A volunteer group that looks out for marine mammals says no minke whale has been seen for two days around St Helen’s Island.
Updates from May, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Rima Elkouri looks again at the Bill 96 plan to give newcomers a mere six months to learn French after which it will be illegal for anyone paid by government to speak with them in any other language. The quotations in the lede, taken from responses to her column last week, have a familiar feel to me. (Some of my French teachers in school tended to sound like that – as if not knowing French were a moral failure, we just had to want it enough and the knowledge would appear. We clearly did not want it enough.)
(Update to my thoughts here. It was even weirder. It was as if knowing French was only natural, and that we were unnatural in not knowing it. It wasn’t about learning a language at all.)
Elkouri notes that the bill does not distinguish between the immigrant with the means to learn French as they prepare their arrival, and the desperate asylum seeker with few resources and no leisure time for lessons.
It’s cold comfort that mean-eyed Simon Jolin‑Barrette is quoted in the Gazette saying anglos don’t have to worry. Believe it or not, it’s not only ourselves we’re worried about.
Blork
When I first arrived in Quebec I learned that the course fee for the government-sponsored French lessons was $35 — or $200 if my mother tongue was English.
That blatant discrimination pretty much set the tone for the rest of my life in Quebec.
I was poor AF, so I lied and said that since I was from Nova Scotia, Gaelic was my first language. (The woman taking the money didn’t even blink and took the $35.)
The first course was great. The teacher was a Tunisian man who made the lessons fun and was very encouraging. I did well and looked forward to more.
The second course was the opposite. The teacher was right out of a Dickens novel. She was mean, and made the lessons no fun at all. It was just going up and down the aisles in the room, repeating things as if we were seven-year-olds memorizing the times table. And if you made a mistake it was very clear that she thought of you as both an idiot and a moral failure. I quit in the middle of the course and never went back.
Daniel
Blork, that’s a great story.
My French classes were free and overall good, but they did not, say, prepare me to seek treatment for a complicated neurological condition in French six months after I landed here. Why the hell would they? And yet here we are.
Fortunately, my brain stayed healthy for a few years after I arrived. Buuuut… I’m going to go out on a limb and say that was just “luck” and under Bill 96 I’d be hosed. And I generally learn quite well in a classroom setting, I already spoke a Romance language, and I was able to dedicate time/energy to learning French because I had no 9-to-5-job/children/etc.!
Six months is just a weird, punitive amount of time, especially as applied without exceptions.
Kate
Someone tweeted the observation that in avoiding a debate in which he’d have to speak English – a language he’s undoubtedly had more than six months’ exposure to, but in which he’s only marginally comfortable – François Legault is revealing that learning a second language takes a lot longer than six months, and is harder to do, than the exigencies of his pet bill suggest.
GC
HA. That’s great.
I’m sure they did some analysis and came to the conclusion that, if he did it, he would piss off more francophones than any anglophones he’d impress. And I doubt the CAQ are really counting on the anglo vote, anyway.
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Kate
The city’s inspector general is not happy with some of the recent lapses in the STM’s approach to awarding contracts, including giving work to a firm where the wife of the STM’s project manager happened to work.
Meanwhile, a different officer, the Vérificatrice générale, slammed the city for poor coordination of city work sites. She was also not impressed with how the city is getting on with planting trees.
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Kate
The big news all day has been the report by coroner Géhane Kamel on the deaths in CHSLDs early in the pandemic. She has some acute observations, the biggest probably being that the Quebec public health director needs to be a more independent role and not also be a deputy health minister. The person in that role should not be constrained by political considerations.
Kamel also suggests ending private CHSLDs and doing more for supporting the aged in their own homes. Le Devoir lists all her other recommendations in their piece and the Gazette notes the major points as well.
Some want a public inquiry into the failures that led to so many deaths in CHSLDs at that time.
Meezly
Didn’t the CAQ look into the possibility of ending private CHSLDs and eventually found that it would be “too hard” and “too expensive” to provincialize them? At the time, it seemed that they had given up that idea. Will the coroner’s report do anything to change that?
Same deal for protecting the French language – too hard and too costly to make real changes, like invest in and improve public education. Much easier to push a divisive bill like 96.
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Kate
The cost of renovating city hall continues to rise, outstripping the maximum estimated in 2018 – before the pandemic, and before workers and building materials were in such short supply.
Remember, the building we know was improvised on the ruins of a building from 1878 that suffered a severe fire a century ago and hadn’t had more than cosmetic upgrades since that time. As Émilie Thuillier says, they keep opening walls and finding surprises.
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Kate
The Biodome’s lynx has had a litter of three kittens and there’s some brief video of the mom and babies in a nest. The Biodome says the kittens may go public in the course of the summer.
Taylor C. Noakes
Like we can invest in the lynxes?
I wonder what the IPO will be!
A-yuk-yuk-yuk!
MarcG
Watch the full 4:49 CTV video for some big cringe oopsies.
Blork
OMG 1: Kitties!
OMG 2: Someone needs to buy Derek Conlon a drink tonight to console him for that video error!
EmilyG
I like the “fun fact” in the article:
“FUN FACT: A group of lynx is called a chain.”dhomas
Oh, Derek!
At first I thought the error was that someone had done a video capture of an Instagram page, instead of just linking to it. But then I wondered “who is Derek Conlon?”. Then I saw the rest. Ouch!JP
I don’t see the video you’re all referring to. What was in it?
EmilyG
I notified CTV of the error. I think the video has been taken down now.
EmilyG
A lynk to the Biodome’s original lynx video: https://www.instagram.com/p/CdnuPFMM3VY/
dhomas
@JP the original video showed someone, presumably Derek Conlon, capturing video of their desktop which at first was showing the video feed of the lynxes from the “Espaces pour la vie” Instagram page. As the Instagram video ended, we could see the user interacting with their desktop, checking emails, sending stuff to Dropbox, etc. It all just seemed very amateurish.
MarcG
My favourite part is they don’t use the keyboard shortcuts to copy & paste. New headline “CTV Editors Are Boomers – Video”.
Blork
The video is back up but it’s been edited down to 36 seconds, with the offending part removed.
From a production POV there are failures from two different people here. The person who captured the video (presumably Derek Conlon) didn’t stop the screen capturing after the intended bit was captured, and just let it keep running. Then that person didn’t check the video in full before sending it to the production people.
Then the production person just dumped it in without checking it.
If I were the boss at CTV, I’d be giving a tut-tut to Derek Conlon, but a serious talking-to to the production person.
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Kate
The city is trying to work out a way to reignite its nightlife but keep the noise down in areas where venues are close to residences. Longer opening hours and grants for better soundproofing are in the plans.
Taylor C. Noakes
Making sure that there’s no rent control such that only Tim Horton’s, A&W, Foot Locker, Pharmaprix and BMO ATM can afford commercial rents on major thoroughfares, as well as ensuring no money whatsoever will be spent to support the city’s old theatres is certainly a winning strategy.
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Kate
The price of gasoline has reached a new peak here at $2.15 a litre.
If a pandemic is not enough to keep people working from home who can, maybe the price of gas will be persuasive.
Bert
Do you actually think that any megalomaniac boss that NEEDS to see their minions every day cares about gas prices? I don’t know many people who get compensated for day-to-day commuting particularly with their own vehicle.
Jonathan
I had read somewhere that in today’s dollars, gas prices are still cheapy than they were in 2009.
Faiz imam
$2 in 2022 is 1.53 in 2009.
So it’s pretty close
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Kate
A con man capable of epic confabulation has been jailed for 20 months. Even this relatively short piece in La Presse suggests the complexity of the lies spun by Guy Lacombe to extract money from his victims.
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Kate
A man who was hit by a tanker truck Sunday downtown has died of his injuries.
mare
🙁
(Is that the first pedestrian killed this year or is your sidebar stat not yet updated?)
Every dead or injured pedestrian is one too many but it’s a miracle there aren’t more. I regularly see near-misses where the pedestrian has to jump away and/or the car/truck comes to a screeching halt just before the driver hits someone. Trucks have terrible blind corners but pedestrians and bikes should be aware of that as well and act with caution. Especially trucks that are already slightly turned, don’t see anything on the crosswalk or bike path anymore. Not staring at your phone screen while crossing and glance over your shoulder are also good habits to develop if you want to stay alive.
Kate
mare, I thought I had. It’s updated now. The only previous one I’m aware of this year was a man killed in an incident with a cube van in Rosemont in March. But police don’t keep a count of pedestrians killed in traffic as they do with homicides.
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Kate
Radio-Canada says the body found in the burnt‑out car on Sunday morning was that of Hugues Leblanc, who had been involved with the Hells Angels, making this the third recent killing put to their account. La Presse’s Daniel Renaud recounts some of Leblanc’s history.
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