Metro has some notes on our urban bats – five species have been found in Montreal – and talks about a Biodome bat excursion.
Updates from July, 2012 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Ottawa is dishing out a princely $4 million for Montreal’s anglo minority. Some groups devoted to protecting French are angry about this untoward largesse.
The man handing out the dosh, Jacques Gourde, Tory MP for Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, is (deep breath) Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Works and Government Services, for Official Languages and for the Economic Development Agency for the Regions of Quebec.
He’s also a farmer.
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Jack
The reaction is interesting and predictable. Josee Legault was the first to attempt to head off the conceptualization of anglophones as a minority in Quebec in her laughable MA to book, “The invention of a minority:the Anglophones of Quebec”. In nationalist mythology it is so critical to view anglophones as part of a Trojan horse, perniciously eating away at Quebec’s dream. It’s the same reason why in the franco media there has been so much debate about the current history reform, owning that narrative is critical to the project. A project only really sustained by convenient binaries, which this story highlights.
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Bill Binns
What a magical time we live in! As an able-bodied, white, heterosexual male, I had lost all hope of ever attaining minority status. I’m going to run right out and get oppressed. Maybe I will attempt to communicate with a bus driver in Laval or a cop in Outremont. Maybe I will use my new minority confidence to write a stern complaint letter to the STM about the French-only announcements on the Metro.
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Chris
Kate, I think “Montreal’s” would have been better than “the city’s”. I read that first sentence and was thinking: “English is the minority language in Ottawa”?!
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Louis
Ironically, Gourde doesn’t speak English. It is one of the reasons why he is the only Quebec Tory MP that is not minister.
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Kate
Chris, you are right, I will change that.
Bill Binns, be as sarcastic as you like, but anglos are still a minority in Quebec. Do our institutions really not deserve the same support as other minority institutions, and if not, why not? It’s not as if English-speaking people from the rest of Canada and other English-speaking countries are chipping in to help keep them running.
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Jo Walton
My immediate thought was to wonder if we get twenty dollars each, or what?
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TiGuy
Jack, vous y avez mis votre doigt on ne peut plus directement. Je suis entièrement d’accord. La communauté anglophone a contribué à bâtir et Montréal et le Québec. C’est une minorité qui mérite d’être respectée et protégée, n’en déplaise à Josée Legault et sa bande.
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jeather
It seems that 2/3 of that money is going to anglophone groups in Quebec, 1/3 to francophone groups in Quebec. It’s not clear to me how much is going to francophone groups everywhere else in the country.
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qatzelok
A similar initiative changed Nova Scotia a few hundred years ago when Anglos were paid to scalp the local natives and to displace the Acadians. And thanks to this help (along with the Expulsion of the Acadians and smallpox outbreaks) the ANGLOS WERE SAVED!!!
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Kate
qatzelok yeah yeah, we get it. You hate anglos, and modern English speakers are guilty of everything ever done by people speaking English in the past.
What’s your program? I’ve asked you this before, and you’ve not answered. Someone like me or Jack, what would you have us do? Leave? (But to you, there’s really nowhere anglos have the right to live, correct?) Take a vow never to speak English again? Self-immolate on the parterre of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society HQ?
Jo Walton: I was wondering when I could go around and collect my share.
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jeather
When my father’s family came to Montreal in the 40s, they chose it in part because they already spoke French. And yet they weren’t welcomed into the French community. So they ended up living in English, eventually.
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qatzelok
@ Kate: “What’s your program?”
Nothing has changed about the mission of the Anglo non-culture over the last few centuries. It was always a group of people trained to destroy cultures to make way for the banks and commercial interests. The most recent “Save our Anglo culture” initiative is more of the same. Victimhood is the new chic for hegemons.
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Ian
You, qatzelok, are utterly ridiculous. I’m a bit surprised you didn’t blame Zionism this time.
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Jack
It is so ironic qatzelok, when my Dad’s people came from Ireland to dig the Lachine Canal that’s what they called themselves, the hegemons. Oh sorry the O’Hegemons.
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Kevin
@qatzelok’s complaints are like a fish who doesn’t realize what water is.
Anglo non-culture? Yeah right. You’re swimming in it. -
qatzelok
@ Ian: “I’m a bit surprised you didn’t blame Zionism this time.”
It’s a very similar cult.
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Marc
@ qatzelok: Louis Préfointaine wrote a book called University Apartheid, where he is scandalized at the amount of funding Anglo univerisities get. I bet you’d be a big fan…
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I did a brief piece for OpenFile today about cognitive dissonance in the city’s approach to the street food issue. We want it, but we don’t want it. Food trucks are mobile, but there’s the impulse to restrict them in a net of regulations. And so on.
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The new MUHC hospital at Vendôme is going to miss its deadline, moving from 2014 to early 2015 (so far). The delay is blamed on a list of issues.
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Blork
And so it begins. It will open in mid-2016 and will be 250% over budget, just as everyone involved in the construction has planned.
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steph
just two weeks ago CTV news reported that they were ON schedule. hmm.
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Marc
Months ago, they said it was going to be summer-fall 2015.
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Faiz Imam
Or this could be a competently arrived to delay decision that honestly accounts for all reasonable issues.
Just, you know… putting it out there.
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Dave M
I’ve seen this story a few places this morning, and what I don’t understand is–why is a debt rating agency the one announcing this?
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Chris
It missed its deadline about a decade ago really.
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Kate
Dave M, that’s a very good question.
Chris, this is true, it took a very long time to come to fruition and now, it seems, it’s taking even longer.
Faiz Imam, you’re trying to be fair and I see what you mean. After attending one meeting about the project, about six months ago, I could see there were plenty of unresolved issues with how the hospital was fitting into the infrastructure where it’s been placed. Even after all that time spent chewing over plans before beginning, a certain amount of handwaving had taken place about things like sewer systems. Sheesh.
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Has anyone been seeing the simpler mobile version of this blog on a regular browser lately? One of my readers has tweeted to say he’s noticed the problem but I can’t replicate it here.
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Jorgh
Long time reader first time commenter: I’m using Firefox (latest version whatever that is) on Windows XP. It seems to happen at random.
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Blork
I have not seen that problem (mobile version in a non-mobile browser). However, now I don’t see the mobile version when I *am* in a mobile browser. As in, it’s as if the mobile version has disappeared. (That’s me testing right now on three mobile browsers. I did see the mobile version — in a mobile browser — a couple of days ago.)
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Anto
It happened to me a couple of weeks ago but it’s been fine since.
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Charles Lanteigne
I’m seeing this blog correctly in a desktop browser, but sometimes you post links to articles in their mobile form. Take a look at the link you provided in this post, for example: http://w5.montreal.com/mtlweblog/?p=20592
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Kate
I knew it’s been unpredictable on mobile devices. Sometimes I get the mobile version on my ipod, sometimes the regular. I’ve never seen the mobile version show up on a full-size browser.
I have to do some updating which may be tricky – update the template and try to preserve my customizations, it’s a solid day’s work.
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Susana Machado
There is a mobile version?
I check in here from various browsers/platforms and never seen a mobile version….
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Blork
Frankly, I prefer the regular version, even when I’m mobile. Since the design is so clean and uncluttered anyways, there’s little need (for me) for a mobile version, whose purpose is to remove clutter.
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dwgs
It has happened to me maybe four or five times. Also a Firefox user. Ditto what Blork said about the regular version on a mobile device.
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Dave M
It’s happened to me a few times, but not recently. I doubt it’s a browser thing, since I use Chrome and other people seem to be having it happen with Firefox.
When it happens, it happens consistently (ie. reloading the page doesn’t fix it, so it’s not just a random page load thing either). Is there a load balancer on the site and 1 of the servers is misconfigured, maybe?
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jeather
It also has happened to me a few times, not recently (a month, two, three?), and I cannot get off the mobile page (by clicking go to full site, reloading, etc). I don’t think I ever bothered to try a different browser, though.
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Dave M
I take back what I said about it not happening to me recently. It’s happening right now.
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Kate
Thanks everyone for feedback.
Seems like the system for perceiving whether an incoming request is from a mobile browser or a regular one is flickering on and off unpredictably. I will look into it.
Yes, Susana, there’s a very simple version autogenerated for mobile devices, black and white, no sidebars or top graphic. But obviously not everyone gets to see it!
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ant6n
On a mobile device, I also always switch to the full version – mostly because in the mobile version the stories need to be clicked on to be read, meaning there’s more loading. Sometimes it takes several clicks to ‘exit mobile version’ before it actually goes to the full version.
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steph
just came across this error. no idea what triggered it, i have no mobile devices and always brows this site with firefox. took a screen shot. http://i49.tinypic.com/1pfnr6.jpg
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Kate
That’s the way the mobile version is meant to look! Not an error.
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The 2011 numbers for the busiest and least busy metro stations are in. Despised Guy-Concordia, notorious for its cockroaches, mold and stalactites, comes in #3, but it’s not really a popularity contest, more a geographical one.
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denpanosekai
To be fair, I haven’t seen cockroaches since they started renovations on the St-Mathieu entrance. I would see them daily before that.
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Bill Binns
You forgot to mention the stifling heat as one of Guy Concordia’s charms. It seems to have gotten even worse since the closed the other entrance.
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Kate
The St-Mathieu entrance is temporarily closed for repairs and according to this STM page they’re working on better ventilation as well as water collection. The page also notes it was the first station designed by city engineers, so I think we can cut them a little slack for having to go back and retrofit some of the features they understand better after working on later stations.
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Some thoughts on the end of the Montreal Mirror from longtime editorial cartoonist Dave Rosen.
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Archives de Montréal (did someone buy them a new scanner or something?) has put up a Flickr set of photos of the Port of Montréal from 1963 to 1966.
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A woman from Montreal has brought poutine to New Delhi. Made an interesting contrast to this blog post on India I happened to read over the weekend.
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Poutine Pundit
I was looking for an excuse to go back to India.
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Kate
Chef Guru has curry poutine, or used to. Wasn’t bad, although I think it needed a bit more sauce. Cheaper than going back to India, at any rate.
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walkerp 15:27 on 2012/07/10 Permalink
There is a bat or two that flies around above the field just across the path from the medieval battleground in Parc Mont-Royal that I have seen on a few dusk walks. Cool to know there are several species.
walkerp 15:29 on 2012/07/10 Permalink
“En une fraction de seconde, elles doivent détecter une proie ou un obstacle, estimer la direction, évaluer la distance, définir sa taille et sa forme, et juger si l’objet doit être évité, ignoré ou mangé.” Now that’s badass.
Kate 16:23 on 2012/07/10 Permalink
They’re specialized little beasties.
Bert 18:17 on 2012/07/10 Permalink
walkerp, are you describing Montréal bats or Montréal pedestrians crossing the street?