Taylor C. Noakes lays out in the Toronto Star why the Canadiens’ introduction of a land acknowledgment has some folks bent out of shape.
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Kate
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Kate
The course on Quebec culture and citizenship will be launched in 2023.
A civics course could be a good thing. The small amount of interviewing and campaigning I’ve done, I realize a lot of people have no clear idea what the different levels of government do, because we haven’t been taught that in school. Basic law, basic financial stuff, would also be good.
But this course is not going to be that. The first bit will be culture but mostly Quebec culture; the second bit will be Quebec citizenship, and the third will in some sense “develop critical thinking” with emphasis on “freedom of expression” and not being woke.
Nobody is actually a citizen of Quebec, but let that pass.
Tim S.
Agreed. Civics is important if done well, but culture is such a vague thing that can’t and shouldn’t be nailed down in a curriculum.
I’m not too worried, though, about the potential success of any government scheme that relies on teens dutifully accepting and memorizing the output of some committee.Blork
“If done well” is critical here. But given that this is being driven by the government — and not just any government; a government whose leader cannot or will not accept the existence of systemic racism simply because he has such a narrow and limited understanding of what “systemic” means — it doesn’t bode well.
That said, critical thinking and an understanding of the responsibilities that come with freedom of expression (or any freedom, really) is very important, and I don’t think is really taught anywhere, at least not explicitly. While the government’s intentions might be “anti-woke” if they can do that right, and in a way that really does encourage critical thinking, it bodes very well for the future. (IMO, “wokeness” has already gone over the top and has failed because it’s now at a point where there are so many wokely-defined triggers that “the woke” easily fall into knee-jerk mode, which basically defeats the original purpose of being woke.)
When I was in grade 7 in Nova Scotia we had a class called “social studies,” which included some stuff that would now be called “civics.” It included a segment on media studies. Not in the sense of McLuhan, which would have been way over the head of 12-year-olds; it taught a basic understanding of how newspapers and other media work, including the role of advertising and how that can and sometimes does effect editorial. It taught us that just because you read something in the newspaper or hear it on the radio, that doesn’t mean it’s true. More important, it taught us HOW that can be untrue.
But it wasn’t any kind of anti-media rant. It was all about understanding it. That included stuff about media biases, but not in a “there’s a bias so it must be fake” way; more like “one newspaper will tell the story this way because it has this kind of bias, and another paper will tell the story that way because it has that kind of bias. That doesn’t mean one or the other is wrong, but you need to understand how the biases shape the story.”
That was a revelation for me as a 12-year-old. As far as I’m concerned that kind of thing should be mandatory for all school kids of that age.
Mark Côté
Knowing the CAQ and the broad context behind this curriculum change, I have a strong sense that “critical thinking” will be interpreted here in a very narrow, perhaps even oxymoronic way.
qatzelok
I hope the CAQ doesn’t think “Machaivellian business practices” is a Québec value.
Azrhey
@Blork ! YES! I had that in grade 6 in a civics class ( it was in Montreal but in a private college, we had half the year latin and half civics ) where we learned to properly read the media. Lots of comparing and contrasting how the Journal de Montreal vs La Presse vs Le Devoir would treat the same story, which angle, which audience was targeted, who benefited ( and also the sorts of ads that were put next to which article to attract the eye: cars were for young men, banks for wives, Mexicuba for parents who can’t afford the escapism…etc.)
Also lots of news articles from around all around the French World where we had to figure out if it was Factual, Biaised or Opinion Piece. And lists and lists of verbs and adjectives and adverbs that we had to sort into “I know”, “I hear”, “I think”.
I clearly remember “un accident tragique” is news , “un accident épouvantable” is biaised and “un accident malheureux” is opinion. The things you remember 30 years later….Kate
Wow, I never had anything like this in high school, except when one rather young and naughty teacher spent a single class on the concept of a “bullshit detector” (I can’t remember how she got around saying “bullshit” in class) which was along these lines, but without time for examples and details.
Tee Owe
Decades ago I amused myself listening to news on FM radio from Voice of America, Pravda and BBC – same news, different
mouthpieces, different spin – can be done today with TV news Fox,CNN, France24, BBC- fun to watch, check your own biasBlork
What was particularly good about the program I went through (which I think might have been a pilot project, but I don’t know if they continued it) is that it wasn’t “anti-media” or all finger-pointy or whatever. It just presented a clear picture of the various forces at work when you read a newspaper or watch TV news (there was no internet then).
Kate
One reason I started this blog was that I was noticing that the same story would be told quite differently by the Gazette, La Presse, CTV, Le Devoir, the Journal – and there were often differences even between how CBC and Radio-Canada would spin a story. Not necessarily bad bias, just different media being interested in different stories, or different aspects of an ongoing issue. I figured I could bring them together.
In practice, not all stories are big or interesting enough to have ongoing meta-stories to tell about how they’re being portrayed, but it does still come up sometimes.
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Kate
A new sculpture has gone up in the Old Port, described as “titanesque” by Radio-Canada, and meant to commemorate Jeanne Mance, Marguerite Bourgeoys and Marguerite D’Youville. A very rough sketch in the piece explains what the metal arches have to do with these three women.
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Kate
Valérie Plante is promising to protect the remaining natural spaces including the wetlands around the Technoparc, although they were drained recently by REM work.
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Kate
Morgan Lowrie has a CP piece about the danger of the Lachine rapids and their role in creating the Montreal we know. This version’s in French on the La Presse site, only finding an English version on the Toronto Star site.
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Kate
La Presse’s Louis-Samuel Perron tells a story about an acquittal in an art theft case over some paintings which may have been worth $3.5 million but which may have been worth a few hundred bucks. Going by the few examples shown in the article, I’d tend to think the low end is more plausible.
(For me, what’s odd is that years ago my sister briefly dated a man called Nasir Mahboobi. It’s not a name you forget. I can’t tell whether this is him.)
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Kate
A brief piece from CTV on Saturday tells how police surrounded a pedestrian on Stanley St. because they thought s/he had a rifle, only to discover it was a cane. The item ends This is a developing story but there’s nothing more about it, and I can’t see a report anywhere else.
Daniel
Yikes! I have a lot of questions.
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Kate
The Gazette headline here is misleading: Daylight Saving Time sticking around. What’s sticking around is Eastern standard time, which we will return to on November 7.
An Ontario MPP received universal approval last year for a proposal to stay on DST permanently, but Quebec is never going to let itself be led by Ontario in this matter, and Ontario won’t deviate from what Quebec and New York State are doing, because of the confusion it would cause. But somebody’s got to go first.
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Kate
The Montreal area can expect big rain this week between Monday night and Wednesday. There’s an Environment Canada special weather statement about it.
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Kate
Two east-end candidates, originally from Ralliement Montréal, have left Mouvement Montréal this week. Balarama Holness’s party has lost six candidates since the campaign began.
Kevin
Originally from the short-lived Equité Montreal, which merged with Ralliement in July.
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Kate
A demo was held Saturday at the Cartier monument demanding the reopening of dance floors.
DeWolf
The government is just delaying the inevitable. It will need to end the prohibition on dancing at a certain point because otherwise we will be seeing more and more illegal dance parties with no health measures whatsoever. We have masks and we have a vaccine passport – a combination that has proven to be extremely effective at reducing the number of outbreaks. There’s a reason why cases and hospitalizations are declining right now when they were skyrocketing at this time last year.
With the vaccine passport, we’ve opted for a harm-reduction approach rather than trying to eliminate all risk. At this point in the pandemic, with Delta as the main variant, elimination strategies are impossible, as the unsuccessful lockdowns in New Zealand and Australia have shown. (Melbourne just came out of lockdown after nearly three months, and cases are higher than they’ve ever been.) 89 percent of eligible Montrealers are fully vaccinated, 93 percent have at least one dose, the vaccine passport has been successful and the INSPQ’s research has shown that immunity here is not waning the way it is in countries that had a shorter dosing interval. It’s time to embrace the full potential of the harm-reduction system we’ve set up, otherwise people will begin to lose faith in it.
Kate
You just wanna dance, DeWolf?
DeWolf
I just wanna feel like I’m not living in a real-life version of Footloose!
Also it’s particularly offensive that Toronto can dance while it’s still illegal in Montreal. Toronto!
mare 10:09 on 2021-10-25 Permalink
The wording on the banner the Canadiens used was different than the one that caused the kerfuffle. They watered down the wording, and made it more ‘inclusive’…
Can only find a French source, and no text version to copypasta:
https://www.tvanouvelles.ca/2021/10/24/le-canadien-change-finalement-son-message
From a reddit comment: “The new message emphasizes that the region was used by diverse nations (e.g. Iroquoian, Algonquian, and Mohawk). The Mohawk are singled out as having the only contemporary connection to the area.”
Kate 08:42 on 2021-10-26 Permalink
Yes, they changed the initial wording after the fuss.