Early in the pandemic, the ARTM stopped taking automatic payments for yearly Opus cards, and has now extended the suspension till December as people sort out whether they will be going back to work in offices, work at home, or arrive at some compromise.
Updates from July, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The city has struck a deal with its white collar union, which has been without a contract since the end of 2018. It will be voted on in September.
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Kate
Guardian piece from a Toronto writer examines the cultural weight of the Canadiens.
David754
The best was when I was a child, Quebec still had a team and we had an awesome rivalry, most of the players were from here, and there was a distinct Montreal style of play. That, your annual game at the Forum, Rad-Can’s soirée du hockey. and you’re imprinted for life.
All of that is gone, and if anything is to be written about the Habs, I’d be curious about how a person even become a Habs partisan with that same affective attachment in this era of Bell Center and an absolutely goofy game experience, no rivalries (not even sure what division we’re in now), an alphabet soup of international players who are barely on the team long enough to learn how to pronounce the name of the country they’re from, and the rest. A Habs game these days feels to me more like a consumer product among others than a part of the culture, write an article to tell me what I’m missing.
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Kate
Mayor Plante has promised body cams for the SPVM by early 2022 if she’s re-elected.
Denis Coderre says Plante is not acting fast enough – but he had four years to do it himself, yet he didn’t.
Spi
Was there even a serious clamouring or talk of body cams for police officer during the Coderre years?
dhomas
There was apparently a body cam pilot project during the Coderre years. It’s in the article.
Dominic
If you look around the SPVM website you can find a PDF of the results of the pilot project. I remember reading it and rolling my eyes so far back they almost fell out. The reasoning behind why the SPVM thinks they shoulnt need cameras was approaching comedy.
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Kate
Tony Accurso, facing charges of fraud against the Canada Revenue Agency, has once again sidestepped justice by getting a stay of proceedings based on some technicalities about seized evidence.
(But I was wrong. Please read H. John’s comment.)
Update: La Presse’s Vincent Larouche looks at ten years of wasted effort on a case so complex that it foundered on the literal weight of the evidence.
H. John
He didn’t sidestep justice, and it wasn’t stopped because of “some technicalities”.
I read a blurb recently from a European who now teaches criminal law in the U.S. He is still shocked by the use of the term “technicalities” when the prosecution loses or is overturned (he was commenting on the Bill Cosby case).
It’s the rule of law. Both sides in a criminal case have rules of procedure to follow. In this case, those rules are written by the National Assembly.
The crown attorneys were warned by the judge.
Kate
Thank you, H. John. I appreciate the clarification.
David754
No, this is pretty much a textbook stupid technicality.
Basically, the crown produced documents, some of which were marked up working docs rather than what they seized. Attorney work product is a privilege that can be and is waived with production. Accurso’s team argued that the production was not code compliant, and the judge agreed, ordering the crown to do a supplemental production of the original documents, and imposed a deadline. The crown then reported that it could not produce the documents within that time frame, and so the case had to be dropped under that idiotic pro-criminal Jordan decision.
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Kate
Marie Grégoire, who was briefly an ADQ MNA, has been named to head the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and thus also the Grande bibliothèque. The ADQ later merged into the CAQ.
I’m seeing some negative tweeting about partisan appointments, but much more approval.
jeather
I don’t think her brief stint as an MNA is an issue, but she doesn’t seem to have relevant experience — she’s been a journalist, she’s worked in marketing/communications, she’s edited and owned a magazine, but does she have any history in libraries? That seems like a very important qualification to head up a library, which should not be run like a for-profit business.
Kate
Le Revoir says today “En nommant Marie Grégoire à la tête de la BAnQ, on voulait faire la preuve que si t’as été députée pendant une fin de semaine, tu peux néanmoins accéder aux plus hautes fonctions intellectuelles.”
Harsh, but encapsulates what some folks are thinking.
Aside from her having joined the pro-business ADQ, I can’t find much out about her political stances, or how they may bear on how she’ll run the big library.
Daisy
Prior to her appointment there had been public requests for the next appointee to be a professional librarian or archivist.
https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/idees/607524/idees-a-propos-de-la-direction-de-banq
Kate
I can also see appointing someone of generally recognized cultural standing, who would outline priorities and give a general orientation to the librarians and archivists working there, without necessarily being of their number. When the library opened in 2005 Lise Bissonnette was at the helm, and as I recall, she was generally considered a good choice, although she wasn’t an archivist. Since then, it’s been Guy Berthiaume, who is an archivist, and Jean-Louis Roy, described by Wikipedia as historian, journalist and diplomat – he used to be the editor of Le Devoir. Not sure Marie Grégoire has equivalent cultural weight, but we shall see.
The only physical change at the library that has made me flinch was the decision to stop holding exhibits in the gallery below street level. I saw some interesting stuff down there, the more charming because I never went to the library primarily for an exhibit, but they were just sort of there, and drew me in – you could see parts of the gallery from above. I don’t recall exactly when this ended but it felt like an impoverishment.
JP
I remember when they had far longer hours. I never spent any time there very late as it’s not very close to me, but I thought it was cool that there was a public library that was open until midnight (or something like that)
Kate
Yes, and you used to be able to access the periodicals section on the main floor on Mondays, even when the rest of the library was closed. It had a nice atmosphere when everything else was quiet, but they ended that a couple of years ago.
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Kate
The Canadiens got so close but the dream is over.
Thursday morning, there are as many post mortems as you can handle. Urbania’s heroic odyssey, Radio-Canada on whether this was a beginning or an ending, CTV instilling pride, CBC looking toward the future. (How many times since 1993 have we been told that the Canadiens are a young team with great things ahead of them?)
There’s the summer to consider all this, and then…
steph 07:47 on 2021-07-09 Permalink
WFH 2 days a week in January. Will I renew my monthly subscription?
Kate 08:11 on 2021-07-09 Permalink
What do the numbers say?
steph 08:20 on 2021-07-09 Permalink
that I’m going to share a pass with my partner and we will only have one WFH day together. 🙁 .