Sophie Durocher works herself into a lather over a Mile End restaurateur saying the name of his establishment is bilingual, like Montreal. Arrêtez de dire que Montréal est bilingue! she shouts.
Well, it is. Sorry, Sophie.
Updates from July, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
TVA reported Friday morning that a woman who was a rape victim in 2020 was turned away from the Montreal General because she’s francophone. (A second hospital wouldn’t treat her because they had no rape kit.)
Other media have picked up this story at face value. And of course it’s bound to cause outrage, Quebec has already launched an investigation, etc. etc.
I notice neither the CBC, CTV nor the Gazette seems to have the story, and I suspect their news editors have the same reaction I do: it can’t possibly have been that simple. Everyone working at the General will have passed French proficiency courses. They treat francophone patients all day, every day – of course they do.
It’s clear some misapprehension happened, or possibly someone even suggested she might be seen and treated faster somewhere else. But simply turned away for being francophone? I don’t believe it.
Adding a tweet from Toula Drimonis showing the official line on the places rape victims should go. There’s no scandal, but the commentariat are working themselves into a righteous snit, and we have not heard the end of this.
Joey
Agreed. Also seems scandalous that the CHUM is unable to provide treatment to people in these situations. I suppose, based on previous comments from others here, that I likely assume the superhospitals can/should be able to do ‘everything’; perhaps they just aren’t made for emergency care.
Kate
Still – no rape kit at the CHUM? That’s as implausible as no francophone patients at the General.
H. John
On twitter, Toula Drimonis remembered she’d seen something about this before:
“Victims of rape should have immediate access to medical services in the language of their choice. But I remember reading a press release last fall about redistribution of services for sexual assault victims in Mtl. Bilingual at Medic-Elle, ENG at the General, FR at Notre-Dame.”
https://twitter.com/ToulasTake/status/1679962374684459008?s=20
She found the info:
I knew I didn’t imagine it… here it is. Is it acceptable? I don’t think so. Victims shouldn’t have to go from hospital to hospital. But shouldn’t the cop know which centre is designated FR services? Was the change/redistribution made because we lack personnel? I don’t know..
https://twitter.com/ToulasTake/status/1679963802446561286?s=20
Kate
H. John, we were both reading the same thing! Thank you.
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Kate
Given how the city’s sewer system was overwhelmed by rainfall yesterday, we’re advised to avoid contact with the rivers – both the St Lawrence and the Rivière des Prairies – for 48 hours.
mare
Oops, I swam in the Rivière-des-mille-îles two hours ago. It was very nice. I hope the sewers of Rosemère and Bois-Briand didn’t overflow.
Kate
mare, you madman, did you cycle all the way to the north edge of Laval island?
mare
Yes, it’s a very nice ride actually, almost all on bike paths through green zones and not just paint on a street. You hardly see anything of Laval. (Route verte no. 2. North from Perry Island bridge. I swam at the Berge de la Plage-Idéale, just north of the Bellehumeur Park. With names like that who can resist? Apart from 5 geese it was deserted.)
Kate
The geese have you on their radar now.
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Kate
La Presse has the story of landlords emptying a couple’s apartment when they were both away, although they both had every intention of returning. Half their possessions were stored, the other half put on the sidewalk, items of value lost forever.
jeather
The landlords were wrong but sheesh, if you go away for THREE MONTHS and your landlords live on site, maybe just let them know that you’re going on a long vacation but will continue to pay rent and intend to return.
Blork
jeather, they weren’t gone for three months. The GUY was gone for three months, but the woman was there right up until June 24, when she left for a short trip to Iceland. Then the guy was a few days late paying the rent from BC, and boom, they’re out. They were only both absent for about two weeks.
jeather
Oh, I misread. Yeah, gone for 2 weeks is totally within normal range. (To be clear, even if they both had been gone for 3 months, while the rent was being paid regularly you can’t just throw all their shit out when it is 6 days late for the first ever time.) I assume they’ll get some money for this, though it never makes up for things.
Blork
Oh, I know. This is fully on the landlord. (And yes, even if they were gone for 3 months, if the rent is paid you can’t just toss everything if it’s 6 days late one time.)
walkerp
yeah and wouldn’t the landlord try to reach out to them if this was done in any good faith?
Blork
According to the LaPresse story, the landlords are immigrants who barely speak French (probably somewhat recently arrived), so there might be a cultural issue here in terms of understanding what the customs and laws are here.
PatrickC
@walkerp, there was something in the article about the landlords having the wrong area code when they reached out, and also that the woman’s phone not receiving calls in foreign countries.
Ian
Regardless, the landlords had absolutely no right to do what they did and should face criminal charges.
I think emptying out a tenant’s apartment illegally could be considered theft insofar as their property was illegally removed from their legal residence.Punishment for theft
334 Except where otherwise provided by law, every one who commits theft
(a) if the property stolen is a testamentary instrument or the value of what is stolen is more than $5,000, is guilty of
(i) an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than 10 years, or
(ii) an offence punishable on summary conviction; or
(b) if the value of what is stolen is not more than $5,000, is guilty
(i) of an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years, or
(ii) of an offence punishable on summary conviction.
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-334.html
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Kate
Most of Friday’s news is of the aftermath of Thursday’s storm. CTV says it was a record‑breaking
38.6 mm82 mm of rain – maybe a record this century, but the 1987 storm dumped 100 mm of rain in a couple of hours.Power is being restored Friday morning to thousands on the island that lost it.
FNoMTL has some of the best shots on Instagram.
Apparently we got a typical month’s worth of rain in a couple of hours, and a tornado was seen in Mirabel.
jeather
I think you misread (or missed it when they updated the article). It’s 82 or 88 downtown depending on if you read CTV or CBC, approximately the average rainfall for July.
Kate
I swear they changed it since I posted. Thanks for the correction.
jeather
Yeah, the CTV article now says they made the correction. It didn’t show that at first either!
Kevin
The weirdness about this is because the airport’s measurement for 1987 is much less than what was recorded in downtown Montreal.
A station in Lafontaine park measured 103 mm.
Laval had about 10 mm. The airport had heavy rain, but nowhere near record-setting on that day.carswell
@Kevin I live on the north side of the mountain, near UdeM. The afternoon the storm hit, I was supposed to join another freelancer downtown, across from the McGill campus, to work on a job. The rain and wind at my place was so intense that water not only came in through a small window under an overhanging balcony but reached a point more than halfway into my fortunately uncarpeted living room (about 12′ in). Meanwhile, a tree behind the building split in two, taking out the fence. We lost power. I turned on a transistor radio and heard that the metro wasn’t working and, due to flooded underpasses, neither were any buses I could take. Before long, I got a call from my colleague wanting to know where the hell I was. I explained the situation and that I’d assumed he, too, hadn’t gone in. He was incredulous, thought I was making things up, and insisted I get downtown ASAP.
I hopped on my bike and headed downtown through upper Outremont, wide-eyed at the damaged wrought on some of the houses (one had lost an entire wing to a huge downed tree) and dismounting from time to time to portage over fallen trees and through piles of rocks, including a couple of small boulders, and other debris that had been pushed off Mount Royal. Around the Cartier monument, the scene suddenly changed, became pastoral, looked perfect for picnicking. When I got to the office, my colleague remained skeptical about my story, said the “storm” had just been a brief thundershower downtown. It was only the next day, when the storm and its damage was front-page, above-the-fold news that he called and apologized.
I suspect that discrepancy is also why Jean Doré, who IIRC was spending the weekend in the Laurentians, was so slow to react and didn’t return until a day or two later. It was probably the beginning of the end of his political career.
Kate
carswell, your anecdote here is about 1987, I gather – not yesterday?
carswell
Thought the refs to @Kevin and Jean Doré made that clear, but, yes, 1987.
Kate
Maybe I need another coffee…
Orr
I walked home during the Great Decarie Flood of 1987 from ville St-Laurent to the old Forum and past the autoroute Decarie. An unforgettable day that was. We heard on the radio that Decarie was flooded, and for sure I had to see it with my own eyes, and I had not much choice as I was a Metro user for commuting then.
Joey
The Tasty Food restaurant on Decarie has a bunch of photos of the 1987 flood on its walls.
Kate
That day, I had to get from mid Plateau to Ste-Catherine and Mackay for 4 pm. The metro was down, so I took the 144. Torrents were tearing down through Mount Royal park onto Pine Avenue – the gouges in the turf were there for years afterwards. I hopped off the 144 around the Montreal General and set off down Côte‑des‑Neiges. The water was surging past me, around knee high.
People hiding in doorways were staring, but after a few minutes I simply could not get any wetter. There was no point in stopping. It was high summer – exactly 36 years ago, in fact – so I wasn’t cold, and I was wearing something like sandals and capris. I got to work on time, as wet as if I’d been swimming in my clothes. A lot of other folks had called saying they wouldn’t be in.
I was living in an upstairs duplex at the time, so nothing of mine was damaged, except that I’d lent my guitar to a friend who had a basement apartment that got soaked. Once his place dried out my guitar was matchwood. I’ve never owned another one.
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Kate
Weekend lists from Metro, CityCrunch, CultMTL, Sarah’s Weekend List.
A foreboding of traffic crises.
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Kate
In its series on pedestrianized streets, La Presse looks at how Wellington Street isn’t just cool.
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Kate
Armed patients, threats of violence and actual attacks are becoming more common at the CHUM hospital emergency. There’s also an anecdote about a lot of people showing up at Sacré‑Cœur hospital with knives.
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Kate
Outdoor workers at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges have ended their strike but its office workers are still out.
denpanosekai 21:24 on 2023-07-14 Permalink
Sophie Who? Sophie Who Cares.
Maybe stop reposting JdeM articles.
carswell 22:21 on 2023-07-14 Permalink
@denpanosekai She reports, we decide.
Actually, I encourage Kate to continue posting narrated links to the articles. I used to occasionally read the JdeM a couple of decades ago, mainly to follow the wine columnists until one day one of them let loose with racist rants in a friggin’ wine column. But it’s the most read newspaper in Quebec and is a window onto the mindset of a significant portion of the population, including a number of bigwigs. Important to know about, even if you need to silkwood shower after reading some of the screeds.
Kate 22:30 on 2023-07-14 Permalink
Thank you, carswell. That’s pretty much the way I see it.
Also, I saw this one because Toula Drimonis tweeted a rebuttal before I even saw the column, and her judgment of these things is good.
thomas 00:41 on 2023-07-15 Permalink
It surprises me to read comments in the Journal de Montreal that embody a paradoxical stance: arguing for the success and necessary expansion of Bill 101, while simultaneously asserting that Montreal has never had fewer French speakers than it does today.
Joey 04:58 on 2023-07-15 Permalink
“ J’ai moi-même passé trois ans sur les bancs de l’Université McGill” obvs
Kevin 10:13 on 2023-07-15 Permalink
I just feel sorry for Sophie, going to the stores in Westmount and nobody gives a shit about anything she has ever done.
Meezly 10:25 on 2023-07-15 Permalink
Could Sophie become the QC equivalent of a Karen?
MarcG 10:38 on 2023-07-15 Permalink
How is “Double’s Late Night” bilingual?
Blork 11:37 on 2023-07-15 Permalink
MarcG, they’re not arguing that “Double’s Late Night” is bilingual. They’re arguing that Montreal is a bilingual city, so an English name is OK.
thomas 11:37 on 2023-07-15 Permalink
The name of the restaurant is Double’s. doubleslatenight is the name of the instagram account.
MarcG 11:47 on 2023-07-15 Permalink
The quote in the article is «Le nom est venu de par lui-même. Double shot, double cocktails et c’était bilingue, comme Montréal!». I guess the word “Double” is bilingual but “Double’s” is obviously not. Anyhoo.
carswell 12:26 on 2023-07-15 Permalink
If, as seems to be the case, Double’s isn’t the possessive form but the plural, it’s not English either…
Blork 14:41 on 2023-07-15 Permalink
MarcG, you’re right. I stand corrected.
walkerp 14:54 on 2023-07-15 Permalink
I can attest that inside, Double’s is quite bilingual.
MarcG 16:29 on 2023-07-15 Permalink
Do they really leave the front entrance covered in graffiti? Is that some new kind of speakeasy chic?
Joey 16:37 on 2023-07-15 Permalink
@MarcG it’s intended to be a dive bar (the founding myth is that it’s replacing Idee Fixe and Snack and Blues), so the graffiti and general exterior shabbiness tracks. The prices aren’t dive bar level but presumably neither are the wages, c’est la vie. The burger is extraordinary.