A party with three seats in the National Assembly is supporting the “right” of a party with no seats at all to be included somehow in the National Assembly.
The argument that “some people like our ideas so it’s antidemocratic to exclude us” is a novel one. An antidemocratic and specious one, but a novel one.
The three PQ MNAs have still not taken the oath, so it’s not clear whether they will be allowed to sit either. As for Éric Duhaime – well, there isn’t even a chair for him.
The David Suzuki Foundation has offered to help the city fulfil its promise to plant 500,000 trees by 2030.
Montreal is in Bee News this week with its plans for more greenery for the stripey ones.
La Presse talked to several people involved in Quebec’s efforts to support biodiversity about their hopes for COP15.
The Guardian has a good, but not very sanguine, forecast of COP15.
A lot of organizations are relying on the COP15 moment to get some traction in the media. Metro reports on a consortium calling itself G15+ that wants to place le bien-être de la population front and centre in Quebec’s affairs, with some environmental spin – not a terrible idea, but not a lot to say about biodiversity.
We’ll see a lot of that tailcoating over the next few weeks.
(Also, I wonder how much governent money G15+ was given to write and put up a website with graphics that make your eyes go funny.)
Radio-Canada looks into how CSSDM schools are managing to teach an influx of child refugees coming from Ukraine and via Roxham Road. (Second link is English version of same story on CBC.)
Curious that the anti-immigrant assholes aren’t there harassing these refugees.
The CP Holiday Train is in town Sunday night, making stops in Montreal West and Beaconsfield.
Why do we do this? Jews have Hanukah, they celebrate it on Hanukah. Muslims have Eid, they celebrate it on Eid. Hindus have Diwali… well, you get the idea. But we have “Holiday” which gets smeared through the calendar starting right after Halloween (if we’re lucky) and dragging on for two months. How is the “Holiday” supposed to mean anything, if it drags on for so long?
Why “raise holiday spirits” as mentioned in the article – a full month ahead of the actual holiday?
I bet people are starting to have Christmas parties already, right?
I may have ranted about this before. I don’t hate Christmas and I like the lights, but why can’t we contain the damn thing?
Christmas in July?
I’m sure it’s been discussed on this blog before, but what gets me is the black hole from January through to April without any holidays.
We totally need a long weekend in February, but François Legault has been determined not to give out more statutory holidays because it’s bad for productivity. I don’t remember discussing it here but it wouldn’t surprise me.
It’s a festive season partly because it’s the darkest season. You need a month or two of partying and indulgence to get you through it.
Admittedly, it feels very dark these days.
Don’t forget that even though winter is just starting, the shortest day of the year is less than a month away. Temperature != Light. Like June 21 is the longest day of the year but just signals the beginning of the warm season.
The holiday season idea perhaps originates with Advent — the 4 weeks before Christmas. Also note, that celebrations in Europe have started in preparation for Saint Nicholas Day on December 6. Personally, I would wish that Montreal would have a Krampus parade.
I think celebrations around this time of year actually predate Christmas. I’ve heard Christmas was moved to December when they were trying to convert the pagans who celebrated a festival around the solstice.
https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-rome/saturnalia
@JP – He was more likely born around Passover, Feast of Weeks or the Festival of Tabernacles, since it was most likely related to the three pilgrimages… which would explain why there was no room for them to stay. Of course, there is also the question of if it would have been even recorded as December as that wasn’t a month in the Hebrew calendar, never mind the fact that there was the Roman calendar and then the Julian calendar reform to deal with. And of course the 10 months to a year with December being the last and tenth month, hence the dec
I would have liked to have seen the holiday train and I have guests in town, one is a little girl from a country that doesn’t have trains and gets excited every time she sees one. It would have been nice had the media reported on it coming rather than telling us that it happened. Also, an filing an article on Sunday saying “coming this Sunday” and not saying that it was that night or the next week is very sloppy.
CE, I posted about it as soon as I saw the news, but they did leave it awfully late.
CE, here’s an idea to entertain your young guest, https://exporail.org/en/home/
CTV looks at how both protesters and police are planning for the COP15 meeting.
Saturday saw a demonstration in Outremont in which a dozen or so strollers were placed to block the intersection of Bloomfield and Lajoie, where a woman pushing her child was clipped in a hit‑and‑run this week. They want traffic calming in the area.
A construction materials company has been fined $40,000 for dumping dirty snow in an area of the South Shore sacrosanct to Quebec’s smallest frog, the rainette faux-grillon or western chorus frog.
Nice CBC piece on how one of the city’s overly lavish parish churches saved its bells from an unstable bell tower by bringing them inside the church itself.
La Presse has a good piece Sunday on whether we can or should save all the churches and looking at various ways disused church buildings in the city have already been repurposed.
Years after the fact, the city is putting up $3 million to compensate people whose right to protest was infringed in the student‑led protests from 2012 to 2014.
The Parti Québécois will be getting what it calls a bare minimum budget and not a lot of questions in the National Assembly, based on having only three seats. Paul St‑Pierre Plamondon pushed for more, based on the PQ getting 14.6% of the popular vote, while the PLQ is the official opposition on 14.3% of the vote, but 19 seats. QS has 11 MNAs and 15.4% of the vote.
CTV adds that PSPP will get a limousine and a bodyguard. Not so bad after all.
St-Chose Plamondon should be taking the bus. And they should be ashamed to ask for the people to pay for their folly. If you don’t get the vote, you don’t get the budget. The budget is to represent your constituents, not those who voted for you.
Oh look someone else that isn’t in power that wishes we had proportional representation. Why not make it a campaign promise to enact vote reform, like all the other hypocrites. I don’t recall the PQ agitating for vote reform when they were doing well either.
I don’t recall the PQ agitating for vote reform when they were doing well either.
That’s the problem. It’s never in the interest of the ruling party to make a change that would cut its dominance, as we’ve seen twice recently when both Justin Trudeau and François Legault quickly abandoned the idea after promising to make changes.
In the unlikely scenario that the PQ ever retakes power (you never know, in Quebec), watch its chief – whoever it is at that time – find an argument against vote reform pretty quickly.
Well yes, precisely – but this is one of the core problems with a democracy based on relatively short terms, it leads to short-term thinking. Those short terms were conceived as a means to prevent too much consolidation of power of course, but in some instances like FPTP and gerrymandering the opposite emergent effect becomes evident.
The federal government is going to pay for 91 units of social housing in Outremont. It’s a drop in a bucket, but a nice bucket at that.
Nice down there too at MIL de l’Université de Montréal. I quite like what they’ve done elsewhere in that new area.
I guess it’s a course correction to make up for how much adjacent Parc Ex has been radically gentrified /s
Gabriel Sohier Chaput appeared in a Montreal courtroom this week, on one charge of fomenting hatred, but his lawyer held the position that we don’t know that the Nazis killed six million Jews. Transcripts of Sohier Chaput’s writings in these items are testament to Sohier Chaput’s will to foster hatred, I think. The judge will render his verdict on January 23.
As far as I can tell, this is happening because the prosecutor seems incredibly lazy (overworked, maybe?) and by not bothering to prove things that are easily provable is giving the defence the chance to play games.
From CTV: “Emmanuelle Amar, Quebec policy and research director at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs,” is correct that “”The Holocaust is the most carefully documented genocide in the world, it was documented by its perpetrators, by their victims, by bystanders; there is physical evidence, there is all kinds of evidence of the Holocaust,” she said. “It’s an undisputed fact.”
And the prosecutor is acting like a seventh-grader to suggest: “that the judge could look in the Encyclopaedia Britannica”
Why not get Amar to testify?
Given that the case revolves around the defendant’s use of language I would hope that the court would want to define the words in question very carefully.
Also going from the CTV article, I don’t think the prosecutor should have to prove the holocaust was done by Nazis, and it should be “judicially noticed.” In fact, I’m kind of astounded that someone who is a judge thinks there’s enough room for discussion that he “rebuked the prosecution for not calling an expert witness to establish that the murder of Jews by the regime of Adolf Hitler was a consequence of Nazi ideology.”
Things to do this weekend: CityCrunch, Daily Hive, CultMTL.
Merchants in the zone around the Palais des Congrès are worried about the effects the COP15 barriers will have on business, especially with the news that they may be left up till January, blighting the holiday season.
Although there’s some indication here that COP15 deliberations may last beyond December 19, the official ending date, the real reason for not removing them seems to be simply that the contract says they needn’t guarantee their complete removal till after the Christmas break.
Blork 12:06 on 2022-11-28 Permalink
Seems to me it’s the PQ hedging against a future election where they get results similar to what the Conservatives got this time around. After all, the actual number of votes cast for PQ and Conservatives is pretty close. PQ just lucked out on distribution (this time).
Tim S. 12:24 on 2022-11-28 Permalink
Actually, I would argue that the electoral system is close to completely broken – those two parties together represent 27% of voters and have 2.4% of seats. I suspect an ad-hoc attempt to alleviate the distortion without making long-term changes is the worst outcome, though I don’t blame the Conservatives and PQ for kicking up a fuss.
qatzelok 12:34 on 2022-11-28 Permalink
I agree with Tim S. An electoral system that gives a party that received 10% of the votes zero seats, is not fundtionning properly.
Our FPTP system was introduced in the late 1700s and seems suited to a manichean worldview of “good versus evil,” rather than the complex social web the we live in today. It only works if you have two parties. And even then… has a tendency to silence minority voices entirely.
steph 14:15 on 2022-11-28 Permalink
I’d say it’s broken when 37.42% gives a majority..
Kate 15:33 on 2022-11-28 Permalink
Well, it needs to be fixed. But the PQ was elected (and the PCQ not elected) under the current rules. They can’t weasel more power under these rules, they accepted them when they opted to run.
I suppose, although in theory I’ve been in favour of some electoral reform, I can now see how it could give fringe and possibly even dangerously nutbar parties a place in government.
jeather 16:34 on 2022-11-28 Permalink
There are alternate voting methods that require a minimum percentage of votes received to get power, so you don’t get a bunch of parties that each got 3% causing trouble.
I have heard it said that the only worse system than FPTP is LPTP.
Ephraim 17:43 on 2022-11-28 Permalink
Either we change the voting system, which no one seems interested in doing OR we run the system as it has been running and stop placating those who were in power who promised to change the system but didn’t
Wahwahwah… you should have realized that there would be a time when you weren’t in power and agreed to change the system
The same goes for the CAC… they will one day no longer be in power. And the PQ, the Action Democratique, the Equality Party, the Union Nationale, Action Liberale Nationale, and the Conservatives (just to name a few who were in the NA… some that were even the governments and are gone) should realize that political affiliations change and maybe it’s time to change the system before they wane… not when you are out of favour and you have to come begging to survive
Then again, the Conservatives haven’t been around since the 1890s. Duplessis and the Union Nationale was in the 1930s and last we heard from them was the 1970s.
I’m so sick and tired of baby boomers running things…. people who think fax machines are new fangled… I’m dealing with an estate at the moment and here I am waiting for a paper death certificate, a paper form from the notaries saying what was the last will, a paper form from the lawyers saying what was the last will and then needing certified copies for all the damn organizations, rather than have certified PDF files… because no one wants the damn paperwork anymore.. we want to store all this in the damn cloud!
Tim S. 19:17 on 2022-11-28 Permalink
There’s an argument to be made for letting ahem, “smaller” parties in and seeing how they handle responsibility, instead of letting the sense of resentment fester. The recent history of the federal Green party is instructive in this regard. Sadly, in my opinion, but the point stands.