A poll shows that Montrealers are disgrunted with the city administration. Just try to get them out and vote, though.
Updates from July, 2012 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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A firefighter died Friday in Saint-Laurent when one of the fire department’s own trucks ran over him out on a call. I feel for the guy who was driving at the time.
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denpanosekai
Although walking distance from my place, I don’t think this new skating rink will take over Verdun’s Bleu Blanc Bouge as the city’s top place for quality icetime…. free!
Anyway what I’d really like to see is a wrecking ball take down those ugly brown buildings on the south side of Saint-Antoine.
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Kate
I kind of like them, myself, as a remnant of what that part of the city used to look like. But I guess I can concede they don’t have tremendous architectural value.
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Ian
A fairly tall mixed-use building is going up at Square Victoria, too – http://www.altoria.ca/en/
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The fraud case against Frank Zampino and his associates will take three months just for the preliminary inquiry because there’s so much evidence to be entered – 1400 truckloads by several accounts. Among the accused are people that were really close to the mayor – Zampino, his right hand man for several years, Martial Filion, who used to run the SHDM, and Bernard Trépanier, who was a political organizer for Union Montreal.
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A man who says he was mocked and jeered at for speaking English to an STM employee has put in a formal complaint.
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Blork
As he should. It’s not a language issue, it’s a public service issue. As in, the employee might not be obliged to speak English, but he is obliged — or at least he should be — to be as helpful as best he can.
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pluc
I disagree. It is a language issue. This man was born and grew up in Montreal yet he couldn’t be bother to learn enough French (which IS the official language of the province) to request a day pass. He had to learn two words. “Passe” and “Journee”.
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qatzelok
“Dunning, who said he was born and raised in Montreal, said Monday’s situation was the first time he’s ever had trouble with a transit employee for speaking English. ”
He was born and raised in Montreal, but doesn’t speak French. Maybe the STM ought to put in a formal complaint about Mr. Dunning.
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Josh
@pluc So basically the onus is on the public to make life easier for public servants is what you’re saying.
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Blork
Pluc, I suppose you think the man recited his biography to the employee before he asked for the tickets. That’s absurd. Where this guy grew up is irrelevant. It’s summer in Montreal, and we get visitors from all over North America and beyond, most of whom don’t speak French. And again, the issue is not that he wasn’t served in English. The issue is that an STM employee mocked and ridiculed a member of the public. That is appalling.
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david m
yeah, i’m sympathetic to both the “it’s totally easy to order a pass in french, wtf is the deal with this guy?” and the “stm employees shouldn’t be rude” arguments, but filing a formal complaint is way disproportionate, and i’m sure that it’ll go absolutely nowhere with the stm administration or discipline body, whoever.
anyone notice how any more anti-english stories we get whenever we’re near an election? not sure if it’s just the press radaring in, or if it’s the english canadian media across canada setting a sort of agenda here (with all the talk of canadian unity/pq threat), or what, but it’s annoying.
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Blork
David m, would it be disproportionate to file a complaint if an STM employee said “we don’t serve fags here,” or “we don’t serve immigrants?” Language isn’t the issue here. Rude and discriminatory behaviour by an employee who is supposed to serve the public. That is the issue.
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Marc
It’s Jean Charest pandering to Québécois Nationalists. Notice how busy the OLF has been lately?
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JB
Blork, please do your cause a favour and don’t compare the reasonably rare irritation of french speakers being rude to english speakers in Montreal to the suffering endured by gay folks? You must know that given the history of domination and abuse of gay people by straights, there’s absolutely no comparison–or that it’d make more sense to frame francophones as having been until very recently more comparable to gay people or immigrants who are the victims of prejudice.
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David Tighe
I agree entirely with Blork. Why after so many years is the STM not able to instill civilized behavior in its employees who are supposed to serve the public. In better run organizations the employee would be fired
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steph
@ Marc, can’t tell if you’re serious or not. But I’ve heard this said before and it blew my mind that time too. “OQLF is a federalist program”
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Bill Binns
I once had a Laval bus driver bare his teeth at me like a furious chimp when I dared to ask him a question in English. The guy literally screamed at me like I was attacking him. The passenger behind me took pity and informed me in English that my Montreal Metro ticket was no good on a Laval bus. STM employees as a group appear to be very enthusiastically unilingual francophone.
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Blork
JB, my only “cause” is to live in a world where people treat each other with kindness and respect. But it sounds like you would prefer some kind of sliding scale, where the groups at the top are “untouchable” and groups at the bottom are fair game for every kind of abuse.
I disagree fundamentally with “grouping” people. People are individuals first, and should be treated equally and fairly as people, not as members of groups.
And that’s the issue here. It’s not specifically language, it’s that the STM employee categorized the customer as being a member of a group that he finds undesirable, and proceded to abuse him for it. It doesn’t matter what group he perceived the man as being part of. It was the prejudice and abuse that makes him an asshole who should be reported.
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JB
Er, Blork, I’m all for kindness and respect too, but are you about to compare an incident of rudeness to people dying in the gas chambers? Probably not, since that would be unspeakably offensive and diminishing to that very real suffering. So you’ll probably want to recognize that the reality is that some situations are better than others, others are worse than others, and you do insult to those who have suffered very greatly by imagining that you, who have suffered not so much, have endured the same as they.
When a person is singled out as a member of a group, that’s a shitty thing. But please don’t assume that the story ends there. If a group has a long history of being dominated and subjugated, then being singled out is simply another step in that long, ugly history. English speakers in Montreal don’t have that history. They’ve been inconvenienced and irritated since the rise of Quebec nationalism, sure, but how many have been beaten to death for being English? Comparing them with a group whose members face violence, torture, and murder daily–even in this country (don’t imagine that gay-bashings have gone away)–is an insult to those people’s suffering.
You have a good point if you don’t stoop to humiliating comparisons. Just stick to your argument.
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Edgardo
This is a service issue and is a widespread problem with STM employees.
Have you ever gotten off the the bus station and tried getting into the metro with your bags? Everytime…everytime…the employees are soooooooo rude. A woman employee once told me to life my bag over the turnstile. huh?
I put this down to local culture = biker culture…..*I won’t say mo* -
Kevin
If you work with the public you should be pleasant and bilingual.
If not, you should be reprimanded and fired on a third offense.
The official language of the province has nothing to do with it. You’re in the tourist/service industry, you put your best foot forward.
Go to Latin America, Europe, everyone you meet understands instinctively that you accommodate the customer. Hell, they are even beginning to understand this in Plattsburgh and Burlington -
Kate
JB, “people dying in the gas chambers”? I went back and read over what Blork wrote, and he never said a thing about Nazis. So you win today’s Godwin prize for inflating a debate into hysteria.
Also, you seem to think that because we anglos haven’t got a lengthy history of being persecuted that we simply don’t have anything to complain of. But “We don’t beat you to death, so you should put up with less serious insults and not make a fuss” is not good logic. Similar arguments are used against the student protesters: “How dare you protest things here when people are dying in Syria?”
It doesn’t follow that if things are or were worse for someone else, we should shaddap about less acute troubles here. In fact that argument has a veiled threat in it, “we could easily make it worse for you, see how we’re too nice to do that for now?” which is meant to sow a certain unease.
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qatzelok
Why are these unionized French-Canadian bus drivers so rude? Don’t they realize Canada is a British colony? Don’t they respect the world’s one and only lingua franca?
/the disgruntled colonist
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Kate
[rolls eyes at qatzelok]
Been thinking about this issue, and basically it’s at boundaries like this that the bankruptcy of nationalism as a raison d’être shows itself. There are no good excuses for people in public service jobs being rude to the public. Otherwise you go down a road where there are first and second class citizens and we know where that goes, or we should.
The other place I think the nationalist project falls down is less germane here, but it’s in the defence of limiting freedom of education. Sure, you can build a whole edifice defending it and people have, but when it comes down to it, there are no good arguments for blocking access to education. Quebec suffers because it has chosen to do this, and in a generation or so we’ll look back on this period and people will shake their heads as they do now when they hear about the Grand Noirceur and the domination of the church, and wonder why the academic success of so many kids was spiked over language domination, exactly as it used to be in the name of religion.
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ant6n
When telling people abroad (mostly people back in Germany) about Quebec language laws, they usually shake their heads in bewilderment, wondering how that’s possible in a democracy. Maybe this ‘edifice’ you mention, the rationalizing of somewhat undemocratic laws because they serve a higher purpose maybe also allows justifying the behavior of the STM employee as some sort of vague protection of French.
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qatzelok
Exactly, ant6n. The best protection for French is to refuse to speak English.
Anglos expect everyone to “speak money” to them, just like international capital expects everyone to welcome foreign investment. The ass waits to be kissed.
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Kevin
@qatzelok
Maybe instead of protecting French you should try encouraging it.Carrot vs. stick.
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I’ve collected a few items on access to religio-historic sites in the Plateau and Outremont this summer. Nothing new, but some info on dates and times.
St. Michael’s on Saint-Viateur is open Tuesday through Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. till August 18. It’s a big, cool building and if you’ve never seen the interior you should really take a look. No other Montreal church is quite like this one.
St-Enfant-Jésus church, at Laurier and St-Dominique, will also be open Wednesday to Friday noon till 6 p.m., Saturday 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Saint-Viateur church on Laurier is open Sunday afternoons from 2 to 4:30 p.m. through August 26. Guided visits are offered. Information: François Beaudin at 514-840-9126
These church visits are free although they won’t stop you dropping a few loonies into the collection box. Thanks to Kevin Cohalan for this information.
There are guided tours of the gardens of the Hôtel-Dieu monastery on July 22, August 5 and 19, and September 9 – all Sundays – at 1:30 p.m. This costs $10. There are also tours of the chapel, the front door of which faces Pine Avenue, at 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. on July 29, August 28, September 16 and October 14 – also all Sundays – for $6. Normally the public doesn’t have access to either of these sites. You have to reserve at 514-849-2919 and the posters where I found this information note that the tours are only given in French.
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Doobious
The rock poster show at St. Jean Baptiste church sounds cool too. Details.
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Saw a flurry of tweets last night as the Alouettes, who looked like losing to Calgary, pulled off a last-minute maneuver to win 33-32. Some spectators had already left Molson Stadium assuming the Als had lost.
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Matt
Never leave until the game is over. Unless you’re from the ‘burbs and you want to beat everyone else to your car and beat the traffic. Ahem.
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Josh
I’d agree Matt, except that Molson stadium isn’t like other large stadiums and arenas that have parking onsite. The cars that spectators travel in to Als games are scattered around the general vicinity of the stadium. There is no central spot to beat all the traffic out of.
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Matt
Right you are, Josh! I was just taking the oppertunity to mock people from the ‘burbs. It seems to me that their main preoccupation is beating traffic or adjusting their entire day’s activities in order to avoid paying for parking.
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River levels are exceptionally low right now, so bad that adjustments were made in an upstream dam to allow enough water through so a ship could dock at the port.
We didn’t have much snow, and now we’re not having rain. Many suburbs are forbidding lawn watering – only the Island of Montreal on this map is free of watering bans.
Areas of Quebec are at risk of forest fires (video, map and text – TVA tends to play video automatically) and there’s a ban on campfires in many areas.
Homeless people are among the groups under risk as the heat wave continues.
erydan 01:05 on 2012/07/14 Permalink
Yes, yes, yes. We hate Tremblay, we have always hated Tremblay. But, like Charest, he is the only VIABLE option we have besides the crazies.
So, only 1/3 of the 1/3 of people who vote voted for him, thank god for them.
Matt 03:50 on 2012/07/14 Permalink
I love receiving the ballot on election day and voting for the random party I know nothing about, just because voting for the main candidates would cause me to vomit all over.
Anto 08:15 on 2012/07/14 Permalink
@erydan: Why are the other candidates crazies, and why is Tremblay viable?
Kate 10:06 on 2012/07/14 Permalink
It’s a good question. So many of Tremblay’s sidekicks have gone down that even if he himself is clean, the mere fact that he chose those people, and either didn’t know what they were doing or looked the other way, is a condemnation in itself.
But I don’t think hating Tremblay is a political force and that may be bad news for his opponents. Nobody loves him, but nobody hates him either. So choosing not to vote for him has to be on more intellectual grounds, because you don’t like the track record of his administration or because you find its history of corruption is an insult. And intellectual reasons don’t propel feet to the ballot box like love or hate do.
Kevin 13:07 on 2012/07/14 Permalink
@Anto
Bergeron thinks 9/11 was an inside job, and that no plane ever hit the Pentagon..
Harel just thinks that after creating one island one city she should be allowed to run it.
Kate 13:17 on 2012/07/14 Permalink
Kevin, how much does Bergeron insist on this 9/11 stuff? Is it important to him, or is it something he riffed during one interview that has come back to haunt him?
david m 14:07 on 2012/07/14 Permalink
yeah, it’s getting to be so that you can’t even talk with an anglophone about politics anymore, they’re just so disconnected from montreal’s reality. they all live in places you need a car, so they’re insanely pro-car. there’s no buy-in, so there’s a ferocious opposition to large scale projects in the central city (like tramways). they consume anglophone media, so they basically don’t believe that a city can be well-run in quebec. this bergeron nonsense about sept 11th has nothing to do with anything, it’s a way of marginalizing the guy without engaging with his ideas. in some dream eventuality, projet montréal will end up sweeping the neighborhoods east and south of westmount, and brutally punishing the fools in the western portion of the island, parking meters on all their streets, closing the ville-marie, the works.
Ian 15:36 on 2012/07/14 Permalink
I’d like to disagree with you but I work in NDG, most of my co-workers are West Island, Laval, or Hudson/ St. Lazare Anglos… and boy, are they ever out of it. Right wing, apathetic, distrustful… It’s a real shame that CTV and the Gazette are the 2 big Anglo news sources because they’re 3rd rate at best. The Anglo media in the ROC rarely reports on QC issues and when they do they usually got ot “respected Anglo journalists” which means people who would normally work here for CTV or the Gazette, so that’s no help either. My experience of Anglo culture is quite different, but I live in the Plateau and the Anglos here aren’t like that, but most of us are bilingual so we read La Presse or Le Devoir. I’m really saddened to say that this whole carré rouge thing has shown me that for the msot part, Anglos really do live up to all the negative stereotypes Francophones lay at our doorstep, at least politically. I’m pretty embarrassed, to tell the truth. I work in a mostly Anglo office of about 350 people and I am the only one who wore a red square even at the height of the protests. It’s like another planet in the west end.
david m 03:01 on 2012/07/15 Permalink
seriously. the student protests were a breaking point, just unreal how crazy the anglo media went, pan’s labyrinth-style. luckily we don’t have greater numbers, or there might really be trouble, it’s a happy (uh) fast that oldline anglo montreal has, for the most part, devolved into a gang of cranks and malcontents, ghost-hunters and delusionalists – it makes it easier for the younger generation to make a clean break from their ignorance, rather than unwittingly carry it forward in a softer form.
Ian 08:46 on 2012/07/15 Permalink
I’d like to agree with your notion of a clean split but looking at the participation rates from McGill and Concordia in the student strikes, I kind of doubt that. If anything Concordia was way more political 20 years ago than it is now.
Kate 10:00 on 2012/07/15 Permalink
Wow this is depressing. I didn’t think a lot about who the Gazette plays to, because my friends are mostly east-end anglos like you, Ian.
I wonder if the conservatism of the anglo universities is partly because of fears from the recession – a desire to buckle down, get that degree no matter what, not “waste” time on stuff like student government, and finish up so’s to be able to become wage-earning as quickly as possible in an attempt to recession-proof oneself. Of course the people who do that tend to make a virtue of having done it, and tend to see any other way of proceeding as lazy, self-indulgent and so on.
Blork 13:25 on 2012/07/15 Permalink
Well, Concordia’s student government has a pretty inglorious history; almost as bad as the Quebec government’s. I can’t blame students there for not having much faith in either. I followed it for a while in the early 90s when I was a part-time student there. It was just endless bitching and moaning about procedures and (student) constitutional bullshit, lots of in-fighting, a fair bit of actual financial fraud, and a whole lot of “justify our existence” activities.
I haven’t seen much evidence that it’s gotten any better, so why should the average student allow that to distract them from their studies?
Kevin 12:00 on 2012/07/16 Permalink
@Kate
It keeps coming back to haunt him, and I’m certain he’s been advised to dodge the subject whenever asked about it again.
(but I was just answering @anto’s question about why people dismiss him as being crazy)
I think for those who would consider voting Projet Montreal, what Ferrandez does in the Plateau is more important.
@Ian
You do realize that francophones in NDG (about half the population) despise the carré rouge movement, right? I was eating dinner one night when the (small) protest went by, and the francophone couple eating behind me nearly hurled their plates into the crowd. They settled for screaming abuse.