An exotic worm from Asia has been spotted here. Wikipedia says Bipalium adventitium was introduced accidentally into the U.S., and climate change is bringing it here. It’s been spotted in Mount Royal park and in Westmount.
The species produces tetrodotoxin, a neurotoxin probably more familiar from stories about fugu. Wikipedia also mentions that it preys on earthworms, a species we need to protect.
Work has begun on several of the OMHM buildings that have been standing empty (and degrading) for years.
The PLQ is calling for a million‑dollar bailout for Metro Media, which ceased activities a week ago.
A man arrested recently in an east-end homicide case dating back to 1996 has been given bail with conditions. Serge Audette has already been declared a dangerous offender once, after conviction of sexual assault in 1999. I suppose the only good thing here is that Audette is 70 so might not pose as much of a threat as he once did.
Bernard Drainville is desperately trying to recruit warm bodies to teach school. Even a bachelor’s degree is no longer a requirement. And the Montreal service centre is short 500 teachers.
Drainville made one of his classic missteps Thursday, saying on Paul Arcand’s radio show that teaching kindergarten is less demanding.
(Maybe I should pop around the corner to the high school and offer to teach the kids English?)
Looks like the pay is $46.52/hr, which is the same rate fully qualified teachers get. However it’s not unionized, and it’s unclear if you get benefits or protection, though it seems they’ll help people get when they need to work permanently. Unless, of course, you wear visible religious symbols.
Just as a reminder, it is pretty normal for technical programs (carpentry, plumbing, etc) to have teachers who are not university graduates; there is a program where they can slowly get their diplomas while teaching. (This is included here because DEPs are DES/high school level, so teachers there are included in these numbers.) I’d really like it if the number of teachers who are working on their degrees because they are teaching in the blue collar field where they worked for years beforehand would be disaggregated from grade 3 teachers who don’t have degrees.
People accustomed to gig work wouldn’t expect benefits or protection, although I can also see that it undermines the union if too many people get hired on a casual basis.
Did Bernie cry again? Just joking. On CBC Daybreak they talked about the teacher shortage and why teachers are leaving the profession. Bernie’s comment pretty much answers the question and reflects the dismissive attitude towards teaching. This is the minister in charge of education. Who wants to work a job where your own ministry doesn’t even take you seriously?
The $46.52 rate is for casual supply teachers. That’s substitute teachers. The hourly rate should be $58.77 and should be unionized. At least that’s how it worked when I was teaching hourly. You also get paid 104% of your salary, so they don’t have to accumulate vacation pay. And by law, that rate includes all holidays, so you don’t get paid when the school is closed for Labour Day, Thanksgiving and even St-Jean. Also the usual limit for hourly teachers is 20h a week. The big advantage is that since you are hourly, you aren’t required to be there for “presence”, which salary teachers are required. But you aren’t paid for preparation, reportes, etc. That’s all considered part of the hourly salary. There are 180 days in a school year and you teach 4 hours, that’s an annual salary of $42K. The other side of it is, that’s basically just 36 week worth of work, depending on the school, the contracted hours and of course, if you are teaching summer or not. Voc. Ed. doesn’t stop in the summer, so that’s only about 4 weeks vacation and somewhere near $55K a year.
Being hourly has it’s advantages. The school will pressure you to do PED days, lunches, etc. But you are NOT obligated to do any of them… no pay, no stay. Disputes though, go through the union, not the CNESST. Upside is, it does pay into RREGOP. Downside is that it will lower your allowable RRSP contribution, but you can, when you leave, ask for your RREGOP to be transferred to your RRSP
A massive water retention basin will go into service in Lachine at the end of the year, adding to the city’s resilience to downpours.
Where is this… There is a “Rockfield street” in Lachine but it’s more of an alley that doesn’t even connect to Victoria.
The Gazette piece says “The Rockfield retention basin, named after the residential neighbourhood that once existed in that area of Lachine.” I see on the map that the Hydro‑Quebec substation near the Du Canal Exo station is called Rockfield. So it must be in that grim industrial area somewhere between Victoria and St‑Joseph.
Yeah it’s likely around there. There are a few things named Rockfield in the old Ville St Pierre area.
Yeah, it’s just opposite the Hydro-Quebec station on the other side of the tracks. There’s a crane visible in the Google Maps satellite view and you can see the evolution of the lot from 2016-2020 if you drop down to Street View
A pair of boaters were rescued from the Lachine rapids Thursday evening. CTV says that although firefighters and other rescue forces were called out, it was a private individual who went out and got them.
An inexperienced jet skier also had to be rescued from the riverbank Thursday night. The river is not to be trifled with.
Regarding the private citizen who came to the rescue, there’s potentially an interesting conversation there about risk-taking and confirmation bias. In this case it worked out well, so people who believe in “taking action!” and not depending on authorities will see this as confirmation that people should take matters into their own hands, that the private citizen is a hero, etc. etc.
But if it had gone sideways and ended badly, the people who believe in deferring to authority would see it as confirmation that random people are reckless and unqualified to help in dangerous situations, that we should leave such things to the experts.
Whereas in reality things are (as always) somewhere in between. Generally speaking, leave things to the experts when experts are available, but in cases like this who even knows who the expert is? Perhaps that private citizen knows those waters like the back of his hand. And whether or not things go sideways can be due to incompetence or it might be from some random factor. For example, the fireman who drowned there last year was a “qualified authority” yet things went sideways because of a freak accident. Had that been a random private citizen, people would be saying things went sideways because he was unqualified and didn’t know what he was doing.
A school commissioner with the EMSB who posted a crude comment about francophones has not been forced to quit after a vote at a special meeting.
I realize a school commission isn’t full‑bore politics, but it does bring participants into some form of public life. How could someone who even wanted that much public participation, in Quebec, have the lack of awareness to post “How’s the REM working out? Leave it to the french to get this working Anglos and immigrants would have had this thing running smoothly”?
Besides being impolitic, it’s also wrong: the person most responsible for the project, Michael Sabia, is from St. Catharines (born and raised), in a family of Italians from Montreal. He’s since been promoted.
Ironic, given that the commissioner in question, Sophie De Vito, is probably also of Italian background.
(Irrelevant detail from Wikipedia: Sabia is married to the granddaughter of Lester B. Pearson.)
Also, it really doesn’t inspire confidence that the EMSB is fully on board with teaching French. Or proper English, for that matter.
Real profile in courage from the head of the EMSB.
(The EMSB being known, of course, for its administrative excellence and operational efficiency.)
Weekend events from CultMTL, CityCrunch, CTV, Sarah’s Weekend List. I always used to include Metro’s list too, but not any more.
Police and social workers from the city and the health system are patrolling together to help the homeless. This is being reported as a complete novelty, although we’ve seen reports of similar projects before. This, for example, was a project reported in February as being tried out in the metro, and this was reported last year.
It’s taking a long time for itinerance not to be seen as criminal.
John B 09:56 on 2023-08-19 Permalink
If you want to go down a bit of a rabbit hole, earthworms are actually an invasive species in Canada, and most of North America.
Kate 10:21 on 2023-08-19 Permalink
I did not know that. But don’t our agricultural techniques rely on them now?
John B 10:42 on 2023-08-19 Permalink
I’m not sure how reliant we really are. We may well be, as we’ve imported our agricultural techniques from Europe too, but first nations had plenty of agriculture before worms got here.
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that we could grow food just fine without earthworms. They speed composting and decomposition, but there’s other stuff that would do it in the absence of earthworms.
There’s also the jumping worm, which is a similar… can of worms.
EmilyG 21:41 on 2023-08-19 Permalink
Didn’t have toxic worms on my apocalypse bingo card.