Three triplexes on de Lorimier were evacuated Saturday after signs that they may be on the brink of collapse.
Update: All but one household were allowed back in to reinhabit their flats, Saturday evening. La Presse clarifies that work was being done in the basement of one of the buildings.
Here’s La Presse on Métropole francophone des Amériques as a city slogan, with the new logo.
Quebec has also appointed four advisers to help save French online – including Louise Beaudoin.
Better slogan than… On est le 4ieme Metropole francophone
Port-au-Prince is in competition for French metropolis of the Americas, but I gather that although French is an official language there, almost everyone actually speaks Creole.
By population (not French speaking population), Paris isn’t even first…. it’s second. Montreal is 10th and Port-au-Prince is 15th. By French speaking population, Montreal is 4th and Port-au-Prince is 5th, but barely…. the 5th, through 8th all have about 2.4M: Port-au-Prince, Dakar, Doula, Yaoundé. Incidentally the next French city is 9th…. Lyon. And the next on the list in French is Marseille at 15th
The stats will always be a little wobbly because determining who can be said to speak a language is not black and white.
And the borders of cities are also blurry.
Many nominally francophone cities are not actually French-speaking on the ground. From the Wikipedia entry on Kinshasa, for example:
“Kinshasa is the largest officially Francophone city in the world, albeit that the vast majority of people either cannot speak French, or struggle in speaking it.”
But if we just take any metropolitan area whose official language is French, we get the following list:
1. Kinshasa – 17 million
2. Paris – 12.2 million
3. Abidjan – 6.3 million
4. Douala – 5.8 million
5. Montreal – 4.5 million
6. Dakar – 3.9 million
7. Yaoundé – 2.8 million
8. Port-au-Prince – 2.6 million
9. Lubumbashi – 2.6 million
10. Lyon – 2.3 million
Hopefully somebody here has been to some of the cities in West Africa and can share what the everyday linguistic situation is like.
@DeWolf – Kinshasa is about 12.8m French speaking, it’s about 75% to 80% French speaking. After this there is Ouagadougou, Bamako, Mbuji-Mayi, Antananarivo and then Marseille. And after that is Lomé, Brazzaville, Niamey, Toulouse, Kigali, Nice, and Goma.
It starts to get murky when you look at just French speakers, France is the largest, then DR Congo, Algeria, Morocco and then… Germany, Italy, Cameroon, the UK and finally Canada.
By percentage of French speakers, you have France, Monaco, Luxembourg, Belgium, Mauritius, Andorra, Switzerland, Gabon, Congo, Seychelles, Tunisia, DR Congo, Djibouti. Under 50% you start with Haiti. Canada is way down there with just over 28.5% Francophone.
Mauritius is a funny one. It was a British colony for 158 years, and a French colony for less than a century before that, and yet French remains the main language of business and media, even if English is the language of government. Of course, most people speak neither in their daily lives, they speak a creole language.
It all comes down to the flux of language. We see this here, where Montreal is very clearly a primarily francophone city in the way it works on a daily basis, but if you do funny things with statistics, you can come to the conclusion that less than 50% of Montrealers are francophone, simply because native French speakers are a minority.
Something about the response of the groups mentioned in this item on the RCMP investigation of “Chinese police stations” in Montreal sounds a bit too edgy, exactly as people do when lashing out after being caught in a deception.
No, I have no idea whether the two named groups have any links to Beijing, but the story about Chinese surveillance worldwide isn’t easy to ignore.
It’s not a secret that the CCP uses community groups to serve its interests. It’s official policy arranged through something called the United Front Work Department:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Front_Work_Department
Of course there are also a lot of legitimate Chinese community groups, so it’s unwise and unfair to assume they’re all simply CCP fronts. I would be very surprised if May Chiu (quoted in the CTV article) has ever had any official dealings with the Chinese government. She’s a grassroots rabble rouser whereas front organizations tend to keep a low profile.
The city has been subsidizing to a surprising 90% the decontamination of land in the east end, where petrochemical industries have rendered a vast area too toxic to redevelop. However, almost nobody has been taking them up on it, because the work has only been paid for when completed to satisfaction. Now they’re moving to paying 50% in advance.
And the work will be never done… they will simply abscond with the money. (Remember that I said so, when it inevitably happens)
Yeah. I feel like that’s a good reason to not pay until the work is completed. (With “to satisfaction”, from Kate’s post being very important.)
Inbound Louis-Hippolyte-Lafontaine tunnel to be closed Saturday night and part of the blue line will be closed all day Sunday.
Metro has a list and map of the sections of street that will be pedestrianized this summer, and the dates.
A bit strange they include Ste-Catherine in the Quartier des spectacles, which is permanently pedestrianized year-round, but they forgot about St-Paul in Old Montreal, which is a summertime pedestrianization.
Good point. I dropped them a line.
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