McGill has a website up about its plans for part of the old Royal Vic.
It’s one of those websites that makes you work to figure out how to navigate around. I thought the UX people had put an end to that idea, but obviously it still pops up from time to time.
It’s not one of the things Montreal brags about, but Pornhub is headquartered here. This week’s New Yorker has an article about the site, its origins, and the difficulties faced by those trying to convince the company to remove video that was posted without their permission.
I wonder how many people know that most of the streaming porn of the world is hosted on the online gambling computer centres in Kahnawake.
@mariah where are you getting your info from? NOBODY at that scale has all their servers/datacenters in one location.
From Mindgeek’s own site:
“The MindGeek infrastructure extends across multiple global datacenters, and is designed to be secure, reliable and efficient.
Though all components in the infrastructure are monitored for performance, we also enable end-to-end service monitoring on all hosted sites. This allows us to meet our response and capacity commitments. Our hosted sites combine to rank in the top ten globally for traffic levels, letting Mindgeek stand alongside a select few who dominate the cyber landscape.
Our production infrastructure is distributed across several global datacenters, divided between North America and Europe. We use a combination of hosting providers to maintain a balance between quality of service delivery and cost, while providing Mindgeek Engineering the flexibility to address capacity and growth.”
https://www.mindgeek.com/services/services-hosting/
La Presse talks to a man who was visiting a Telus phone store when it was held up by two armed robbers.
A study commissioned by Quebec concluded that it’s nearly impossible to learn French in six months but it was not made public before Bill 96 was introduced.
Update: Tuesday brings news of an open letter from tech companies saying the law could hurt recruitment and damage the economy, and asking for mercy.
As Mark Twain once remarked, any fool can learn English in 30 days, French in 30 months or German in 30 years
I’m three years into my allotted 30 and although I can discuss literature and politics, I don’t think I could handle jumping through bureaucracy in German.
Bill 96 is a brilliant multi-functional feat of legislative legerdemain. Wise and skilled political leaders have interpreted the true needs of the body politic to create a series of measures designed to address La Belle Province’s most important priorities: recalcitrant anglophones and other nagging malcontents (racial or ethnic minorities, Montrealers and other aliens) at last will be brought to heel; Quebec will stimulate its bureaucratic apparatus creating thousands of new jobs to support and enforce new regulation; Quebec will correct the gross imbalance in federal receipts relative to the rest of the country with a hitherto undiscussed portion of the legislation–The ROC Enrichment Act will generously send a multitude of our talented, bilingual citizens to struggling, deprived places like Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Halifax(!) that would appreciate a bit of Quebec’s good fortune; the housing crisis will ease as prices and rents drop and thousands of homes and apartment units become available; respect and love for french will bloom among the populace as it is purged of the ignorant. After all, six months is plenty of time to learn la française if you put your mind to it. When I reflect on the foresight and wisdom of Premier Legault, Simon Jolin-Barrette, and the CAQ leadership (all currently villainized in the anglophone media), I feel gratitude, and my heart swells with pride!
It’s all making me think: How in god’s name did they even come up with the six-month notion? Wishful thinking and the idea that if you design a timeframe like that people will conform by sheer pluck and force of will?
At any rate, I’ve seen reported that it won’t come into effect for another year or so, as they piece together the bureaucracy needed to manage/enforce it all. And certainly the devil will be in the implementation/enforcement.
@robert h – you also forgot how it distracted everyone from remembering the shitshow private medical care was during the pandemic. the superior private system that the caq says is the best for health care, but failed royally. Now there’s no more ideas but who cares as long as you ace your next dictee?
B’nai Brith says Jews may leave Quebec following the new language law (Bill 96) because it will become more difficult to find rabbis willing to move here.
Am I cynical to feel that there are some people in Quebec who may feel that getting Jews to leave is a win?
I’m still waiting for the demographic realization about what it really means when more francophones are moving to the regions https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2022/06/13/demographie-des-regions-revitalisees-par-la-pandemie
Interesting, Kevin. As more disgruntled Montrealers find paradise in the country, the chasm between La Métropole and the rest of the province widens. Perhaps a special status can be negociated for the island like the Cold War Pact that instituted West Berlin?
For decades, Quebec governments have taken steps that have weakened French in the rest of the country, such as taking part in lawsuits involving minority language rights, and now the current government is just applying those steps to Montreal, which as everyone knows is really part of Canada and not Quebec. :/
There are concerns that the sex orgy accompanying the Grand Prix may give the monkeypox virus a boost.
A woman fell into a road construction excavation earlier this month when an improvised wooden bridge tipped her in. She was lucky not to be more seriously injured, but it seems pedestrians haven’t the same kind of rights that motorists do when it comes to compensation for road injuries.
Pedestrians, and cyclists alike. I had a bike accident while avoiding a collision with a pedestrian, was transported to the hospital in an ambulance, but when during my long recovery I contacted the SAAQ I was basically told, “Too bad, you won’t get any financial aid. Next time, avoid the pedestrian, but try NOT to avoid those parked cars, but slam right into them.”
Despite me paying into this fund with my driver’s license and car registration, this is a car-only compensation, and the message was clear: other road users are only a nuisance.
I’ve had to make a claim with the SAAQ in the past, as a pedestrian/transit user. I can confirm that they are only concerned with road accidents involving vehicles. I suppose it’s in the name: Société de l’Assurance Automobile du Québec.
But if you get charged by a cop for rolling a stop sign on your bike you get a fine and lose demerit points just as though you were driving a car…
I know an easy trick to not get tickets just as though you were driving a car for blowing through stop signs, crosswalks, red lights…
Follow the rules !
… or simply don’t provide your DL as ID
I have no drivers licence, and the one time I was stopped was while cycling in Île de la Visitation park and strayed onto a footpath that wasn’t clearly marked for no bicycles. There was literally nobody on this path at the time, but the cadet decided to ticket me. He wanted to see a licence. Nope. He then demanded the name and number of a family member to verify my identity. I thought this was bizarre, but it was also futile (I was also clearly not a minor when this happened). It got pretty heated there for a moment and I probably would’ve handed across a licence if I’d had one, just to resolve the thing.
Ended up paying $45 for my mistake. People have told me cadets can’t ticket, but this one certainly did.
This was some time ago.
Save me the sanctimony. I stop for red lights, pedestrians, crosswalks, don’t ride on the sidewalk, don’t ride the wrong way on one way streets, and have never been charged for a bike violation, I’m just pointing out how the system works. I will confess to slowing down and then rolling stop signs when there is no car or pedestrian in sight.
From my understanding, bicycles are vehicles in Quebec, which is why they aren’t allowed on the sidewalk or pedestrian zones. But they aren’t insured like cars. But maybe we should insure them like cars, charge a fee, put up a plate and require a driver’s licence and knowledge of the rules of the road. It certainly would make the roads safer for everyone and share the burden of insurance better.
Cadets are allowed to write tickets as far as I know, as long as they have been trained for it. And as far as I know, bicycles aren’t allowed to be ridden in parks unless it’s a path specific to bicycles… all other pathways are like sidewalks, verboten to bicycles. Unless the laws have changed. And there is no “no bicycle” legal sign, just the sign to “walk your bicycle” or so said my city councillor (who reads this blog from time to time.) Which is why on Prince Arthur there are just those green signs showing to walk your bicycle instead of mow down a pedestrian, especially the folks from the readaptation centre on Sherbrooke, with their walkers and canes.
I really really wish the cops would do something about cyclists in the wrong direction on the streets. It’s not just a nuisance, it’s really dangerous for them… doesn’t anyone study physics anymore? Two vehicles moving towards each other is a lot of momentum!
Demerit points are no longer added to your driving record for bicycle infractions. There was a court case and it as deemed unfair that a driver got a fine and demerit pints while someone without a license got just the fine for the same offense. Fine have, however, tripled since then. (Source -CAA-Quebec)
I got a ticket on my bike once and told the cop I didn’t have a drivers license and used my RAMQ card as ID. Sure enough, a month before my birthday the demerit points were there on the license renewal.
@JohnS, glad to hear they changed it. I never felt it was fair the way it was set up.
@dwgs you almost had me with your high ground, giving me shade fir sanctimony…. until you admitted you broke the law when it suits you. That’s precisely what fines are for, enjoy.
@JohnS well that’s good to know. FWIW I’ve never had a bike fine, surprisingly, given that I’ve been an urban bike rider since childhood and a bike commuter for 25 years of my adult life.
If you get caught, you get fined. If you font want a fine, follow the rules. Unless we are talking about POC especially in working class neighbourhoods, that’s a whole other can of worms even vélo Quebec pretends isn’t an issue. Funny how most of Montreal’s bike infrastructure primarily supports recreational bicycling in gentrified, mostly white neighbourhoods.
@Ian a rolling stop on a bike is COMPLETELY different than in a car. On a bike, you have complete visibility of your surroundings whereas you do not in a car. Case in point, they have made “Idaho Stops” legal in many jurisdictions already because it’s actually SAFER than doing a complete stop. I chose my own safety over legality…
Ian, do you always come to a full and complete stop at every stop sign, even in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night? Do you put one foot down and look about you in all directions, signal every turn? Have you never jaywalked? Are you completely without sin?
I feel like this conversation really got away from the terrible safety practices at Quebec construction sites.
@Ephraim, bikes are not cars. Setting up a licensing system would involve spending millions of dollars to suppress a healthy, democratic and environmentally beneficial way of getting around. Cars are dangerous and environmentally damaging, bicycles are not.
@Ian, I find it really hard to believe you come to a full and complete stop at every single stop sign. Especially when there’s a stop sign every 50m on some streets. There’s no reason why an Idaho stop shouldn’t be legal.
Fair point about the lack of safe bike infrastructure in more ethnically diverse neighbourhoods, but this often comes down to the borough administrations. There was a protest in Montreal North the other day asking for safe bike infrastructure there. It doesn’t seem like a priority for Christine Black.
I don’t see how you can describe most of the infrastructure as recreational though. The REV is purely for transport, as are the Rachel and de Maisonneuve paths – just for example.
@DeWolf – Licencing has nothing to do with any of that. We require people to do many things for the benefit of society at general and government issues licences for many things to prevent chaos. That’s an argument that has no merit in the discussion of licencing. Drinking milk is arguably healthy and yet we have quotas, licences, verifications, pasteurization and minimum prices.
The closer you are to downtown, the more bicycle paths are for transport… because the closer you are to downtown the more the neighbourhoods are pedestrian… you walk to work and school at that point.
Many places used to issue bicycle licences, including Quebec. They all abandoned the practice because it was a waste of money and completely ineffective in preventing bad behaviour.
Licensing would also be an effective ban on children riding bikes because, well, how do you license a child?
Toronto has considered it on many occasions and always decides against it:
https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking-transportation/cycling-in-toronto/cycling-and-the-law/bicycle-licencing/
Ottawa discovered that bike licences would cost $100,000 to implement while bringing in only $40,000 in revenue:
https://greenactioncentre.ca/healthy-travel/bike-licensing/
Again, licensing would be counterproductive, because it would prevent many people from cycling due to the cost and hassle of getting a licence – especially poor people who don’t have the means, time or ability to navigate complicated bureaucracy. That, in turn, would have negative consequences for our healthcare system and our environment, because high rates of cycling mean healthier people and less carbon being pumped into the atmosphere.
“I really really wish the cops would do something about cyclists in the wrong direction on the streets. It’s not just a nuisance, it’s really dangerous for them… doesn’t anyone study physics anymore? Two vehicles moving towards each other is a lot of momentum!”
We could start by eliminatig bike ‘lanes’ that run against traffic. Take, for example, Clark between Villeneuve and St.-Joseph. The cars go one-way north. There’s an implied bike path (no lines) along the east side of the street running in the same direction as the cars, connecting (vaguely) the southern Plateau with the Clark bike path that begins north of Laurier. There’s also a painted bike lane heading south, connecting the Clark bike path with the southern Plateau. If you have a car and you’ve parked on the west side of the street, you are pulling out of your spot directly into an incoming bike lane. But because there is most likely a car parked right in front of you, you cannot see whether there are cyclists approaching your car. If you don’t have someone on the passenger side to scout the lane, you wind up pulling into traffic blindly, with no idea whether a cyclist is approaching (often with good speed), making a collision extremely likely.
+1000 for everything DeWold said. Imagine if you needed an SAAQ-issued license to ride a bixi every once in a while.
You can run every example of it, but the fact is, until there is a licence system in place, you aren’t insured… and you can’t expect there to be insurance. There has to be a way to collect an insurance premium. And that was the point of the discussion.
Since we seem to be mostly back on track to the original topic, I did some quik googling and if you’re a member of Velo Quebec, you automatically get insured for accidents involving bodily injury (but not material damages): https://www.velo.qc.ca/en/toolkits/couverture-dassurance-offerte-aux-membres-de-velo-quebec/
VQ has also been advocating for the automobile insurance act to protect all cyclists and pedestrians, even if no motor vehicle is involved.
I know not everyone has home or tenant’s insurance, but depending on your coverage, your home insurance can cover material damages to your bike, since it’s considered your property, even though an accident occurred away from home. You might have to pay a deductible so would only make sense if your bike had major damage.
A little late, but I came across this communiqué from Piétons Quebec about discussions at the Nation Assembly about expanding SAAQ eligibility to accidents in which no (motor?) vehicle was involved:
https://www.pietons.quebec/nouvelle/2022/toutes-les-personnes-blessees-route-seront-prises-en-compte
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