CBC says Montreal has 50,000 Moroccan immigrants, and a lot of them were out in the street Saturday after their side beat Portugal to progress to the World Cup semifinals.
I’m not seeing any reports yet about the French team’s supporters celebrating the defeat over England.
On TVA, a piece about how hard the SPVM works to track suspects down to the four corners of the globe is next to another saying that the new police chief, Fady Dagher, will be paid more than the maximum rate for city functionaries.
Does he get paid for overtime?
But seriously, I actually prefer him getting paid a lot and be less corruptible. And if he was the CEO of a company with +5000 employees he’d make much more, but of course that company would also have a larger revenue, and profit.
But would it be more or less off mission?
La Presse’s Stéphane Laporte has an affecting piece Saturday on the experience of having a cat for a long time, and then it dies.
Thanks for the link Kate – enjoyed reading this tribute to his cat. They truly are amazing creatures and can somehow always ‘read the room’. I was recovering from surgeries and feeling miserable at home x 1.5 years and our cat became my best friend while family was at work/school; she changed her routine to keep me occupied.
Misogynist blogger Jean-Claude Rochefort had his sentencing hearing this week over his hate posts about women and his open praise of the Polytechnique killer. It wasn’t only hate: Rochefort had posted photos of two UQÀM professors, making an implicit threat. Going by this piece, he has no regret for his attitudes. Rochefort will hear his sentence in January.
It’s a minor detail, but Mayssa Ferah adds that Rochefort had an alter ego called Ulrich. Back in the day, on the BBSes, the first time I ever encountered a user sowing race and gender hatred online it was someone with the username Ulrich. Could be a coincidence but it makes me wonder.
The proliferation of orange cones has practically become as typical of this city as bagels and smoked meat, but now the city is promising to organize street work sites to be less intrusive to daily life.
A couple weeks ago, I wasn’t paying attention while walking on a sidewalk and ran straight into one of those temporary street signs that had lost its weighted base and tipped over. Without the weight, it’s just a big piece of flat metal with sharp corners sticking up at a slight angle right at shin level. I messed up both shins and one knee pretty badly but was lucky to have nothing more serious than a limp for about a week. Had I run into it at another angle, I might have cut myself pretty badly. Since that happened, I notice one of these signs tipped over almost every day and usually put them back up now. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been injured by one of these signs.
I’ve occasionally thought of tipping signs back up, but assumed they might be down on purpose because the directions were not currently valid. But if city workers are doing that, they certainly need to make sure they’re not turning the metal signs into dangerous traps for pedestrians.
Mayor Plante has made a promise to protect 30% of the city’s area for nature. As with other promises being made during COP15, we will see whether it’s possible for them to be kept later.
Federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault has just promised he will soon have the means to protect the monarch butterfly field near the airport.
Reports that the Parti québécois have insisted on renaming them “democratically elected butterflies” have not been confirmed.
Would Mount-Royal park count as nature? Park de Maisonneuve? Park Frédéric-Back? Even a large amount of the trees in the various Nature Parks on the island are of very recent date, and a lot of their area was agricultural a few decades ago. I think Green Space is a better term, and it definitely needs to be protected from being used for suburban housing, roads and industry.
(And big LOL about the butterfly joke.)
(I see that the term nature is Kate’s, and Plante calls it ‘green and blue space’, so disregard my comment.)
Yes sorry, my sloppy on-the-fly interpretation.
This official piece also mentions nature.
Some board games are not available in French, or else the French version comes out much later or is more expensive. The OQLF may be able to intervene to ban the sale of English‑only games.
Not for recent big games, but you can often get a board game cheaper in French bc it’s less popular.
Well… online games aren’t available either. Let see them ban them. I want to see how that will go down… please!
As a connoisseur of the finer points of life in Quebec, I thought I knew my Charte de la langue française. But I was shocked to learn this morning that English boardgames (or technically non-French boardgames — an important distinction as many of the best ones are actually in German) are basically illegal in Quebec. Who knew? I’m surprised that’s even constitutional to be honest.
Meanwhile, that fact that English books are still legal can only be seen as an affront to the Quebec nation. Hopefully this intolerable situation will not be allowed to continue.
Thomas, it’s been a long time that products not labelled in French, or failing to include instructions in French, have been illegal here. I used to see reports and complaints that certain toys, hobby kits and other items couldn’t be sold here, but the problem has largely disappeared with the rise of online shopping.
Further down in the article they explain that cultural products are exempted from the Charte, and that the industry here (and in France) is lobbying to have boardgames recognized as cultural products with the same rights as books or films.
Strangely enough, non-French videogames are allowed to exist because there is already an exception in the Charte for software. It’s all very arbitrary and not well thought out at all, even broche à foin you might say. Quelle suprise…
@Kate the Charte bans their sale here outright, and specifically mentions online shopping as being illegal too. It’s just that most online merchants apparently ignore the rule and the Canadian federation being a customs union makes it hard to enforce. Although the article mentions that Hasbro sells many of their games everywhere in the Western world except Quebec, illustrated with a screenshot of the Hasbro website refusing to ship the Wordle game to Quebec.
And thus the French language was saved.
AFAIK Non-French movies are only allowed to have a limited run (8 weeks?), unless there’s also a French version (dubbed or subtitled) available. I can’t find an online source for this, someone told me.
I’m pretty sure that’s true, mare, but I don’t know where to look it up.
By now, Bill 101 must be quite a thick book with all the rulings and exceptions that have been made since.
My kids really like The Game of Life. I wanted to buy it for them in French because I like to have them practice their French. The french version is much more expensive and never goes on sale. I ended up buying it in English.
As for things not being sold in Quebec because of lack of French instructions or packaging, not everyone follows those rules. Mostly, Amazon just completely ignores them. Case in point:
https://www.amazon.ca/Hasbro-Wordle-Players-Official-Inspired/dp/B0B5B9CP17
Est Média has an interesting history piece on Rosemont and its quarries.
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