McGill has withdrawn its injunction request against the pro-Palestinian groups that created the protest encampment on its downtown campus starting in April, but it’s an empty gesture given that they sent in private security to dismantle the camp on July 10.
Updates from July, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A new oil slick has appeared in the river off Pointe‑aux‑Trembles. This time, the Canadian Coast Guard has identified a source, but saying it’s a storm drain isn’t really much of a clue. Who’s dumping oil has still to be determined.
It’s not trivial, either. The spill two weeks ago is estimated at 19,000 litres, and birds have been damaged in the area.
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Kate
Environment Canada has verified that a tornado ripped through parts of the suburbs, uprooted trees, knocked over a semi-trailer damaged infrastructure.
Something definitely tore down some of my hollyhocks, anyway.
Eventually it was determined that three tornadoes touched down in Quebec this week.
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Kate
The city is aware of a growing number of soi‑disant tour guides operating without permits, so it’s considering abandoning the requirement. People who have spent money and time acquiring permits are not happy about this.
Updating to add: we had quite a detailed discussion about this issue last year, with some good ideas including thoughts from a participant who has a permit.
jeather
Without getting back into the fight about whether permits should or shouldn’t be necessary for tour guides, taxi drivers just won a big lawsuit about this.
Ian
Oh noes, what if they tell a version of local history the SSJB doesn’t support? QMI will never get over it!
Chris
A strange concept that walking around and talking with people should require a permit.
Kate
One of the regular participants here does have a permit, and has defended it in the past. It’s not a bad idea to make sure the tour guides know actual history, geography, architecture and so forth, and are not walking around babbling received ideas and nonsense.
Josh
I mean, journalism doesn’t require any kind of permitting. Given that, the idea that tour guides should have permits is a difficult thing to defend.
Kate
Journalists – traditional ones, anyway – have editors, and they have feedback from their public, who live in the same area and are aware of local conditions. Whereas a tour guide is addressing a small group of people who don’t know the area, won’t pick up on any mistakes or exaggerations, and have no way to respond to any issues, since they’ve presumably already paid for the tour and will be leaving town before they figure out that Mount Royal is not a volcano.
Nicholas
By my reading of the by-law (it’s very short), this is no requirement that the guided visit be paid or commercial in nature, so not only do you need a permit if you do it for free, you need it if you take your friends around and show them things and talk about them.
I just had two friends visiting from DC, and one of them loves alleys. So I made up an alley tour in our area. I found some of the best alleys, with pretty landscaping and cool murals, and then I took them on this tour and talked about what we saw and the history of the city. They loved it (and Montreal), and when I mentioned it to some friends they all wanted to see the alleys too. So not only am I a criminal, I’ve started a criminal enterprise, even though I’m not taking any money from it and am just hanging out with my friends exploring my city.
Regardless of what you think of these permits (and I’ve already expressed my opinion on this), I think we can all admit that the law is too broad as written. Good on the city for looking to change this.
walkerp
Except obviously it isn’t since you were able to complete your tour without any issues.
Joey
Leaving aside the question of whether tour guides should or should not be licensed (as well as the question of whether in this transition license-holders should receive some compensation for the devaluation of their until-now mandatory license), it’s encouraging to see the city even consider abandoning a requirement that it refuses to/cannot enforce.
Stringent rules without enforcement or consequences for rule-breaking do nothing but upset people who follow them.
Josh
Kate: The scenario you paint of journalistic rigour is pretty much done. Not many editors left these days at most outlets, and fewer all the time. It seems a perfectly reasonable comp to me in the age of citizen journalism and one-person brands (like the guy who accosted the Prime Minister on vacation just this week) popping up everywhere.
Ephraim
Over the years, I have heard foreign guests who have taken tours tell me many different stories as to why Duplexes in Montreal have outdoor stairs. And still most of them seem to always miss the real reason… taxes.Even the Atlas Obscura history misses the fact that by putting them outside, they didn’t count as square footage of the house and lowered property taxes.
So, having them actually licenced means that they are tested on things like that… and don’t just make up history as they so fit. I mean, how many of them can actually tell you where Craig street was, what was the first skyscraper of Montreal and the two last skyscrapers before the great depression (hint, only one of them is in Old Montreal.) Nevermind things like where is the memorial to Kate McGarrigle or who was born at 1577 Van Horne or even where the Expos played in their first year.
Kate
Nicholas, would you be willing to share your alley map? If so, I’ll send you the one I like, which was made by another blogger a few years ago. Email me if you would.
Ephraim, I had to look up who was born at 1577 Van Horne!
Josh, people still get degrees in journalism. There are still standards.
Nicholas
Ephraim, why do I need to know all that if I’m giving an alley tour in NDG, or a food tour of Pierrefonds, or a video game tour of Mile End and environs, or a bookstore tour of St Catherine? Tour guides who have spent $2,500 plus spent weeks of their time in a course do not know every fact there is to know about Montreal, and people taking the tour don’t expect that impossible standard. What is important and basic to you on your tour may be irrelevant to another’s tour; if a topic is not on the official curriculum of the one place that all tour guides have to go, the licensing does nothing to help ensure accuracy or knowledge. The current regulatory regime does not ensure that every licensed tour guide never says an incorrect piece of information, and I don’t think we want government-enforced fact checkers (especially since not everyone agrees on history, and those things are often much more interesting that basic facts). We saw recently on this blog a story about a very old home in TMR and people disagree even as to the year it was built, but I guess that is of no matter to tour guides there because TMR doesn’t have a regulatory regime to ensure tour guides don’t just make stuff up.
walkerp, I was able to complete my tour because no one caught me, but that doesn’t make it legal. The city says they have not given out a single fine in years, but just because something isn’t being enforced now doesn’t mean the law isn’t too broad as written. The tour guides and their association want the law enforced and fines doled out. They want the law strengthened, not weakened or repealed. They want to stop people walking around with their friends and talking about the history, culture and architecture of Montreal, which is currently the law; if they didn’t they would agree to at least that change, but they haven’t. I want that law changed, even if it’s not currently enforced, just like park curfews and Quebec’s pot regime. Do you?
carswell
@Ephraim Do you have a source for that claim? I’ve always understood that it was tax-related but had nothing to do with square-footage, rather with Montreal properties being taxed based on the length of the front property line. That, in turn, led to narrow lots and houses and staircases being placed outside so as not to make flats even narrower.
@Kate Why not share the secret? Just wasted minutes searching. Former or current residents include F. Jeanbart, D.C. West, Th. Thornton, N. Costa, E.M. Friedman (Freedman) and J. Shatner, none of which I recognize. The last could be Captain Kirk’s dad, except William was, per Wikipedia, born in NDG.
Ephraim
@Carswell – Houses were taxed on the gardens, which is why you have houses in the village that are built right ot the sidewalk. The thing was not only did the city like the garden space, but also the big fire jumped from street to street, so having the gardens also provided more of a break against fires. But the city changed it’s taxation system and went to square footage (which is still in place today. So a staircase outside was in the garden and didn’t count as interior square footage. There are two other reasons, one of which was heating, because of course, you didn’t need to heat it. The last related to the landlord being able to watch who went upstairs, especially if it was his kids, to make sure that no one “untoward” was going up (ie prevent cheating).
It’s the same reason they have small windows in the UK and cheap handles… they were taxed on the fixtures in the house.
carswell
Thanks. But I asked for a source, not another unsubstantiated claim.
jeather
There are all sorts of weird property tax histories — windows, fireplaces, building width, etc.
Kate
Also the stories about why so many duplex and triplex flats have a long room with an archway…
Blork
I tend to agree that requiring a license or permit just to tell tourists stories seems silly, both in terms of government overreach and a lack of enforceability. On the other hand, I see the value in having tour guides be trained and reliable.
If you ask me the solution is pretty simple. Make it known that licensed tour guides give better tours. The ol’ “ya get what ya pay for” thing. If this is well known (advertised around the touristy spots, on the Metro, etc.) then tourists might be inclined to pay a little more for a proper guide, or at least they might be mindful that the unlicensed tour guide is likely uninformed and unreliable.
And if a tourist doesn’t care for quality and gets a bullshit tour… so what? It’s not like there’s actual HARM if some dummy thinks that Jacques Cartier got here before Columbus, or if they think Montreal was the capital of America before the US Civil War. There is so much stupidity and misinformation out there in the world, absorbed and spread by hopelessly dumb people. If some of that is touristy info about Montreal, so what? It also means that people who actually care about quality information might be smart enough to seek out the licensed guide.
Ephraim
@carswell… been a long time… don’t remember which book had the whole discussion. I’ve read a heck of a lot of books on the city.
Chris
>So, having them actually licenced means that they are tested on things like that… and don’t just make up history as they so fit.
There is a middle ground between *forced* licensing and ‘making up history’.
>Josh, people still get degrees in journalism. There are still standards.
And people still get degrees in tourism. But even those people, unlike journalism grads, are *forced* to do this licensing.
Much of the historical knowledge that tour guides (or really anyone) have is ultimately from *unlicensed* journalists or authors of the past. The people writing those old books and newspapers didn’t need any licensing, but you need a license to regurgitate their old work? It’s nonsense.
>If you ask me the solution is pretty simple…
Yup, i.e. ‘let the market decide’. Provide/allow *optional* licensing and let those customers that want it pay some premium.
Kate
Chris, there have been discussions about imposing journalism licences. Effectively, they’ve existed for years anyway. If I wanted to attend an official press conference, do you think they’d let me in, without press credentials? Not likely. Anyway, I wouldn’t be told such an event was happening, but if I found out and showed up and said I was from a blog, I’d be shown the door.
Chris
>there have been discussions about imposing journalism licences
Sure, but there are none actually.
>If I wanted to attend an official press conference…
That’s only a small part of journalism. Only a small minority physically go to press conferences.
Kate
Chris, I realize there are no journalism licences.
The point I’m making is that there are many situations where a person has to have standing as a representative of a recognized journalistic platform before people will answer questions or interact with them in any way. We still believe, as a society, that journalism holds the powerful to account, but that doesn’t mean random people can carry out investigations or grill politicians – not with impunity and credibility, at any rate. We accord legitimate journalists that kind of status.
This has nothing to do with tour guide permits, so that’s all I’m going to say on this matter.
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Kate
A notebook found on a search of Ali Ngarukiye’s place showed that he had instructions on making explosives and may have been planning a bomb attack in Montreal in emulation of similar actions in London and Paris. Whether Ngarukiye had accomplices in this plan isn’t known.
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Kate
A man has been charged in the fatal shooting in February of the brother of a prominent mob boss.
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