Updates from December, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 23:41 on 2022-12-19 Permalink | Reply  

    I made a few small corrections to the calendar, which is available in PDF form by clicking the graphic above.

    All the pages are 11×8.5″ with the art and the calendar layout on alternating pages.

    In previous years I’ve made the final calendar on a full 11×17 tabloid page. I could still do that if anyone speaks up and asks for it, but if not, I’ll leave it.

    I can also easily create a PDF which has only the holidays but not the historical data, leaving room for the classic calendar purpose of writing on the squares. Speak up and I can do it for you.

     

    • Herve 17:48 on 2022-12-21 Permalink

      Great work, I love it! The September metro one in particular is gorgeous

    • Kate 21:07 on 2022-12-21 Permalink

      Thank you, Herve.

  • Kate 22:28 on 2022-12-19 Permalink | Reply  

    I noticed a post to Facebook from a user called QuebecVortex the following: “Une tempête potentiellement historique est sur les radars depuis maintenant quelques jours pour le soir du vendredi 23 décembre et l’avant-midi du samedi 24 décembre.” There’s already a Special Weather Statement on the weather page warning of big weather coming starting Thursday evening.

    TVA is afraid Christmas Eve will be ruined as other media outlets ponder the oncoming storm. Nathalie Collard noticed, as I did, that there was no sand or gravel on the sidewalks Monday as the snow deliquesced into ice.

     

    • Blork 09:48 on 2022-12-20 Permalink

      Friday is going up to 9C with rain, then plunging back below zero. I’m dreaming of an icy Christmas.

    • walkerp 13:21 on 2022-12-20 Permalink

      Yeah, a lot of weird mixed messaging on this one.

    • Joey 17:24 on 2022-12-20 Permalink

      Those QuebecVortex maps are hard to read, but it looks like Montreal might be spared the worst of it – lots of wind though…

  • Kate 18:16 on 2022-12-19 Permalink | Reply  

    London has enlarged its zero-emissions zone, and the Plante administration is hoping to emulate it in the downtown area, at least by 2030. Quebec is not interested in participating.

     

    • Kate 18:08 on 2022-12-19 Permalink | Reply  

      The Journal reports tersely that workers covered up the holes in the triplex wall that fell down recently in Little Italy. Whether the structure is otherwise sound or safe is not mentioned.

       

      • Kate 15:24 on 2022-12-19 Permalink | Reply  

        A new refugee centre will open this summer. Refugees have been bunked at the Hyatt in Place Dupuis, but soon they’ll be given space, four to a room, at a onetime office building on Port‑Royal just east of St‑Laurent, in Ahuntsic. It looks like nowhere in particular, but the location is minutes from both Sauvé metro and Sauvé Exo station, with a couple of decent-sized parks nearby, so it has its points.

         

        • MarcG 20:45 on 2022-12-19 Permalink

          “Office buildings converted into cramped apartments for refugees”. It’s a perfect overlap of the climate and covid twin apocalypse.

      • Kate 14:41 on 2022-12-19 Permalink | Reply  

        Newly released results from the 2021 census show that the number of trilinguals is growing here, indeed making Montreal unique in North America in this category.

         

        • Blork 15:04 on 2022-12-19 Permalink

          Triple threat!

        • Hub 16:24 on 2022-12-19 Permalink

          And I noticed that so many francophones in MTL are also fluent in Spanish, even thogh it’s not one of their mother-tongues.
          Anyway, I believe the prevailing and prospering multilingualism is a 100% good addition to MTL’s uniqueness among cities of ‘North Generica’.

        • DeWolf 18:19 on 2022-12-19 Permalink

          @Hub: That’s reflected in the census. In 2021, there were 179,555 Spanish-as-a-second-language speakers in Montreal (compared to 142,175 native speakers). All told, 7.6% of people in Greater Montreal can speak Spanish.

          By contrast, Toronto has 96,900 second language Spanish speakers. The overall percentage of people there who can speak Spanish is 3.7%.

        • CE 19:30 on 2022-12-19 Permalink

          I had some guests visiting from South America and was blown away by how many people were trying out their Spanish with them. I know a few Francophones who are more fluent in Spanish than in English.

        • Daniel 10:35 on 2022-12-21 Permalink

          This is very cool and made me happy to read.

      • Kate 14:36 on 2022-12-19 Permalink | Reply  

        A 14-year-old girl went missing in NDG in 1954. Susan Schwartz recounts how a consumer genetic testing kit helped investigators figure out where she went and what she did with her life, although with unanswerable questions like: was she kidnapped, and did she marry willingly at age 16? (Also, how can someone marry at 16 without parental consent?)

        The piece wraps up with something of an encomium for DNA kits in helping solve mysteries. Maybe so, but it does mean that innocent people who simply want to start over fresh somewhere unknown can be tracked down.

         

        • Blork 15:16 on 2022-12-19 Permalink

          I’m guessing that in the 1950s it was pretty easy to just lie about your age. Especially for a girl. The man she was marrying probably had to be more forthcoming, and any financial aspects (job, rental arrangement, mortgage, etc.) all would have been in the man’s name. The female was just bolted on to provide child rearing and keep the house clean. No need to show an ID for that.

        • Josh 15:55 on 2022-12-19 Permalink

          Also, I believe 16 remains the current legal age for marriage to this day in Canada. (There are definitely many countries and some US states where it’s even lower than that.)

        • Kate 15:57 on 2022-12-19 Permalink

          True. Also since she was German and came here after the war, she could have claimed to have been displaced or to have lost her papers somewhere.

        • Kate 16:00 on 2022-12-19 Permalink

          Josh, there are two things here, the minimum legal age for marriage, and the age of majority. You can’t get married under age 18 without parental consent. (There was a time the consent age was 21, which I know from looking up marriage records while doing genealogy.)

          When I was growing up I remember finding out that the minimum age in Quebec then was 12 for girls and 14 for boys – with parental consent. Almost nobody actually got married so young, but it’s been changed since.

        • Ian 16:43 on 2022-12-19 Permalink

          My wife recently found out her family name was simply made up by her great-grandfather. In ww1 the Canadian government was making noises about rounding up Ukrainians as enemy aliens – so this young single guy took off from Saskatchewan, never speaking to his family again. By the time he reached Toronto he was going by a different name, joined the army, and now had papers. We only found out a year ago bc a cousin did a genetic test and matched with a bunch of people from the prairies nobody had ever heard of.

          All this to say it used to be a lot easier to slip off and start up under a new identity.

          For that matter out in the country very few records were kept, there are no birth or death records for anyone in my grandpa’s family in Nova Scotia unless they went to church. Even “marriage” wasn’t necessarily official, or recorded.

        • H. John 18:27 on 2022-12-19 Permalink

          While the federal government has legislative authority over marriage and divorce (Constitution Act, 1867 s.91(26), the power to pass laws regulating the solemnization of marriage is provincial (Constitution Act, 1867 s.92(12)).

          So each province and territory has it’s own rules.

          Quebec’s minimum age is 18, or 16 with the authorization from the courts.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_Canada

        • H. John 18:35 on 2022-12-19 Permalink

          I’m not sure when Quebec changed it’s rules but in 1969 the legal age for a wedding was fourteen for a boy and twelve for a girl, with parental consent.

        • Josh 18:45 on 2022-12-19 Permalink

          Fwiw, I looked on Justice Canada’s website and found this. Seems to say the age is 16 under pretty much all circumstances?
          https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/cj-jp/fv-vf/caw-mei/p10.html

        • H. John 19:00 on 2022-12-19 Permalink

          It was changed in 2016 by “Loi apportant diverses modifications législatives pour renforcer la protection des personnes”

          10. L’article 373 de ce code est modifié : 1° par le remplacement de « que le titulaire de l’autorité parentale ou, le cas échéant, le tuteur a consenti au mariage » par « que le tribunal a autorisé la célébration de leur mariage »; 2° par l’ajout, à la fin, de l’alinéa suivant : « L e mineur peut demander seul l’autorisation du tribunal. Le titulaire de l’autorité parentale ou, le cas échéant, le tuteur doit être appelé à donner son avis. » .
          https://www.canlii.org/fr/qc/legis/loisa/lq-2016-c-12/derniere/lq-2016-c-12.html

          In a 2021 case a judge relied on the parliamentary discussions to decide what to consider to reach a decision.

          https://www.canlii.org/fr/qc/qccs/doc/2021/2021qccs1276/2021qccs1276.html?searchUrlHash=AAAAAAAAAAEAHENRTFIgYyBDQ1EtMTk5MSwgU2VjdGlvbiAzNzMAAAABABMvNjE5NS1jdXJyZW50LTEjMzczAQ

        • H. John 19:10 on 2022-12-19 Permalink

          Josh, as the Wiki article points out “Since 2015, federal law has set the absolute minimum marriageable age at 16. Provinces and territories may set a minimum age higher than that.”

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_Canada

        • Kevin 00:50 on 2022-12-20 Permalink

          Ian
          It’s not just “out in the country”.
          I know a woman born in Montreal in the 70s and there was no record of her birth because her parents are atheists.

          At the time hospitals didn’t inform the government because the church was supposed to do that. If you didn’t go to church, there was no record of a baptism, and so no kid.

          The parents eventually had to go to court to prove they had a child.

        • jeather 10:18 on 2022-12-20 Permalink

          My initial birth certificate was through a synagogue, though at some point those were deprecated and I got a normal government one.

        • Kate 11:39 on 2022-12-20 Permalink

          Mine was a baptismal certificate as well, originally.

          The Drouin records archive includes churches of various denominations as well as synagogues, but also has a listing for births recorded at city hall, so presumably – in Montreal at least – you could record a birth in a non‑religious context.

          It was definitely mandatory to record births, marriages and deaths with the government in the UK from 1837 onwards, but I don’t know whether they extended this to the empire.

        • dhomas 15:19 on 2022-12-20 Permalink

          My original birth certificate was a baptismal record, as well. These were very easy to get modified, if you asked the priest nicely. I’m born in October, and apparently the priest offered to change my date of birth to September so I could attend school one year earlier. My parents decliend. I don’t know how easy it would have been to do this after the fact, but at birth (or rather, at the time of the baptism) it was entirely possible to have a birth/baptismal certificate that was not entirely accurate.

      • Kate 14:20 on 2022-12-19 Permalink | Reply  

        The Ullivik Centre in Dorval was opened in 2016 to host Inuit coming south for medical treatment, or to accompany someone having treatment. CBC looked into conditions there and they’re disheartening – and saying the building “has the appearance of a boutique hotel” is a stretch. The article says the institution has a new director, who intends to improve things.

         

        • Kate 06:38 on 2022-12-19 Permalink | Reply  

          COP15 has arrived at a deal. Radio-Canada summarizes the main points.

           

          c
          Compose new post
          j
          Next post/Next comment
          k
          Previous post/Previous comment
          r
          Reply
          e
          Edit
          o
          Show/Hide comments
          t
          Go to top
          l
          Go to login
          h
          Show/Hide help
          shift + esc
          Cancel