Updates from September, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 17:32 on 2024-09-05 Permalink | Reply  

    Papa Legault has done a cabinet mini‑shuffle. Christine Fréchette, till now immigration minister, moves to energy and economy, those two portfolios having become wedded in the shadow of Fitz, as well as minister responsible for Montreal. Fréchette is MNA for Sanguinet riding on the South Shore.

    Jean‑François Roberge becomes immigration minister in addition to being minister of the French language.

    Does Legault have so few trusted henchpersons that he needs to double and triple up on cabinet roles?

    Meantime the PQ is already campaigning in Terrebonne, Fitzgibbon’s recently vacated seat.

    Nathalie Collard writes a nice piece honouring Fitzgibbon as minister for Montreal after most journalists even forgot it had been one of his roles.

     

    • Joey 18:46 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      I think he purposefully chose to keep this shuffle as small as possible – adding new MNAs to Cabinet means he would need to explain to the other 65 or whatever why they weren’t chosen. Hardly worth the aggravation, unless there’s a need for a bigger shuffle, which very well may be in the offing at some point in the next half year or so.

      Then again, it’s common in organizations of all kinds to close the ranks of the “inner circle” when times get tough.

    • Joey 10:48 on 2024-09-06 Permalink

      Collard’s piece is really depressing. Fitz was somehow the most powerful cabinet minister (non-PM) in a generation, he had responsibility for Montreal, he talked a good game… and nothing happened? No results? Oy.

  • Kate 14:44 on 2024-09-05 Permalink | Reply  

    A kid on the way to school (the entirely secular école primaire Christ-Roi in Ahuntsic, incidentally) was hit by a schoolbus on Thursday morning, and another kid, this one only three years old, was hit downtown on the way to daycare. Both kids had head injuries but are expected to survive.

     

    • Joey 15:40 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      The downtown story is the stuff of parents’ (and some drivers’) nightmares – kid darts into the street and gets hit by a car. Even The Economist argues that cars today are simply too big and heavy, especially electric cars. In this case the driver probably did nothing wrong and could not have done anything to prevent hitting the child, and yet it happened – and the result is surely worse because everyone (presently company included, I’m afraid) drives cars that are too big, and ludicrously marketed as “safe.”

    • dwgs 10:10 on 2024-09-06 Permalink

      I generally agree with your point Joey, the number of huge SUV’s and pickups on the road these days is crazy. But physics being what it is, if that kid had been hit by me on my bicycle (roughly 230lbs between me and the bike) at 25kph he’d likely still be in hospital with a head injury.

    • Uatu 12:28 on 2024-09-06 Permalink

      Yeah but would you be doing a full 25kph on a downtown street? You could also probably react faster with better sightlines and the impact area of a SUV grille vs a bike wheel is greater. Maybe there would be an injury but not as bad?

    • Ian 11:21 on 2024-09-07 Permalink

      Given the video we all saw earlier this year of a bicyclist on a bixi plowing into a kid skipping across the street for her schoolbus, a bicyclist can definitely go fast enought to knock down a medium size kid, let alone a three-year old. Having had a couple of three year olds myself and having witnessed all their friends, 3 year olds are very prone to falling over and hitting their heads even wihtout any kind of vehicle of any size involved. I’ve seen them run straight into each other and fall over.

  • Kate 08:20 on 2024-09-05 Permalink | Reply  

    One of the reliable themes in the annual news cycle is how bad the traffic is at the rentrée. So many kids are being ferried to school by car?

     

    • Chris 09:11 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      Uh, yes. So many *everyone* is being ferried by car.

    • jeather 09:40 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      Yes, because the rules are — at least at the EMSB — very strict about who gets on a schoolbus and which stops you are allowed to use (not always the one nearest you) even when there is plenty of room on the bus. I won’t go into the details, but if you want kids not to be driven to their schools, reasonable school bus access is the actual solution. (This could be combined with more aggressive confirming of the rules surrounding car dropoffs, and a slightly longer dropoff window.)

    • Joey 14:23 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      The extent to which parent-drivers refuse to allow their kids to walk even a short distance (say, a couple of blocks) – or find a safe/legal spot, park and walk their kids to school – is crazy. This attitude seems to positively correlate with the price of the vehicle.

      The EMSB is always going to be tricky since it can’t just organize around neighbourhood schools, yet presumably lacks the resources/willingness to provide adequate transport.

    • Kate 14:49 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      Joey, you remind me of an incident when I was temping some years ago. A woman in the office was practically in tears because her husband had not been able to drive their kid to the school front door. There was construction or something in the way. Kid had to walk a block or two.

      Other women were trying to soothe her.

      So I asked how old the kid was, expecting like maybe seven or eight.

      Kid was fourteen.

      I said nothing and got back to work.

    • Tim S. 14:58 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      The CSSDM also has pretty restrictive school busing policies, as I understand it.

    • Sara_P 15:30 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      Longueuil’s newspaper, Le Courier du Sud, reported recently on that city’s efforts to make its school zones safer.
      “The street giving access to the schools covered by this project will be temporarily closed, two days a week, for a period of 30 to 60 minutes, during the arrival and departure times of the pupils, in order to give priority to walking, cycling or scooting.
      Volunteers will ensure the smooth running of the closed street for the occasion. “

    • jeather 15:48 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      I’m sure both do, but I have knowledge of the EMSB. If you want kids not to be dropped off by car — a very good idea — there needs to be another option. You can’t carpool anymore, because giant cars don’t have enough seats, plus the car seat issues.

      There’s been a big change away from high school students taking public transit to school. (Though I note that one friend’s EMSB high school is not accessible by bike from where they live, and is an hour on two separate city buses, so there’s not always a great public transit option either.)

    • Alex L 15:51 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      What a nightmare. It’s a grim reminder that kids need safe streets, not only safe streets in front of their school. Though it has to start somewhere.

    • Joey 18:49 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      Does anybody track this stuff in a rigorous way? Almost every one of my sixth-grader’s classmates takes public transit to and from school – it helps that they are in a transit oasis (what’s the opposite of a transit desert?).

    • Ian 20:21 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      Transit hub? My kids didn’t have a bus, I took a city bus and walked with them the rest of the way when they were little – but I live in a hub, too.

    • jeather 09:47 on 2024-09-06 Permalink

      The reality is that many people are going to drive some or all of the time unless something else is a similar level of convenience. School buses often are. City buses, biking and walking less often are. If you want to stop people from driving kids you can start by making it less convenient for stopping/parking, but you also need another option, aka a school bus.

      Not much can be done about the helicopter parents of teenagers, though it would be nice if the STM looked into specific coordinating of rush hour lines with high schools in the city and their catchment areas.

  • Kate 08:14 on 2024-09-05 Permalink | Reply  

    Vermont’s Seven Days sends a journalist to cover second-hand clothing stores in town – determinedly spelling it Montréal in English, but that’s often a quirk from those who want to feel the city is more exotic than it is.

     

    • Chris 09:27 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      I think they’re just trying to be respectful and write it in the native spelling. For them, it’s politically correct.

    • Kate 09:34 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      That isn’t native. If they wanted to be PC, they should call it Tiohtià:ke.

    • DeWolf 10:38 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      The same type of person talks about going to Firenze and Praha, which is fine, just a little pretentious.

      Kate is right that Montreal is a perfectly legitimate way to write the city’s name. But someone is likely to get called out whether they write Montreal or Montréal, and if they don’t have a full understanding of local history and language politics, I can understand why they would err on the side of the official.

      Incidentally, since Kate brought it up, Tiohtià:ke is just one of the Indigenous names for Montreal. I’ve always been amused when people use it as their location in their social media profiles. They are effectively erasing other nations who have had a presence on the island, notably the Anishinaabe. Given that the Mohawk were at war with the Anishinaabe, you could conceivably argue that privileging Tiohtià:ke over Mooniyang are inadvertently playing out an 18th century conflict, choosing the victors over the vanquished.

      (Most institutions now refer to Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang in their land acknowledgements, which is a change over a few years ago.)

    • Kate 10:48 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      I have fond memories of visiting Baile Átha Cliath, myself.

      Good point about Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang, DeWolf.

    • bob 13:08 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      Hochelaga was the only known settlement that existed pre-Ville-Marie. The Mohawk et al. of the time passed through, but did not settle. The inhabitants were St. Lawrence Iroquois – or should that be St. Laurent Iroquois now? They all but disappeared as a distinct group long before Ville Marie was established, and as far as I can tell there is no record of their name.

    • Meezly 15:38 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      There are quite a few used/vintage clothing stores on the Plateau, but it’s really difficult to find adult consignment clothing stores nowadays. The two places that do consign, they only give you store credit, not cash. What kind of a consignment is that? I don’t want to buy MORE clothes, I want to get rid of them and make some money!

      Still, where do these stores acquire their clothes then, if not from the community? Do they scour thrift stores (thus driving thrift prices up?). The only alternative is to sell my clothes online (more return but more work).

    • DeWolf 16:43 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      @bob I went down a bit of a rabbit hole this morning trying to find information about the Iroquoian peoples who were thoroughly settled in the St Lawrence Valley but who “disappeared” in the 60 years between Cartier and Champlain. Apparently the most likely scenario, according to both French and Indigenous sources, is that they were hit hard by European diseases and the survivors ended up becoming refugees who assimilated into Algonquin nations north of the river.

    • bob 18:32 on 2024-09-05 Permalink

      @DeWolf While the disease narrative may satisfy a need to blame all bad things on Europeans, I think the consensus is that they were driven off by ethnic cleansing on the part of Mohawk and Huron to gain hunting grounds and trade with Europeans. There was, of course, disease, but it seems it was not a major factor in the Montreal area until the 1600’s.

    • Chris 09:55 on 2024-09-07 Permalink

      >That isn’t native.

      Not ‘native’ is in Amerindian, but ‘native’ as in ‘native tongue’.

    • Ian 11:38 on 2024-09-07 Permalink

      I’m pretty sure Kate was being tongue-in-cheek, Chris.

      I think we need to come up with special diacrtitics in English so we can distinguish between MAWN-tree-all (born here) and mun-tree-ALL (moved here), or CHRA-no (born there) and Tuh-RONNO (much of the ROC).

      Yes, yes, I know ROC is a pretty much Quebecer-exclusive term.

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