A spokesperson for Google says, “This is the fifth data set that we’ve released. Just like every other time, we’ve been asked to take down political speech. It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect – western democracies not typically associated with censorship.”
Sweet dreams.
Time grinds inexorably on. The Piknic électronik is marking its tenth anniversary with a special show on the Fête nationale.
A four-alarm fire damaged a condo in the heart of NDG Sunday, producing a huge plume of smoke but not injuring anyone except one firefighter who had heatstroke.
Student activists will be adjusting their approach to demonstration by carrying out an information blitz punctuated by more marches. With growing rumours presaging a fall election, the FEUQ is also gearing up to put their efforts into fighting tuition hikes in the context of an election campaign.
The UN has noted its concern that Bill 78 restrains students’ right of association. I predict this will lose Jean Charest precisely zero minutes of sleep. In a desperate attempt to inject “journalistic balance” into this story a quote was solicited from a group called UN Watch (the UN concerns are “absurd”); you can read about this group here.
I’m going to say again: because other places have it worse is not an argument that things can’t deteriorate here.
Ho hum… no point. Well, at least it gives them something to do with this lives, because obviously working isn’t on their minds.
The difference between children and adults… adults know you have responsibilities and costs and get a job to pay them… children get the summer off for vacation.
Be like that. Some of the students don’t even normally live in Montreal. And they are not yet working adults. This is simply a fact and doesn’t deserve our scorn.
@Kate – Sorry Kate, but this is the point at which people need to start to look at responsibility. I left home at 17, well before university. I paid for my schooling. I worked two different jobs at school. I worked a full-time summer job each year. My parents paid for plane tickets, because they wanted to see me during the summer. And yes, I had a student loan and paid it off. Have my parents helped with my bills, sure, but for the most part, I did a lot of work to pay them as well.
Some of us take responsibility in our own hands and do what we need to do, others want 3 months vacation in the summer. I haven’t had a 3 month long vacation since high school.
“I did this ∴ others should do the same” makes for poor public policy.
@Ephraim
Good for you if you were able to work and study and come out without debt. But your “I worked hard”-argument is nonsense, because it assumes students are lazy right now. But no, students actually work to pay most of their lives and their tuition; most of the rises beyond this point are just debt.
Most people who are from Quebec and claim they worked and claim today’s students are lazy are the self-entitled brats, benefiting from much lower tuition and ability to work and study without debt, and now denying it to the younger generations.
@ant6n – Didn’t pay the lower tuition in Quebec, except when I took part-time courses as an adult and they certainly didn’t seem to be subsidized, one course cost me more than the current tuition (and I paid it personally and managed a very high GPA). Spent years in a dorm sharing three showers and three toilets with 19 other people. No phone, no mobile, no car. Four burners for 20 people. A half of a shelf in a commercial fridge. Bed consisted of a piece of foam over plywood, half a desk, a closet and three shelves over the bed for books and three in the cupboard for food and clothing. Couldn’t afford to waste money on a pillow, so I used rolled up towels. And there were plenty of days where all I had to eat was rice or chicken hearts, because that’s what I could afford to buy. Do I think there are responsible student out there, absolutely. Do I think that there are irresponsible students out there, absolutely. Do I think that some of the students are lazy, you better believe it. Because 18 weeks of strike is 3 years of tuition. And you better believe that if it was me, I would have been working them.
@Steph – The “you should pay for my education because I want you to” makes for very poor policy as well. Sticking your head in the ground like a ostrich, doesn’t make you an ostrich. You want to ask the public to pay for university, give a damn good reason, show how it will benefit. Show that it’s effective. If it’s as effective as CEGEP, you have a long way to go, because so many people can’t finish CEGEP in the allotted time that the public is picking up the bill for extra years.
@Ephraim
Are you US-born?
Nope. And in case it wasn’t hard enough, I did it in a foreign language and graduated with distinction.
That’s not the point. There was a time when eye exams in Quebec were free, they aren’t free anymore. My grandparents paid $6 a prescription at one time. It’s no longer $6. Life goes on. We can’t live in the past. It’s still a reasonable cost compared to elsewhere. Maybe there is a better way to do it, but free isn’t it, either. It ends up being a wasted resource.
The city’s planning a campaign to try to make people behave more responsibly with their pets including, eventually, affordable cat sterilization clinics.
The SQDA claims that Montrealers keep a pet for an average 19 months, which, if true, is sad considering a dog can live to 15 years and a cat can reach 20.
Language Log looks at “bonjour/hi” and what it can mean (with quotes from @William!).
Ah, of course, the old “anglos are dull” trope. Glad to see this didn’t descend into idiotic stereotypes. Oh wait.
@ Ian here’s my favorite, totally analytical and empirical a sentence that does cognitive science proud,”And to this day any social interaction, even an incidental encounter with a shopkeeper, just feels more warm and spontaneous in French than it does in English.”
Do people really refer to the OLF as the language gestapo? Police, yes, but gestapo?
I’m not sure how she both grew up in Montreal and never had to study French.
I’ve never heard the OQLF called that. But like the Penny Red piece I linked earlier, and other pieces I’ve seen, I find that bloggers elsewhere who write about Montreal likely rely on limited sources – things told them by one or two contacts can be given out as universals.
Thanks for finding this one :) Super nice to be acknowledged by an academic.
Saturday night saw the 54th evening demo and eight arrests for holding an illegal gathering. La Presse ponders the wit of protest chants and slogans.
In other demo-related news, the Journal had a piece about a landlord in Little Italy who has forbidden his tenants to bang on casseroles.
Also, it’s been news that one member of Mise en demeure is also on the CLASSE executive committee. Mise en demeure is the band whose record cover caused a minor fuss recently because of a piece of satirical art connected with them.
BTW, did you see the $8 million dollar lady trying to figure out how to bang pot covers? http://youtu.be/RUAkUaalfjA
The mayor of Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve has been floating the idea of a zone where street prostitution would be tolerated in an attempt to move it away from residents unhappy with the current situation of open solicitation near their homes and businesses.
The prostitutes would be confined to a short, industrial stretch of Ste-Catherine in the borough.
Police have not given this plan their nod and Jocelyn Ann Campbell, the executive committee member for social development, has also slapped it down. (But note that borough mayor René Ménard is with Vision Montreal while Campbell, of course, is with the mayor’s party.)
Campbell’s quoted in the Gazette as saying prostitution is linked to poverty and drugs and you don’t get rid of it by hiding it. Fine, as far as it goes. I wonder if it has occurred to anyone that the women doing this work are safer if they’re on regular streets among ordinary people than if you push them onto an industrial road with no foot traffic and force them to do all their work by getting into cars with complete strangers with no witnesses to what happens.
I’m naive about this: do modern street prostitutes do all their work in cars? Are the women currently soliciting on foot in Hochelaga bringing customers back to a rented room? That would strike me as a whole hell of a lot safer than getting into someone’s car and hoping he’s not a maniac.
But I do know one thing: Prostitution always abides. You can repress it here, it’ll pop back up there. In that way it’s like homelessness – you can take measures that will reduce the number of people who have to resort to it, but there’s always going to be some of it going on in any big city.
The homeless comparison seems like a good one to me. You get rid of homelessness by building affordable housing or shelters that they can use. You can get rid of street prostitution by building safe, secure brothels so they don’t need to solicit on the streets.
Somehow I don’t think that’s what Union Montreal wants, though.
Most prostitution happens by phone these days so the girls who end up on the street are really quite desperate. I think the brothel idea is better, but it’s harder to convince the city and law enforcement to let prostitutes operate at an address.
Shouldn’t we put it on Ile St-Helene with all the other “entertainment”?
One time Ben Soo and I were wandering around Île Notre-Dame at night in wintertime when a cab driver with a car full of young dudes asked us where the strip club was. He didn’t want to believe me when I said I was certain there were no strip clubs on the island.
Later I looked up the name of the club the cabbie was looking for. It turned out to be in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu.
There might be a few prostitutes left in that part of the city but street prostitution has effectively disappeared elsewhere.
Une ville sans prostitution est comme une rose sans pétales.
The new Saputo stadium was reopened Saturday evening with the Impact defeating the Seattle Sounders 4-1. La Presse notes that there were a fair number of empty seats in the newly enlarged stadium.
It’s so far away, and there’s almost to bixis there. :(
I’m not an Impact fan however I do bike by Olympic park often and it doesn’t seem very far away from downtown-west (via Notre-Dame bike path + Bennett) or from the north via St. Zotique.
I watched on TV and it sure was striking, the number of empty seats for the first game in a renovated stadium.
Hamza 01:14 on 2012/06/18 Permalink
but if it was a quran, what would they do?
Charest, Harper, Tremblay = Nixon = Watergate x10 = All going to jail.
Bye bye bastards.
[BTW , hi to all the haterz. no i wasnt arrested, just doing other things with my life.]
Tux 08:53 on 2012/06/18 Permalink
Microphones in airports, internet spying legislation, censorship of political speech, bowing to U.S corporate interests… Harper is really a piece of work. This isn’t the Canada I knew growing up.
Tux 08:54 on 2012/06/18 Permalink
Remember when Bush was elected and a bunch of Americans fled to Canada? Where will Canadians flee when our government just completely loses its collective shit?
Ephraim 09:15 on 2012/06/18 Permalink
Meanwhile, it’s over $90 to get a new passport, plus the passport photos. Waste of money to pee on it. Pictures of Harper are a heck of a lot cheaper.
It’s easy enough to send a request, you might at well do it. I assume they don’t even think about it or expect any results.
Kate 10:21 on 2012/06/18 Permalink
@Ephraim maybe not, but Google noted the trend that requests are on the rise, which does tend to confirm one’s sense of a growing worldwide malaise with existing governments.
@Tux it’s a good question. I know someone hoping to leave if the federal government’s current copyright package is passed. But where the hell will he go?
Ephraim 10:30 on 2012/06/18 Permalink
@Kate – Or government malaise with the Internet. The reality is that government has to change, the question is how. But we also can’t get into this American thing of deficits without thought.
Marois apparently shot herself in the foot this weekend saying that she would have given in to the students after 2 days. What kind of strong leader is that?
ant6n 12:30 on 2012/06/18 Permalink
A strong leader in a democracy is somebody who tries to build a consensus among everyone, not somebody who takes their simple majority and dictates everyone else, screwing over large minorities in the process. I bet Marois will be a “strong leader” in your sense of the word when it comes to screwing over the Anglophone minorities in Quebec, i.e. she probably won’t give in to them.
Ephraim 13:12 on 2012/06/18 Permalink
Lyndon Johnson tried to govern by consensus and opinion poll. It didn’t work.
ant6n 15:15 on 2012/06/18 Permalink
Hitler governed by strength. Didn’t work either.
Ephraim 18:01 on 2012/06/18 Permalink
Godwin’s law. Discussion over.
ant6n 18:37 on 2012/06/18 Permalink
The discussion was basically over with your boring bash against Marois; it’s not like you’re interested in reasonable arguments anyway.
Ephraim 21:03 on 2012/06/18 Permalink
Notice, I discuss what you say, your discuss me and put words in my mouth. To me, the minute you cross that line, it’s troll time and I don’t feed trolls.
ant6n 21:37 on 2012/06/18 Permalink
You discuss yourself (‘omg graduated with distincution’)…
Anyway, you reduced my comment about favoring governance by trying to build consensus to some obscure comparison with LBJ, so why can’t I reduce your comment even further?
You ignore that Pauline Marois would mostly likely drag some strikes on, gladly so, if for example Anglphones rose up to fight for some language related issue. The student strike issue wouldn’t have escalated this much, because the PQ favors a more moderate approach when it comes to tuition increases. So the claim that she would be a weak leader because she says this wouldn’t have dragged on if she was in power is a red herring. Quebec has a proud tradition of shitting one some group because you’re put in power by another, and I say that’s bad. And I find an attitude that glorifies this notion of ‘strength’ a wee bit undemocratic.
Ephraim 22:05 on 2012/06/18 Permalink
I discussed myself and my experience, that’s one thing… we all draw from our own experience, but I never discuss others in personal fashion. There is a BIG difference between speaking to the subject and getting personal and acting like a troll. (Yes, I believe that when you get to adulthood you need to take responsibility and step up to the plate. That’s the point of being an adult. )
LBJ was a perfect example of what happens when you try to govern by opinion poll. It didn’t work. Read about it. There are plenty of articles about it. (And the basic rule of reducto ad Hitlerum always applies, which is why I never use it.
The whole of Quebec isn’t governed by simply a stance on tuition. It’s really a rather minor issue. Sure, it looms big for students, but it’s really minor. The Plan du Nord… now that’s major. The rationality behind the decision was to reign in a part of the budget that was getting too large. Quebecers pay the highest taxes in North America. Every single penny is a decision that has to be made and asking the people who are the highest taxes to pay even more… not going to happen. (Frankly, I would love to see free tuition, especially if it means I’m going to get a rebate on the tuition that I have paid)
The fact is that I don’t see the Marois as a person who has what it takes to govern. I never have. Why? Well, she walked away in a fit when she wasn’t elected as leader, instead of stand behind who was elected. She quit politics but came back because she saw a chance for power. Her comment that she would have capitulated after 2 days to me suggest a person who doesn’t stand for their convictions, someone who makes a decision and walks away from it because a small minority disagrees with it, isn’t a strong leader at all. And there is the whole $8 million dollar home issue. I don’t think she is able to stand up and make the tough decisions this province needs. And we need tough decisions made.
As for the PQ, it’s come a long way from the greatness of Rene Levesque. There last PQ government hid deficits from us. Under Landry they manipulated both Hydro and the Caisse. I’ve repeatedly said that neither the PQ or the Liberals are clean.
And if you have read my comments, you know that I also don’t believe that Charest is up to many of those tough decisions either. It’s one of the lessons that you learn as you get older, just because you are against A doesn’t mean you are for B. It’s not that clear cut.
ant6n 23:11 on 2012/06/18 Permalink
I still don’t understand how you muddle up the idea of a consensus politician with LBJ, who escalated the Vietnam War and pushed through civil rights legislation. He polarised the US between pro-war and pro-peace people, but also between civil rights advocates and the South. It’s not about opinion polls, kind of the opposite. It seems that opinion polls reinforce a politician’s policies as long as they have 51% support on a policy, even if 25% of the people feel _really_ strongly against those policies.
And yes, I agree one can dislike most current Quebec politicians. Which is also possible even if one disagrees with the notion of a leader being ‘weak’ if they don’t want to walk over smaller or larger sections of the population. I think I made it pretty obvious that I don’t like Marois either, but it has nothing to do with her being a weak leader.
(And I don’t know where you get this whole ‘discuss in a personal fashion’ thing came about, do you feel like I called you a nazi? Did you call me pro proxy-war US democrat? I believe, on a personal level, that my attitude is much less aloof and over-bearing than yours.)
Hamza 01:47 on 2012/06/19 Permalink
as with any ‘law’ Godwin’s Law has a true and opposite counterpart ~ Thou Shalt Not Mention the Jewish Race In Any Subject That Does Not Immediately Include The Great and Laudatory Glory of Israel And the Horror and Viciousness of The Worst Crime In Human History [The Holocaust]
Before that statement gets miscontruted, I love Jewish people. I read the Suburban as much as I can. And I love Cote Saint Luc as a neighbourhood. The Library is great and I practically grew up in Cavendish Mall. So please, no anti-Semitism. my Jewish friends and I will only get offended at such libel.
Peace and love to all .
Ephraim 05:10 on 2012/06/19 Permalink
@Ant6n University and College is a time when you learn. You learn to self-sacrifice. You learn to balance a budget. You learn to figure out debt, values, etc. Consider how many of us didn’t have a quarter of the current luxury. As I struggled through University, I never had a telephone until I managed in my fourth year to move to an apartment. To work on a computer involved my being in the university. To avoid paying for expensive books, I often had no choice but to sit in the library and read. It’s a time that you get to look back at what you did, the sacrifices you made. And it’s a glorious time.
The argument that people paid cheaper tuition in the past is a straw argument. Sure, it was cheaper, but we also didn’t have nearly as many things available to us. The computer I worked on, was only for computer class and it was a white on black screen terminal to a central computer. When you bought a pair of jeans made in China, they were horribly styled and everyone knew you couldn’t afford the real thing. The reality is that things change over time. I’m not getting free eye exams and I’m not getting $6 (or was it $4) prescriptions that my parents and grandparents had. It’s a reality. Things change, priorities change. I remember my parents getting a baby bonus cheque. And my parents certainly remember when they paid to see the doctor. You can’t live in the past and if we did, we would all be driving giant cars that barely got 10 miles to the gallon… oh and still be buying gas by the Imperial gallon.
I didn’t “make up” anything. LBJ was the first president who tried to rule by opinion poll. But it doesn’t work. There are times when you have to make tough choices and they aren’t popular choices. Or do you really think that putting sales tax in Quebec from 7.5% to 8.5% and then to 9.5% is a popular choice? Think that that would go through by consensus? Nope. Does it take a strong leader? Yes. (Which doesn’t mean that I agree or disagree with it, that’s not relevant, what is relevant is that if you are going to have a leader, they should be able to stand up to opinion polls, make tough choices and then let history decide. And the fact that Pauline Marois said that she would have caved in after two days doesn’t sound to me like someone who is going to be able to stand up for her convictions and make difficult decisions. And they are all difficult decision. Balancing the budget is full of difficult decisions. Education, health, the future, taxes, fisheries, immigration, salaries, infrastructure.