The new party chief of Projet Montréal will be elected on March 15.
Make your (entirely unofficial) choice here!
Who would you select as new chief of Projet Montréal?
Total Voters: 43
Loading ...The new federal Liberal chief will be elected on March 9.
Make your (entirely unofficial) choice here!
Who would you select as new chief of the federal Liberals?
Total Voters: 86
Loading ...This morning I read a New Yorker interview with Tim Walz (remember him?) in which he said he has no plans to reënter federal politics, but that running for President in 2028 isn’t completely off the table. That got me thinking… Imagine a world with Mark Carney as PM and Tim Walz as President of the U.S. Imagine how boring and uneventful that would be. Imagine how goddamn wonderfully dull that would be…
I often think of the parallel universe where Bernie Sanders is US president.
Saturday morning on CBC – Gym teacher arrested in Nunavik – Coach accused of sexually abusing minors – High school coach acquitted of sex-related charges (there remains reasonable doubt, says judge) – tell me again why sports and gym are great for kids?
>tell me again why sports and gym are great for kids?
Is this a serious question? You are making an exception fallacy here.
It is a serious question.
Hardly a week goes by that my news sweep doesn’t turn up something about kids getting abused in some way while practising a sport. Bullying and hazing are the least of it – often it’s sexual. People are predictably corrupted by having authority, even the small bit of authority that comes with running a kids’ sports team.
I’ve no kids, but if I did, and they wanted to practise a sport, the first thing I’d do is tell them: go ahead, but if anyone else involved, especially any adult, does anything to make you feel uncomfortable, you come and tell me, and you can stop anytime for any reason. And even then I’d be worried, because kids don’t always want to tell parents about incidents they feel are ambiguous or shameful.
>Hardly a week goes by that my news sweep doesn’t turn up something about kids getting abused
And what fraction of kids do you think this happens to? My point is that it’s very little. It’s like avoiding going for a walk because you might get hit by a car.
Sports are good for kids. Adults who get to be alone with children are the risk.
And once again, it’s not drag queens causing the problem.
“And what fraction of kids do you think this happens to? My point is that it’s very little. It’s like avoiding going for a walk because you might get hit by a car.”
The numbers I’ve heard are 1 in 6 girls and 1 in 12 boys are victims of some sort of sexual abuse before age of majority. So no, the fraction is NOT small.
Stats Can says 1 in 10 across the board before age 15. Still not a small number: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2022001/article/00016-eng.htm
Yeah but most of those are not sports coaches.
Sadly, it’s likely that a lot of those stats are from family members or close contacts of families.
m, your own link basically proves my point. Although it doesn’t mention sports coaches specifically, the closest is “a small proportion (3.4%) of Canadians stated that the most serious incident of sexual abuse during childhood was perpetrated by a teacher, professor or tutor”.
Kate, definitely. “Stranger danger” is mostly a myth. Sexual assault, kidnapping, etc. is usually done by someone close. m’s link says only about 3% is perpetrated by strangers.
These stats are horrifying.
The REM is to be free for another week, at least on weekdays at rush hour.
Yeah sounds great, but I expect to pay for it later with fare hikes next year or maybe sooner.
The new bottle deposit system starts Saturday. Details.
I wonder how that will work in practice. I commit the crime of occasionally drinking beer at home, so every few weeks I bring the beer cans back to Provigo, where there’s a machine that eats them and spits out a ticket for the refund.
It works in theory, but in practice it’s a huge pain. The main problem is the waiting. When I’m lucky I can just get right in there, but I’m frequently beat to the machine by people who literally have two shopping carts bulging with huge bags full of cans and bottles. There’s no point in even waiting since they will be there for so long, so I just put my cans back in the car and try another time.
Even when I do get my kick at the can (machine), it’s not fun. At least half the time the machine fills up before I’m done, and then there’s the long and Sisyphean road towards getting some 20-year-old who doesn’t give AF about anything to empty the machine so I can proceed.
And then there’s the rejects. Sometimes the rejects are because Provigo doesn’t sell that brand and sometimes it’s just because the machine is being a SOB.
So that bad situation is about to become worse, as many more bottles are eligible for the refund fiasco.
I’m not against the idea of bottle deposits (to the contrary, actually). I just wish there was an easier way to deal with it. Hopefully some third-party organizations will see the potential and will open themselves up to just taking cans and bottles in bulk, as donations, with no need for the donor to sort or count. (Then they can do the arduous task of sorting and keep the money for their charity or whatever.)
Why don’t you just take them to the dep?
Because it’s annoying! I used to do that with bottles that are easy to count because they fit nice and snugly into a carrier. But a bag of 40 or 50 cans is like this big rattling thing that needs to be counted by hand, and the dep guy doesn’t want to do that so I get a dirty look. I’d rather just give them to someone.
Blork, have I got news for you! The new machines let you just dump your bag of containers into an opening, and it automatically sorts and counts them and either puts money into your account (which they send to you by Interac transfer once it hits $25) or in cash with a receipt. Unfortunately that’s only at Consignaction+ locations, of which there are few; for Consignaction without the + they just have the old style single returns or one where you print a QR code, stick it on your bag, and then push it through a hole and then they will get to it eventually and credit your account. And deps and stores under 4,000 SF no longer have to take returns, though they can.
I wrote a long thing a while ago about how they have much better machines in the world that can handle all this stuff, such as the TORMA R1, and machines that accept cases of glass bottles automatically, scanning and counting them. I’ve used them in Europe and they’re great, but it doesn’t seem we’re there yet. But this is progress.
IF the new machines work and going there isnt a debacle I will start bringing back my stuff.
Otherwise I’ll just keep chucking them in the green box for the binners.
Getting the deposit back can indeed be a hassle. That’s why I basically just started throwing it in with the recycling, too. If a homeless person–or one of otherwise limited means–wants to come along and claim the deposit, I feel like that’s a win because they might need it more than I do. The only flaw with this plan is the knowledge that a lot of what is being “recycled” probably isn’t recycled at all :(. I had not heard of Cosignaction, however.
Nicholas, if you’re right that’s great news. Too bad the media reports couldn’t be so specific!
GC, plastic is not great so I don’t know how much is being recycled, even though it is cleaner than mixed plastic and sorted by type so they say it’s being recycled. But glass bottles are reused: they’re standardized after work by the industry decades ago (except for a few imports), so they’re cleaned and reused dozens of times (you can see bits of glue from old labels on brown bottles). And aluminum is definitely being recycled. It takes about 20x the energy to smelt new aluminum than to recycle it. Aluminum is basically the best thing you can recycle, it’s incredibly environmentally friendly.
Blork, it is, except way fewer depots are open than expected, and Kate’s original story notes that BMO isn’t lending any more money to Consignaction because they think it’s such a debacle that the government will take the monopoly contract they granted to Consignaction away. Also, if you click on the TORMA video you can see an interview with a Nordic store manager who says people come to her store because the machines are so easy to use. There’s nothing stopping stores from buying one of these machines, and the labour savings are really big; it’d be tougher for small, old, urban stores, but new builds should absolutely jump on this.
That’s great to hear, Nicholas. I keep trying, hoping that nothing I put in the blue bin is going to the landfill…
Is there any sense in putting glass into curbside recycling? I’ve watched how the trucks handle blue bags and can only imagine it’s shattered to bits by the time it gets to the sorting facility.
FWIW I have read that glass was the first material being accepted for recycling so there is a lot of infrastructure for it, and that glass and aluminum are the most readily recyclable materials. I’ve also read that besides pop bottles most plastic just ends up in landfill, and hardly anyone actually wants paper as there is so much of it, and it’s biodegradeable anyways.
The reason why I don’t do it every time is because the two grocery stores near me that have the machines, the machines are usually broken, which means walking between them, then carrying the bag home. When they aren’t, I’m waiting in line for up to fifteen minutes for my turn to put six bottles in to get a refund ticket. I want to do my part.
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