The Plateau Astro guy is breathlessly excited about the total lunar eclipse coming May 15, but he’ll tell you all about it.
Updates from April, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The CAQ has backed off on the plan to make students at English CEGEPs pass three core courses in French, and will now make them take three French language courses instead.
Pragmatically, I’ve heard that it would be structurally difficult to set things up for the teaching of core courses of so many programs in French at English CEGEPs that switching to simply teaching the language must be a huge relief to everyone involved.
jeather
It is most certainly not a relief. Where are these three classes coming from? Core courses? Electives? English or humanities classes? Don’t forget that capacity is now capped, so what’s happening with the people who teach whichever classes are being switched over? Maybe it’s marginally better, but it’s no good.
Kevin
I have no fucks left to give. It is all meaningless nonsense.
The system is rigged. People from France, francophones with degrees in French literature, can and do fail Quebec’s linguistic purity tests.
Whatever happens people will do what they want, bribe the correct officials, the people without hobbies will continue to complain to the OQLF every time they see or hear an English word, and stickers saying Démarrer will be placed on microwaves in workplaces in order to comply.
Ian
@jeather they were supposed to be core courses, therein lies the rub. Who among the unionized teachers with the Ministry approved curriculum will suddenly teach these courses without having a full program revision and not be penalized retroactively for the. conditions of their hiring as government employees… CEGEP teachers officially work for the Ministry not the college, and the Ministry is responsible for all program revisions – which is usually at least a 2-year process. Also, once you have been hired as a CEGEP teacher you can’t be un-hired retroactively – not to mention permanent postings (equivalent to tenure), seniority-based hiring priority, and pensionable hours.
I suspect the CAQ realized what a deep, dark mess this was going to turn into and decided to play the “generous” schtick instead. This is still on Anglade and the incompetence of the PLQ, if the CAQ had decided to be as obstinate as they have been in the past this would literally have destroyed the English CEGEP system. The vast majority of English students could not pass the French exam, especially as it is geared toward students that have been studying French literature, not FSL. I had started planning an unexpected early retirement, assuming the system would collapse within 6 years. That or it would have been totally rejigged to become a better, more efficient system … haha who am I kidding
In any case Anglo CEGEP students will still have to take 3 French courses, but they will be electives. Still not ideal but better than the hole the (!@#$%&*?) PLQ was digging for us.
Joey
@Ian or @Tim S. would know – what’s the previous French requriement? I seem to recall taking at least one class in French at Dawson 25ish years ago. Can’t recall whether it was a mandatory French-language class or just an elective taught in French. In any case, bureaucractic machines are usually pretty good at working around this kind of obligation.
Ian
It depends on whether it’s a DEC or an AEC – this page still hasn’t been updated: https://www.quebec.ca/en/education/cegep/studying/overview
Honestly I’m not sure if the 3 FR courses will be gen ed or complementaries. It may very well vary faculty to faculty as many faculties specifically prepare students for working in a French milieu. It also depends what counts as “French instruction” – for example all of my web projects need to follow OLF regulations for commercial websites – but that’s my choice as the instructor, not a requirement of the program, and not a core competency.
Tim S.
Right now students at anglo colleges take 2 French-language courses. I’ve seen different reports about whether this new change will mean 3 or 5 total French classes. If it’s 3 total, that shouldn’t be a huge deal, but 5 means other courses will have to be cut.
Meanwhile, my daughter in EMSB French immersion keeps coming home to report that they spent French class watching English movies.
Ian
FromJohn Abbott College’s Director General:
In the Spring of 2021, our provincial government presented Bill 96 (Loi sur la langue officielle et commune du Québec, le français). It went through public consultations in the fall, and it is presently going through the detailed (line-by-line) revisions in a parliamentary commission in Québec City.
Let us begin by saying that John Abbott College strongly supports enhancing the use of the French language in Québec, and the intent of increasing the French language skills of our students (as detailed in our 2020-2025 Strategic Plan, Orientation #6). However, some provisions in the present version of Bill 96 are of concern for English-language colleges.
a) The enrolment of English CEGEPs would indefinitely be limited to the registered numbers of 2019.
b) Admissions priority would need to be given to students “ayant été déclarés admissibles à recevoir l’enseignement en anglais conformément à la section I” (those who have a right to attend English language school boards under Law 101), commonly referred to as “les ayants droit”.
c) All other students would be required to pass the French Exit Exam.
d) All students would need to complete three courses given in French to complete their DEC. As of last night, French as a Second Language courses will be possible for “les ayants droit”.The requirement of the French Exit Exam for approximately 40% of our students (principally francophones and allophones) would involve three French literature courses for those students rather than the English literature courses they currently take in preparation for the English Exit Exam (which has a higher success rate than the French Exit Exam). Details for the three additional courses required in French remain unclear, but this new two-tiered approach to college education would likely also affect success rates, since approximately 30% of JAC students are normally enrolled in our lower-level French courses. The proposed changes could also reduce the success rates of our Indigenous students, and thus increase the difficulties faced by these marginalized and underserved groups. Bill 96 would also require a change in our existing balance of teaching positions.
Student success is our primary mission. In 2021 the Ministry of Higher Education was rightly proud to announce an investment of $450 million over the next five years to enhance student success, yet the same government proposes a bill that could jeopardize the success of many of our students. Some students may decide to leave our publicly-funded colleges or the province. This, along with the effect on our graduation rates would exacerbate a well-documented labour market shortage.
The leadership of English colleges and universities has been working for many months to raise the awareness of our elected representatives about the impact that Bill 96 would have on student success. Our requests to meet our most senior elected officials have unfortunately not been granted. English colleges want to increase the French language skills of our students, but not at the expense of student success.
What can you do if you wish your perspective to be heard?
a) Write to our politicians or the press.
b) If you share our concerns about student success, you can take part in demonstrations, such as those currently being planned for May 5 at John Abbott College (11:30am to 12:30pm, without class cancellations but with classes welcome to participate at the teacher’s discretion), and May 14 in downtown Montréal starting at 10:30am at Dawson College (Anglophone groups plan downtown protest against Bill 96 on May 14 – QCGN).
c) Consider whether signing this petition from concerned English educators would represent your views: (https://openletter.earth/lettre-ouverte-concernant-les-amendements-au-projet-de-loi-96-db77fa0e?fbclid=IwAR0LN3kW_JqHnxt0XlnxHEumJFsAeGIiG3eAX26Kw0GK7325NgejjaL7HU8)We hope our political leaders will heed public concern and consider changes to the proposed law in order to ensure that measures to strengthen the use of French also support student success.
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Kate
City council has passed a motion to make May Jewish heritage month against a backdrop of Quebec seeing record numbers of antisemitic acts lately.
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Kate
The access to the Place Ville Marie esplanade is to be turned into a wide staircase, and a giant metal ring designed by Claude Cormier will hang above it. More views from Cormier’s own site. (Does this make Cormier le Seigneur des anneaux?)
JoeNotCharles
Celebrating Montreal’s long history of things not falling on people.
Tee Owe
seigneur des anneaux – ha ha
Blork
The first casualty will be the idiot who climbs up onto the ring to get a selfie and then slips off.
The next casualty will be the drunk idiot who tries to climb up the inner part of the ring to see how high he can go, and slips off.
The next casualties will be the people crushed under the ring when it falls off the building during a retrofit to install barriers to prevent people from climbing up onto the ring.
The final casualty will be our hopes and dreams for having nice things, ruined, as usual, by the behaviour of idiots.
Myles
That rendering makes it look low enough to the ground that tall people would have to duck under it, to say nothing of whether anyone would want to walk under something that heavy.
Ephraim
Does this make the Guinness World Record for largest C-Ring?
Kate
Fagstein asks whether the city is getting a Stargate.
Kevin
I’m amused that the renderings don’t show how the thing actually stays in place. There are no connection points between the ring and the adjacent buildings.
Mr.Chinaski
Yes there are, look carefully. Anyway the construction plans have already been submitted and every calculation was done by a large group of professionnals (Wind engineers, structural, landscape, architecture, etc…)
mare
I can already see the lineup of trapeze artists who want to perform in it.
Kevin
Mr Chinaski
All I see are some posts sticking out of the building that aren’t connected to the hoop. Is something hiding in another artist’s rendition?carswell
@Kevin Those appear to be lights. But on a couple of the drawings on Cormier’s website, you can see two stays — roughly at the two and four o’clock positions — that appear to connect the ring to the building.
As for the ring itself, it gets a meh from me in the renderings. Hoping it’s less, er, pointless in real life…
JaneyB
Love it. It’s a wacky counterpoint to the festival of concrete right angles surrounding it. Worried a bit about QC’s gravity problem though. Plus, there will be acrobats, drunks, and idiots as we know.
DeWolf
Lots of armchair engineers here!
The ring is described in some news articles as being “several metres” above ground. Based on the renderings on Cormier’s site it looks like it will be 5-6 metres above ground at its lowest point, so I’m not sure how anyone could climb up on it.
Ephraim
And yet no one is worried that King Kong might want the giant c-ring 🙂
carswell
@Ephraim Le roi Kong, SVP.
Kevin
DeWolf
Clowns. A pyramid of clowns.
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Kate
Rima Elkouri tells us about how Élise Desaulniers donated a kidney to an absolute stranger. Desaulniers, well known as the head of the SPCA (and, before that, as an active member of the local WordPress community), felt it was the right thing to do, although live donations to unknown recipients is extremely rare anywhere.
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Kate
The Gazette reports that the nascent plan to install platform barriers in some metro stations has been put on ice given the STM’s current budget crunch.
Regular readers may remember that I’m not a fan. The photo in that piece, from a London station, shows how the platform becomes a claustrophobic corridor with these doors. Most of our stations have both tracks in a high wide hall, one of the metro’s architectural assets that would be marred forever by boxing the platform in.
It’s also worth considering a positive benefit that would be lost: most of our platforms are clearly visible from the far side of the tracks. You can’t get up to shenanigans without the likelihood someone will see you from the other side. Put up barriers and some stations would have enclosed areas, especially at the ends of the platforms, where things could happen, even if there were cameras.
James
Platform screen doors are a big improvement for safety. They also help to reduce service disruptions and improve passenger comfort. When the REM opens I think people will be quite impressed – especially in the winter. However, retrofitting them to a system in service is very expensive and certainly should be looked at carefully to make sure that cost/benefit ratio is good.
Half-height barriers also exist – they could reduce that “boxing in” feeling that you might perceive.Blork
I’m not sure what to think about this. On the one hand, I totally get what Kate says about ruining the openness of the system and creating architectural claustrophobia. On the other hand, a few years down the road and everyone will have forgotten that and they’ll just accept the corridor effect as normal (which it is, on many systems).
Is it a price we’re willing to pay for added safety? This can’t be answered without having a sense of how unsafe the current system is. And for that we need data; data on how many people jump, fall, or are pushed onto the tracks in any given year. I suspect that number is extremely low.
But will it always be low? Will cultural ennui and/or some other black cloud lead to a run on jumping/falling/pushing onto the tracks in the future? What is the acceptable casualty rate for keeping the system open, as it is? (Questions reminiscent of the COVID health measures, but are not at all new; we are awash in such questions at all levels. Everything from “what is an acceptable level of cirrhosis of the liver and other health effects before we ban alcohol? What is the acceptable level of broken arms/legs or concussions before we ban playground structures? What is the acceptable level of interruptions to the goddamn 10:00PM news before we ban the Stanley Cup Playoffs?)
Since the first time I rode the Metro many years ago until the present day I am always a bit shocked at the lack of any safety barriers on the platforms. It boggles my mind that people aren’t killed every day on the Metro, between falling/jumping/pushed onto the tracks, and just standing inches from the train when it comes blasting through the tunnel at 60KPH (or whatever it is)… SO MUCH HAZARD!
And yet… Not many cases that I’m aware of.
I might think differently had I ever been witness to someone falling/jumping/pushed onto the tracks, or if I had been standing upwind of someone whose head was watermeloned when they leaned forward and had that speeding train crack into their skull.
Ephraim
Having been on the platform when someone attempted suicide… I have sympathy for both the person trying (because it rarely succeeds, they then pull them out from under the metro and the hospital has to deal with the consequences) but the driver, who is doing their job, has to deal with the psychological consequences of having hit someone, the sounds and the actions going through their minds… maybe forever.
It would be a lot more loving for us to have a place where those seeking suicide can seek psychological help and if they really want, euthanasia under humane terms… sort of like Soylent Green… without the… part.
Tim S.
Half-height barriers could be interesting….
Kate
They’ve had occasional platform-level campaigns encouraging depressed or desperate people to seek help, but it’s impossible to know how many people have read and acted on the messages.
I’ve never been on the platform when an incident happened, but a long time ago I saw a woman acting strangely too close to the edge of a platform at Berri, so I went and spoke to her and got her off the edge and upstairs – no way to know whether she was contemplating a jump.
There’s only so much you can do if you think a stranger may be in a bad state, because you risk interfering with someone who’s perfectly fine and not thrilled with your amateur intervention.
Tee Owe
Check out The Blue Angel, short story by Liam Durcan, about a Montreal subway-car driver who attracts multiple suicide jumpers – it’s in A Short Journey by Car
EmilyG
I’ll never forget the account of a commenter on this blog, who witnessed a suicide in the metro. Absolutely chilling.
I hope something can be done about these kinds of things.
Kate
EmilyG, it’s in this thread but it is, as you say, chilling, and intense.
DeWolf
Apparently there are 15 suicide attempts every year in the metro, on average. On top of that, there’s the risk of people being deliberately pushed onto the tracks, which hasn’t been a problem here but is increasingly common in New York and other places. Before the pandemic, the orange line was sometimes dangerously overcrowded, so there’s also the risk of people accidentally falling off the platform.
It’s like the STM would use half-height screen doors because of the high ceilings in most metro stations. Here’s what they look like in Taipei:
https://english.metro.taipei/News_Content.aspx?n=4AC29B484EBD5848&s=EE9E0AF195FDD33D
carswell
Here’s an idea: the STM is preparing to build five new stations for the blue line extension. Why not incorporate half- or full-height barriers — along with elevators or, at least, shafts for future elevators — into the stations’ design? Ten fewer opportunities for the suicidally inclined and a chance to work out the bugs and see how metro users react to them.
James
carswell: The new blue line stations will definitely be fully accessible with elevators. This has already been announced by the STM.
https://www.stm.info/fr/a-propos/grands-projets/grands-projets-metro/prolongement-ligne-bleueRight now the STM has a mixed fleet with Azur trains with 3 doors per car and the older trains with 4 doors. For platform screen doors to work, the line needs to be operated with only one type of train. This is why the original plan was for a portion of the Orange line to be equipped because it only uses Azur trains.
It is certainly possible to design the new stations to make it easier to install the platform screen doors in the future.Kate
carswell, the three Laval stations have elevators. Attitudes toward accessibility changed a lot between the last station to open on the island of Montreal (Acadie, 1988) and the Laval extension in 2007.
carswell
@James Thanks for the link. I’d been on the page to make sure it was five and not six pages but obviously missed that info nugget.
@Kate You’re right. Was just thinking about all this talk of the STM not being able to afford stuff.
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Kate
An anglo group is on the verge of launching a new provincial party, the Parti canadien du Québec. This one really may be Equality Party 2.0 – leader Colin Standish is almost a Robert Libman lookalike.
In other anglo news, a protest against Bill 96 is planned for mid‑May by anglos.
Thomas
I suppose the Bloc is something of a Parti québécois du Canada, so there is some nice symmetry here 😉
Tim S.
I guess someone has to organize a protest and it’s going to be an anglo group, but the people I really feel for in Bill 96 are ambitious, non-elite young francophones who are being held back from becoming part of the outside world. It’s really sad that there’s no internationalist party in Quebec, or anyone with the confidence to say that bilingualism is a strength.
Mr.Chinaski
More split votes in the west island between the PLQ and this new party = more chances of seats for the CAQ.
This is good news for them as they are currently making grounds in Laval, Lachine and other more anglo-places.
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Kate
With Moving Day on the horizon, the city knows a lot of households will find themselves without a new place to live.
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Kate
Tanvir Singh, accused of attacking and beating a ten‑year‑old girl on a street in Pointe‑aux‑Trembles last month, has seen his stay in a psych hospital extended by 30 days. I wonder whether it’s because the shrinks can’t make up their minds whether he’s fit for trial, or if they used a legal maneuver to keep this guy off the street.
Ian 21:26 on 2022-04-26 Permalink
Hah yes I’m sure 🙂 Pretty cool, I’m very much looking forward to it.