Nicolas Kruchten has made a finely grained election results map on which you can see exactly how many people voted for Plante, Coderre and Holness in the smallest election units.
Interesting to see there are a few blocks in Lachine, NDG and Pierrefonds where Holness beat the other two.
But I find myself curious why 104 voters are indicated on the Jean Drapeau islands, and 56 on the Île aux Hérons bird sanctuary island off Lasalle.
Protesters gathered at Air Canada headquarters Saturday, demanding the removal of Michael Rousseau as CEO.
François Legault wants the names of CEOs who don’t speak French and make them learn. Meantime, SNC-Lavalin CEO Ian Edwards, who was supposed to deliver a speech here Monday, has delayed it by a year so he can do some of it in French.
At one point does this stop…? He wants the names of people…who don’t like French. The names of people who might have learning disabilities that might prevent them from mastering French…The names of people who don’t have French names because henceforth all children born here should have a French or Francized name.
It’s going to backfire. CEOs have a role in a capitalist society, to increase shareholder value. Whether they are multilingual, bilingual or unilingual matters not.
For matters of convenience, English is the language of business communication. If a CEO is going to invest in learning another language, It might actually behoove them to learn Chinese, Arabic, Hindi or Spanish before they even bother with French.
Look, it’s one thing calling out Michael Rousseau who basically said he didn’t need to know any French, despite having 14 years to learn it. But now they’re actively seeking out “bad CEOs”, regardless of their background. The first case was reactive, but now they’re acting proactively. Sounds like a witch hunt to me. And one that will be costly to the CAQ and Quebec. What companies are going to want to have CEOs (and therefore head offices) in Quebec if this is how they get treated?
Ssjb is trying to keep the story going after every one has moved on. Telling CEOs to learn French? Sure. They’ll say “you’re right, I’ll get right on that” and then move on to the next thing scheduled. That’s if they actually accept the call and not put them on perpetual hold.
They’re completely blurring the notion that people with public-facing jobs should be bilingual – which they should, absolutely – with the idea that the high management should also be. At such stratospheric levels of business, it doesn’t matter. For good or bad, the international language of business is, inconveniently, English.
Other side of this argument is you don’t rise to such levels without some brains, and assembling around you a lot of support staff. A guy (and it’s usually a guy) should be able to arrange a crash course over 3 or 4 months to enable them to make a speech and answer questions on the same topic. It’s another Indo-European language – we’re not asking them to become fluent in Mandarin overnight.
A lot of these guys don’t rise that much, they tend to start quite far ahead on the path so you can’t always guarantee the brains are there as well.
Personally, any thing that weakens shareholder value for the possible, albeit obscure, benefit of the common good, I’m in favour of. More CEO witch hunts!
The guy didn’t even need to learn how to speak French, he just needed to learn to not say certain things in public. The offensive quote is “[I am] able to live in Montreal without speaking French and I think that’s a testament to the City of Montreal” for anyone who missed it..
Yes, that quote shows how out of touch he is with Quebec society and how he doesn’t even have much non-work related contact with francophones. He has to be very very ignorant to make such a tone-deaf statement and not realize the effect it would have.
I hate that at some point some in the early 2000s a fonctionaire decided to add a diacritic to my name and it Stéphanie with an accent. It had been Stephanie everywhere for 20 years prior to that moment. It creeps up here and there on some official quebec documents once in a while. I hate it and… well, I don’t even know what to do about it sometimes when I see it.
A scissor-tailed flycatcher, a species normally seen only in southern Texas, has been seen flying around the Dorval Technoparc. Hubert Gendron of Flickr’s Montreal faune/wildlife group captured a few views of this unusual bird earlier this week.
Josh Freed is annoying me today. He’s (in his ploddingly jocose manner) suggesting we try to forget Covid.
Any journalist who uses “Face it” as a writing ploy has already lost me, but we have really not got to forget Covid, for several reasons.
We need not to forget that we’re still at the mercy of nature. Covid was a taste of what a new contagious agent can do to us, and was relatively benign as contagions go. For an idea of what we might have faced, see any zombie movie. We got off lightly, and I don’t say that with any disrespect to people who lost family or friends, or who are coping with Covid’s effects themselves.
I visited friends at their place last night for the first time in nearly two years. We were talking about the tension and weirdness in those first weeks, boarding buses via the back door, people sanitizing their groceries because we weren’t yet sure how the virus was transmitted, when the streets were empty and everyone woke up to fresh bad news about new places where the virus had been identified.
And then it was an entire year between the virus breaking on the world stage and the availability of an effective vaccine.
People are, I’m afraid, already forgetting that period. But that was an important piece of our history because it proved to us that, when necessary, we could do things differently. The federal government could pay a universal basic income if it wanted. We could streamline our way of living, even reduce our consumption. We could stand two meters apart in grocery lines, we could learn to shop less often and live a little differently. We had this, it was possible.
But more than anything, when the pandemic came, almost everyone acted instantly, government stepped up so people could stay home, vaccines were created and new rules were followed by almost everybody. If we really believed in climate change we would act with that kind of urgency – but we don’t. As a society, we still put the economy and jobs and our own comfort first.
That’s why Freed isn’t just foolish. Attitudes like his are dangerous. He’s a useful idiot on the side of overconsumption, comfort, burning fossil fuels and pretending nothing happened. Because something did happen, and if we don’t take lessons from it, the next big weirdness might not be quite so easily laughed off.
Very well put Kate.
Josh Freed is an unfunny, car-loving, viciously-cat-hating jerk.
We were talking about the tension and weirdness in those first weeks, boarding buses via the back door, people sanitizing their groceries because we weren’t yet sure how the virus was transmitted, when the streets were empty and everyone woke up to fresh bad news about new places where the virus had been identified.
> People are, I’m afraid, already forgetting that period.
I watched the film 8 rue de l’humanité/Stuck Together, a film not about COVID but totally about COVID on Netflix recently, and it brought all that rushing back.
For the larger problem, that society seems paralyzed unless the problem appears suddenly and appears scary, I’m not sure what to do, other than maybe prepare for the floods/storms/etc.
In my country of origin, The Netherlands, the government and the population decided “Covid is over”, and now they have a surge in cases.. Yesterday they had the highest number of new cases *since March 2020*, and the hospitals and ICUs are slowly filling up, and the death toll is also rising. They have a vaccination rate of around 73% of the total population, similar to Canada, but slightly lower than Quebec. But that’s not enough for herd immunity, and when inside masking is no longer required and it’s business as usual, we’ll pay the price. Meanwhile in Portugal, where nearly 90% of the population is fully vaccinated, they have very few cases, for now at least.
For various reasons, economic and social, we can’t continue the current measures forever, at a certain point we have to decide that we have to live with Covid and devise a system to contain outbreaks as much as possible. Which means rapid testing everybody as many times as possible.
A Covid specialist I know thinks it will take about twenty years before we’ll have herd immunity because all young people will have had the Covid vaccine in their regular vaccine cocktail, and most people will have built up natural immunity by being vaccinated and regularly boosted and having had Covid a number of times. Even the Spanish flue pandemic eventually ended, even without vaccines.
In the meantime it sucks big time for people who can’t get vaccinated or have a very low immune response after vaccination. They’ll need to hide from public life, or risk getting Covid regularly.
The rise of Covid in colder States and the drop in warmer areas shows that being inside with others is still dangerous unless an area has very high vaccination rates.
We will see what happens with more companies returning to work.
Freed, the Gazette, cjad… All are dismissable voices of local media whose time has passed. Even when they were relevant they were cringeworthy at best.
TVA’s analysis of the election results shows that Denis Coderre was shunned as city mayor even in Pierrefonds‑Roxboro and St‑Laurent where voters elected Ensemble borough mayors.
Doctors at the Lachine General are offering to give respiratory therapists bonuses from their own pockets in an attempt to lure trained people to work with them.
Mr.Chinaski 01:01 on 2021-11-14 Permalink
You’re reading the map wrong Kate, because information is lacking about boundaries (typical TVA). Ile aux Herons is also all the part in Lasalle near the river, that’s where the votes are from. Same for Jean-Drapeau, which also has the area right in front near the old port.
Kate 10:56 on 2021-11-14 Permalink
Thank you, Mr. Chinaski