While La Presse has a piece saying the mayor is promising a quick spring cleanup, TVA leans on the city’s filth being worse than it’s ever been.
Updates from March, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
In the “oh for fuck sake” stakes Thursday is news that Quebec plans a bill that would stop school support workers from wearing religious symbols and force students to uncover their faces.
Some women providing extended care to kids before and after school hours wear hijab. They will have to uncover their heads or be fired, possibly compromising that service to busy families.
How many students actually wear full face‑covering niqab in public schools? “Drainville said he didn’t know how many students or staff would be affected by the ban but that it was the ‘principal [sic], not just the number.’ ”
There’s nothing else going on in Quebec or in the world that needs attention, obviously, more than legislating over how an unknown (but very tiny if existent at all) number of children cover their faces at school.
Joey
Additionally, the measures will make it harder (impossible?) to accommodate students’ religious needs – so observant Muslim and Jewish kids will either get the pork snack or nothing, they’ll have to beg for time off to worship their religion, since only Christian festivals conveniently occur on statutory holidays. Really nasty, petty shit.
Kate
During the Reconquista in Iberia, one of the tricks available to the Catholic church was to offer a tray of cold ham at the door of the church. Everyone had to take a piece and eat it before going in, presumably because this would prove they were no longer keeping kosher or halal on the sly.
Do we have to reproduce this medieval witch hunting in Quebec in 2025?
Kevin
From the video he put out Monday it seems like Drainville worshipped all his teachers and expects everyone does the same.
So at least his secular movement kinda makes sense except it shows a complete lack of understanding of 95% of humanity.
EmilyG
From the article: “The same rule on face coverings would apply to parents picking up their children from school.” Just, WTF.
Joey
@EmilyG I wonder if CBC got it wrong. The press release, which has quite a bit of details, doesn’t mention that – it specifically says the ban on face coverings applies to students and personnel, but it doesn’t mention parents. See here: https://www.newswire.ca/fr/news-releases/laicite-dans-les-ecoles-du-quebec-le-ministre-drainville-depose-son-projet-de-loi-une-reponse-forte-pour-renforcer-les-valeurs-quebecoises-877450047.html
jeather
No religious celebrations, I guess we’re all lucky that Christmas is zero religious. (Do schools do Easter things?)
I’m not sure the unions will agree to “only allowed to speak French when speaking to another teacher any time on school property”. (What happens for second language teachers who are making lesson plans etc together?)
dhomas
@jeather: my kids’ school does “Easter things”, but it’s mostly Easter Bunny and egg hunt kind of stuff. Not explicitly religious. They do get both Good Friday and Easter Monday off (I only get one of the other).
jeather
Not explicitly religious my ass. (I know the government pretends that Christmas and, apparently, Easter are secular.)
Mozai
Does the unmasking include health/safety gear during flu season, or if the kid is sick and can’t miss classes? The “thou must not cover your face in public” bylaws from years ago sounded silly to me for a city that experiences winter.
dhomas
@jeather: I mean the Easter stuff they do is not about Jesus’ resurrection kinda religious. The simple fact that Good Friday and Easter Monday are holidays is religious enough. Students who are not Catholic need to miss school for their holy days.
jeather
Yes, I understand that they do not reenact the stations of the cross or whatever, but it’s not like the Easter Bunny is religion neutral. (There is a much better argument — which I absolutely reject, but which does exist — that Christmas is secular. There is no real argument for Easter.)
I had a bunch of issues with missing school for Jewish holidays, and we’re secular enough that I only missed the three.
Meezly
An argument can be made that the Easter Bunny originated as a Dutch and German cultural tradition, similar to how yuletide and Santa Claus are associated with Christmas but not have any Christian context.
https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/04/ostara-and-the-hare/Plenty of people celebrate Easter and Christmas in a secular fashion, myself included. Is it necessary to restrict existing cultural or religious traditions just because an inhumane government wants to make life more difficult for people who don’t fit cultural “norms” or follow a different faith?
Joey
I’m Jewish, but if I were Christian, I would take offence to the notion that the two biggest holidays in my calendar aren’t religious in nature.
jeather
Yes, many things were incorporated into Christian celebrations to encourage local populations to convert. We’re well past the point where you can debate this.
And I absolutely support you celebrating these things however you want, in any way you like, outside of in public schools which are claiming to be completely secular.
walkerp
This is so fucked. As far as I have seen, the majority of service de garde staff are women from Muslim countries who wear a headscarf. They perform an essential service, are underpaid and under-staffed and now we want to restrict it even more?
Uatu
Quebec has one of the lowest highschool graduation rates in Canada. At least this will ensure dropouts abandon a completely secular environment lol
Drainville is such an ineffective clod.
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Kate
SPVM chief Fady Dagher is accused of letting his wife and daughter ride police horses on Mount Royal over the holidays. Normally no non‑member of the force is allowed to do this.
Dagher’s also in the news Thursday bragging that his recruitment efforts have hired at least 140 more people into the SPVM.
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Kate
Le Devoir has a good piece Thursday on the city’s plans for a new sewage treatment plant, not cheap, but absolutely necessary.
Nicholas
Nice piece, thanks. Interesting that a quarter of municipal carbon emissions on the island are from this plant.
Kate
That’s one of the reasons it’s so important to build a plant equipped with newer, less damaging technology, although it’s impossible to imagine any way in which the poo of two million people can be safely disposed of, day in and day out, without doing some kind of environmental damage.
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Kate
More election scuttle: Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois will finish his term as MNA for Gouin but is stepping down as party co‑spokesperson and won’t seek re-election.
dhomas
It’s too bad he won’t be running again. Despite not always agreeing with his politics (especially re: Quebec separation), I found him to be a politician with integrity. My wife met him and found him to have a good grasp on the plight of the common man (me paraphrasing for brevity’s sake).
The “poor showing” in Terrebonne likely has little to do with his performance and more to do with people being fed up with the CAQ and not wanting to vote liberal. It’s much easier to switch votes from one separatist party (QS) to another (PQ), when you want to vote strategically to get an incumbent party out. The biggest loser here wasn’t QS, but the CAQ. They went from 49.44% of the vote in 2022 to 28.77% this week; an over 20% drop. Yowza!
walkerp
I was told by someone who pays attention to these things that one of the factors of him dropping out was that he was the principle supporter of moving QS to the center and that this strategy had failed badly, losing them much of their previous core support. The election loss was another factor as well as him having two kids.
Ian
Yeah he def pushed QS more right, and showing his colours as just another ethnonationalist didn’t help either. One of the big features of QS sovereignty was that it was supposedly inclusive.
Mark
yup same here, I know a few people on the inside at QS (either ran as candidates or are active members) and there have been two cliques for a few years now.
GND was pushing for a broader appeal as he felt that was necessary to get elected…and he believed that with the PQ dead in the water (at the time), the Libs missing any leadership and support for the CAQ starting to wane, there was a legitimate opportunity that QS could form the next gov. Others never accepted this and felt he gave up too many of QS’ core principles for this pursuit. Those folks believe it’s better to sit in opposition and be firm than to dilute the policies in the hopes of electoral success.
It will be interesting to see who steps up now, I’m not 100% sure the party will survive TBH, but I hope some alternative emerges. We have two ethno-nationalist right parties that are only distinguished by their approach to sovereignty (PQ and CAQ), and I don’t even know how to qualify the Liberals anymore.
Kate
A chronic problem in Quebec is that the political axis is federalist-nationalist (with the nationalism often being outright sovereignism) rather than right-left. It’s proven to be impossible here to have a party of the left that isn’t also sovereignist. This is why Quebec doesn’t have a provincial NDP.
The closest we’ve had is Québec solidaire, but it would never have even got as many votes as it does if it didn’t also have as a founding principle that it wants Quebec to secede. I vote QS and I know others who do, based on its lefty principles. If the party ever got closer to power I’d reconsider my options.
Joey
The PQ has been polling in first place, above 30%, since at December 2024. That’s more or less when QS’s numbers went about 17% to about 11%. The PQ has siphoned off a good chunk of both the CAQ’s and QS’s support (though some CAQ supporters have shifted to the Liberals, who are on a bit of an upswing even without a leader in place).
There are a lot of hypotheses to consider here, including those described in the previous comments. Given that the news is about GND, I suppose there are also lessons to be learned about the kind of charismatic leader who can take a party from ~20% to ~33% (PSSP) vs. the kind of charismatic leader who can’t crack 20% (GND). I posit that QS’s ‘co-spokesperson’ model isn’t really viable in our electoral system. As voters, we generally know what the parties stand for, but many of us base our votes on how the current leaders express their parties values and priorities. And Quebecers are done done done with GND.
Kevin
I know it’s just anecdotal, but I know a lot of people who would have voted QS but never did specifically because of their pro-separation stance.
QS chasing the separatist voter is like the federal Conservatives chasing the PPC voter.
But what do I know — I’m the guy who thinks that defining Quebec voting strategies based on separation-federalism is a massive misunderstanding.
jeather
For a while I wouldn’t vote for them because they had no English website. They now have one page and their old platform, but I guess I’ll see what happens during the election. I don’t expect a full translation of the entire website.
walkerp
Will be curious how much even the PQ are going to push independence in the current climate. Quebecers are already showing themselves to be more patriotic than the ROC.
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Kate
Media are buzzing with the theory that Mark Carney will ask the GG to dissolve Parliament on Sunday and call an election for the end of April or beginning of May, Carney having decided to strike while the iron is hot.
Joey
The opposition parties are, tragically for them it seems, going to get exactly what they want.
Ephraim
I wonder how many of Pierre’s old clips are going to come back to haunt him.
Honestly, I wish we would all agree to stop negative campaigns, forever. Talk about the future you are promising, rather than knocking someone else’s vision. Show us the future you want, why and how you are going to get there.
walkerp
100% Ephraim. They are basically pollution even among other advertisements.
Blork
The trouble with that is the bullshit factor. If you just talk about the future that you are promising you get things like Trump’s long rants about “beautiful America” and how everyone will have jobs and two chickens in every pot, blah blah blah.
I don’t like negative campaigning either, but to some extent it’s necessary to show the difference between what your opponent presents and what they actually deliver based on their history. But the key thing (for me at least) is that any negative stuff should be fair and honest.
MarcG
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Kate
The STM is suing the architect firm Provencher Roy over lengthy delays in the rebuilding of its Crémazie complex, which took five years longer than projected.
Item mentions that other STM projects – the Pie‑IX bus lane, the Côte‑Vertu metro garage, and other unnamed examples – have also ended up in court over construction delays and problems.
mare
The bus garage on Bellechasse seems to be almost finished. They even opened the (REV) bike path that had been narrowed to a small track full of potholes. At least it’s wider now so you can avoid the holes without going into the path of approaching cars.
The humidifiers are still running non-stop though, so the damage from the leak last year hasn’t been fully fixed. (I wouldn’t want to live across the street, it’s loud.)
MarcG 08:35 on 2025-03-21 Permalink
I walked down St-Denis last weekend and it was a horror show, and it’s the same thing now in the riverside park in Verdun after the snow has mostly melted. I assume the cause was the massive snow storm and week of no garbage pickup that not everyone followed.
walkerp 08:46 on 2025-03-21 Permalink
It is a particularly messy spring with the Monday and Thursday pick-ups both getting blocked by those two storms and then no pick-ups the week after. On the other hand, the sudden thaw allows for a quicker and earlier clean-up. I did my block last week and to my great surprise, the always filthy apartment buildings on either side, somebody also did a clean-up in front! It wasn’t the best job but as this has never happened before, I was very pleased.
As a west coaster, the culture in the east of people not cleaning up around their places and simply depending on the city to do it (and the culture of media whining about the mess and lack of city response) is baffling to me.