The Rover has a great piece about how Chinese Family Services was saved after an accusation from the RCMP that it was a Chinese “police station”. Neha Chollangi puts this charge in the same frame as historical anti‑Chinese xenophobia dating back decades in this country.
DeWolf reported on this in a comment here from March.
Shots were fired Thursday evening at the Deauville Coiffure Spa where Claudia Iacono was murdered last year.
A cargo ship has become wedged in the Seaway so that on top of the stoppage in freight trains there’s now a stoppage on the water.
That’s the same kind of wedge job that messed up the Suez Canal a couple of years ago.
But a great opportunity to learn to pronounce Dutch! I would ask about clowns, but I’m not sure we are ready for the majesty of a clown navy.
The name of the ship is Heemskerkgracht which means ‘Canal of Heemskerk’. A canal blocking a canal, a Russian Doll situation.
(I’m not going to try to teach anyone how to pronounce it.)
Since Heemskerk is in the north, are both the g and ch a voiced fricative is my only question
@Ian they’re not exactly the same, but yes, definitely throaty sounds. And indeed pronounced differently if the speaker is from the North or the South of the Netherlands. They call it speaking with a hard G or a soft G. (I moved to the North but never completely lost my southern ‘soft G’.)
I doubt an English speaker’s mouth could produce that sound. Maybe after a lot of practice, but even then it wouldn’t sound quite right.
My half-sister grew up in Groningen, and she laughs at me every time I try to just say the name of the place.
The blue line extension will take longer and cost a billion dollars more than expected.
Adding TVA’s assessment of the inconveniences to drivers to be expected from the construction.
At an average annual salary of just over 57k, that’s about 17,469 clowns.
The new portrait of René Lévesque that gazes out over the Met was inaugurated Friday morning in the presence of several old‑school nationalist notables.
On the topic of clowns in the news. Someone should say bonjour-hi so they can practice miming heartbreak, it would be a great photo op.
How long till someone paints in a cigarette?
We can rent a cherry-picker crane for the day, I’ll keep an eye out for cops while you paint 😉
The STM is declining to install platform screen doors anytime soon, even though coroners have talked them up as preventing suicide attempts. The report says 92 people suicided in the metro between 2015 and 2023.
I’d like those doors just to prevent dumbasses from dropping their phones on the tracks or the occasional weirdos who disappear into the tunnels and cause a delay on the orange line.
The Journal says that 95% of open teaching posts in town have been filled, while Le Devoir says a thousand positions are still vacant.
Meantime La Presse is reporting that Quebec is short a lot of CEGEP places while the schools that exist are falling apart.
I read in the Journal that it was 4800 and change a few days ago – Lord, who are they hiring?
And why the shortage? Private schools.
Education in this province is a dumpster fire. It’s like everything the neo-liberal xenophobe pods touch becomes a catastrophe, held together by the wills of a minority of workers in those institutions.
Quebec has the most stratified system in the country – actually the whole continent. Most of them are not all that posh, and many are not that expensive thanks to massive public subsidies. But boy are they white. It’s similar to, and more effective than, the trend toward charter schools in the US that has been used to reestablish segregation, only as we all know from fearless Leader Legault that there is no systemic racism in Quebec.
White? Based on the students I see coming out of Collège Français, Stanislas, Marianopolis, Villa-Maria and some of the private schools in Ahunstic – basically any school I happen to have passed by around 3pm – they seem very diverse. Certainly less white than the public elementary school near me or the public schools I used to live near in Mile End.
Part of the reason it’s more effective is that a private school can’t just teach whatever they want. They must teach the provincial curriculum (and then they can add to it as much as they like, it’s a floor); kids must do the provincial exams. (This is also sort of true of homeschooling, though my understanding is they make it very difficult and usually parents will finish off high school using a different province.)
I’m not supporting the subsidised private school system — though it will go nowhere — but it does at least do one thing correctly.
I figured someone would bring up some anecdotal evidence, because that is pretty much what happens every time any kind of widespread racism is noted.
Statistically speaking, private schools in Quebec are schools for white kids, and the immigrant kids go to public schools This is a fact. There are two drivers of neo-liberal privatization. One is economic, so elites can profit off of what should be public institutions, but the other is to remove the institutions from the realm of public controls. In this case, private schools discriminate against non-white children by making sure they set a bar to entry their parents cannot pass, and by diverting non-white children away from the private stream by other means. There are, of course, non-white children whose parents can afford the fees, and who have managed to not get tagged as problematic in some way, and they constitute a minority within a minority.
Anyone in a hijab or turban is barred from teaching in a public school (funny how that doesn’t apply to private schools), and there is a severe under-representation of minorities in general in teaching and administrative staff (the MEQ – whose minister has the kind of respect for education that exterminators have for cockroaches – is as diverse as a box of chalk). So a more diverse population of students is taught by a less diverse set of teachers. Teachers who now, in the public system, need practically no qualifications at all other than a university degree – because the non-white kids don’t need to learn anything beyond “speak French”.
It is racism, and it is systemic., and it is an indisputable fact of Quebec society and culture.
It can afford to do it correctly because it is better funded, and it is better funded because the public system is starved of resources.
Why doesn’t the government just keep the funding in place, and make them public? It is because they are designed to be discriminatory and elitist. That is their function.
While I mostly agree with you, the exception to the box of chalk is all the religious schools.
> I figured someone would bring up some anecdotal evidence
Whereas you have presented no evidence at all, only assertions.
My observations match DeWolf FWIW.
@bob: I’m not saying you’re wrong, but when I present something in a debate as a statistical fact, I will usually present some evidence of that fact. Can you please provide sources to your assertions?
Anecdotally, another part of the reason they’re successful is that they kick out all the kids who might fail the ministry exams before they take them.
More anecdotal evidence here. I went to a private high school. There was a purge after secondary 4. Many students that were not performing well were told they were not welcome back for secondary 5. I didn’t understand it at the time, but in retrospect it seems like this was done to preserve a high score on the success measurements. The school took their money for 4 of the 5 years, though…
@ jeather -yeah I think that’s a function of the house exams.
I’m Asian but a lot of my friends who are Asian and south Asian went to Loyola, Villa and Sacred Heart. They were the kids of doctors and engineers and business execs. I think around the Montreal area we see a lot of visible minorities but maybe that might be different in the regions which is probably what Bob is referring to. In the south shore the private schools I see are primarily white but their ads show diverse students so maybe it’s changing.
>…their ads show diverse students so maybe it’s changing
That’s just the marketing department checking the requisite woke checkboxes I’m afraid. They’d do it whether they were admitting more diverse students or not.
That was happening long before “woke”. Grumpy old men used to blame the portrayal of diversity on political correctness. To be fair, overinflating diversity is often just tokenism.
Back to the whiteness of non-religious private schools, anecdotally, one of my kids goes to Marymount and one of her friends goes to Villa Maria, literally just the other side of the fence, so same neighbourhood etc. Marymount is WAY more ethnically diverse, in an immediately observable way.
That aside, without clear numbers in front of us any observations will be anecdotal but here’s the thing – within qualitative research methods, matching anecdotes are observable data. Quantitative research is not the only valid methodology.
More anecdotal info: Reine Marie on the northern end of St Michel is about 40% ethnic (according to a former student’s estimate).
There’s a significant difference in costs between French and English private schools. Since English schools allow you to avoid the affects of Bill 101 they are several times more expensive.
Affects or effects? Good point though, and in combination with private religious schools I am sure combining them all under the umbrella of “private school” demographics would miss an obvious skew. the Collège Français on Fairmount skews way more diverse than Villa Maria, just based on casual observation. I wonder if combined French/English schools like Villa skew more or less ethnically diverse compared to English-only schools.
>That was happening long before “woke”.
Yup, it certainly was. Call it woke, call it PC, call it tokenism, whatever. Woke is the current word. (Grumpy old men tend to get upset by neologisms. I didn’t invent it, I use it because that’s what the language/culture has chosen.)
>Grumpy old men used to blame the portrayal of diversity on political correctness
In case that was directly to me, to be clear, I’m not arguing for or against this portrayal of diversity. I responded specifically to “their ads show diverse students so maybe it’s changing”. I’m saying: you can’t conclude anything about changes to the student body by portrayals in ads.
A downtown hotel is being converted to residential spaces, but it started out as apartments so the switch back is not a major one.
A Concordia union has threatened a strike as the new term looms. The union represents a diverse group of professional workers at the university, although not the professors or lecturers. Workers want the right to do more teleworking from home.
Weekend notes from La Presse, CityCrunch, CultMTL, Sarah’s Weekend List.
And no weekend would be worth the name without the road closures.
Ian 21:39 on 2024-08-23 Permalink
Hundreds, really. The RCMP have been implicated in anti-Chinese law enforcement and policy since before the head tax.