Julie Payette has stepped down as governor-general after a very negative report on the “toxic work environment” at Rideau Hall during her term. Payette, a Montreal native, is a scientist and astronaut, and – as her Wikipedia entry attests – “faced some criticism about controversial comments she had made against those who believe in creationism and those who did not believe in climate change.” Controversial?
Updates from January, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Marie-Josée Parent stepped down in 2019 after being appointed the city’s first advisor on indigenous reconciliation, after a genealogical researcher questioned whether she had any indigenous ancestry at all. Now she has spoken out to maintain she does have indigenous ancestry, based on her great-grandmother’s baptismal certificate.
Michael Black
But what changed from the last time? The genealogists the last time just determined her native ancestry was well in the past. The birth certificate she found says nothing, it’s only “proof” by location.
The denial wasn’t that she had no ancestry, but that it didn’t make her Native. DNA and ancestry don’t mean a thing. She is claiming based on history, rather than relationship.
People can weave their stories, and it sounds good. But once a story is told, it’s remembered, even if the first telling was wrong or garbled. Weaved in it is the notion that they were hiding their identity.
How is her story different from Joseph Boyden’s or Michelle Latimer, or Elizabeth Warren? Why is it not like Nakuset’s?
There are no Eastern Metis (with a capital M), there was no historical grouping and resistance. So she can’t be Metis.
She could have done everything the same, just mentioning Native ancestry, no need to claim being Native.
I’ve seen the scrip issued to my great grandfather, the lawyer. “Half breed”.
Kate
Michael Black, while I’ve seen a few Mohawk names on the baptismal register from St James Cathedral (now Mary Queen of the World), a lot of folks of indigenous or mixed indigenous background here would be using French or Scots names so would not be marked as indigenous in the records. A certificate wouldn’t prove anything either way (and I still want to know who paid the genealogist who set out to “debunk” Marie-Josée Parent – would some journalist please dig this up?).
Also, not to be crude about it, how much indigenous ancestry is enough? A great‑grandmother means 1/8 of your ancestry. Is that sufficient to claim indigenous identity?
EmilyG
As for Indigenous identity, I’ve seen people say, “Well, so-and-so is only half Indigenous” as though that discounted them.
If someone has “only” one Indigenous parent, it doesn’t mean they’re not Indigenous.An example:
https://twitter.com/Alethea_Aggiuq/status/1318436767192784896
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Kate
The number of tickets issued to the homeless here has skyrocketed over the last 30 years according to a wide study carried out by three universities.
The homeless population receives close to 40 per cent of the fines issued in Montreal, according to their findings.
However you feel about homeless people, the city and its police have to recognize the sheer futility of issuing fines to people with no resources.
Update: The study also shows that indigenous homeless people are hit with an even heavier burden of fines.
John B
And I can’t imagine it’s easy to get off the street and get housing and/or a job with tons of unpaid tickets.
Bill Binns
“an individual would spend between $438 and $1,750 per week and between $22,810 and $91,250 per year on heroin, depending on its street price.”
https://www.addictioncenter.com/drugs/how-much-do-drugs-cost/Booze isn’t much cheaper. The homeless have cash flow and thanks to the myriad of services available to them for free, have few expenses other than their drug of choice.
dwgs
Jesus Bill, really? I’m often ok with your posts even when others aren’t but this is beyond the pale. Have you never known an addict? An alcoholic? Do you think that these people are capable of making choices and budgets? Do you believe that anyone would choose such a life?
MarcG
Seriously, Bill, you make it sound like fun. Why aren’t we all living on the street?
Bill Binns
@dwgs – What was so shocking about my comment? Why must the homeless be treated as helpless babies? Is that really the only allowable opinion? Go talk to some people involved on a daily basis with these people. I have. Talk to the homeless themselves. They will be the absolute first people to tell you the real truth about their situation and how they found themselves in it. A large chunk of the homeless population drift in and out of homelessness as a conscious, planned choice to spend more time with their drug of choice.
Since you asked, yes I have known some addicts. My father, grandfather, uncles and brother are all alcoholics at various levels of functionality. My maternal grandfather was a welder and died in a workplace accident after going to work drunk. My mother lost her job as an emergency room nurse for stealing pills. Oh yeah, my 30 year old sister has 5 kids with 5 different fathers and is probably homeless or in jail right now.
MarcG
So instead of showing sympathy for your family you throw them under the bus? Psychology is complicated.
walkerp
Starting to think Bill Binns is one of your sockpuppets, Kate, to spark discussion. The heel shtick is just a little too exaggerated. 😉
walkerp
I mean how do you go from “what a waste of time and money to ticket homeless people that doesn’t help them or society” to “treating them like helpless babies” lol.
Kevin
Some of you have never had (semi-) functional addicts in your life and it shows.
Michael Black
But addiction is a thing separate from homelessness. People can be addicted and still live well (assuming they had money first. One could argue that.money causes addiction). Others can steal a lot, and have a roof over their heads.
But people can be homeless without drugs. Women in a bad relationship leave, and have nowhere to go. People with unstable income, an emergency comes along, and rent money gets spent on the emergency. Somebody has prblems, and can’t make rent? A pandemic comes along, and they lose their job, or have to move out because there’s no room.
I know nothing about addiction, but I know not all homeless are addicts. And I suspect some start drinking or drugs because of their situation, rather than tye cause if their situation.
dwgs
Started to write a glib reply to you Bill but deleted it. I grew up with a nasty, hellish, abusive alcoholic father. I carried that demon with me for years after he died, it really fucks you up on levels you don’t even realize. His father was an alcoholic invalid, his brother was an alcoholic, his sister suffered from mental illness to the point where she underwent electroshock therapy, I have a maternal uncle who was a lifelong mostly functional alcoholic, a sister who is an alcoholic as well as several other siblings who married alcoholics and/or abusive assholes. I understand your anger, believe me. The thing is, the drug rules them. Despite what they might say, they’re not making a conscious choice to live on the street in thrall to their addiction.
dwgs
Good point Michael.
Kate
dwgs, thanks for sharing that history with us, and thanks, Michael Black, for drawing some important distinctions, and Bill Binns, for also sharing your history. It’s important for a personal history not to make us feel tough and competent and thus seeing others as weak. What we are, largely, is lucky, in inheriting the genes that (somehow, we don’t really have the full picture yet) make us less susceptible to addictive tendencies.
Bill Binns
@Michael Black “addiction is a thing separate from homelessness”.
You would think so and I’m sure they exist but sane, non addicted, non criminals are the unicorns of the homeless world. You would never know this from listening to what advocates say publicly though. Again and again we hear the fantasy that homelessness is caused by expensive rent. As if the guy sleeping behind a dumpster with a needle in his arm would be just fine if a studio apartment cost $700 a month rather than $1100.
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Kate
A dozen social housing complexes are scheduled for construction over the next year, with support from all three levels of government.
Alison Cummins
Wonderful news.
qatzelok
It’s not many units (263) but it’s a start to a beginning.
Alison Cummins
That averages 22 units per complex, which is probably a doable size not requiring appropriation of large tracts of land with the associated bitter arguments and bad publicity.
The previous administrations (including the late Susan Clarke) worked hard to keep Blue Bonnets out of the hands of the poor in CDN (supposedly the late Susan Clarke’s constituents), who desperately needed replacements for the shoddy, worn-out towers they are currently occupying.
Even now, developers are pushing to make it friendlier to car-owners, claiming to be advocating for the indigent mobility-impaired.*
Multiple small infill lots might even be better than big projects if they are well-integrated into their neighbourhoods and completed quickly. And if this initiative is ongoing and not a one-off.
Politics is the art of the possible; developers are less motivated to fight for each individual scrap of infill.
su
More details about this much needed program, and who will qualify. https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/nearly-57m-for-12-affordable-housing-projects-in-montreal-879505895.html
Alison Cummins
*Yes Ephraim, transportation is very much an issue for the mobility-impaired!
We’ve done the math for ourselves and it would be cheaper to take cabs and rent cars as needed on those occasions that we need a car. We pay the premium and keep our ‘98 Subaru because as landlords it’s convenient to be able to lug stuff around in a car that we aren’t worried about scratching up. When it eventually dies we will probably not get a new one.
Other obstacles to accessibility in Montreal are more significant. When I lived on Gilford in the ‘90s my neighbour across the way on the third floor of a triplex was a diabetic double amputee. I don’t think he’d left his apartment in many years.
We need better access to public transit (we’re working on it), wider sidewalks (more possible with fewer cars), ramps to businesses (more possible with wider sidewalks), modern apartment buildings integrated with small shopping malls (I believe this is a thing in newer neighbourhoods but not nearly as standard as it needs to be; addressable with thoughtful zoning).
Uber, as evil as it may be, is making cabs more accessible to people who don’t use wheelchairs or have STM handicapped passes. Most wheelchair-users don’t have driver’s licenses.
More private car ownership for everyone in densely-populated areas is not top of the list and even works counter to general accessibility improvements.
Ephraim
I actually think that the STM’s Transport Adapté is excellent, even if it isn’t perfect. But even Transport Adapté needs loading/unloading zones. Look at the Jewish General, on Légaré… on what is supposed to be a loading/unloading zone, the city put up 15 minute parking and Transport Adapté has to let people off in the “no stopping” zone.
Alison Cummins
Ephraim,
Good to hear that Transport Adapté is excellent! I haven’t been keeping up. When my clients were using it, it was terrible. That was then.
My comment was wrt the developers wanting private cars and private parking in the planned Blue Bonnets eco-community “for people with reduced mobility.”
su
Susan Clarke was councillor for the Loyola district not the Blue Bonnets district. Not sure who was councillor for Hippodrome.
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Kate
In a “you can’t win” scenario, the city administration is being accused of cultural appropriation by an Inuit group because it decided the cultural centre in the complex rising on the old Children’s Hospital site should be named Sanaaq, from the title of a 1950s novel by Inuit writer Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk. They’re probably wishing they’d stuck to the original plan of naming it for Montreal’s second mayor, Peter McGill (no relation to the disgraced James of the university).
Reading between the lines here – and it’s not hard – there is not one single Inuit voice or authority, and someone who thinks they ought to have been consulted is annoyed that they were not.See below.Update: See even further below. The issue has been resolved.
EmilyG
Cultural appropriation is one of those concepts that many white people just never seem to understand.
I suggest that white people who don’t get the concept should listen to non-white people who understand it first-hand.Bill Binns
Lol. You think? Sort of like when a tribal government agrees to something but then some unelected “tribal elders” decide to setup some lawn chairs on the railroad tracks all summer anyway.
EmilyG
Perhaps worth noting that I’ve heard the “Inuit are not a monolith” argument before from someone who thought that cultural appropriation wasn’t a problem.
Kate
Thank you, EmilyG. I must be in error. I will cross out the offending concept.
walkerp
Bill Binns you should educate yourself on the history of elected leaders and hereditary elders in the indigenous communities in Canada. Here is a very simplistic article that should get you started. The important point is that the elections were forced onto their political structures by the Indian Act and have never been considered legitimate.
Your condescension is hurtful to people for whom these conflicts are very real in their day to day lives. And basically racist and ignorant.
Chris
>Cultural appropriation is one of those concepts that many white people just never seem to understand.
Why would someone’s melanin levels prevent them from understanding a concept or not? Is cognition a function of skin colour?
>I suggest that white people who don’t get the concept should listen to non-white people who understand it first-hand.
I’m curious: in your view, is cultural appropriation something that can only be perpetrated by white people?
Kate
Chris, lived experience is bound to be different than a grasp of theory. One of the key facets of lived experience is that the dominant culture often disbelieves you until it’s absolutely impossible not to credit the evidence. Even then, often they try to minimize perceptions of the effects the experiences have had on the individual. This is why we now try to have people with some lived experience take the lead in matters to do with the particular group.
White culture has been dominant for centuries and has steamrollered over other cultures, often taking attractive bits and pieces – music, food, artifacts – to add to its cultural grab bag. Yes, cultures cross-fertilize and always have, but when one culture has an overwhelming portion of the world’s wealth and pretty gizmos, they’re the only ones that can appropriate in quite that way.
DeWolf
Here’s what I get from the article: this wasn’t a unilateral decision by the city and the name was suggested by an Inuit cultural organization. The mayor also suggests that there was some informal consultation of Inuit people in the neighbourhood. But the claims of cultural appropriation are coming from Nunavik, which suggests that may be a disconnect between Inuit groups in Montreal and those back home.
So there was a process but maybe it wasn’t comprehensive enough. I’m curious, though, what’s best practice in cases like this? How many people and organizations need to be consulted in order to avoid the perception of appropriation?
Personally, my biggest concern isn’t with the name but whether the cultural centre will have any Inuit management (or programming). But I’m not Inuk so maybe that’s just me.
EmilyG
Yes. It’s about colonization, as well as taking things without permission and out of context.
George
DeWolf, you can never know how many need to be consulted because you can never please everyone. And that’s precisely because, EmilyG, groups of people who are identified by a given characteristic are not monoliths and one of the most harmful and reductive things we can do is to essentialize people. Ironically, it’s the reductive and essentializing tendencies which are the most insidiously colonial. Moreover, the notion of “cultural appropriation” is self-reflexive and unfalsifiable.I think that Kate was right in the first place and she should not have struck out the latter part her comment.
Michael Black
“Cultural appropriation” is in part like being in high school and nobody likes you. Until they find out you can help them with that test, or hook up a VCR to their tv set.
But they still don’t like you.
So here it sounds like “but we thought you’d like being included”. One group thinks “inclusion” is inviting someone, the other thinks it’s about a bigger place at the table.
All the native words we know , were taken, no say in use, maybe not even in meaning.
When this thing was announced, I thiught because of the name it was to be an Inuit cultural space. Only later did I realize it was only an Inuit name.
As for Chris’s comment, my great, great grandmother’s picture is at the Museum of History, well the website at least. She’s wearing European clothing, “it must be cultural arpropriation”. No, it’s assimilation.
Most people haven’t moved up enough to create balance with Native people. Just in recent months I’ve had to correct one columnist about why someone wasn’t Native after all, and then why someone who is Cree isn’t described as having “Cree roots”. She hasn’t grasped that while she thinks it’s good that she’s devoting space to these matters, the only? reason she “needs” to do it is because someone directly affected doesn’t have that space.
Jack
This is the President of Makivik having a hissy, nothing more. He is also up for election soon.
Mark
Seems as if the issue is resolved. https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/grand-montreal/2021-01-21/centre-sanaaq/makivik-se-range-derriere-le-projet.php
Kate
Thank you, Mark.
MarcG
DeWolf, who it seems I have a lot in common with, makes a good point about tokenism vs. actual representation. These symbolic gestures are so meaningless and distracting.
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Kate
It’s a study by a landlords’ group so brace for bias, but it says that the rental vacancy rate is rising in town for several interlocking reasons.
Alison Cummins
Interesting. I like it.
The primary reason they list is that airbnb’s are returning to the residential market, which is as it should be.
They also list people sharing living space because of employment precarity, and lack of immigration because of travel restrictions.
In my tiny little 5-plex, I’ve seen the opposite, so I’d been envisioning increased demand for rentals.
• A single person moving from an apartment building with elevators and shared facilities, to something better for both quarantine and working from home.
• Students deprived of dormitories electing a private apartment.I’d be interested to know whether different types of rental buildings are experiencing different vacancy rates.
Kate
Alison, I can’t see a link to the study, but maybe you could ask CORPIQ whether they have a breakdown of the numbers by type of housing.
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Kate
Onetime felquiste Louise Lanctôt admits that kidnapping James Cross was a bad idea, but what would you have done, with liberation movements busting out all over the world?
Blork
That’s something that seems to get lost in many of the discussions of the October crisis; it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Those were crazy times, with revolutions and liberations happening all over the place, all on the heels of the civil rights movement in the US and the various assassinations that resulted. That doesn’t make it right, but it’s an important context that shouldn’t be overlooked if you’re trying to understand the times and the people involved.
Kate
Not just civil rights in the U.S., either. I’ve recently done design and editing work on several books about Africa around those years. Before the civil rights movement, people in Africa were already working hard at pulling their countries away from colonial control – not just British, but French and Portuguese colonies as well. It was in the air and everyone had a copy of The Wretched of the Earth in their back pocket.
Blork
Things going on in Africa were absolutely part of the current of revolution and liberation at the time. Also Cuba (the revolution was a decade old by then, but the wheels of the October crisis had been turning for almost that long) and of course all the other things going on in Latin America, much of it fueled by the apparent success of the Cuban revolution.
Michael Black
I always figured (once I was old enough to know) that the FLQ bombings were probably based on the bombings in Algeria. But the kidnappings almost seemed like the FLQ leading. It became a big thing in Europe in the seventies, but was it a thing before? I have no sense of that for political reasons.
People “say” that Abbie Hoffman’s Steal this Book was “banned” here, though I’ve never seen anything official, and in 45 years, all the copies I’ve seen have been in Montreal. But I can see why it wouldn’t have been liked here, coming months after the kidnappings, and some of tge contents was violence chic.
The Oct 29th 1970 episode of “Ironside” (the second part the next week), had him coming to Quebec, and a story that was obviously the FLQ. I gather from reading shortly after that they didn’t air it here at the time.I
But if it hadn’t been happening elsewhere, it likely wouldn’t have happened here. It’s easier to do something if you can point elsewhere and say “but they did it too”. And the language was the same, and still remains to this day.
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Kate
The section of the orange line between Bonaventure and Beaubien was down
WednesdayThursday morning starting at 5, but should be coming back up soon as I post. Water infiltration from a broken main is the culprit. The orange line’s Twitter feed says it’s down all the way from Lionel‑Groulx to Henri‑Bourassa and expected to resume around 8:15.Service resumed gradually and normal service was tweeted at 8:38.
dwgs
Wednesday morning? 🙂
Kate
Is it Thursday already? 🙂
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Kate
CBC’s Jennifer Yoon rides on the bus that attempts to ferry homeless people to shelters, and explains how social distancing has reduced the number of beds available and puts people at risk. Some new shelters are opening, one far from the usual downtown haunts, over by Viau. A second, heated shelter is promised on Cabot Square, and the relatively new soccer stadium on Papineau is being requisitioned to serve as a shelter for homeless with Covid.
MarcG 21:06 on 2021-01-21 Permalink
Yeah I think it’s time that we normalize calling out people with horrible ideas in their heads, especially if they hold positions of power. I want some quotes of what she said.
PatrickC 03:22 on 2021-01-22 Permalink
According to La Presse, she also resented having to sign the pro forma royal assent to legislation. That was what, an hour’s work a week? Too bad, with a little savvy, and a little diplomacy, she could have used her position and her background to make the “trust the science” argument to audiences around the country that would never listen to Greta. What a waste!
I gave up on her after reading a CBC report back in August about her stairway to nowhere, in which it was said that: “According to multiple sources, Payette doesn’t like maintenance workers in her line of sight. Even RCMP paid to protect Payette are no longer allowed to stand directly outside her office door and must hide in a room down the hallway, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.” Shades of Ivanka!
steph 10:41 on 2021-01-22 Permalink
“please respect my opinion”, their opinion; “2+2=5”
Meezly 10:43 on 2021-01-22 Permalink
“Payette doesn’t like maintenance workers in her line of sight.”
Seems like she took notes from Ellen DeGeneres on how to run a toxic workplace.
Payette’s resignation made it to the Washington Post. Quite embarrassing.
Kate 11:32 on 2021-01-22 Permalink
The G-G is, formally, a head of state, so it’s news. The story also made the Guardian and Le Monde.
That stuff about the workmen and not wanting to sign an important law because she had other plans are disturbing. But there’s also an echo here. Just as Sue Montgomery and her office manager were vilified in CDN-NDG, Payette and her secretary are being vilified at Rideau House. It’s almost as if these women were put in an apparent position of authority but failed to grasp that they were never really meant to direct things. So when they started actually giving orders, maybe asking people around them to do things a different way, it was perceived as bullying and “toxic”?
Maybe.
In the Aaron Wherry piece I linked there he says Justin Trudeau made a bad choice, but he also suggests that Payette never really grasped the basic bones of the job. You get a nice house and have to show up occasionally, but when you have to show up, you really have to show up. Did nobody ever read her the riot act?
DeWolf 14:02 on 2021-01-22 Permalink
Kate, I would have been more sympathetic to that line of defence in the past, but it has also been reported that Payette was forced to leave two of her previous jobs for exactly the same kind of bad behaviour. Twice is a coincidence, three times is a trend.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/governor-general-julie-payette-hr-issues-past-employers-1.5732109
Kate 15:02 on 2021-01-22 Permalink
Wow, that really is a detailed and damning piece.
Meezly 15:21 on 2021-01-22 Permalink
WTF happened in Maryland where she struck and killed a pedestrian while driving?
EmilyG 16:00 on 2021-01-22 Permalink
Yeah, this is more serious and goes deeper than her just making comments about creationists.