UQAM is making a somewhat daring choice: its library will be made more open to the public including the many street people in its vicinity. I don’t think it’s obvious where the university library is anyway – I’m looking at the photo and can’t mesh it with my knowledge of the neighbourhood.
Can they do this effectively while protecting their collection and keeping the premises clean and serviceable for students and researchers? It remains to be seen.
Time Out has some notes on outdoor cinemas this summer.
That article is odd. Did they reprint an article from 2021? Every date range they mention for the outdoor cinemas is for 2021, with a few exceptions where they are cancelled. Example for Film Noir au Canal: “While they’ve suspended activities in Montreal for 2021, we’re sure they’ll be back in action next year (provided health regulations permit it)”.
Luckily, most of the links to the sites still work, so you can get more up-to-date showtimes there. But the Timeout article is just weird.
I noticed that as well. Looking at it in the Wayback Machine, it’s a page that they’ve been republishing every summer since 2021 but do a lazy job of reviewing the content.
These are the kinds of things that really give credence to
Dead Internet Theory.
QMI commentators are getting bent out of shape that city hall is including images of women in hijab as representative Montrealers. Sophie Durocher has already done two columns on the topic: “Est-ce qu’on est à Montréal ou au Montrealistan?” and Martineau, on the weekend, did a heavily ironic “interview with Valérie Plante” in which he too leaned hard on the hijab image.
Le Devoir also has a brief op‑ed criticizing this choice.
Plante has said before that she is a mayor of all Montrealers, and that includes women who choose to wear hijab. I’m glad she isn’t caught up in this latter‑day attempt to revive the crusades here.
Seem that maybe it’s time someone ask the question about how QMI does it’s hiring and if it’s hiring is also full of such discrimination.
This city’s provincialism is sometimes on par with deep red states souht of the border. Not a good look.
The Outremont pieds-noirs do give the Westmount Rhodesians a run for their money.
As when Joe Biden was first elected, pieces about Kamala Harris and her time in Montreal are appearing again. This CP piece admits that “Harris’s biography on the White House website doesn’t mention her time in Montreal” – probably wise, given her need to emphasize that she’s thoroughly American.
When Harris was first elected, journalists were scrambling to find anyone who had been in school with her here to get a quotable bit about her history. If she is chosen to run, we can expect more of the same.
A few days later, also in the Journal.
This is the old inferiority complex acting up again. I don’t think people here understand how this makes us look like a small village… and not in a good way.
It’s just journalists looking for a hook for a story. Admittedly this puts us on the same level as Jenkinstown in County Louth which purports to be the ancestral homeland of Joe Biden, but I’m sure it’s a nice little place.
The Irish Times report that her Jamaican father’s family were Irish slave owners – try to insert link here, hope you can help Kate if I don’t succeed https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2024/07/23/kamala-harris-is-a-descendant-of-an-irish-slave-owner-in-jamaica/
Tee Owe, I saw that, and someone’s comment “how do you imagine a white slave owner would become the ancestor of a woman of colour?”
More on the hazards of electric scooters, stressing the need for helmets and some form of training.
Taylor 19:48 on 2024-07-22 Permalink
Good for them. This is the right move. Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s not like university students are paragons of cleanliness or acceptable public behaviour. If our society can’t get its act together to house the homeless, they can at least invite them inside to read.
bob 20:10 on 2024-07-22 Permalink
The photo is of the courtyard diagonally behind the wee church on St. Catherine.
Is it not open to the public in the sense that you need a UQAM ID or some such, or do they mean that it is kind of inaccessible unless you know how to get there (très peu de porosité et de transparence entre l’intérieur et l’extérieur)?
Kate 20:48 on 2024-07-22 Permalink
I don’t know the answer to that, bob. In general, I don’t know how university libraries view outsiders. I mean, obviously they don’t lend books to people who aren’t students or members of the teaching staff, but how do they feel about random people coming in and browsing the stacks?
Taylor, I’m of two minds about this plan, because there’s some distance between student disorderliness, and the kind of disorder you get when people are shooting up or nodding off or making bad messes in your bathrooms. Somebody’s going to have to keep the place sanitary.
Mitchell 06:34 on 2024-07-23 Permalink
In response to the question about university libraries and the non-university public: everywhere I’ve lived in North America, including Montreal, university libraries usually do allow members of the public to borrow materials. I am authorized to borrow from both McGill’s library and from Concordia’s library. But there’s usually a fee. The fees for these two schools is higher than the fees I paid in, for example, Colorado, but not as high as Yale’s ($750 US/year).
And the stacks in both libraries are open (although McGill’s currently are not because they’re in the middle of a big project and redoing all the study space at the library).
Taylor 17:33 on 2024-07-23 Permalink
@Kate – all I can say is take a stroll through the Maclennan or SGW library during exam season and you *absolutely* see students:
sleeping
making bad messes in the WCs
shooting up? well, I never saw that but I wouldn’t be surprised. Drug and alcohol abuse are common amongst university students. I have heard people having sex in university library washrooms, so pick your poison about what’s ‘less sanitary’
Put it this way – I used to make it a point of using the WCs on the upper floors of the library bldg, where the faculty offices are, just because they were so much cleaner
I say give it a shot and see what ‘natural order’ develops between the unhoused and library staff. My bet is that most unhoused would be willing to play by whatever unwritten rules are worked out to govern ‘respectable behaviour’ in exchnage for a climate controlled environmentto spend most of their days in, not to mention a lifetime’s worth of reading material and internet access.
Perhaps it will lead to a pilot project run by social workers program where they help get the unhoused to fill out forms for additional benefits. I’d rather take that chance
CE 00:26 on 2024-07-24 Permalink
@Taylor, have you spent much time in the Grande Bibliothèque? I don’t know what it’s like these days but when I was a student and would go there to study and work, I’d stay away from the section that overlooks the lobby area because there would be so much yelling and screaming from homeless and/or people on drugs. I have my doubts that most (some, yes) homeless people are going to take advantage of the “lifetime’s worth of reading material and internet access” at the UQAM library.
JP 09:59 on 2024-07-24 Permalink
Just going to be honest and say I don’t think I would have appreciated having the homeless around the university library. Mind you it has been 15 years, but I studied a lot at both Concordia libraries and it was generally pleasant and felt safe. Yes, it does get crowded at peak study times and I’m sure some crazy things happened but I don’t remember that. I get that the homeless need places to go but I really don’t think this is the answer.
Ian 13:36 on 2024-07-24 Permalink
I suspect this is part of the reason McGill closes its libraries to the public during exam time.