Ending a judicial epic that’s dragged on for years, the Supreme Court has dismissed the application by Jérémy Gabriel’s mother to sue comic Mike Ward for mocking her son.
Updates from January, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Noted clothing chain Frank and Oak are seeking creditor protection while Wazo Furniture, which used to advertise extensively on social media, has gone away leaving some customers wondering what happened to the money they deposited for future deliveries.
Clothing stores Ricki’s, Cleo and Bootlegger are also in trouble.
In some cases, the pandemic is still being blamed. That was five years ago, although it still draws a line through a collective sense of recent history, I find.
MarcG
Some educated people are still blaming kids’ bad behavior and learning loss on the pandemic “lockdowns” rather than the brain-eating bat virus they’re being regularly infected with so why the hell not.
Tim S.
Out of curiosity MarcG, did you have any kids home during the pandemic?
MarcG
I have 99 problems related to the pandemic but am lucky that caring for children isn’t one of them.
CE
The lockdowns and school closures during the pandemic are going to have long-term affects on the school-aged kids who lived through them. I don’t have kids but work with teenagers and, while things are getting better, those kids were seriously messed up by the two and a half years they were kept away from school and social interaction with their peers. The issues they face don’t exclusively stem from the pandemic (there’s also the issues of social media addiction, techno surveillance, helicopter/bulldozer parenting, etc) but they certainly added to the issues they’re facing. I feel bad for them and am very glad to not be part of their generation!
Re: Frank & Oak, they used to make very high quality clothes at relatively affordable prices but in the last few years, they quality went into free fall and I suspect I’m not the only person who gave up on them after seeing how shitty their products became (along with inexplicably higher prices). It’s too bad because I prefer to buy from local designers when I can.
MarcG
I’ll admit that I’m guilty of minimizing the effect of crisis homeschooling on kids and their families.
I would be interested in seeing a study that compares children from places that had little/no school disruptions vs those with more in order to tease out the specific effects of that intervention. Given there are so many factors, including as I mentioned, the neurological effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection, learning loss from sick days of both students and teachers, psychological stress from living through a pandemic, death of family members including many kids who lost their parents to Covid, parental stress, etc, simply saying “the lockdowns did it” is an obviously lazy explanation for all of the downstream consequences. Sorry for taking this way off topic.
Tim S.
In some ways, it’s complicated with all the different factors MarcG listed. In other ways, it’s not. I saw the changes in my kids (long before they were actually exposed to the virus), and I know what was lost, despite our best efforts.
One thing that bugs me is that we still haven’t come to terms with the generational and class disparities in the effects of the pandemic measures. I supported the measures at the time, and if a similar crisis were to reoccur would probably support them again. But some kind of appreciation for those sacrifices would be nice and would go some way to restoring the good will that we might need again, sooner or later.
MarcG
Class and race being obviously intertwined, I’ll mention this study that illustrates how when White U.S. residents were made aware of the racial disparities in the impact of Covid they became less concerned about the virus, less empathetic, and less likely to support safety precautions.
Joey
Some new, emerging research on the experience of parents during the pandemic: https://bsky.app/profile/andiyeg.bsky.social/post/3lfaemlhfhk2f
Here’s the abstract:
“The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected those with caregiving responsibilities and its impacts continue. Through the fall of 2022, the circulation of RSV, influenza, and COVID-19 – a “tripledemic” – placed parents and caregivers in precarious situations with few COVID-19 supports available and less flexibility in work arrangements, potentially increasing family-to-work conflict (FWC). This mixed-methods study incorporates online survey data from the January 2023 Alberta Viewpoint Survey (N = 1196) and interview data collected from May-August 2023 (N = 23) to study the strategies families and caregivers used during the tripledemic to manage FWC in a time of high uncertainty. We find that parents, especially mothers, were most likely to miss work for extended periods, leading to a greater potential for FWC among these groups. Parents’ ability to manage FWC depended on the resources available to them, which were highly unequal. Those who were able to take advantage of workplace, relationship, and network resources were better able to limit FWC during these uncertain times. Findings contribute to larger understandings of family-to-work conflict by highlighting how parents attempt to manage uncertainty and the inequalities in available resources.”
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Kate
La Presse’s Maxime Bergeron considers how a Poilievre government will change things for Montreal besides ensuring we have no ministerial presence in Ottawa.
Nicholas
Current polls modelled out show a few Tory seats on the island (one showed more Tory than Liberal; that’s how much people wanted Justin to go). Harper had none and solved this with a senator.
Kate
Nicholas, where are you seeing these polls? I know that a few seats in Montreal had the Tories second, last time, but this isn’t a Tory town on the whole.
Nicholas
A modeller who also posts maps on Twitter has Abacus polls, modelled out, showing Tories winning Mount Royal and all the West Island, and even downtown and NDG-Westmount, totalling seven. His overall model, which includes other polls, has them ahead just in Mount Royal, up by eight points, but only down two in Dollard-Pierrefonds, four in Saint Laurent, six in Lac Saint Louis and two in Laval Les Iles. 338 is less pessimistic for the Liberals, but still has Pierrefonds Dollard as a tossup, and Laval Les Iles too.
Modelling individual riding swings on national polls with medium sized Quebec subsamples is certainly not a perfect science, so some large skepticism is warranted, and much could happen with a new leader and an election campaign. But there have been some close calls over the years (Irwin Cotler won by less than six points in 2011 when Harper won his majority over the orange crush, and Israel was not as polarizing an issue then), and the Conservatives are polling nine points better today than Harper did that year (there a few points from winning a majority, not a plurality, of the vote nationally). I think we in Montreal have just gone a long time without a Tory MP, and forget that before the Bloc split off from them, the Tories could win half the seats on the Island and nearly everything off of it. The Bloc is still there, but anglos aren’t voting for them, so with a collapse of the Liberal vote it’s not unthinkable that the Tories win a few seats on the Island.
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Kate
While rents continue to soar and people have trouble finding affordable lodgings, the OMHM has cut 40% of the households from the waiting list for social housing. By tightening its requirements for keeping their dossier up to date with recent tax returns, the OMHM has removed a lot of names from the list, although by doing so it risks making people living precariously face an even more uncertain future.
Joey
Some of the people were removed from the list because their most recent tax documents report them having incomes that are no longer below the threshold (nothing in the article about whether the threshold has been adjusted to account for inflation), which is somewhat understandable, though I would doubt that most of them are no longer in challenging circumstances. But others were removed from the list because the OMHM couldn’t get in touch with them – FRAPRU and others posit, convincingly, that some of these people are unreachable because they are likely homeless, meaning this ‘efficiency’ operation will wind up excluding homeless people from affordable housing.
It seems absurd to us lay citizens that departments within the same government can’t automatically share information – there’s really no logistical reason why the OMHM needs individual citizens to share their tax information when the OMHM could ostensibly retrieve *all* their users’ tax data directly from Revenue Quebec. I suppose there are valid reasons to have all kinds of internal firewalls around the use of personal information, but at some point governments will have to accept that we have been doing everything digitally for a long time now and public services could work much better if we allowed much more seamless sharing of data (obviously only among government departments). I think Estonia is a world leader on this, but it’s been a while since I’ve read about their approach.
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Kate
A Montreal lawyer plans to sue Starbucks, Tim Hortons and Second Cup over charging more for non-dairy options in their coffee. Once he succeeds, let’s sue restaurants for charging more for a steak than a hamburger. Also as reported by CTV.
Mark Côté
According to the article, in at least 3 provinces, nondairy milks are less expensive than dairy, so, if that is indeed factual, it would be more accurate to say “let’s sue restaurants for charging more for a hamburger than a steak” which makes a bit more sense.
(A quick search of metro.ca indicates that oat milk is very slightly more expensive than cow milk, but it’s hard to say exactly since the container sizes are different, and these are of course consumer prices.)
The confusing part for me is the timeline, with at least two of the three of these companies apparently having ditched the extra fee before the lawsuit was launched. Maybe the lawsuit was anticipated?
Kate
The other milks may involve extra effort to find a supply, and don’t respond like regular milk, so although they may be no more expensive on the charge sheet, they mean more training, more cleaning, separate equipment, separate storage and generally more trouble.
Nobody should be diluting their coffee with goopy white stuff, anyway, whether from a cow or anything else. I have spoken.
Chris
My first reaction is the same: different product, different price. Free market. Seller chooses their prices. Buyer chooses to agree, or not buy.
But is soy/oat actually more expensive than cow? A quick search at metro.ca:
1) cow: 5.49 / 2 L = 0.27 / 100 mL.
2) soy: 5.99 for 1.89 L = 0.31 / 100 mL
3) oat: 4.99 for 1.75 L = 0.29 / 100 mLIn other words, they are all basically the same price. So one could make a left wing argument that this is like the “pink tax” but on vegetarians instead of on women. One could argue vegetarians are a minority, and discriminated against. One could even try to invent a word like “vegaphobia” to try and smear people that disagree. Oh wait, I didn’t just invent it! There’s a wikipedia article already! Damn, I learned a new word today.
Chris
Doh, my message crossed with Mark’s, I think it got into a moderation queue due to having multiple links. Funny that both our minds went to metro.ca. I guess we see it on a lot of trucks.
Meezly
The hamburger and steak comparison doesn’t make sense. It’s not about the extra effort to provide non-dairy choices to a customer or how much milk costs. There is no reason for a large coffee chain to charge extra for oat milk other than to find an excuse to make more profit.
Don’t we wanna to stick it to big corporations like Starbucks and Tim Hortons (which is now owned by Burger King)? If he wins, this would actually set a good precedent.
Kate
Meezly, I suppose you’re right about the profit motive. I just saw it from the point of view of someone demanding that their minority request should be catered to.
Joey
Three things.
One, @Meezly, I think we’re worse off if we decide that we should rely on the justice system to set non-dairy milk prices, even if it ostensibly fucks the man or whatever. Non-dairy milks are, I assume, still a niche product, and almost by definition niche products cost more. Nobody is being forced to buy these drinks, the prices of the products are not being hidden, customers aren’t being misled, and there are lots of alternatives (to Kate’s point, nobody “needs” milk in their coffee to make it drinkable). We are not talking about pharmaceuticals or basic necessities, we are talking about the cost of lattes.
Two, @Chris and @Mark – coffeeshops don’t buy milk at retail stores, they buy it from wholesale distributors, so looking at unit-level prices at grocery stores isn’t definitive. More importantly, if a majority of drinks use dairy milk and the rest are split among the non-dairy options, the acquisition cost of dairy will be considerably lower given economies of scale. If you are buying 100L of dairy milk per week and only 10L of oat milk, you will wind up paying more for oat milk and should quite reasonably can pass that cost along to your customers (so, yes, there is indeed a legit reason for coffeeshops to charge more for products that, per-unit, cost more to acquire).
Three, confounding all this is our dairy supply management. It would be amusing if some bogus class-action lawsuit led to the end of this long-standing policy.
Anyway, the real scam is charging $1 for the 75mL of steamed milk that goes in your cappuccino, when a litre costs bout $2.50 (and that price is already propped up by supply management!).
Meezly
Fair points, but I would beg to differ that non-dairy milk is a niche or minority market. Non-dairy coffee orders comprise ~30% of sales! Has anyone seen the non-dairy section at any supermarket lately? It’s sometimes larger than the dairy milk section! The plant milk industry is huge now. I like dairy, but cow’s milk is just not cool anymore.
DeWolf
There’s at least one specialty coffee chain, Paquebot — four locations in Montreal and one in Gaspé — that now uses oat milk as the standard. You need to specifically request lait de vache if you want dairy milk.
Granted a small specialty chain is a very different scale of operations than Starbucks or Timmy’s, but Paquebot isn’t a vegan business and they wouldn’t have made that choice if it didn’t make economic sense.
MarcG
The non-dairy milks used in coffee-making are not the standard ones for drinking, you need the speciality “barista” style ones that are designed to “steam, stretch, and foam in a latte” which are more expensive.
Nicholas
Chris, just a side note, who is paying retail for Lactancia, a premium milk that’s thus allowed to be sold for more than the maximum price? The price of 2 L of 2% is a maximum of $4.45, and all big grocery stores sell it for the minimum $4.11 (and they’d be buying it at the cheaper 4 L rate anyway).
dwgs
@MarcG that may be true for a cappuccino where you need stiff foam but in our house we use either 2% dairy or Nature’s Own regular plain oat milk and the oat milk makes a very nice latte without the oils and other things added to the ‘barista’ types.
pop
plant-based milk is more expensive because the dairy industry is subsidized by the government. milk should be many times as expensive if they had to pay for the environmental damage they cause and provide proper living conditions to the cows instead of having them restrained in cages where they spent most of their life being raped, giving birth, and having their calves taken away (until they are too old and get transferred to the slaughter house)
David S
Kate: you’ve obviously never had a delicious macchiato 😉 and I’d recommend oat milk with it, which I feel simultaneously brings out the flavour of the coffee and reduces the acidity as opposed to regular coffee that just drowns the taste. But I admit that I also drink my coffee black when I make it at home.
Chris: it’s not just about veganism. I would even wager that the majority of people order vegan milk because of lactose reactions, although I may be biased by the people that I go to coffee shops with.
Kate
David S, a little while ago a new barista dabbed some milk into my double short espresso – without my asking – and it totally changed the texture. It was more like drinking melted ice cream than a proper coffee. I don’t like milk, whether it’s got from milking cows or tiny little soybeans. I rarely act the Karen, but I asked him to make me a new one, without additions.
There are all kinds of inequities involved here. I’m subscribed to Lufa, which has a selection of what they call “plant‑based alternatives” which, in many cases, are more expensive than the equivalent foods from animal sources. Things like vegan sausages and vegan cheese are expensive and, in most cases I suspect, ultra processed too. Would it only be “fair” if the cashew‑based cheese was kept to the same price as standard cheddar?
Also, and this just occurred to me, given that the dairy industry is so heavily subsidized, why is cheese so damn expensive here?
Joey
@kate because we don’t subsidize dairy farmers directly, we establish quotas and price floors etc and restrict imports to keep prices artificially high
Nicholas
What Joey said. Canada has some of the highest dairy prices in the world.
Blork
A few points, some of which have already been touched on I think:
Regarding prices, it’s not fair to look at supermarket prices as a basis of comparison. When buying in bulk the economies are different, and it’s likely that there’s more bulk advantage on the cow milk than on the plant milk just because of quantity differences.
While it might be mean or nasty for those places to charge more for plant milk, I don’t see how that’s a legal issue. If a pizzeria sells 100 cow-cheese pizzas for every one plant-cheese pizza, nobody blinks that the plant cheese pizza costs an extra dollar. It’s a different product. That said, these cafes would do well to recognize that plant based milk is becoming less niche, and there’s a market advantage to them to not make it seem like a fussy and more expensive option. But again, more of a marketing issue than a legal one.
Dairy is bad for the environment, but so are some plant-based milks. Specifically almond milk, which takes rivers and rivers of water to create enough almonds to whiten a coffee. (That’s part of the reason why almond milk is largely falling out of favour among the non-dairly people.)
I haven’t tried oat milk. I’ve tried almond milk and rice milk and disliked the taste of both and didn’t like all the weird ingredients and shitty oils they use. Is oat milk any better?
dwgs
In answer to your question Blork, yes it is. I too don’t care for rice, soy, almond, whatever ‘milk’ but to my surprise when I tried oat milk I actually liked it. My son likes 2%, my partner can’t digest lactose so it’s oat milk for her and I do a 50/50 mix when I make a latte for myself. I will even drink a glass of oat milk straight up, something I’d never do with any other milk substitute.
MarcG
I agree that oat milk tastes good but it does contain the miscellaneous gums.
nau
Of course, some people have an intolerance to proteins in oats called avenins, so if you always feel off after oatmeal porridge (or oatmeal stout, I suppose, though depending on how many one has, it may be hard to say it’s the oat proteins that are to blame), the same may happen with oat milk.
CE
Oat milk is by far the superior milk substitute. I’m surprised that the other milk alternatives are still holding on.
jeather
To each their own but I have tried oat, almond, hazelnut and soy, and the only one I’ve enjoyed is soy. I like regular dairy milk too though.
JP
My preferred options for a latte are the lactose-free version of dairy milk and oat milk. I’ve been meaning to try pistachio milk which I’ve also heard good things about.
GC
I really enjoy pistachio milk in my matcha lattes that I make at home. There aren’t a lot of stores that carry it, though.
Orr
@Nicolas. It is true that Lactantia charges a premium price, but I dispute that Lactantia is “premium milk” bc, as they put it, “Lactantia® PūrFiltre milk, every drop of milk is carefully filtered to provide a smooth, pure taste that stays fresher longer than pasteurized milk* – naturally.” which in my mind it means the main advantage is to the milk sellers, because its shelf life is longer. For the consumer tho the fact is you are in fact getting older, less fresh milk. That’s not premium in my mind.
The anti Dairy supply management has been run by corporate interests for a few decades now. if we cancel dairy supply management the alternative is lower cost of milk at the supermarket, but at the same time it means adopting some form of direct farm subsidy. So in order to give a tiny increase in profit to Loblaws and middlemen like Saputo, the taxpayer will have to make up the difference. A sterling example of “privatize the profits, socialize the costs”. Diary supply management has stabilized Quebec and Ontario dairy regions for many decades with zero direct subsidy from the gov’t. Without it our rural regions farm bankruptcies with skyrocket, (see: USA) and most likely turn into poverty zones. Then the opportunity for additional corporate concentration over the food supply chain is inevitable, and we’ll see things like 4000-caw dairy factories, bc the term farm is inaccurate to describe these places. Are you ready for a coca-cola company subsidiary being the company that produces your milk? That’s the end game, the Fraser Institute is playing the long game, and their funding for this PR campaign, unsurprisingly, never dries up.
MarcG 09:03 on 2025-01-10 Permalink
Noticed a typo in the title of this post “kawsuit”.
Kate 09:17 on 2025-01-10 Permalink
Thanks. Once a year or so I find I’ve worn all the letters off my keycaps and so I become more prone to typos. I’ll have to order up a new keyboard soon.