Twenty-five cases of monkeypox have been confirmed in Quebec, with 14 of them in Montreal. Contacts of these cases will be offered vaccination.
Updates from May, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Tony Accurso lost his appeal and is facing four years in prison for contract collusion. Accurso is 70 years old.
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Kate
Sad to report that a minke whale was found dead in the river near Contrecœur.
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Kate
The city has to carry out Bill 96, but wants to know how it can discriminate between those with a right to be spoken to in English, and those without. “How can the person who picks up at the other end of the [311] line know whether the person calling him has the right to have services in English?” asks the chair of the city’s executive committee. How indeed.
azrhey
I am reading this at my Drs office. We usually speak in French to each other because we default to that, but he serves his patients in french, english, spanish, hebrew and arabic. The waiting room is a hodge-podge of anything from Argentine dialect to Pashto and lots of other languages I don’t recognize. The admin staff usually adresses newcomers in French. but sometimes if she has two or three patients in arabic she’ll greet me with that ( gotta love my “non descript mediterranean genes” )… sometimes I answer in English, sometimes I answer in Spanish…. and I love Montreal for all of this!
I was born in France, I did all my school in French, French litt and French linguistics included. And as a bona fide professionelle de la langue française, my opinion is that this bill, and others like this have the exact opposite results that they want. You don’t protect a language by shoving it down people’s throats, you show them how to love using it.DeWolf
That sums it up beautifully, azrhey, both the problems with this bill and the way Montreal works in real life.
Robert H
@Azrhey : Exactement, parce que la loi 96 est subordonnée à la loi des conséquences imprévues.
J’aimerais organiser une rencontre entre vous et le premier. Vous pouvez jaser un peu, peut-être avec un verre (vin, bière, gin). Essayez de lui parler avec bon sens. Pensez-vous qu’il vous écoutera ?
Oh well, let the lawsuits begin.
azrhey
Il m’écoutera peut-être, mais je suis certaine qu’il ne m’entendrait pas : je ne ferai jamais partie de son électorat cible et pour lui, rien d’autre ne compte.
Uatu
Interesting take in Bill 96 from a Washington Post op Ed:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/26/quebec-bill-96-french-language-nationalism/
Robert H
That was interesting Uatu. J.J. McCollough is a talented writer and rhetorician (see his amusing/annoying youtube videos). He makes a sharp argument here against bill 96. His argument would be even sharper if it weren’t stained with Quebec-bashing in particular and francophobia in general. He’s perceptive about the position of Montreal relative to the ROQ, and he compliments the city. But he completely misses the point about Québécois sensitivity to survival of its language and culture. In fact he gleefully mocks it. That alone wins him a following in the ROC and the States. Of course one could say that Bill 96, a classic blunt instrument deserves at least a few sneers. It’s a badly-built contraption that won’t endure, but you don’t fight it by vilifying Quebec and branding it a stain on the otherwise pristine progressive face of Canada.
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Kate
The city has created a framework for overseeing households offering space for refugees from Ukraine. A flight is expected to touch down here on May 29. There will be background checks and the scope of the offers will be defined so that nobody’s misled about what to expect.
I think this is very wise. You’re dropping people abruptly into a new culture and it’s smart to make sure expectations are understood, and also that nobody falls into the hands of pimps or crooks.
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Kate
Here’s part two and part three of Linda Gyulai’s examination of the state of the Metropolitan and its future.
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Kate
This week the mayor restated her demand to the federal government to crack down on handguns as news of the massacre in Texas unfolded amid a mood of concern for gun play here in town, including recent bullet pocks on a daycare in Rivière‑des‑Prairies.
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Kate
A report submitted to the National Assembly slams the ARTM, the entity that manages public transit in the Montreal area. This is one of those news stories: what are the odds the report is not biased in such a way to give the CAQ government extra leverage over the city, even if it does contain some legitimate criticisms?
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