We will be able to ride on the first spur of the REM this weekend for free.
Updates from July, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Last week Montreal was rated as the best place to learn French, even ahead of Paris, and this week it’s rated as one of the top places for university studies in the world.
This all sounds fine, but the student rating, which used to have some meaning when cheap apartments were cheap, rings a little hollow now. As for French, wouldn’t it be better to go to Quebec City where people won’t just switch to English rather than waiting while you work out whether your verbs are agreeing with your nouns?
Blork
the important question, of course, is “rated by who?” In this case, the “best place to learn French” rating comes from the German home rental agency Holidu, using data scraped from the Duolingo app combined with info like “number of language schools.” In other words it’s bullshit, like the CultMTL “best of” lists.
If not pure bullshit it’s at least unreliable, because it’s based on subjective data and subjective interpretation and has nothing to do with the quality of the lessons or how well the training sticks. No one has actually surveyed HOW WELL someone learns French here vs. somewhere else.
Ian
by whom
😀 /pedant
Blork
Noted.
Anton
Probably pas se best place to learn english either.
Ian
I’m doing Duolingo in Yiddish, my neighbourhoodis one of the best places in North America to learn it 😉
Kate
Cool, Ian. I see they’ve added a lot since I did the Spanish segment. Maybe I should log back on and try my hand at Portuguese or Italian.
I did try Irish for a few passes but man, that is not an easy language, and there’s little or no chance I’ll ever have occasion to speak it.
Ian
Short of Newfoundland, yeah. At least you could just go to Cape Breton to practice Scottish Gaelic.
A quick search gives me these guys though, might be a good lead at least? https://comhra.org/
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Kate
The Journal is emphasizing how garbage seen around town is disgusting a lot of people.
Chris
Yes, they love to hate on Montreal, but they aren’t wrong here.
Ian
Hey, I know a lot of people that are disgusted to see Le Journal around town, too 😉
I’ve often thought that the long and complex signs the city puts on garbage bins & in alleys would be better served anti-dumping signs indicating the $ amount of the fine – and enforcing it.
Chris
Enforce how? Unless a cop/agent witness it, or there’s a name/address within the garbage, how do you have any proof of who littered?
Kate
Chris, I don’t live in Park Ex, but in an adjacent area, and I follow a Park Ex group on Facebook.
Some of the group is agitated about garbage. From the photos and their reports it’s clear that trash is being put out on the wrong days either by apartment building janitors or store owners, who either don’t know or don’t care which are the correct days for pickup. In all these cases it’s pretty clear where the garbage came from and it would not be difficult to pin it down. It’s also clear that nobody’s getting fined, or not fined enough, to get them to stop.
I assume similar things apply elsewhere.
MarcG
Airbnb is also a source of garbage problems. The one on my street keeps their big rolling garbage bin out front next to the sidewalk and it’s always overflowing with trash.
Chris
Kate, “pretty clear” does not hold up in court. I have complained to 311 about litter, and I also know someone that got fined once. Plausible deniability gets you off. My acquaintance lost because they had actual evidence: a hydro bill with name and address was in his trash. But “garbage in front of your house” could just be a neighbour trying to get you in trouble. Judge will toss it with no stronger evidence.
Kate
Chris, a few of the participants in the group I named may be angry enough to lurk and take photos of the dumping in action. Not sure any have done so yet.
Orr
Ugly dirty Montreal is usually more of a March/April JdM story. But of course this is how they keep people from outside Montreal from coming in to Montreal this summer, to counter all those downtown Montreal positive-press stories earlier this year. And maybe to see how french is actually not threatened in Montreal? Better to form peoples opinions via their op-ed haters, rather than encouraging people to visit in person. IMO ville de Montreal needs to some tourism paid-promotions and advertorials in the JdM.
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Kate
A major AIDS summit was held in Montreal last summer. At the time there were reports of delays and problems in providing visas even for visitors who had been invited by the government. Of the people who did manage to get here, 251 have claimed asylum.
Spi
Which is exactly what people were warning about at the time.
Kate
Granted there may have been concerns about asylum claims, especially from LGBT people in certain African countries that have been passing strong anti‑gay laws recently. But shouldn’t we be willing to extend asylum to people in that kind of jam?
Ephraim
@Kate – Canada is one of a few countries in the world that does. And for those who are interested in donating without having to actually take out your wallet, BMO currently has a campaign for Rainbow Railroad, where you send them pictures of rainbows and they donate $1 per rainbow depositted. See https://www.bmorainbowdeposits.com/
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Kate
A Concordia political science student is undertaking a one‑man campaign to change the name of Christophe-Colomb Avenue because of Columbus’s responsibility for slavery and genocide. Ray Coelho is proposing to return to an older name for the street, boulevard Des Ormes.
Update: Kevin’s comment below is crucial information.
Further note: I emailed La Presse about him, and the journo replies: “la décision de publier a été prise puisque cet individu n’est plus impliqué dans ce parti et que cette initiative n’a pas de lien avec ce parti.”
Kevin
This petition is organized by a guy who belonged to a neo-Nazi party.
https://www.antihate.ca/neo-nazi_party_active_in_montrealKate
Kevin, thank you for this information!
Shouldn’t La Presse have known that?
Kevin
It wasn’t hard to dig up his background, but maybe the staff just stopped when they found other articles about his petition and they assumed someone else had done due diligence.
thomas
He also has a campaign to end fluoridation in Montreal. https://www.gofundme.com/f/legal-expenses-to-end-fluoridation-in-montreal
Kate
Oh, he is a nutbar. I’ve emailed La Presse about the info Kevin found.
Anyway, I didn’t think we had fluoridation in Montreal. I was discussing that with my dental hygienist just last week.
Nicholas
The city of Montreal does not have water fluoridation, but the treatment plants in Dorval and Pointe-Claire, which serve some independent West Island municipalities and are owned by Montreal, do.
qatzelok
Did you know that CC was a slave trader before becoming a “discoverer of continents?” So that street sign is commemorating a slave trader who instigated genocides.
After reading what Keven provided, I don’t think we should name any streets after Ray Coelho either.
nau
Would be a bit odd to change the name back to Des Ormes, given that there likely aren’t any elms left on it. Maybe they should change the name to Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, even if it doesn’t make it all the way down to Old Montreal. Or maybe they could extend Atateken to cover all these adjoined streets.
Kate
qatzelok, did you think the readers of this blog were unaware of the transgressions of Columbus?
nau, you’re right, the name Atateken could easily be extended alongside Lafontaine Park then right up past Henri‑Bourassa.
Blork
I don’t care what the street is called, but we should NOT rename it NOW, based on this petition, because the last thing we want to do is give this guy any credence or credibility, at all. Full stop.
Kate
There’s also another lurking can of worms although many Quebec thinkers won’t see it this way. If we banish colonialists as diverse as Columbus and Sir John A. Macdonald, we should also rethink the roles of people like Champlain and Jeanne Mance. Merely the fact of speaking French rather than Spanish or English shouldn’t automatically exonerate them.
Ain’t gonna happen.
Tim S.
So is the assumption that this is an attempt to provoke a culture war?
Blork
More likely this is just a crazy guy clamouring for attention.
thomas
Considering his ties with the anti-vax movement and Pierre Poilievre, I suspect that he is gathering email addresses and phone numbers to perpetuate his anger-driven fundraising.
walkerp
Ah yes, Thomas, you nailed it.
MarcG
If so, won’t his list be full of ‘woke’ people, rather than fellow right-wing reactionaries?
Blork
Exactly, which is why I repeat my assertion that this is just a crazy guy clamouring for attention.
Michael
Atataken is such an ugly street name.
They could have spent 5 mins choosing something that fits better.
Sean French
Mr Coelho was one of my original co-admins of my Facebook group Decolumbize. He was ejected and banned by me as of yesterday. I’m in total shock. As a leftist Indigenous activist, I’m totally disgusted by his history.
We confronted him yesterday, and he tried to say it was in 2018, and that he stopped associating with the NP after they “changed”. But I can see in the Elections Canada website that he received 28 votes on behalf of the NP in the fall 2019 election.
I do ask you all to support the name change, but not through Mr. Coelho’s petition. Support it by standing with the Indigenous people of the region when we start pressuring for change.
I can’t believe the damage this character has caused to my genuine effort to remove a name that honours genocide. I’ll keep trying, and definitely without the “help” of Coelho.
EmilyG
Ugliness is subjective.
Atateken is a carefully chosen name. It fits well.
Kate
I agree that Atateken is fine and I’d be very pleased if the name could extend up to the Back River.
Thank you for your thoughts on this, Sean French.
qatzelok
Sean French, I totally support the name change. That we still have names like Columbus on our street signs demonstrates that most people are still painfully unaware about how Canada and the USA were built on genocide and extreme racism.
By the way, we haven’t had a revolution in Canada or the USA since the days of non-stop genocide, so we still have the same government model as we did then.
Arie
I think the idea to change the street name is perfectly valid and needed. We are on stolen land and there is no reason to keep exposing the people who have been affected by colonialism to have to keep seeing the names and images of their abusers anywhere. I don’t agree with changing the name to anything that isn’t approved by the Kanienkeha:ka. Above and beyond basic justice, which should be enough, we will not survive climate change if we don’t restore Indigenous sovereignty worldwide. Changing the name is the LEAST we can do. The dude never even set foot anywhere near here. Don’t use Mr Coellho as an excuse to keep this awful man’s name up on one of the longest north-south streets in the city.
Ian
Actually it’s worth npting that qatzi hasn’t mentioned just HOW BAD of a slaver Columbus was – his governorship in the Caribbean was so notoriously brutal even by Spanish slaver standards that he was actually recalled to Spain – in chains.
“Natives were regularly whipped for what Columbus considered minor offenses — but stealing a vegetable or animal could result in cutting off a Taíno’s nose, ear, or hand; the offender was sometimes forced to walk around with their severed body part in shame. Columbus took and gifted Taíno women to his crewmen, who would violently beat and rape them. Pregnant Taíno women who were taken captive gave birth to babies who were sometimes thrown to hungry dogs. Columbus established a business in the sale of 9- and 10-year-old Taíno girls for sexual slavery. He also kidnapped and enslaved Taínos themselves — personally initiating the transatlantic slave trade in his voyage back to Europe.”
full articleOrr
I understand that Samuel de Champlain spent some time in the Spanish Caribbean before coming to North America and was himself disgusted by the horrific crimes there by the Spaniards and developed a mindset to create something different for the French colonization of North America. That was my takeaway from the David Hackett Fischer book Champlain’s Dream.
Chris
>we will not survive climate change if we don’t restore Indigenous sovereignty worldwide
Honestly, that’s magical thinking. Everywhere around the world homo sapiens is destroying the climate. The indigenous people of China, Indian, Africa, are in charge of those places, and they are all polluting plenty. It’s a species-wide problem of ours.
Arie
You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about. Goodbye.
JP 16:27 on 2023-07-24 Permalink
The 7 pm cut off sucks….
walkerp 08:20 on 2023-07-25 Permalink
I bet it will be fun those first rides.
Kate 09:42 on 2023-07-25 Permalink
I was geeky enough to go look at the Laval metro stations the day they opened and there was a surprisingly large crowd there, milling around. But that was 2007. I suppose the REM may also attract a crowd.
I’m tempted to go anyway. I haven’t even been across the new bridge yet.
DeWolf 11:57 on 2023-07-25 Permalink
@Kate, you’re in for a treat. The new bridge is pretty magnificent.
JP 12:40 on 2023-07-25 Permalink
Despite my comment above about the 7 pm cut off, I’m looking forward to trying it out on the weekend.
Faiz Imam 17:28 on 2023-07-26 Permalink
nuns island is very nice, the area around that station is worth a look, though its pretty marred by construction at the moment.
Orr 13:14 on 2023-07-27 Permalink
On the Brossard line the view coming into Montreal has good scenic potential, sit on the right side crossing the bridge, then switch to the left side of the car as you arrive n Montreal Island.