The Journal cites a study that claims that failing to provide service in French is costing Montreal merchants more than a billion dollars a year.
I simply can’t believe this. Who can get hired for a public‑facing job if they can’t speak French?
Maclean’s has a current piece about the CAQ and language.
La Presse has an epic tale of how to be a predatory landlord.
A promised access that shortens the hike between Bonaventure metro and the REM is opening on Friday after a long delay.
It’s about time. I and a whole other bunch of commuters have been using it for months already.
Bordeaux Jail has been locked down in response to the many drone deliveries that have been showing up there – six in one hour, recently.
La Presse reports that ceramic knives are circumventing the authorities’ use of metal detectors in the prison.
TVA says there’s been one arrest.
Can’t they jam the radio signals over the jail? Or would that be impossible without cutting out legitimate wifi and other communications? Do drones use specific frequencies that can be identified?
Next you’ll be telling me people in will fly helicopters to a Quebec prison to break people out….
Autocorrect is taking typos to a new level – I feel like I have dementia reading some comments online these days.
I’m not seeing any autocorrect glitches in this thread…?
Maybe it’s just a missing word but “people in will fly” hurts me.
“People in” is a direct, though incorrect, translation of french- Canadian slang “les gars en-dedans” witch means the ” guys inside.” Describing the state of somebody being detained inside a prison.
There have been 31 arrests in the car theft sweep by the OPP and SPVM this week.
This is mascara on a mongoose, with no basic action on the essential. Cars are worth a lot of money and the security systems seem to have been by a committee of kindergartners with impressive scissor skills.
@fagstein’s post added a bit of clarity:
“OPP and Montreal Police complete big operation against car theft by arresting dozens of people … who had already been charged with car theft but just didn’t show up to their court dates.”
https://x.com/fagstein/status/1771290097285017658?s=20
H. John, thanks once again.
Suggests police are busier putting up PR smoke than actually rooting out the operators of these car theft operations.
A DDO resident who says she needs a tempo for her car because of physical disability got no traction in court, and will have to pay $13,000 in fines because her suburb outlaws them.
Can someone explain to me why she can’t use the garage (You can clearly see the house has a garage in the Gazette article)? You can see from the Global photo that they pay someone to clear the driveway. Or am I completely nuts in an expectation that you use a garage to store a…. car?
It says in the article that she fosters kids, and the foster system requires that they securely store anything remotely hazardous – “tools, paints, toxic substances” – and she locks all this stuff up in the garage, not leaving room for a vehicle.
I understand that tempos are unaesthetic, but it’s not like they’re permanent structures. I don’t understand why these suburbs are so fixated on property values that they can’t allow them for part of the year.
It does seem silly to not use the garage for the car(s). That said, around my neighbourhood it seems that hardly anyone uses their garages for their cars. the garage becomes a storage area for household junk, lawn mowers, etc. etc., and people just park in the driveway.
Fair enough, but if you claim your disability is such that you can’t handle an un-covered outside driveway then you’d think you’d be motivated to de-clutter a bit and use the darn garage for your car.
Ephraim, the Global photo is a “file photo of a car shelter,” not the shelter for this specific house, so we don’t know if they have a driveway clearing service. They likely do (most people do it seems), and even if they don’t, that $13,000 fine would pay for 30 years worth of driveway clearing!
Right, I just saw the part about the toxic stuff in the garage. Although I do have my doubts that any regular house would have enough of such substances to fill a two-car garage.
That said, I also agree that the complainers about Tempos are making a lot of noise about nothing. Everything looks like shit in winter, so what’s the big deal if there’s also Tempos in the driveways (especially in DDO for Pete’s sake.)
I think the anti-tempo law is absurd but “we foster kids and therefore have to keep a two car garage full of paint and tools and cleaning products” is pretty difficult to believe.
The industrial-modern houses of DDO and their barren bulbous streets are already so ugly, who cares if they have tempos?
It’s a 2 car garage, how much toxic stuff can you have? And why are you keeping all of it? And you can secure tools in many places, basements, a storage shed and even…. a storage facility, where you would have to actually DRIVE out to get at it, definitely keeping it away from the kids. And 2 garage spaces worth? Really? I’d love to see the transcript where the judge started asking about the garage because clearly he wasn’t buying that excuse, either.
Does the article say it’s a two-car garage? I agree that it seems suspect they have so much paint to fill a garage, but some older homes have a garage that just barely fits one car. Let’s not assume too much.
An easy way to find out! I read the decision:
[16] Due to the number of items stored in the garage, they are unable to park in it, even though photos that were filed show that the garage is wider than a single-car space. Over the years the garage has always been used as a “designated locked environment,” to which the youths have no access.
[17] Furthermore, Ms. Gibson testified that they have a large car that takes eight people, and there is a platform in the garage, so the car will not fit into it. However, when she was asked specifically if her car would fit into the garage if she removed all the dangerous objects what were stored in it, she replied “yes.”
[25] No evidence was provided to the Court as to the role Mr. Buchanan plays in providing for the transportation of these youths or doing the shopping. Perhaps we are to assume that he is at work all day and therefore unavailable to clean the snow from Ms. Gibson’s car or transport the youths wherever they must go.
[26] It would have been helpful to have more information as to how he could or could not help with these tasks and whether Ms. Gibson is always the only person who must be available. This information was not provided to the Court.
[47] Respectfully, the evidence in this case does not show that it was impossible to comply with the by-law. The defence of impossibility cannot succeed when no attempts to comply with the by-law were made.
GC, the Gazette has an article about this that shows the woman in her driveway and you can see a two-car garage in the background. However, see jeather’s post above.
Tempos can also pose a safety risk. They can block visibility at intersections and in high winds if they are not secured well (or even if they are!), they can take off and damage nearby structures. It’s not always an aesthetic thing even though they are f-ing hideous.
Thank you Jeather. Didn’t realize we had access to it! So she’s paying $13K in fines because she doesn’t want to clear the garage. Seems an expensive lesson.
Fair enough, Blork, but that was not in Kate’s post. Didn’t realize you had done extra reading. And thanks, jeather, for the details from the judgement.
I also found myself wondering how big her vehicle was, which the judgement sheds some light on that. Just because the nature of her disability might make it easier to have a higher car, which would tend to be wider.
They may not be able to afford off-site storage but they do appear to have a yard. Surely, as Ephraim suggested, they could lock the dangerous stuff up in a shed?
I agree that it’s a pretty stupid rule that DDO has against them, but it does sound like she has other options and that the judge probably made the right decision.
Yes if you look up the name in SOQUIJ the judgement comes right up. It’s pretty short, very clearly written. They have a shed, but it isn’t winterized so is not good for all the items (unclear if it’s good for enough items to leave room for the car), and it’s also at the far end of the property so it’s difficult to access and not useful for daily needs; they never looked into putting in a closer shed, etc, and they refuse to repurpose one of their bedrooms (which may or may not be a reasonable option).
My gut reaction about the bedrooms was to give them a free pass, in the sense that they might be needed for foster children. Now that I’ve skimmed the judgement, however, it sounds like they are keeping bedrooms free for six kids but rarely actually have that many…
Seems to be big news that a Canadian pair won the figure skating world title here this week. The angle for a lot of media is that Deanna Stellato‑Dudek is 40 years old and her partner, Maxime Deschamps, is 32.
Well, to be fair, the angle is mostly that she’s 40 and came back after a 16-year hiatus to win the top title, and that makes her the oldest woman to ever take that title (beating the previous record of 38, set 101 years ago). That’s quite an achievement, and is certainly notable.
I don’t really see the stories playing up the age difference as some kind of mismatch or “older woman/younger man” phenomenon. But that’s based on just those articles linked above; maybe others are going that way (which would be stupid and unfortunate).
I didn’t mean to imply that the age difference was a theme. I didn’t see anything about that, only that while being 32 years old is unusual, being 40 is unheard of.
Got it. And it’s nice to see “old” (40!) people doing well and breaking barriers. Personally, I can barely remember 32; it was so long ago, and like a different universe in terms of the kind of carbon-based Earth humanoid I was then. (Pre-“Blork!”)
Complaints to the STM by metro passengers have soared recently. La Presse sorts them by type, short version being that the presence of homeless people, and the consumption of drugs and alcohol, is making some people feel unsafe.
I’ve been taking the metro for pretty much my entire life, and things don’t seem particularly worse than at any other time. Maybe I’m not using the troublesome stations.
Ditto, although I haven’t had a commute since the pandemic. But I did take the metro earlier this week, and when the doors opened at Laurier, we could hear some guy shouting on the platform, some crazy mixture of accusations and abuse, but it didn’t sound like a fight, it sounded insane. Everyone around me was clearly thinking “please don’t let him get aboard” and luckily he didn’t.
Weirdly, the thing that crossed my mind was “Laurier station? Really?”
As someone who lives near Laurier and uses it regularly, there definitely seems to have been an increase in the number of homeless people camping out inside. Especially around the northern entrance, where there is no ticket booth or other personnel. (Although, I rarely use the southern entrance, so I have less knowledge of what’s going on over there.)
Whether or not this makes one feel unsafe is a matter of perception. Some of them panhandle, but probably not even the majority. I’ve never witnessed them threatening anyone or each other.
There was one guy who just started pissing on the platform one day. I realize that he has limited options, considering the lack of public washrooms in the city. But, he had just walked in from outside at the same time as me, so I kind of wish he had picked a bush instead.
GC, your account makes me wonder how much the working conditions of metro cleaners have worsened since the pandemic.
I work in a building close to de la Savane metro. I sometimes see homeless people there & we’ve had homeless people hanging around our parking lot and building. Sometimes we see beer cans and bottles in the morning. Also, what I assume to be human excrement.
I’ve noticed lots of homeless people and active drug users at Bonaventure during rush hour since starting to take the Metro regularly this January. Certainly more than in the past and I haven’t witnessed anything that would make me fearsome, but I can understand how someone reasonably would. The stench motivates you to walk quickly. The bigger issue, IMO, is rampant homelessness and dangerous drug use (as in dangerous for the user).
Laurier is my metro station and I use both entrances regularly. The one on Laurier often has about half a dozen people sleeping on the landing above the tracks and there are almost always some drunk/high old guys standing at the entrance yelling at each other but they seem harmless. The St-Joseph entrance is very busy and people seem to be coming and going all the time, nobody really hanging around.
I went to Bonaventure on Friday night coming from downtown around midnight and the entrance was jam packed with people sleeping just inside the doors and there was garbage everywhere. Honestly, I had never seen anything like it in Montreal. It felt like we were being followed by an erratic man for a little while but in the end, he was just walking behind us. It was the first time I’ve felt unsafe on the metro in a long time.
There are definitely way more people sleeping in the metro, much more drug use, and I would assume that the cleaners’ jobs have gotten much more difficult based on how much more filthy the stations and trains are. It’s been increasing since things started going back to normal post-Covid, but has increased the most since around the middle of last summer. If things are this bad here, I can only imagine what cities like Vancouver or Seattle are going through!
CE, was this the entrance just outside Windsor Station? I remember seeing a bunch of homeless guys bedded down in that entrance some years ago – well before the pandemic. It wasn’t filthy, though.
Yeah it was that one. There have always been homeless people there but this time it felt like many many more than usual.
We’ll be getting chilly weather and snow for the first weekend of “official” spring.
Weekend notes from CityCrunch, CultMTL, La Presse.
Traffic crises of the weekend, plus road closures for the Mulroney funeral, and there may be some for the Gaza demonstration downtown too.
Blork 21:47 on 2024-03-22 Permalink
OMG. The article begins with “Les commerçants montréalais pourraient profiter d’un potentiel de ventes supplémentaires de 1,1 milliard de dollars chaque année s’ils récupéraient les clients qui évitent de magasiner dans la métropole à cause du manque de service en français.” But it provides zero evidence that this lack of service in French exists. What does exist is a PERCEPTION that there is a lack of service in French, and that perception comes from bullshit articles like this.
Notably not asked: how much would these merchants lose if they were to be openly hostile to English speakers? I suspect it wouldn’t just be local Anglos who would be perturbed (at the hostility; not the lack of English). All those visitors (tourists, business travellers, family visitors, etc.) might find themselves shopping less too.
Kevin 00:10 on 2024-03-23 Permalink
30% of customers don’t go to places where they are afraid they might not be able to speak French.
One of my former colleagues once said “Je suis content de jaser en français but my money speaks English.”
As I’ve said before, Parizeau should have gone to a therapist, not a dentist.
Kate 10:34 on 2024-03-23 Permalink
The Gazette echoes Kevin’s statement: “Thirty per cent of francophone respondents […] say they avoid certain Montreal boroughs because they expect to be unable to get service in French.” But that doesn’t mean they can’t! This story seems to be a structure based on preconceptions.
Even if I were hiring for a store in Westmount or Beaconsfield I’d damn well make sure the hire could manage in French, even if it wasn’t their first language. Wouldn’t anyone?
Daniel 11:52 on 2024-03-23 Permalink
What I don’t understand: “L’étude a été menée du 9 au 21 mai 2023 auprès de 3012 répondants anglophones et francophones”… And they spoke to anglophones why exactly?
MarcG 11:52 on 2024-03-23 Permalink
It could be that businesses currently can’t even be so picky as to demand bilingualism, so it wouldn’t surprise me to get served by unilingual Anglo at a gas station in Beaconsfield, but yeah this “study” sounds bogus.
Nicholas 11:58 on 2024-03-23 Permalink
So what they’re saying is if all businesses had adequate French, then areas around Montreal, particularly places that voted CAQ and that the Journal writes for, would lose $1.1 billion in business? Is that…their goal?
Kate 15:25 on 2024-03-23 Permalink
I think that what they’d like to be able to do is enforce French only in all retail settings. You can’t really frame a law that would actively ban other languages, and it would be impossible to police anyway, but you can claim that if everyone agreed to speak French – and only French – then francophones would feel “safe” everywhere in expecting to be served in French only, everywhere in town, and we’d all make an extra billion dollars and be happy.
But it’s a fact everywhere on the planet that someone serving in a shop or restaurant will naturally switch to the language of the customer if they can. In addition, you can’t claim to be promoting tourism if you insist that a salesperson on Ste‑Catherine Street should only speak in French to visitors from elsewhere in North America and others. But this study is going to be used to support that kind of idea, just watch.
Blork 18:26 on 2024-03-23 Permalink
Folks, the study says nothing about the ability or inability to receive service in French. Nothing.
The study is about people’s PERCEPTIONS that in some neighborhoods they won’t receive service in French. It’s about what people THINK, not about what really happens.
The Gazette puts it this way: “Thirty per cent of francophone respondents in a Léger and Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton poll released Friday say they avoid certain Montreal boroughs — such as Côte-des-Neiges—Notre-Dame-de-Grâce — because they expect to be unable to get service in French.”
EXPECT is the operative word. What they EXPECT, not what they actually get.
And bear in mind that the poll was done for Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton, which is an accounting firm. The whole point is that from an accounting point of view, some businesses are losing money because of consumers’ expectations.
(That said, there are likely family run businesses in CDN and NDG that are run by recent immigrants and primarily serve the South Asian or Latino communities, and if the kids manning the till are recent immigrants then maybe they don’t speak perfect French yet. It happens. You can’t compare downtown shops to shops in highly immigrant neighborhoods in terms of expectations for employees.)
You can download a PDF of the study here: https://asdcm.com/upload/ressources/ASDCM-Etude-sur-limpact-socioeconomique-du-commerce-en-francais-a-Montreal-RAPPORT-FINAL.pdf
Kevin 23:39 on 2024-03-23 Permalink
Like Blork said, this is a survey of perception, not reality.
We’d be in a better world if people went into therapy instead of politics or commentating…
Uatu 10:17 on 2024-03-24 Permalink
This JDM article deserves its proper place: lining the bottom of a birdcage.
qatzelok 12:16 on 2024-03-24 Permalink
@ Blork: “Folks, the study says nothing about the ability or inability to receive service in French. Nothing.
The study is about people’s PERCEPTIONS that in some neighborhoods they won’t receive service in French. It’s about what people THINK, not about what really happens.”
Yes, but a lot of our behavior is determined by perceptions. And if francophones have the perception that they will be asked to speak English at shops in the Eaton Center, they will go to the Dix3o instead.
As someone who lives and shops downtown, this perception is correct. A lot of service-industry workers at the malls downtown don’t speak French, and even go so far as to insist that customers speak to them (the service workers) in English. If I have experienced this, so have many francophones.
Tee Owe 14:37 on 2024-03-24 Permalink
Kind of with qatzelok on this – we don’t live in Montreal (used to), visited last summer, we were struck by how much English there was downtown – ok, we speak English to each other so maybe shop assistants picked up on that, but I have to say, it felt more ‘English’ than before. Our perception.
Kate 15:31 on 2024-03-24 Permalink
qatzelok, have you complained to management or to the OQLF about this? Jean‑François Roberge says you should.
Tee Owe, do you think I should insist on being served in French?
Tee Owe 17:16 on 2024-03-24 Permalink
No, not that, just that the ‘perception’ of english was more than we had experienced before – not that we were pushed to use english, opposite, our (lousy) french was well-received when used – so I am not entirely with quatzelok, but he is making a valid point
Kevin 09:57 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
As someone who is frequently downtown, my perception is that the perception of francophones is highly influenced by the phenomenon of Confirmation Bias.
azrhey 12:25 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
The availability of French speaking staff downtown has really gone down in the last 5-10 years. I don’t care either way but when I shop around with my dad, who doesn’t speak English at all, I find it tiresome. I, nor he, mind being approached in English but the number who staff that cannot understand when dad speakings in French has really gone through the roof is a lot of places and some fast food. With the problems of actually finding ANY staff to work on this stores these days we don;t complain much about it, but it used to be that nearly everyone woudl swtich to French when needed, even if broken french, but these days I’d say 90% of staff will speak english to us ( which we do not mind ) and of those a good 30-40% are unable to switch to French when asked. ( which bothers me when I’m with dad ).
Kate 19:23 on 2024-03-25 Permalink
OK, I believe it, even though I still can’t quite credit that people can get hired here for public‑facing jobs if they can’t speak or understand French.
Ian 08:21 on 2024-03-28 Permalink
Yeah I’m with Kevin on this.
According to my personal experience over the last year about half the people in Montreal speak Yiddish as their first language, and of those, roughly 6 out of every 8 are children.
Could that just be my neighbourhood and my own interactions leading me to false overgeneralizations? Of course not, my experience is obviously universal.
.גײ קאַקן אױפֿן ים