I thought Trump 2016 would have taught us once and for all that journalists, no matter how active on Twitter or how vehement the headlines, are not the opinion movers they may have once been. Let the candidates/councillors develop a personality and see what happens.
There are real and obvious reasons that white men are by far the most willing to run for office, and changing some of those reasons would probably help the ratio a lot.
The north-end high school teacher who gained notoriety for saying the N-word in class has now been suspended, and students say he also did Nazi salutes in class and displayed other racist behaviour.
I find it noteworthy that the high school students found the courage to post this on Snapchat after hearing about the University of Ottawa professor, because they have been complaining about Ouellette for years via “normal” channels. Once his behaviour was on display in social media did the school take any real action.
The FB page that these ex students put up is brutal, absolutely brutal. This man put a hurt on these kids that is unconscionable. Check out the bottom 10 minute clip.
https://journalmetro.com/local/montreal-nord/2551266/mot-en-n-vague-de-denonciations-contre-un-enseignant-de-montreal-nord/
Hopefully this asshole will lose his job. He hates just about everybody…
Guess which major newspaper has not covered this story?
In my experience it is very difficult to get rid of a teacher once they have attained a certain level of seniority. There is a math teacher at my kid’s school whose classes have a failing average every year and yet they keep their job. How can you consistently have a class average in the 40s in a core course and keep your job?
There were probably rumblings about this idiot for years but the hands of the administration were tied until it became public.
Police shot at a man in Côte St-Luc the west end* early Thursday. These items don’t say they killed him, but radio news just announced he has died. There are no other details.
Update: Reports say the man rushed police with a knife, after someone called in about a man in crisis on Côte St-Luc Road. The BEI is investigating.
*The corner of Côte St‑Luc Road and West Hill is a spot where NDG, Hampstead and Côte St‑Luc meet at a three‑corner boundary. CTV makes the incident NDG, La Presse says it’s Côte St‑Luc. Who knows.
david335 00:53 on 2020-10-30 Permalink
You don’t need to spend a million dollars to decide whether to let bicycles have a lane. You just do it.
CE 09:52 on 2020-10-30 Permalink
I thought that part of the reason St-Denis was chosen for the REV was to reduce the traffic on the street to make it more pleasant for pedestrians shopping at the stores.
DeWolf 11:28 on 2020-10-30 Permalink
“L’administration Plante a sacrifié la fluidité de la circulation automobile sur l’autel de la sécurité des cyclistes” is a very weird thing to say. Are we really supposed to accept that the price for “fluid” traffic is human beings getting hit by cars and crushed underneath trucks?
The priest is a strange one, too. It’s not like a bike path is a moat.