I’m tempted not to mention this latest (poorly-explained) complaint against The Gazette to the Quebec Press Council, especially considering so many of those complaints eventually get rejected.
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Monthly Archives: May 2008
Stage 2: Anger
The media’s feelings toward The Gazette have started to move from Stage 1, denial (”if what The Gazette says is true”) to their predictable second stage, anger:
- Not a good start leaking it to the anglo paper, says the Journal’s Benoît Aubin
- Distorted, says a source to La Presse
- The Gazette tricked us, Jean Dorion tells Le Devoir
- The Gazette read the report wrong, say sources to Radio-Canada
- And in the blogosphere: The Gazette “doesn’t look good“
The bargaining stage seems to have failed, with the government saying it will only release the report on Thursday (though it was initially to be made public on Friday). The depression stage will continue until then, as the media have to continually attribute all their information to a competing newspaper.
That just leaves acceptance.
Meanwhile, as this news starts hitting the funny pages elsewhere, The Gazette has put PDFs of its partial drafts online (margin notes, reporters’ food stains and all): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Expect analyses tomorrow of anything the paper has missed or gotten wrong.
UPDATE: Jim Duff has some thoughts on this as well.
Montreal Geography Trivia No. 24
I’m working six days this week, so I’ll make this one simple:
What is the minimum driving distance between Sherbrooke and Fleet? And how long would it take to drive from one to the other (and back) at posted speed limits?
For the sake of this exercise, assume there are no stop signs along your route and all traffic lights are green (but one-way streets are still one-way streets).
UPDATE: I’ve removed the references to “Street” as Fleet comes in different formats. Consider all of them in a potential answer, whichever provides the minimum distance is the correct one.
UPDATE (May 21): Rosa has the correct answer below: Fleet and Sherbrooke intersect in Beaconsfield. Therefore the answer to both questions is zero.
Nuns’ Island hates public transit
As if trying to find a way to sound more like elitist suburban NIMBY snobs, residents at the southern tip of Nuns’ Island have apparently complained to the STM that they have too much bus service. They complain about the noise and dust generated by the buses.
I know buses are loud. I hear them outside my living room window every day. But I’ve never thought to complain about them, nor have I ever experienced dust problems (do they shed?)
Perhaps the noise and dust problems in the area might be due to the fact that it’s one giant construction zone for upscale condos? The photo above is one of many new skyscraping condo buildings going up in what was once empty space near a park.
The STM, after considering numerous half-assed schemes to placate residents and needlessly inconvenience public transit users, has concluded that it’s not reducing service to the area. The article doesn’t make clear which side Claude Trudel is on, since he’s both the Verdun borough mayor and the chairperson of the STM board of directors. Let’s hope he and his constituents realize this is the best option for everyone involved.
Especially when you consider that one bus on the road can replace dozens of SUVs.
Myanmar 101
This week’s Bluffer’s Guide is by yours truly, about the crisis in Myanmar following Cyclone Nargis.
I was actually responsible for the entire Seven Days page this week, replacing the vacationing Peter Cooney. So I ended up filing the story to myself (literally, in that I emailed it to my work address from home).
For those who don’t subscribe to the paper, Seven Days also includes a summary of headlines from the week, quotes from each day, editorial cartoons from papers around the world (this week it’s all about Myanmar’s reluctance to accept aid and its decision to keep on with a constitutional referendum to give its governing junta more power) and a few items from this week in history (it was 15 years ago this week, for example, that the Expos retired their first jersey, No. 10 Rusty Staub)
No online link for the bluffer’s guide, so I’ve included it below:
So, what happened? On May 2, Cyclone Nargis made landfall in Myanmar, and became the deadliest natural disaster in the country’s history, killing tens of thousands. International relief efforts have been stymied by the government’s reluctance to issue visas.
Wait, wasn’t that Burma? Yeah, it’s confusing. In 1989, the military junta unilaterally changed the English version of the country’s official name from Burma to Myanmar. Democracy activists reject the legitimacy of that decision and continue to use the name Burma, along with countries such as the United States and Canada. The United Nations, however, recognizes Myanmar.
So how bad was this cyclone? Bad. The storm grew in the Bay of Bengal during the last week of April. It then began weakening, before rapidly intensifying the day before it hit the coast. By that point, it had reached peak wind speeds of 215 kilometres per hour, the equivalent of a Category 3 or Category 4 hurricane.
What’s the death toll? Nobody knows for sure. The UN confirmed 38,000 deaths, while the Red Cross says the number could be anywhere from 60,000 to 130,000. The official government figure is 130,000 dead or missing. It is probably the deadliest cyclone since a 1991 storm hit Bangladesh, killing 138,000 people.
What’s being done to help? Western governments and the United Nations have begun relief efforts, but report frustration that the Myanmar government is being slow to grant visas into the country.
How are neighbouring countries responding? Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, countries hardest hit by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake (and receiving no assistance from Myanmar) offered millions of dollars worth of money, food and medicine. India, which still has close ties to Myanmar, has led efforts with 140 tonnes of materials.
What is Canada doing? The federal government has promised $2 million in relief aid, including 2,000 shelter kits that left Canada on Wednesday and are being handed off to the International Red Cross in Thailand.
Why is Myanmar resisting aid? Because it makes them look bad. Myanmar has been a military dictatorship ever since a coup d’état in 1962. Free elections in 1990 resulted in a landslide victory for democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, but the results were ignored by the government which refused to step down. Opposition political parties are banned, the Internet is strictly regulated, the media (what little of it is not run by the government) is thoroughly censored and prisons are filled with political prisoners.
Is anything getting in? Yes. Though the government accepted money and supplies from other countries (which it would then proudly hand out to its citizens to improve its image), foreign aid workers would embarrass the military junta, and are being resisted to an extent the UN World Food Programme called “unprecedented” in modern history. The first U.S. military relief plane was only allowed to land in the country 10 days after the disaster.
How will this affect the food crisis? It doesn’t look good. Myanmar is a fertile source of rice, and the cyclone hit at a critical time. Farmers lost 149,000 water buffaloes, which won’t be replaced before the critical plowing season. Aid groups are trying to replace them with Chinese-built machines, but time is running out. Farmers also need tonnes of rice seeds after the ones they had just planted were washed away. If the harvest isn’t saved, a famine might dramatically increase the number of casualties.
Bad timing: Only 10 days after the disaster in Myanmar, a major earthquake in neighbouring China (magnitude 7.9) caused a catastrophe on a similarly devastating scale. The earthquake has affected relief efforts in the region, which must now split between helping both areas.
Worse timing: In the aftermath of the disaster, the Myanmar government decided to proceed with a controversial constitutional referendum, delaying the vote only in the worst affected areas until May 24. The new constitution, which the government said was approved by over 90 per cent of voters and a 99 per cent turnout, reserves parliamentary seats for military officers and restricts who can run for president.
Open-ended discussion question: How would this diaster have affected Myanmar if the country had a free and democratic government and a healthy economy like its neighbours?
Edward who?
Dear LCN, I know Ted Kennedy is an obscure political figure, what with him having run for president and being one of the most prominent members of the U.S. senate (not to mention the butt of many jokes), but I still think some people might recognize him better if you used his own name rather than referring to him as JFK’s brother in a headline.
Just sayin’.
Anywired on Station C
Anywired has an interview with Patrick Tanguay about Station C, the coworking space I wrote about in December and which opened in February.
Tanguay says they haven’t been open long enough for any dramatic conclusions, but he’s still getting used to having a regular schedule, and says he’d advise people to bring headphones to cut out distractions when you’re working to deadline.
The reasonable accommodation debate begins again
The Gazette’s Jeff Heinrich today has an OMGEXCLUSIVE!!!!11 on the salient facts that will make their way into the Bouchard-Taylor Commission report. It’s in a bunch of parts:
- The main story, which boils down the conclusions to: learn about immigrants (especially Muslims) and be nice to them; and learn more English
- A list of common fallacies in arguments against accommodation
- A sidebar on the need to learn more English, which will no doubt be interpreted not as “we need to be more multilingual like world-leading countries” but as “we need to surrender to the unilingual anglos who will enslave us”
- Some comments from members of the commission not named Bouchard or Taylor
- Criticisms from UQAM prof and commission adviser Jacques Beauchemin, calling the report a “whitewash”
There’s also a piece noting that Taylor has been named one of the world’s top 100 public thinkers, an editorial praising the commissioners, a soundoff forum for people’s comments, and a post-publication reaction story from the premier (he’s not saying anything) and others, including Mouvement Montréal français (I won’t spoil the surprise)
I don’t know how Heinrich obtained the parts of the report he bases his stories on (maybe he found them in a cab?), but I’m sure plenty of ink will be spilled noting that it was the anglo paper that got the scoop on a commission report that says we should learn English.
Meanwhile, my bosses are (insert disgusting metaphor for happiness here) that the competition is all over talking about their scoop (it was even in Le Monde!). Patrick Lagacé blogs about it (and the comments give a pretty good idea of why this commission was needed in the first place). Maisonneuve also has (coincidentally) a story about the commission from yesterday.
My take
Anyone who expected the commission report to magically solve the issue is clearly fooling themselves. It simply won’t do that. So then the question becomes what we spent all that money on. Was it just a chance for people from the régions to vent about immigrants they’ve never met? Or was it something to clearly define what the issues are so we can slowly work through them? Either way, expect a lot of people to be angry.
And anger is what the commission brought out more than anything else. It made racism, xenophobia and all sorts of discrimination acceptable and normal by allowing people a forum to express it.
As the Habs riot showed us, crowds are like children. Without proper discipline, they revert to the intelligence of an infant.
This problem isn’t unique to Quebec. The U.S. has the same issue with immigration: the media and politicians practice open discrimination, and that makes it acceptable for everyone else to do the same.
One of the knee-jerk reactions we’ve already seen is that francophones are the ones expected to do the accommodating while anglos don’t have to change. I don’t think that’s the point. Anglos already have to learn French here, otherwise they won’t get jobs in public service (outside of Fairview anyway). Statistics show that those who are bilingual make far more than their unilingual counterparts, anglo or franco. So the solution is to make sure both language groups get education in both languages, no?
I think there’s an even more fundamental issue that wasn’t explored here, and one that would have pissed francophone activists off more than anything else: Is it still in our best interest as a world society to preserve minority languages? So many conflicts can be boiled down to communication difficulties, and so many of those can be boiled down to translation problems. What would be so bad if the entire world spoke just one language, whether it be English, French, Latin, Esperanto or Mandarin?
And what about the media?
The commission thinks it went a bit far, and the media will no doubt disagree. I think the real answer (as always) lies somewhere in between. The media (especially tabloids like the Journal) overhyped the issue, which is a large reason why people who have no real connection with immigrants became so frightened. On the other hand, the media only serve to reflect society, and there was clearly some latent xenophobia there to exploit.
New Gazette blog goes personal
Though it officially launches on Monday, The Gazette’s latest blog went live today (and this morning’s paper includes a small pointer to it). It’s called Patent Pending, and it’s the blog of a veteran Gazette copy editor who is undergoing the transition from male to female.
It varies from other Gazette blogs because it’s personal. Very personal. In fact, you can’t get much more personal than this.
The editor is Jillian (formerly Bill) Page, whose service at the paper is measured in decades more than years, and whose long-time coworkers were shocked to say the least when they got an email one day explaining that Bill was now Jill.
Coming out in this way is a challenge in itself. It’s still a bit awkward for me to override my habits in the use of personal pronouns, and I’m one of the youngest ones there. You can imagine how difficult it is in an environment where the average age is about 174.
As the inaugural post explains, expect the blog to vary between seriously discussing the social, political and health aspects of such a transition and humorously discussing some of the unexpected quirks that sitcom-like awkward situations that arise when you try to get everyone to switch from “he” to “she.”
56 rioters and counting
The SPVM says 56 people have been arrested in relation to the Great Riot of April 21, and are taking great pains to point out that none of them had tickets to the game that night, as if that’s somehow meaningful. They add that most didn’t intend to do anything wrong, but caught up in the mob mentality which turned them into 5-year-olds.
Why is CBC Montreal’s News at Six sucking a bit less?
The Suburban crunches some numbers in the evening TV news race here, and theorizes that Frank Cavallaro’s move from CTV to CBC had something to do with the latter’s 25% jump in viewership over last year, prompting Inside the CBC to wonder if weathermen are the magic ticket to success.
I think we should take a step back here. 25% seems large, but only represents about 6,000 actual viewers. CBC Montreal’s news audience is still an order of magnitude smaller than CTV, which has dominated the race since CBC gutted Newswatch.
Though I’m sure Cavallaro has a loyal audience, the numbers probably have more to do with people slowly trickling back to CBC after the network decided to bring back a local one-hour newscast. And the station still has plenty of ground to make up. It needs a new studio (well, actually, it needs its own studio), a graphics department, and other things that only money can buy.
Meanwhile, The Suburban notices that Paul Graif, a victim of Global Quebec’s job cuts, is now at CTV. Another example of why we have one local news program here and two pretend local news programs.
Star Choice is too good for RDI
The CBC is complaining to the CRTC because Canadian satellite TV provider Star Choice does not include francophone all-news channel RDI as part of its basic lineup.
The problem is that the CRTC mandates that RDI be included in all cable and satellite basic lineups, as it does for channels like CPAC, Newsworld and The Weather Network. So unless I (and the CBC) are missing something, Star Choice is violating CRTC regulations. (Then again, it’s not the only company that thinks CRTC rules are just a suggestion — *cough* *cough*)
Meanwhile, Global Quebec is still not available even as an option for Star Choice and ExpressVu customers in Quebec, more than 10 years after the regional network launched. Ditto CBC Saskatchewan.
But hey, God forbid anyone should miss the World Fishing Network for some local news.
UPDATE: Star Choice responds to the CBC Saskatchewan issue with the usual “technical limitations” excuses, and adds that it’s somehow the CBC’s responsibility to provide local TV service to satellite customers. (via Inside the CBC)
Is Bell.ca the best commercial website in Quebec?
Some consulting firm we’ve never heard of has released its rankings of the top 25 consumer-oriented commercial websites in Quebec. At the top of the list:
- Bell.ca, which doesn’t work with Safari.
- Radio-Canada.ca, whose address they got wrong, and which opens audio content in strange 1px-by-1px pop-up windows.
- Desjardins.com, which won’t let you me log into electronic banking with Firefox, and whose top-notch security includes such impossible-for-anyone-else-to-guess questions as “what high school did you graduate from?”
- Videotron.com, which admittedly I haven’t had issues with, even if their cable and Internet service has much room for improvement.
- Metro.ca, which uses Javascript needlessly, has a badly-designed site map page (the stupid web 2.0 sharing buttons hides some of the text) and shows 0 stores in Montreal with delivery service available.
Of course, when you judge websites through a mathematical formula that suggests quality of a website is directly proportional to the size of the organization running it, this is what you get.
Clutter-Freed
Josh Freed, The Gazette’s answer to Andy Rooney, has a new documentary, My Messy Life, which airs this Saturday on CTV. In it, the humorist/columnist/filmmaker glamorizes messiness with the few people willing to share the fact that they have disorganized homes.
The Gazette amazingly managed to score an interview with its own columnist, and talks about the one-hour film.
Municipal democracy is for losers
So the Ile Bizard 2004 demerger referendum vote has been annulled, because with the ridiculous requirements for the vote (i.e. that 35% of all those registered must vote yes, making everyone who doesn’t vote a de facto “no” vote), 400 people who were on the voter rolls but moved away or died before the vote made the difference between it passing and failing.
So now that we’ve rewritten history and Ile Bizard did, in fact, vote to reconstitute itself as a city, what’s being done to ensure the democratic will is being followed?
Apparently, absolutely nothing. The judge didn’t order a new referendum, nor require the government to reconstitute the municipality. Instead, it will be left to a “political” solution. In other words, let the government do what they want. In other words, nothing.
Isn’t that great?
UPDATE (May 17): The Gazette’s Henry Aubin says don’t hold your breath waiting for the government.
I’m very disappointed in all of you
My request was simple: Don’t vote for me in the sad popularity contest that is the Mirror’s Best of Montreal readers’ poll. Instead, it appears, someone did do exactly that because I came in eighth.
I’d say I was honoured, but I placed just below Drunken Stepfather. That doesn’t exactly fill me with pride.
Still, congrats to those who did end up on the list, especially those who didn’t use their blogs to inflate their votes (Montreal City Weblog, Spacing Montreal, Pregnant Goldfish).
I should also point out some other blogs on that list, which I’ve never frequented because they aren’t about the city, but are still interesting:
- Black Sheep Reviews (Hollywood movie reviews)
- Said the Gramophone (MP3 sampler)
- Hastily Put Together (webcomic)
I also think Coolopolis should have been there somewhere, as well as some francophone blogs. But this is about popularity, not quality, right?
No news here
As for the rest of the poll, nothing is particularly surprising for anyone who’s seen BOM results before. Chain restaurants still dominate the best eats categories (McDonald’s is there twice).
In the media categories:
- CKUT won best radio station
- CFCF best TV station (with Mutsumi Takahashi and Todd van der Heyden best news anchors, though the Mirror seems to think the later is the evening news guy, when last time I checked it was 8th-placed Brian Britt)
- K103’s Don Smooth best radio host (the Mirror has a profile)
- Mix and CHOM’s morning shows as best radio shows
- Nightlife Magazine won best magazine
- The Mirror, shockingly, came in first for Best Newspaper, again. The Gazette was second, which I think says something, followed by the three franco dailies, Voir, Hour, The Link, Metro and the McGill Daily.
- The Gazette’s Aislin won for Best Cartoonist, beating ballot-stuffing Radomsky and La Presse’s Serge Chapleau
And Boustan, who also mounted a self-promotion campaign to improve its standing, maintained its dominance in the Middle Eastern categories, improved in others and added two new ones:
- Best Middle-Eastern (still 1st)
- Best Falafel (still 1st)
- Best Late-Night Eats (2nd from 3rd)
- Best Delivery (2nd from 4th)
- Best Cheap Eats (3rd)
- Best Sandwich (5th)
However, people weren’t convinced enough to vote for it as Best Fries or Best Vegetarian.
Elsewhere in the bragosphere:
- Spacing Montreal
- Indyish (Pregnant Goldfish)
- Montreal City Weblog
- Slushblog
Libraries are way cool, man!
To celebrate its new web portal (the city’s websites are going to keep reinventing themselves until they realize that the entire thing sucks horse manure and needs to be replaced from the ground up), Montreal’s library network crowdsourced (through a contest) the making of a minute-and-a-half-long commercial/film about how awesome the libraries are.
The results are pretty impressive. Above is the winner from among the 94(!) videos submitted (they’ve posted all of them to YouTube). It’s slick, heartwarming and even features a few cameos.
The videos use varying styles, including fast-talking animation, generic ad montage with cool music to appeal to a young audience, piano-accompanied first-person documentary targeted toward an even younger demographic, paper-eating film-WTF, silent-movie comedy, dramatic metaphor, creepy stalking, annoyingly-dubbed sock-puppet theatre, animated post-its, animated crumpled-up-pieces-of-paper, people-walking-around-with-numbers-on-their-heads, and, of course, awesome Transformers battle, plus dozens more that I haven’t gotten a chance to watch yet because I really should be going to bed about now.
Shaw wants more boring sports channels
Shaw Cable has asked the CRTC for permission to add two new U.S.-based sporting channels to the list of digital cable channels available to Canadian consumers. Because the channels are non-Canadian, they have to show that these channels do not compete with any Canadian-based specialty channel.
The Big Ten Network is a channel that focuses exclusively on U.S. college sports: football, basketball and other sports from Big Ten college athletic conference. Some people might question the need for a TV network devoted exclusively to college sports, but those people would be stupid. Comments on the proposal are due by Friday, May 16.
The Sportsman Channel is devoted to hunting and fishing (so perhaps it would more appropriately be called the Killing Animals For Fun Channel, but I digress). Comments on that proposal are also due by Friday.
Neither channel obviously competes with any Canadian offering.
We’ll do it live, then we will dance
Bill O’Reilly + archival footage + YouTube + remix creativity = awesome
(The original, in case you haven’t seen it, warning about language on both)
The Mario Dumont Show
Mario Dumont is getting his own eight-minute weekly show on Corus radio stations in Quebec, following Premier Jean Charest’s 10-minute weekly radio address.
Can’t be any worse than what’s already on Quebec talk radio, I guess…
