A bomb scare at the National Assembly has interrupted debate on Jean Charest’s special law.
Updates from May, 2012 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Mayor Tremblay declared Jeanne Mance an official co-founder of Montreal on the city’s 370th birthday Thursday. She now shares the accolade with Maisonneuve.
Now, it was mentioned last year that Tremblay was planning to make this declaration in 2017 at the city’s 375th anniversary party. Might this be a clue that Tremblay’s not expecting to still be in power by then?
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Spock
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Jack
A mayor who speaks perfect English like that Ford fella in T.O. thats what we want ,right Spock.
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Martin
Good for Jeanne Mance. Too bad the beautiful monument on Des Pins dedicated to her is in the middle of a parking lot. Only in Montreal.
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ant6n
@Jack
+1 -
mdblog
Spock, I’m with you 100%. Special thanks to Jack and ant6n for showing us just how much they want White-Franco power to remain entrenched in Quebec, despite all of the obvious mismanagement caused by that group.
Now, I’m not saying that they mismanaged things BECAUSE they’re White-Francos. I’m saying that when you choose people for important positions in society based on language and ethnicity, and not on their merit, as we do in Quebec, you tend to get less competent people is all.
I’d be glad to have some competent management, no matter what language he or she spoke. Would also be nice to have a mayor who would stand up to the bullies in Quebec City and from les regions who seem to dictate terms to la Metropole.
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Kate
I’m not sure you’re reading sarcasm very well today, mdblog.
We’re likely to have white francophone mayors because the majority of the electorate here are white francophones. City hall pretty much represents us – mostly white francophones, with a sprinkling of Jewish and Italian and generic anglo Montrealers for variation. If the city’s demographics change, the makeup of city council will follow it, but I don’t foresee radical changes there over the next couple of administrations.
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mdblog
Kate, Francophones represent 70% of the population of Montreal. Whites represent 25% of the population. I cant find a list of the etho-linguisitic makeup of the council, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t match up with these statistics. It would be even more weighted towards white Francos if we looked at unelected folks such as those in the civil service. Come on…
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Kate
Whites represent 25% of the population of Montreal? Not sure what island you’re living on.
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ant6n
I’ll take Nenshi or Bergeron any day over Ford or Tremblay. Now of those four, who’s more white, who’s muslim, etc. etc.?
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Kate
I admit it would be interesting to have a mayor that wasn’t your typical white male francophone de souche type, but I’d be delighted to see Richard Bergeron win the title even though he’s all that, and I’m not in a hurry to see Louise Harel in the role because although it would be satisfying in some ways to see a woman land the job, I don’t think Harel is really a woman of ideas – if she is, she hasn’t succeeded in expressing them through her politics, which comes to the same thing.
The person’s ideas and politics is what matters.
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MB
mdblog, let me google that for you. Statistics Canada sez:
Some 26% of the population of Montreal and 16.5% that of Greater Montreal, are members of a visible minority (non-white) group, up from 5.2% in 1981. The most numerous minorities are Blacks (4.7%), Arabs (2.8%), Latin Americans (2.1%), South Asians (2%), and Chinese (2%). -
mdblog
My bad everyone. My dyslexia made me put down 25% when I was thinking 75%. I think you’re all smart enough to see the point I was trying to make though – whether or not you agree with it.
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SMD
Jeanne-Mance’s statue is in a parking lot, it is true, but of the first hospital in the New World (which she founded).
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Ian
In the French New World – the Spanish bult a hospital in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in 1503. Hotel-Dieu do Montreal only came in 1645.
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Ian
Forgot a link for fact-checking – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital#Colonial_America
Apparently Hotel-Dieu is the first hospital in the New World north of Mexico, and wikipedia cites it at being started in 1639, not 1645.
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There will be no charges laid against police who shot and killed itinerant Mario Hamel and passerby Patrick Limoges in the early hours of June 9, 2011.
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Ian
In other news, the sky is blue, politicians lie, and water’s wet. Do you have a link to any police killing in Montreal’s recent history that resulted in charges laid?
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Bill Binns
The bystander getting killed by the ricochet is a one in a billion freak accident. As far as the knife-wielding crazy guy…what can you do? Let them go on their way? Shoot them with a tranquilizer dart? Throw a net over them? I don’t see how you can tell police officers that they have to engage in hand to hand combat with crazy people holding knives. Does anyone really think these cops deserved to go to prison for this?
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Kate
Why not tranquilizer darts? If we can use those on animals, is there any ethical reason on earth why it’s better to use ordnance on people?
Jailing those cops would send an unmistakable message to the rest of the service that it’s very, very important to find other solutions to problems before pulling your gun. Yes, even potentially dangerous problems. Police need to know they are not above the law themselves.
But I would be happy to know that they had to go back for some period of intensive retraining AND that the SPVM was working hard on providing them with better tools – physical tools as well as psychological ones – to respond to fear and stress and people with mental illnesses.
We’ve seen our cops kill two guys with mental troubles within the last year. They get away with it. That’s not a trend I want to see.
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Bill Binns
I agree that the police should have more non-lethal tools. There has got to be a way to disarm someone without killing them. Why don’t they ever shoot anyone in the leg? I can’t find a detailed description of the incident in English but the article I read does say they pepper sprayed him first. I guess Montreal cops don’t carry Tazers? I imagine they told the enraged, crazy, pepper sprayed guy to drop the knife and he took a couple of steps toward the officers. Thats all it takes. But you can’t imprison Police officers for failing to use tools that they have not been given.
I hope the family of the bystander that was killed are being taken care of financially.
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Kevin
Not that I’ve ever held a gun, but it takes a phenomenal amount of training to deliberately hit someone other than the chest.
The only place you see people deliberately shooting for (and hitting!) a leg is in Hollywood. -
walkerp
Where are their freaking tasers? Do they only use those to kill innocent people once they are already down?
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Some student journalists covering the end of Wednesday night’s demo were rounded up for arrest when their tweets were noticed by the all-seeing eye of @SPVM and word came down to let them go.
Some other student strife-related links from today, in no particular order:
Thoughts on the need for a “special” law and what it means.
Ten points everyone should know about the student movement.
Both the Ligue des droits et libertés and Amnesty International are concerned about the sheer force used by police against students here. It’s interesting that this plays out against today’s news that police commanders at the very violent repression around the G20 protests in Toronto two years ago will be charged with various misconduct offences.
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Bill Binns
Beware…The “Ten points everyone should know” article may make you roll your eyes so far around that you vision will be impaired for life.
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mdblog
Kate, the 10 points article should be titled: “10 points in support of the Student Uprising”
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qatzelok
Thanks for recommending the article, Bill and md. It’s a fine read. What a relief that money and organized crime no longer get to frame every social phenomenon.
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Montreal is included in this transit geek exercise in showing how far you can get on public transit in half an hour in various cities. The maps are in scale and Montreal shows up rather well.
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Blork
That’s pretty sweet, but unfortunately I don’t think it integrates the various transit systems very well (south shore, Laval, etc.). For example, I tried an address in Longueuil and it said I couldn’t get downtown in less than 56 minutes when I know for a fact it takes 45 minutes on average and sometimes as little as 35. It seems to only be referencing the RTL and not an integrated ride on the RTL and STM. (Yes, I’m picking at that because I really wish the various transit systems were better integrated in real life.)
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Raoul
Every other bus in the RTL should go direct downtown. Save having to transfer at panama or longueuil (longueuil not so bad, but panama you freeze your asterisk off)
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ant6n
@Raoul
What do you mean? During rush hour, basically all Panama-bound buses continue on to the Bonaventure Terminus via the contra-flow bus lane on the Champlain bridge. I’d argue that it’s more convenient to get to downtown from Brossard (0 transfers) than from Longueil (2 transfers). -
Spock
Not bad.
Lets see them sticking Cairo or Mumbai in the mix. In 30 minutes you can probably get from the equivalent of one corner of Peel and Ste. Catherine to the other. :)
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Adam
Spock: actually, the metro in Cairo is quite efficient. One of the only things (if not the only thing) in Egypt that is. Tourists don’t use it much since it mostly goes to and from working-class neighbourhoods rather than tourist sites, but it’s actually fairly clean and quick. Although the stench in the summer heat can be quite unbearable, since antiperspirant isn’t at the top of the shopping list for people who are eking out a meager existence.
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Raoul
RTL can be tricky. It once took me 3 hours to go from brossard to cite soleil in sthubert, i think it was like 3 busses. Some trajets are incredibly short, others can take an hour before they double back. Though i think having Panama and Chevrier so close to eachother is a waste. Instead of having two poorly heated terminus they never thought to build a decent real terminus with room for expansion. Before panama came along though, busses went straight DT or to longueuil, which is where most people are still heading anyways.
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Michel
I blame it on not being of the B&T crowd, but what is this Panama of which you all speak?
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Blork
Michel, what’s “the B&T crowd?” (Panama is a bus terminal in Brossard that’s a hub for that end of the south shore; it feeds a lot of buses across the Champlain bridge during rush hours.)
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Kate
Blork, it’s a snide Manhattan expression for people living in other New York boroughs or beyond – the “bridge and tunnel” crowd.
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Spock
I took the Cairo metro once. Not bad… But traffic in that city still reeks!
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The Oxford University Press blog has a brief piece on the founding of Montreal 370 years ago.
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Spock
Question: What’s the oldest continuously inhabited city/town in the world?
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Kate
There’s no definitive answer. List of cities by time of continuous habitation. Either Byblos or Damascus seems to be a good guess.
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C_Erb
As far as ancient cities go, Shibam in Yemen is one of the more interesting.
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Spock
Thanks guys. I was curious.
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Blog piece on the Museum of Fine Arts’ newish external piece, David Altmejd’s The Eye.
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Thousands were out in the streets Wednesday night protesting the new law that suspends classes. Some windows were broken and 122 arrests ensued.
Student organizations are pressing for continued resistance.
Interesting look at some of the older people joining in the protests.
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Raoul
I love how the judicial response to anything is issue fines… nevermind the fact that most people earning minimum cant even pay a 200$ fine. But thats where old hospital cards come in handy.
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Adam
What else do you want the courts to do in order to enforce their rulings? Authorize live fire?
It’s bizarre how some people hold sacrosanct a non-existent rule (“if your student association votes for a ‘strike’ you have no right to go to class”) while heaping contempt upon an actual rule (“court injunctions must be complied with”). The are some incredible mental gymnastics going on here.
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Adam
More noble self-expression from our intrepid activists.
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Raoul
I dont see what giving fines people cant/wont pay accomplishes. You end up having to process people into the penal systems which costs a helluva lot more than the fine was worth.
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Kate
Adam, we hear a lot of bluster from you, posting from the email address “no@spam.com”. Please back off until you have something new to say.
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Adam
It’s your blog, Kate, so if you want me to stop commenting, I will. Given the general thrust of discourse I don’t believe that I’m being any more repetitive than anyone else, but this is your soapbox so you get to make the rules. Incidentally, yeah, I don’t like to give out my actual email address because, well, it avoids spam.
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alanah
“special” is such a creepy way to describe a law, don’t you think?
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Steve Quilliam
The student strikes seems to be eating out the energy on most of the press main pages, TV news headlines, radio talk shows and bloggers comments. And that has been going on for a long while now. It’s also a debate that is turning ugly. A real mess, as some say.
Whatever happened to the language debate ? Nobody is talking about it anymore. Nobody is paying attention to Don Mcpherson’s and the Mouvement Montreal français’s paranoia. I thought that the debate was a bad thing for our city but it looks like it was easily surpassed by the students need. Some say that the new generation isn’t concerned about the language debate, they have different preoccuppation !!!
Is it a good or bad thing ?
Maybe…. ”The times they are a changin”’ as one famous person said !!!
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Bill Binns
What is it about this law that has the students antagonized anew? Classes that were not being held anyway have been suspended and there is some language about guaranteeing access to students who wish to attend. This doesn’t seem to be the big anti-protest “round em up and throw em in jail” law everyone was expecting.
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Kate
Steve, that’s why I’ve been trying hard to include non-student-struggle links here, even when it’s really the big story at the moment. Gets so you’re really happy to hear about something like the Zampino arrest because it’s a change of focus.
The new generation will shape things as they need. Nobody in their 50s or 60s ever wants to believe that.
Bill Binns: Charest and his new education minister made moves like they were going to talk to the students in good faith then, bam, they pulled the plug. Ever hear of the Gordian Knot? Instead of untangling the knot, Charest cut through it, and has simply refused to listen to student criticism about university mismanagement and political corruption at all, shutting the door to any possibility of, you know, actually trying to improve aspects of Quebec society, which is what this is about, fundamentally.
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paul
Sorry to see your voice silenced Adam, I enjoyed your perspective
I guess anonymity is only supported when it involves physical masks… -
Kate
::rolls eyes::
I didn’t “silence” Adam. I politely asked him to put a sock in it for awhile.
But if someone condemns physical masks, they should be prepared to post under their real identity too, I think.
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Adam
Paul: thanks, but Kate is correct, she’s not silencing me. She’s the proprietor here and I’m just trying to be a good guest.
Kate: you are confusing me with someone else. I got into a lengthy exchange with “Ephraim” the other day in which I strongly defended the right of masked protesters to demonstrate anonymously.
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Kate
OK Adam, sorry I confused you with the anti-mask people.
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Kate
alanah: excellently satirical piece on the special law.
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AC
Yea I don’t know… the language debate just makes me angry, and then depressed. There’s retards on both sides. Couldn’t we normal, open-minded, bilingual people just claim the Island and throw everyone else out? … Yeah, that sounds pretty bad when you say it out loud…
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Kate
Let’s not use “retard” in that way, OK? You’re new, but it applies to everyone here.
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Spock
Hiding behind masks is the mark of a wimp. If you have beliefs and want to stand for those beleifs then you needn’t hide… If you know what you are doing is wrong and don’t want to get in shit for it, then I can see why you would hide your face.
Explains why these “students” hide their faces!
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ant6n
Okey dokey, “Spock” “no@spam.com”.
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Chris
ant6n, beat me to it! :) (I post pseudo-anonymously here too, but I think masks should be legal at protests.)
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Raoul
TBH i dont give my real email to every little website that asks for it either. The day i need to get in touch with someone they’ll have it, otherwise there’s a little thing called privacy. now gtfu and try arguing the points.
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qatzelok
@ Spock: “Hiding behind masks is the mark of a wimp.”
Yes, now that we know organized crime runs everything, it’s a good idea to let them know who you are. This way, your cement shoes can be carefully fitted to the contours of your protest-weary feet.
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Spock
ant6n, I use my real email address and Kate knows it.
qatzelok, ummm… huh? What does that have to do with anything. The cops are not going to drop you in a lake. This isn’t Syria.
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ant6n
;-)
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The Marteau anti-corruption squad have arrested Paolo Catania and Frank Zampino in connection with the Faubourg Contrecoeur affair. Zampino, once the mayor’s right-hand man and chairman of the city’s executive committee, was involved in selling a piece of city-owned land to Catania in 2007 at a sweet price – land on which Catania has since built 1800 condos. More details are expected from a presser at 11.
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Regular reader ant6n crunches us some numbers on the tuition issue.
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mdblog
ant6n will make a fabulous fonctionnaire one day. I’m not disputing his/her data, but his/her ability to make the numbers say exactly what he/she wants is something that all corrupt regimes have a need for. I guess that university degree was worth something after all, huh?
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steph
@ mdblog. Since we’re making straw man arguments approaching Reductio ad Hitlerum, I’m gonna invoke the rules of Godwin’s law and say you’ve automatically lost whatever point you were trying to make.
[meta]Now someone post some unfounded insinuations about me too![/meta] -
mdblog
@steph, ad Hitlerum? Grow up.
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Adam
The point about minimum wage is a red herring. The relevant information is what people actually earn, not the level of a state-legislated price floor that merely prices unskilled labour out of the market. Anyone who thinks that this is interesting data should ask him or herself whether we could solve the problem by increasing the minimum wage to, say, $5,000 an hour. Voila, you barely need to work at all any more to pay your tuition!
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Spock
Go to school pay off your loans and minimum wage will be a distant memory.
Keep protesting, drop out of school and minimum wage will be all you will see.
Time to end this banality…
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Bill Binns
A well done piece. I don’t see anything hear that is untruthful or misleading. The cost of university has certainly gone up here over the last few decades. It’s still a little like running riot because the cost of hamburgers has gone from 35 cents to 50 cents when everyone else is paying 3 bucks. There is just nothing here that would justify the behavior we are seeing.
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Joey
What’s absent is a full accounting of price: tuition and ancillary fees on one side and tax credits and bursaries on the other. Quebec students get a tax credit for tuition that is worth 35% of the amount they pay in tuition and fees (20% from the province and 15% from the feds), plus an amount for every month of study (e.g., a full-time student would get a tax credit worth $480) from Ottawa.
If you paid $3000 in tuition and fees last year, you would have received a tax credit worth $1,530, bringing your net price down to $1,470. Add on the $450M the province spends on bursaries (not all of it to university students, to be clear) and the substantial money spent on university student aid/scholarships and you get a much fuller picture of what it actually costs to be a student.
A PhD student at UofT named Andrew Bird has factored in tax credits and institutional financial aid into calculations about the students’ share of university costs (tuition & fees). He found it averages in Quebec about 1%, far from the 12% figure bandied about by the press and the government. The data don’t allow us to go back in time and figure out what things were like in the late 60s or mid-70s, but I would be surprised if the student contribution were lower than 1% then.
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paul
What is also missing is an analysis of the statistics regarding basic university costs. How have teacher and administrator costs risen? I know for a fact that construction/building maintenance costs have skyrocketed in the past 20 years alone.
I think if those other costs remained static, raising tuition would be a moot point.
We need to remember that these tuition increases are due to a lack of funding for universities, due primarily to rising costs – not necessarily mismanagement. -
ant6n
@Joey
This is a very complicated issue. Yes there exist tax credits, but students don’t pay taxes (they’re too poor), so they won’t benefit from them until they start making real money much later (Note that tax credits exist only on the actual tuition, not the fees; also, did you calculate 8 months of full time study for the federal amount, rather than 12?). There also exist gov’t bursaries and aid and loans, but again how do you measure whether people can actually rely on that, rather than be denied aid because your parents are too rich or something like that? Are your bursaries taken away if you work, because you can’t pay you bills? Would you sue your parents for money? Also, How much of the gov’t aid comes as debt?Consider that the majority of the money students have comes through work (http://cupwire.ca/articles/38179). And that’s actually bad – it’s been shown that even doing 15 hours of work per week during full time studies noticeably impacts academic performance.
There exist scholarships and aid coming from the universities as well. But they tend to give scholarships based on merit, which is not a reliable source of funding; Financial aid comes in bursaries, but they like to give aid as half bursary, half debt. And their aid is especially vulnerable to abuse.
Of course in my calculation I also didn’t show numbers that go against students: The crazy increases in book costs; the crazy increases in institutional costs (which together eat up your tax credits right there, only you don’t get those tax credits until years later). To get such a detailed idea of all these different issues coming together, you’d have to make a full audit on thousands of students over several years. Or you could look at what comes out at the end — debt. And that’s also on the rise.
The overall point I was trying to make is that tuition is _not_ at the lowest levels in decades right now. I wanted to clear up a basic misconception about costs of education during the last 30 years.
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Joey
@paul Three-quarters of university costs are faculty salary, and faculty unions have done a good job of negotiating annual increases above inflation over and above increases due to “rising through the ranks.” There’s your problem in a nutshell.
@ant6n True enough. The point about tax credits is that, even though they are regressive and inefficient, they can’t be ignored. Since the late 1990s the federal and provincial governments have decided that the tax system would be a major way of helping families pay for their education – remember that students can and do transfer their unusable credits to parents all the time. Think of it as a BS reward for the middle class for sending kids to university. And it clocks in at about $2 billion a year across the country. Useful or not, tax credits must be part of any credible exercise looking at university affordability in Canada.
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ant6n
@Joey
True. Although you could approximately offset the tuition credits with rising costs of institutional fees and books.You know, I paid international tuition, so racked up crazy amounts of tuition credits, in the order of 20K which I don’t have to pay in taxes over the coming years. While that’s all nice, and a good incentive to stay in Quebec, it didn’t really help me to get the money together to pay for my education in the first place.
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We are going to have a mayor who speaks perfect English and is either of the Jewish or Muslim faith by 2017.
Hahahahaha… Who am I kidding, shame on me for forgetting that this is Montreal in the province of Quebec.
My bad!