Since the mishap Wednesday kids who can’t swim on a cursory test will have to wear a life-jacket at all times at the Jean-Drapeau beach. (CTV seems to have a problem here with a slightly nonobjective headline: Young beachgoers forced into life-jackets.)
But I have a question: if you can’t swim, how the hell are you going to learn if you’re wearing a buoyancy device?
Listening idly to CBC’s Homerun just now, where Jeanette Kelly was interviewing Didier Awadi, who’s playing at the SAT Friday night. After a couple of inane questions, unprompted, Awadi said something like “I also want to show some solidarity with the students here. I know they’re having a struggle, and I’m supportive of them.”
Immediately Kelly said “Hey, and what about Syria, WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT WHAT’S GOING ON IN SYRIA, HEY HEY?” – um yeah, subtle much?
Overheard in Kelly’s headset: “Try to bring Awadi’s narrative into the Hegemonic conversation our drones are having with the Third World.”
Some apparent human bones were spotted beside the Rivière des Prairies way out towards the eastern tip of the island, and now they’ve got to be examined, verified to be human, and matched to possible missing people. Low water levels are a possible reason they became visible this summer.
The Supreme Court has refused to hear the case of some residents of the old Olympic village who wanted to stop development of new condos nearby on land they maintain was public parkland. Since the Supremes never give a reason, we don’t know why they think there’s no case to be made.
Simple. The case was first made in Superior Court, then the Court of Appeal. The Supreme Court figured there was nothing else to add to these previous rulings. So it declined to hear it.
Andy Riga visits the Beauharnois power station – he gets a picture of the amazing generator room, but according to the story, ordinary visitors are not allowed cameras.
Cool! Thanks for the link. Considering going for a visit.
CLASSE is calling for a big demonstration this Sunday, 2 pm at Berri square.
I saw a demo about a week ago, all 14 student. There were more policemen than protesters.
Yes, they know. Lots of students have left town to go home, or are working. That’s one reason they want to mark the 22nd again with a bigger demo.
Most of the provisions of Bill 78 would be shot down by the supreme court, in the opinion of the human rights commission, because they directly attack basic rights.
In tangential news, the SPVM has created a demonstration squad out of a squad initially created to patrol festivals.
The Jewish General’s excellent reputation is telling against it. Now the government wants it to reduce its throughput by advising some patients to seek care closer to home.
Two thoughts: wouldn’t it be a better principle to try to encourage hospitals in the suburbs to study what makes the Jewish so good that sick people will travel distances to be seen there?
Also, let’s try telling Westmounters to go home and be treated in a Westmount hospital.
There’s rep, and there’s facilities.
I was at the Jewish yesterday to see my GP, and had to go to Orthopedics to make an appt. to consult with their surgeon.
The department is ONE guy — who himself is recovering from a bad accident, so as you can imagine, they have an immense backlog.
Not sure how much suburban hospitals can do when the #1 thing the Jewish (and the General and the Royal Vic, etc.) has going for it is that it’s a teaching and research hospital associated with a top medicine faculty.
True. if your specialist is at the Jewish you will find yourself going to the Jewish, it’s unavoidable, and from what I hear it has the city’s top oncology people. And when someone has cancer, do they settle for being given painkillers and dying quietly in a suburban facility, or do they go downtown and find somebody who might be able to give them more effective help?
Kate, it’s worth mentioning that for more serious illnesses (like cancer) and/or more immediate health concerns (like incontrolled asthma or a bad bone break), you really are better off to make the trek to the downtown teaching hospitals or to wherever your primary physician is affialited with (where and when possible). The teaching hospitals are top notch because they’re associated with universities as teaching/research centres and you are going to get better care and follow-up there. This is a no-brainer. In addition to that, the top people tend to work in the downtown university-affiliated hospitals with better funding and better equipment.
I live in the city, but if I didn’t, I’d still make the trek. I know where the best care is here and its not at the smaller older and crappier hospitals that are essentially decades behind in everything from infection control to equipment that looks like it came from the 60′s.
That said, most other “less serious” stuff can be treated equally well at the suburban hospitals allergic reactions, cuts and fevers etc… (with the exception of pediatrics of course – I’d head straight to the Children’s or Ste. Justines given children can rapidly worsen without much warning).
What I’ve never understood about Quebec healthcare is why the CLSC’s don’t operate more like the Walk-In Clinics scattered all over southern Ontario do. Many of these are open until 11 or midnight 7 days a week. I used them when I lived there many years ago and the 2 hour wait sure beat the 8-12 hours in emerg with my ear pounding (at the time) where by the way, you are deemed non-urgent anyway in emerg with said pounding ear. The Walk-In clinics took some of that edge off the more minor stuff. The trauma who comes in always gets priority and well they should.
Quebec does a lousy job of informing the general public about these realities and hearing that the emergency departments are overflowing once again in the news does little to change that. I suppose its all about liability in the end, and poor planning on the part of the government. There appears to be no interest in rectifying these ongoing issues.
The hospitals have their hands tied. They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.
Consider it the ongoing inertia that healthcare has become but do go to the best centres. Your life could very well depend on it.
It is however gratifying when our health care administrators get their priorities right.
But Jack, how else will people understand that Quebec is a French society?
Revamping CLSCs like @Carrie mentioned is not a new suggestion. It would be the single most useful thing any government could do to eliminate the doctor shortage.
I’d settle for 15 hour days at clinics. 7 am until 10 pm. A team of doctors/nurses/practitioners who have access to your files.
@ Marc I agree with you that Quebec has one official language and that prominence of French is what makes this an interesting place to live, but man this is overkill.
” La Régie vous informe qu’elle communique d’abord en français avec sa clientèle.» Il faut plus de 35 secondes avant que les indications qu’un service en anglais est offert soient données. Lorsqu’on appuie sur le 9, la boîte vocale répète, dans la langue de Shakespeare, que la RAMQ favorise le service en français avec sa clientèle.”
Jack, of course it’s overkill. I was being facetious. :) Which, granted is hard to tell when reading text on a screen.
I like how they are supposed to use French even if you speak in English if they think you understand French. I guess if you don’t say “I don’t understand”, they assume you do.
(That said, whenever I have spoken to a government employee I have had perfectly pleasant experiences in both official languages.)
i wouldn’t want anglophones to leave quebec, but it’s irritating when they demand special accommodation. i can’t think of another sub-national level of government in the developed world where a linguistic minority representing 8% of the population gets the sort of service we anglophones do in quebec. considering how easy it is to learn french (i did it when only a child!), it seems a legacy/courtesy service that our generation (20-40 years old) oughtn’t to assume to be a right.
well david m – how did this hospital thread turn into a language thread? never mind – who built the Jewish, the Vic, the General, the Children’s? I’m afraid it was anglos. We have a historic stake in the provision of health services here – otherwise why would the government be going to great expense to build two crazy huge superhospitals?
@david m.
You forgot to mention that french Quebecers only make up 2% of the population of North America. It’s another way to justify being so gracious while pretending that only people who have direct ties to England speak English :/
Seriously, name another place in the world with two strong founding peoples. Montreal is unique, it has unique rules. Deal.
well, i mean, the anglos in calcutta and south africa built hospitals too. the point is that quebec is on an irreversible course toward full francisation, and while at the margins the incremental changes towards this surface as irritations, but globally, the trend is clear. personally, i don’t have to use the english and i feel sort of embarrassed to do so, given that i’m capable of speaking french about as well as a university educated francophone. that’s me, personally. my father, who can barely do more than order a coffee in french, needs the english service. but our generation (i assume virtually everyone reading this blog is in my cohort) speaks french and our children will probably be more comfortable in french than english. an increasingly francophone staff at the old anglo hospitals (anyone tries speaking english at the children’s lately?) is just what we should expect. montreal is in transition. deal.
I am guilty of language turning this thread, my bad.@david m I was thinking of your Dad when I posted this story, their is a pre-76 generation and a post-76 generation of anglophones in Quebec, the ease in which younger Anglo’s speak french is not shared by a lot of our older folks, for a variety of reasons.However when they call the RAMQ as full fledged citizens, tax paying citizens an 80 year old doesn’t need a lecture or a sermon, just a health card.
david m says: quebec is on an irreversible course toward full francisation
I think you’re mistaken on this.
I don’t really welcome the domination of half a dozen languages in the world, but it’s a fact, and French is not one of the major ones. French won’t die, it has too much culture and too many speakers in postcolonial places, but Quebec cannot close its borders politically or culturally, and anglos keep seeping across the borders and coming to live in Montreal. That’s not going to stop.
Besides, Spanish is getting steadily stronger here. It’s a bigger language with nearly 400 million world speakers as compared to 120 million for French (numbers here). In another generation we’ll have more languages being spoken here, rather than a retreat to a French monoculture.
i think we’ll have to disagree. the nexus of legislation, attrition and exclusion make for a straight-forward result. for sure, some anglophones eke out their livings in montreal, in low-paying or sporadic jobs, and there are still various anglo professionals serving an ever-shrinking base of customers. but as the old networks fall away for whatever reason and the new networks exclude anyone without a professional-level french, the future for anglo montreal becomes increasingly bleak. everything from saq employee to deloitte accountant requires a near-native mastery of the french language at a minimum.
the government has spent 40 years consolidating francophone domination of all aspects of quebec society, scores of anglophones have moved on to more friendly climes, and the taxes and language prevent others from staying or moving at all. i’m pretty sure that the pq is going to solve the student crisis by introducing phenomenal increases on the fees charged non-quebec students (so the 5000/year canadians pay will go to 15.000/year) and that’ll pretty much sink concordia and mcgill as major sources of new canadian blood. with pressures like these, it just seems inevitable.
david m, I’m counting on a change in zeitgeist to avoid the progression to a sterile monoculture that you describe.
In the 1950s, anyone visiting Quebec might’ve expected it to remain devoted heart and soul forever to the Catholic church. By the mid-1960s thousands of Québécois had walked away from the church for most purposes, using it only for weddings and funerals as they do now, and ceasing to let it dominate their lives so that we now have the lowest rates of churchgoing in North America. People are still digesting that change.
In the 20th century protests usually contained a lot of “Le Québec aux Québécois” type chants. The recent demonstrations still had some implicit nationalist content (someone’s always carrying a big flag) but the intent was not primarily nationalist or separatist. And people whose first language is not French do keep immigrating here, and the internet keeps opening things up.
Your arguments are based on government policy, but recent fragmenting of the nationalist option plus a wider and more gathering international roar against the ruling plutocracy and in favour of more social justice is going to bring a wave of change here too. I mean, who would’ve predicted Quebec would chuck out the Bloc Québécois and vote massively for the NDP?
One thing is certain: it’s never safe to predict the future solely by extending existing trends. The zeitgeist will always throw you a curve – and in this case I’m counting on it.
The new sculpture announced recently for the Olympic park has had a bad review from some artists saying the sculptor is an unknown, the work is poor and an effort should have been made to find something more significant.
There was a time when people complained about abstact public art. Times change…..
How many artists does it to screw in a lightbulb?
One to do it, and innumerable others to say it’s not really a good example of screwing in a lightbulb.
The work is pretty lame, actually, and the linked story naturally focuses on perceived bitchiness of artists pointing that out.
However, it glosses over the cogent critique: the lack of accountability. Closed process to the benefit of private interests. Public dollars to fill a public space (previously occupied by a Riopelle that was controversially removed about a decade ago) with a strangely kétaine piece of questionable artistic merit.
The community is justified in questioning the ham-fisted process and surprise announcement.
I agree, Geoff. It was selected, or nominated, with no public consultation. Who is this artist, and who’s he related or connected to – or who does his agent know? This seems to be him – drawings and sculpture shown below.
I don’t think it’s going in the same place as the Riopelle, though. This piece says it’s going on the esplanade. The Riopelle was below, in a space focal to the Olympic layout seen from above, but in fact, mostly visible to people using the eastern entrance to Pie-IX metro. Lots of metro users could see it, but one of the arguments for moving La Joute was because it wasn’t in a sufficiently prominent location.
An ugly statue in front of an eyesore. Odd how people notice that statue, not the eyesore.
What’s the story behind the Riopelle piece being removed?
steph, it really was a struggle. Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve is pretty short of public art. Two city councillors came to blows in 2003 over the issue. But none of the links I had at the time work any more.
I wrote this in July 2009:
I was reminded of this scene recently while wandering around the Olympic Stadium area. I took the above photo in 2002 during the public squabble over whether this fountain, Riopelle’s La Joute – the only major sculptural piece done by an artist better known for his paintings, and one of the few major pieces of public art in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve – would be taken away from this, its original setting, and moved downtown.
At the time it was still working as a fountain and visible to anyone who passed through the east-side Pie-IX metro entrance, as well as from the concrete walkway above. Claims that it was hidden away and neglected were spun as leverage to move it to its current location by the Palais des congrès. Various promises were made to replace it with another fountain or piece of sculpture after the removal. But this is how the space looks now:
I don’t live in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve but I tend to think they wuz robbed.
At the moment, that entrance to Pie-IX metro station is under heavy renovation, so I suppose it’s possible this is just a temporary measure. But it’s been five years since the sculpture was taken away, so I wonder if any thought or budget has been given to the promise to find a replacement.
Basically, I think Ville-Marie pulled rank to bring the piece downtown.
I used to live in Ho-Ma, and I disagree that “they wuz robbed.” That fountain was hidden behind an incline and cement modern crap. It was invisible when it was at the Big O, so everyone wuz gettin’ robbed.
qatzelok, as I recall, some of the bad feeling came from someone implying that mere users of public transit in the east end wouldn’t appreciate art the way visitors to the Quartier international would.
The integration of fire to La Joute as it was moved, just as Riopelle had envisioned it, along with the whole animation with mist and water really improves the experience of that fountain. It probably could have been done at the Olympic park, but I think it fits perfectly in Quartier International. I have some bias for Riopelle, but I think this is one of the most interesting place in Montreal.
Just like the fountain at Place des Festivals, maybe the Olympic park would need some kind of interactive installation, so that people and kids can feel connected to it.
Frédéric, you may be right. I don’t think they could’ve run the fire and steam stuff in back of Pie-IX metro, and it does work downtown.
I think we’ll see changes around the Olympic park towards the 2017 stuff.
Update on this: CBC news at noon Saturday said the André Desjardins sculpture has been nixed, but I’m not finding a text link anywhere yet.
As of next year, when there’s a metro outage, the STM should also be able to announce how long it should last.
There was a 90-minute downtime on the green line Thursday morning.
Also, the STM says the system crash on July 7 was due to a single computer bug.
The Gazette makes two subtle errors in this piece on the start of Ramadan: the headline suggests that Montreal Muslims rely on the moon, etc., to define the beginning of the month, but that’s misleading. That’s how it’s done everywhere, it’s not a local particularity.
Also: “Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. The last day of Shaban, the eighth month, corresponds to July 19 on the Gregorian calendar.” That’s true this year. But the Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar and moves around relative to the sun. As the Wikipedia article on Ramadan observes, “Compared to the solar calendar, the dates of Ramadan vary, moving backwards by about eleven days each year depending on the moon; thus, a person will have fasted every day of the Gregorian calendar year in 34 years’ time.”
Thank for the studious corrections. I hate sloppy writing , especially from our ‘English language daily.’
I think it’s a stagiaire’s writing, but an editor should’ve clarified it.
Do any of the lazy Gazoo writers ever ask their maids or kid’s tutors to write their articles for them?
I doubt they have to. Enough young people are still trooping out of journalism school, keen to do a summer internship at a real newspaper for a nominal fee or nothing.
Clément 20:10 on 2012/07/19 Permalink
To your question: I think the beach (wasn’t it called plage Doré at one point?) is more concerned with liability than teaching kids how to swim.
I kind of agree with them. Kids need to learn how to swim, but it should be the parents’ or the school responsibility to teach them and it should be done in a more controlled environment.
Marc 20:26 on 2012/07/19 Permalink
Lifejackets at the beach/pool…another thing under the column of security theatre.
jeather 21:22 on 2012/07/19 Permalink
The law doesn’t say that they need to wear a life-jacket at all times in all places, just that on a busy beach with no swimming lessons, if you don’t already know how to swim, you need to wear a life-jacket.
Doobious 21:32 on 2012/07/19 Permalink
Maybe the beach should offer swimming lessons?
Stefan 03:51 on 2012/07/20 Permalink
last saturday (34 degrees) at the event weekends du mode, i went to refresh myself in the lake close to the metro jean-drapeau, where the water fountains are. standing up to my swimming trunk in the water directly at the side of the lake, a security woman ordered me (and some kids) out – ‘il n’y a pas des sauveteurs!’. no use explaining to her that i am an adult (implying somehow that i am responsible for myself), able to swim and the water was only about 70cm high.
well, shortly after i enjoyed a dip in the st. laurent a few 100m’s away, where nobody bothered (although currents can be very dangerous away from the coast).
it seems a public space (large area on the island) is taken over to maximize profits (which any liability would reduce), where it is most important that people consume, not that they enjoy, or care for their safety. and that is wrong in my opinion.
i think montreal has a really great potential with its many km’s of waterfront, but sadly under-used. other cities show how they can make a big difference in quality of life (at your own risk, of course, but most drownings are kids in private pools, or drunk adults overestimating their capacities).
Taylor C. Noakes 08:43 on 2012/07/20 Permalink
It’s the parents responsibility. The city only needs to make sure public pools and lessons are available, but the onus is on parents. You can’t expect schools (that typically don’t have access to a pool) to offer it gratis. If a school’s PTA comes up with the cash and figures out some arrangement with a city pool, great.
All that said, let’s be for real here. All these drownings, near drownings etc. the only people to blame are the people who let their infant children out of sight by the side of a pool. The city doesn’t need to mandate fences around pools, we don’t need to force schools to have swimming lessons (though it’s not a bad idea if it doesn’t cost extra) and we sure as shit shouldn’t close the few beaches we have.
Parents just need to be hyper responsible around their kids. Put down the crackberry, and don’t let your kids out of your sight.
Part of that responsibility is making sure your kid knows how to swim. Swimming lessons can be started at six months if I’m not mistaken.
walkerp 09:22 on 2012/07/20 Permalink
They should provide lifejackets, but make them optional.
Kate 10:52 on 2012/07/20 Permalink
Clément: I saw one reference to “plage Doré” in the news since the near-drowning mishap. Was that ever an official name? The website doesn’t name it.
david m 12:04 on 2012/07/20 Permalink
i doubt it’s a poor assumption that parents who can’t swim don’t tend to prioritize swimming as an activity for their children. in most european countries, swimming is a required skill, like learning how to write using a pencil, taught at school, at an early age. one would think that the crazy high number of drownings this year would put this on the agenda in quebec
Kate 13:01 on 2012/07/20 Permalink
Not just for kids. I for one cannot swim. I was born here and grew up here and at no stage of my education was swimming part of the picture.