Some notes on free things to do during spring break; more spring break from Time Out; more from La Presse; more from CTV; some highlights of the High Lights festival; the metro will be open all night for Nuit Blanche, Saturday night to Sunday morning.
Spring break is listed as from March 3‑7 this year at the EMSB and CSSDM.
As the ground ices up, Urgences‑Santé has been receiving a deluge of emergency calls from people who have slipped and fallen.
We have a weather alert: about 10 to 15 cm of snow from Friday evening until Saturday afternoon.
The dusting we’ve been getting Thursday is welcome, because the remaining snow from earlier in the month had mostly turned into a nasty gray brown sludge.
Quebec intends to force Blainville to sell 70 hectares of delicate wetlands to U.S. firm Stablex so they can use it to bury toxic waste. All mayors in the CMM are against this.
“Il s’agit d’une négation par Québec du principe de l’autonomie municipale qui établit que les municipalités sont responsables de l’aménagement de leur territoire, s’est indignée Mme Poulin. Un principe pourtant reconnu par tous les partis représentés à l’Assemblée nationale, a-t-elle rappelé.”
Principle of municipal autonomy? From the province that deinstituted hundreds of municipalities, vanishing into thin air at the stroke of a pen? We can argue whether municipalities should have more autonomy from the province, but let’s not pretend that they have anything other than exactly what the province gives them, and can take away at any moment.
Also, I remember a news site that, whenever it talked about a specific property, would make a custom Google Map showing exactly where it is. I wish more did this.
The google map and satellite view are actually fascinating. The area was an explosives and munitions factory in WW2 and turned into a training camp after, which was then divided up into the toxic waste dump, a Transport Canada test track, and maybe different explosive storage for a mining company? There’s all sorts of weird shapes in the wilderness. Is this a moat? https://maps.app.goo.gl/sK5hr1TXKngrrhad6
When cops targeted Hells and related groups in 2018, they seized a lot of jackets with gang patches, even from people they didn’t eventually charge. Did they have the right to do so, and to hang onto the jackets afterwards? It’s up in court although a date for the hearing hasn’t been set.
I’d go see an exhibit of these jackets if they held one.
The brotherhood of general practitioners here is calling for the abolition of the PREM system that strictly allocates where doctors can practise, and which they say is deterring promising people from entering the profession at all.
I’m willing to vote for any party that offers an end to the PREM and another stat holiday or two at this point.
This year, after the heavy snowfall and delayed pickups, the post‑snow garbage cleanup will be worse than usual.
The garbage pickup firm ‘forgot’ to pickup about 30% of the garbage bags on my block yesterday. Intact bags, put there *after* the snow removal, and black ones so they were clearly visible. As far as I can tell, they took and emptied all garbage cans, just left behind a lot of bags.
I don’t know how garbage removal companies are paid, but having twice as much garbage will take much more time, during pickup and the increased number of trips to the garbage dump, which is probably far away.
I am hoping that there are clauses in the contracts that penalize contractors who leave garbage behind – in my experience, a call to 311 usually sorts that out fast. I think they just add it to another truck’s route. On our street the recycling, which is supposed to be picked up by Thursday night, is still out there. Not to much additional lingering garbage from the snowstorms.
Our recycling usually gets picked up Thursday – the compost trucks came around, but the recycling wasn’t picked up until Friday. Which is odd because the other side of the street has their pickup Wednesday and it all got picked up as usual. I know Ricova (who has the contract in my area) gets paid per route, not according to hours worked, so even if they were running late I don’t see why they skipped certain blocks. There was no obvious pattern, either.
I also noticed that none of the recycling in my area was gettting picked up in recycling trucks either, just regualr garbage compactor style trucks, all of it mashed together. Pretty sure it was all going straight to landfill.
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