Like many readers of this blog I was jolted from my postprandial torpor by an Amber Alert going off on my phone around 13:30. A one‑year‑old has been abducted in Lachine by a teenager. TVA specifies that the abductor is the child’s mother.
Update: The alert was over early Wednesday. The kid has been found and her mother arrested… and is now charged with abduction.
La Presse has a preview of high‑profile court cases expected in 2024. Louis‑Samuel Perron is right in guessing that the case of Denis Leblanc was almost forgotten among 2020’s pandemic news. Leblanc is accused of shooting his sisters dead in the street in Longue‑Pointe in early October that year – this is how it was reported at the time. All of them were in their 60s.
In the Globe and Mail, Frédérik-Xavier Duhamel has a sobering piece on organizational disarray in the city’s fire department that led to general abandonment of proper building inspections and culminated in the fatal fire last March.
It would be good to know whether these problems are being attended to.
You mean a publicly available list of buildings inspected and date inspected? That would be too hard to set up on a website. Like a list of when a restaurant was last inspected and it’s score
Honestly, other places manage to have functional services and support, why can’t we? Most of those places have lower tax rates as well, where the hell does our money go?
I know. Doing the blog, I get a sense of so much cash disappearing into the inextricable bureaucracies of borough halls, healthcare facilities, educational “service centres”, the OQLF and similar ideological warrens – and now the fire department. Every little tinpot manager is squatting on their own bit of power, keeping their own secrets, hanging onto their own bit of the budget, giving gigs to relatives and friends, and meantime the public fails to get the kind of services we all know we’re paying for.
Is this how Rome fell?
The only solution anyone uses here is an extra level of bureaucracy. We just added a new one for the health system. I am not against government jobs, we need people who run these things as opposed to just hiring consultants all the time, but the level is unsustainable.
A side effect of cutting budgets and jobs is a loss of institutional memory. Combine that with people dismantling Chesterton’s fence and we collectively end up worse off.
Before changing stuff people need to know why it was done that way… but that kind of high-level thinking is exceedingly rare.
A bit more of an explanation here.
…or the tl;dr:
Second-order thinking will get you extraordinary results, and so will learning to recognize when other people are using second-order thinking. To understand exactly why this is the case, let’s consider Chesterton’s Fence, described by G. K. Chesterton himself as follows:
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
When I was writing my book about informal uses of space in Hong Kong the most important thing I learned was how the civil service worked. It’s very complicated. There are many layers of processes that go unquestioned and you have to understand why they exist and why they’re possibly destructive before you can start to dismantle them.
All of this to say that organizational behaviour is overlooked and maybe we need a left-wing, non-profit-driven MBA type course in our universities so everything begins to work better 😛
I was just going to let people search on their own because I was being lazy 😉
One of my favourite classes during my undergrad was in organizational communications. Fewer than 10 people in the class because most people just didn’t see the point, but it was incredibly enlightening.
That said, I think more people need to take humanities courses, and make them pass-fail instead of graded, so the people who truly need them get exposed to these ideas.
The Journal has a history of the goalie mask in hockey, and how it began with the Canadiens’ Jacques Plante after a series of injuries to his face and head.
CBC has a piece by a woman whose great-uncle, a clergyman at Union United Church, helped found the Negro Community Centre, an organization which she’s now working to revive.
Global on Italian sandwich shops – no mention of the fate of Momesso’s, though.
The Gazette profiles a woman it calls the city’s most influential lifestyle guru.
Or the sad demise of Boulangerie Clark thanks to Brandon Shiller. They had the best sandwiches. Sigh.
Momesso’s is still a going concern. They’re keeping shorter hours but I ate there a couple of times in the last month or so and it’s still good.
The STM has borrowed an idea from Toronto: it sent out one of its people into the metro along with an ordinary passenger to experience the system as a user does – noting blind spots where users feel there are possible hazards and no oversight by security.
Interesting. I know the STM also has started a program wherein they accompany users with disabilities to help them navigate the transit system. A pilot project happened and then more outings are planned at some unspecified time in the future.
I wrote to them for more info but got nothing concrete. A small request: If you see something about this being reported, would you consider posting it? 🙂
I got an email from the STM asking me to participate. I would have liked to have (the compensation was pretty good) but was out of town. I think they contacted me because I’m signed up for the Ma Voix Ma STM surveys.
Daniel, I will certainly post anything I see about the STM doing something like that.
CE, I’m also on the survey list, but haven’t heard from them about this program. All I know is in the La Presse piece I linked.
Ephraim 11:10 on 2024-01-03 Permalink
I have to say that the Amber alert provided some interesting comedy for us. We were on a flight…. and as people turned off “flight mode” the whole airplane began to buzz with alert after alert
Mark Côté 11:39 on 2024-01-03 Permalink
Am I the only one who got that alert four times that afternoon?
Ephraim 12:11 on 2024-01-03 Permalink
@Mark – 3 Times. But one was a “Presidential Alert” and may have come in because I have a travel esim installed on my phone
Kate 12:12 on 2024-01-03 Permalink
Only saw it once – at home in Montreal, phone on Fido.
Ian 12:17 on 2024-01-03 Permalink
I got it twice on my mobile, on Fizz.
steph 12:59 on 2024-01-03 Permalink
Three times within 20 mins. Fido.
CE 13:00 on 2024-01-03 Permalink
I only got it once.
Daniel 13:17 on 2024-01-03 Permalink
Strange. I got it once in the afternoon and then once near 11pm as we were going to bed! Bell mobile.
jeather 13:23 on 2024-01-03 Permalink
I got it once, but half the office got it at one time, then the other half 15 seconds later.
EmilyG 15:02 on 2024-01-03 Permalink
I caught the end of it as I turned on the radio.