The STIJM, the union representing Journal de Montréal workers, was busy this week. First they crashed a lecture given by freelance columnist Joseph Facal, accusing the former PQ minister of being a scab in no uncertain terms (especially because he's now writing two columns a week instead of one). Shockingly, Rue Frontenac was there, admitting that students were not amused, but mitigating that by saying some were on Facebook or browsing other uneducational websites.
Despite how much Journal de Montréal salaries are bringing Quebecor down, the company still seems to have enough leftover money to spare in this economy to buy the Canadiens.
Metro could only find two articles out of eight in the Journal on Saturday that mentioned the Journal in a self-congratulatory we-got-the-scoop way. La Presse beat it out by a huge margin. That's unfortunate.
As much as I'm not a fan of consumers paying for local TV stations they already get for free, even that would be preferable to a government bailout with who knows how many strings attached.
This move is part of the metropolitan area's move from paper and magnetic-strip based fare systems to the new Opus smart card, whose long phasing-in process is expected to be complete in June.
As of the dates above:
Monthly train-only passes (which are only available for Zones 4-7) will no longer be issued in paper form
Ticket machines will no longer issue single-fare paper tickets
Six-packs of train tickets in paper format will no longer be sold (even though the vending machines they use to sell them are barely five years old)
Paper ticket validation machines will be removed from service
That leaves commuters with three options:
Get an Opus card for $3.50, which can store monthly passes and fares of all kinds (just make sure to keep the receipt)
Get a TRAM magnetic-strip card which will still be accepted for now
What's not clear here is what option there is for someone who just wants to take one ride on a train. Unless the Solo card is available in single-use format (which would be a huge waste), tourists who want to explore the city using its public transit system will be forced to purchase an Opus card or get more tickets than they need.
The City of Montreal is holding hearings about youth participation in the democratic process, and it wants to hear from young people. It's not really clear what it wants to hear from young people exactly, but it has something to do with "their capacity to influence the development of their neighbourhood, their involvement in collective actions, and their interest in municipal affairs."
Being a soulless pit of bureaucracy, it issued a public notice (in PDF format, because young people want to print out everything they read online) inviting people to open forums where all questions have to be pre-approved 30 minutes before the meeting. Those wanting more information can see this page, deep within the city's vast website (it took me a while to find it even though I knew what I was looking for), which has a bunch of other PDF documents.
I'm just going to go ahead and predict that young people aren't going to flock to this meeting in large numbers.
For those who do want to go, the first meeting is April 20, 7pm at Verdun city hall (4555 Verdun St., right outside Verdun metro).
Stop me if you've heard this one before: my employer Canwest got another extension on its bank debt deadline. So the waiver on certain borrowing conditions now lasts until April 21. But Canwest still has to make a $30.4-million interest payment by April 15 (the end of a month-long grace period), or bondholders could push the company into bankruptcy.
The Globe piece talks about the war between banks and bondholders (and why the latter might be better off giving Canwest more time), and also speculates (with unnamed sources) about potential sales of newspapers, either individually or as a group. (Anyone want to spend a couple of billion on a mostly-nationwide newspaper chain?)
See you next week.
UPDATE (April 9): $1.4-billion quarterly loss, though most of that is in the form of a non-cash writedown. I hope they don't take that out of my paycheck.
To those who might think that wire services, whose content is replacing a lot of laid-off journalists, might be immune to the crisis affecting the news industry, Canadian Press is cutting its staff by 25, or 8%. Though the cooperative doesn't have to worry about servicing a large debt or reversing the advertising decline, it does have to worry about the decreasing membership dues. Quebecor is the latest mega-publisher to pull out of CP, following Canwest two years ago. Though large newspapers don't represent as much of CP's income as they used to, Quebecor is still a huge player and the red balance sheet means they have to reduce staff.
The City of Longueuil is doing what every transit fan has done at some point in their lives: dream of extending Montreal's metro lines far beyond their current terminuses into places it may or may not make sense for them to go.
Laval's Gilles Vaillancourt makes a hobby of this. Even after getting an insanely overpriced extension of the metro into his territory fast-tracked before much-needed extensions into poor dense neighbourhoods in Montreal, he complains that the loop needs to be closed on the orange line with more stations on his territory.
Of course, it's better to have suburban mayors dreaming about metro extensions than strip malls and highways. But maybe there's something behind the argument that politicians shouldn't be in control of public transit.
The Réseau de transport de Longueuil, which handles public transit in Longueuil and its merged and demerged suburbs, is making a bigeffort to add service in a new schedule which began on Monday, especially in St. Bruno, which it had served with a handful of bus and collective taxi lines through an agreement with Veolia Transport. The contract (which the RTL points out predates its own existence) expired on Sunday, and the RTL is taking over service directly.
98: This route, which had previously only served St. Bruno locally, has been extended to Terminus Longueuil (but only during rush hours). A section on Grand Boulevard has been cut from its route, and will be served instead by the T99 taxi service.
From two expat Vancouverites, Adrian Underhill and my friend Kai Nagata, comes Montreal Postcard, a rhythmical expression of all that is sweet about living in this fine city (though no mention of poutine, bagels or smoked meat Club Super Sexe).
In the wake of non-stop bad news about the state of the Canadian and world economy, and readers who say they're tired of reading about crime, politics and foreign wars, The Gazette on Tuesday launched a good-news-only page called "You'll Like This", which will appear every week.
The biggest problem with the idea of "good news" is that there is a reason news is rarely good. Good events are planned, bad events are unplanned and more newsy. "Good news stories" tend to be non-news fluff, particularly human-interest stories. They tend to fall into a few predictable categories:
Fundraisers, charity and other events
Miracle survival and other good-because-it-wasn't-bad stories
People coming together to work on some volunteer project
Science news that makes us feel good about ourselves or see hope for the future
Amazing/funny coincidences and other believe-it-or-not stuff
