Dany Turcotte, the longtime “fou du roi” on Tout le monde en parle, has left the show after one wisecrack too many: he asked Mamadi Camara if he’d talk on his phone again while driving.
Will this story feed into the freedom of speech thread that’s been exercising various columnists and giving the premier something to kvetch about?
A man has been arrested six months after a fatal hit-and-run killed a woman on Sherbrooke Street East.
An accessible area for kids with reduced mobility so they can play safely will be created at Lafontaine Park, the work to start this fall.
Quebec is refusing to ban hunting on the island of Montreal, even though common sense says the island is urbanized enough for the practice to be hazardous.
In tangentially related news, an ethics committee has listed a lot of objections to Longueuil’s plan to move 14 white-tailed deer away from Michel-Chartrand park, where the species has been judged too numerous.
Even more tangentially, citizen groups are trying to preserve the few wooded areas on and just off the West Island which have not yet been declared parks.
The Longueuil deer thing is tough, because reducing their numbers is absolutely the right thing to do. But if you go into that park on any kind of a regular basis you become rather attached to them. They’re like puppies, especially when they’re standing right next to you and looking you right in the eye. A few days ago I counted 34 of them on my 40-minute walk, about a third of which were close enough to poke with a stick.
The park authorities are pretty strict about people not feeding them, but they also don’t want you to feed the birds. Who doesn’t love having chickadees and nuthatches landing on your hand? Unfortunately their finger-wagging about feeding the birds sort of discredits their position on the deer, because they come off as being too strict and no fun at all, and people end up ignoring everything they say.
The deer thing bothers me for other reasons. I work on managing some community gardens in Verdun, and there are plenty of groundhogs that eat the vegetables, but we’re not allowed to trap & move them because the wildlife protection laws say it’s more or les forbidden to trap & move animals, (there are lots of good reasons not to move animals, including they’ll probably die anyway and it’s a way diseases move around). Reading between the lines the law suggests that if someone does need to deal with problem animals they should be killed.
But then I see Longueuil has been feeding the wildlife, created a problem for itself, and is getting permission to move animals that don’t destroy food people eat, while we’re stuck trying to put nets around veggies to save them.
Basically, I think Longueuil made its bed so it should have to lie in it. The wildlife laws are not new.
@John – Tried spraying with fox pee? Or rotten eggs on the plants? It’s how I managed to get the squirrels to stop eating my flowers. The fox pee keeps them away. The rotten egg taste keeps them from eating plants. It does smell for a day or two, but after that, the taste is on the leaves.
Or set up a hipster locally-sourced marmot bistro/boutique where you sell slow-cooked marmot tacos and retro marmot fur cache-cous.
John B., where did you hear that “Longueuil is feeding the wildlife?” AFAIK it’s the opposite, as there are notices all over the place to not feed the wildlife, not even the birds. And the problem with the deer is they’re wrecking the ecosystem of the park because they are eating all the new growth, so the forest can’t regenerate.
walkerp, that is genius.
Blork, I’ve seen references to how Longueuil has fed the deer. At a quick google, here’s a CP piece (from Kelowna, but that’s just the link that showed up) saying “The City of Longueuil acknowledged that it fed the deer in past winters in the hopes of stopping them from wandering onto roads and getting killed. It reduced the feeding in 2015 and stopped it in 2017 as knowledge of best practices evolved.”
Well, look at that. At least they’ve learned and have stopped doing it. And now they need to solve the problem they created.
@walkerp Can I get a pint of Fox Piss IPA with that?
“.. citizen groups are trying to preserve the few wooded areas on and just off the West Island which have not yet been declared parks.”
I’m sure conservationists will be kept busy as people continue to flee the city for ‘greener pastures’, not realizing they’re inadvertently contributing to the accelerated loss of wooded areas.
@Blork: I was referring to how they were fed in the past. The feeding has been stopped, but the effects linger.
@Ephraim: I haven’t tried fox pee. I have used a pepper-based repellent that seemed to work. A problem is that it’s a community garden, right by the bike path, so we can’t put anything too stinky in it. It can also get quite expensive if we try to do the whole community garden. For now we’ll work on better fences, at least, so groundhogs are either in or out and not going in & out.
Then, when we have a BBQ, we may have to get some tortillas… Especially since it’s legal to hunt them, apparently.
New data Thursday from the Institut de développement urbain du Québec suggest that Montreal’s downtown core continues to empty out, with smaller businesses suffering most from the disappearance of office workers. There’s a lot of vacancies, a situation which this item sees as a crisis, but from another angle may be seen as a needed correction to an overheated market.
Some downtown dwellers are not happy with the plan to build the REM along René-Lévesque and Notre-Dame. My advice? If you own residential property along the route, sell it now. Quebec is not going to change its plans for Montrealers.
Meantime, François Legault says he’s very interested in extending the REM further into the South Shore,
It’s not just Montreal. Quebec City doesn’t have it any better. Read the news today about how Legault has made it his personal business to attack Régis Labeaume after the mayor rejected Legault’s comments about how the tramway is flawed because it prioritizes downtown over the suburbs.
Bottom line is that the CAQ is the party of suburbs and small towns. Legault grew up on the West Island and I guess it really left a lasting impact on him, because he just doesn’t seem to get cities and how they work.
Legault’s family goes back generations in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, as I found when trying to prove or disprove his claim that he has indigenous ancestry (I was not able to come to any firm conclusion on that).
Côté seems to think Legault is paying far too much attention to the REM compared to the Quebec City tram.
In Bonaventure metro, certain benches in the area where tunnels converge on the ticket booth level, made of stone or composite, have been used by itinerants for decades. The STM has now built big pointy wooden boxes around them to make them unusable, saying it’s a measure against Covid. Statement from the STM on Twitter.
Yeah they installed them yesterday and I know it’s mean but I stopped using the metro last March because every day getting to the platform meant running a gauntlet of coughing homeless people. Unfortunate but necessary
Global has a bit of video on this. It looks like the boarding was only applied to the parts of the mezzanine east and west of the centre of the station. I imagine the homeless will continue to congregate at the ends of the mezzanine (which is where they mostly hung out before anyway).
https://globalnews.ca/video/7647818/homeless-advocates-condemn-decision-to-cover-benches
I wish they’d done something less visually intrusive to deal with this. From the video it looks just terrible.
At least they mention that it’s to prevent the spread of COVID. They must have learned what not to do from the MTA in New York:
https://i.redd.it/sgtsyxp8w5g61.jpg
Relevant observation there, dhomas.
The Legault government may soon announce a limit on access to Anglo CEGEPs rather than expanding the scope of the French language charter. How students will merit one of the limited spots remains to be determined.
I’m sure this will get some jimmies in a twist but I’m curious how many of the non-anglophones are francophone?
At some point the province will have to forcibly relocate francophones from Sti-c’est-loin to Montreal. /s
Another predictable move from the Legault ideological playbook. So much cheaper and easier to chip away at Anglo education instead of investing in infrastructural support for the French school system.
Meanwhile this will allow them to allocate more money to the OQLF, the true protectors of the French language.
By limiting places, they’ll ensure that it’s the privately educated, middle to -upper class francophones who get to go to English school and have access to the international job market, while everyone else gets stuck in perpetual neo-peasantization. I’m curious to see if anyone will ever point out that cultural anxieties are being used to perpetuate class hierarchy within francophone society.
There already aren’t enough spaces for the anglophones (which I am defining as “people who went to English high school”), this will really screw over the kids who don’t have great test scores and now can’t get into Dawson/John Abbott/Vanier.
Some thoughts on this:
Haven’t heard from Pier-André Bouchard St-Amant in a while, eh? Seems like all “ensure acecss to higher education for all” during the Maple Spring now comes with some caveats, eh?
Why does the second table not show the number of studenst at English CEGEPS who report French as their mother tongue (also, I thought we had moved past ‘mother tongue’ as a meaningful term given the variety of truly bilingual and trilingual households)? The implication is that there are a ton of Francophones occupying spaces in English CEGEPS, but I suspect many are ‘allophones’ – think the kids of Italian immigrants who grew up fluently trilingual in St. Leonard. If they went to French high school do we consider them Francophone? If they went to English are they allophones? PABSTAM’s quotes make clear that legislating this stuff is going to be a nightmare; there’s a reason why Bill 101 is restricted to children. Young adults entering post-secondary education are entitled to navigate these choices without the heavy hand of the language police weighing on them.
Elite Francophones have sought out schooling in English-language institutions at all levels for decades in Quebec as a kind of Weblen consumption, ensuring they remain elite (see Tim S.’s comment above). Francophone enrolment in English CEGEPS is 100% a product of this, and is 0% a cause of it. The fact that the CAQ (and other nationalist parties) have zeroed in on giving Dawson a haircut as the one and only soltion – as opposed to improving the French public education system from CPEs on up – tells you all you need to know.
Before he was elected premier I attended an event where Legault was speaking. Aside from some economic nationalism stuff, the focal point of his remarks was the urgent need to imrpove educational outcomes in Quebec, particularly for Francophone males. Feels like a long time ago.
@Meezly
I know people like to shit on the OQLF but their budget is a minuscule $25 million. That’s about half the annual maintenance cost on the Olympic stadium.
@Joey
Deliberate obfuscation of the difference between language of use, mother tongue, and ethnic origin are how fears are stoked about the death of a culture. It’s dog whistles all the way.
Well, there’s supposed to be a $6.7 million (28 per cent) increase of the OQLF’s budget, from $24.1 million to $30.8 million in 2021.
Total funding for three bodies related to promotion of the French language will be increasing from $29.8 million in 2019-20 to $42.5 million in 2021.
Total education spending up a whopping 4.5 per cent in 2020-21.
Total health spending up another whopping 5.3 per cent in 2020-21.
I feel sorry for the students. I’ve met Franco students studying in English cegeps and they’re some of the most driven, ambitious and capable teens who are interested in broadening their horizons. Way to punish your youth, QC
Mr.Chinaski 01:52 on 2021-02-19 Permalink
Nah, there was an escalade of cringe each time he opened his mouth since the show went live instead of taped. Worst, he even had an author to help him, alas he still sucked. Nothing more, nothing less. Just somebody who is past his prime (was he ever?).