Monthly Archives: November 2007

| Blogosphere, TV

Vlog in danger of cancellation

UPDATE (Nov. 13): It’s official: the show has been cancelled. See the latest post for more details.

Vlog, the TVA viral video show that airs after Occupation Double on Sundays, is apparently in danger of cancellation. Within hours of the rumour starting there’s already a Facebook group to save the show and suggestions for what host Dominic Arpin should do now. (He’s already shut down his blog, despite my objections.)

According to a funny-looking, funky-dancing, hairline-receding source at the show who I won’t name (at least not in this paragraph), the rumours have some truth to them. Director Jean-François Desmarais mentions on the Facebook page that “sad news” is coming tomorrow (Monday).

If the show is cancelled (and rumours like this tend not to propagate until after the decision has been made), that would be a shame. Despite its popular lead-in show, the start-up series has been a victim of horrible scheduling (it always starts late, and it’s on against Tout le monde en parle), insufficient advertising and a general lack of effort on the part of TVA to give it a chance to succeed.

But there’s a more important issue here: How this affects me. You see, I interviewed Arpin for an article I wrote about Vlog, which probably won’t be published for a week or two. If the show is cancelled by then, the article will be dated before it’s even printed. It’s not like I could just add a line that says “oh yeah and the show was cancelled”. So please, TVA, for my sake, don’t cancel the show (at least not until next month).

Vlog airs Sunday nights at an entirely unpredictable time between 9:30 and 10:30 on TVA. Let’s hope tonight’s episode won’t be the series finale.

| Blogosphere, Media

Francs-Tireurs aren’t that close (not that there’s anything wrong with that)

Francs-tireurs

Patrick Lagacé wants to make it very clear that he and fellow Franc Tireur Richard Martineau don’t live together and aren’t attached at the hip.

Which is surprising to me because that show always seemed to have homo-erotic undertones, what with their matching wardrobe and the way they goof around together.

Anyone up for writing some Lagacé/Martineau slash fiction?

| Media, Montreal, Opinion

Marché Central is an environmental disaster

In an example of corporate chutzpah the likes of which I’ve never seen, Marché Central, the awful strip mall just above the Acadie Circle, is touting its environmental-friendliness by installing 25 recycling bins in its massive parking lots. It’s also distributed recycling bins to its stores, which means that its stores will be allowed to recycle for the first time.

Why do I think this is insane? Look at a map of the mall (click to embiggen):

Marché Central map

The red areas (which represent just about everything but the buildings) are parking lots and roads. The green areas (which are just about invisible) represent foliage (trees, grass), which fill spaces that they haven’t figured out a way to park a car in yet.

It gets worse. Besides enough space to park 4,000 cars simultaneously (600 of which are underground), the giant strip mall from hell has absolutely no provisions for pedestrians. Traffic lights have no pedestrian crosswalks. Sidewalks abruptly end forcing people to walk through parking lots. The closest bus comes only every half hour, and it doesn’t enter the mall. There are no bike paths anywhere on or near mall grounds, and very little bike parking space.

So you’ll forgive me if statements like this make me laugh:

«Ici, l’environnement, c’est devenu une priorité. Maintenant, quand le temps est venu de faire une dépense, on essaie toujours de trouver un moyen de réduire nos dépenses en énergie. C’est important de trouver des façons écologiques de gérer nos activités», précise de son côté le directeur-adjoint, Raymond St-Jacques.

«Ce projet est un bel exemple de responsabilité sociale et un effort important pour l’environnement, de dire la mairesse de l’arrondissement d’Ahuntsic-Cartierville, Marie-Andrée Beaudoin. Nous les félicitons et il nous fait grand plaisir de soutenir ce projet par la cueillette des matières recyclables sur le site-même du Marché Central.»

Reading further, you get the real reason behind this move (which, of course, should have been done years ago):

D’ici peu, le mégacentre commercial aimerait obtenir la désignation environnementale Go Green, une certification canadienne remise aux établissements commerciaux qui réduisent leurs dépenses en eau, en électricité et autres, afin d’innover et d’améliorer leurs pratiques environnementales.

In other words, it’s a B.S. PR stunt designed to get a B.S. corporate “green” certification that doesn’t mean anything, and convince the yuppie SUV drivers that by putting a used water bottle into a green bin they’re doing their part for the environment.

Shutting Marché Central down would do the environment far better than any PR stunt they can think of.

And shame on “journalist” Philippe Boisvert and Courrier Bordeaux-Cartierville for allowing a company to fool them so easily with smoke and mirrors.

UPDATE: Chris DeWolf agrees with me.

| Media, Montreal

Le Devoir numbers improving

Le Devoir ejaculates the news today that it’s the only major Montreal newspaper whose readership has gone up this year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Its weekday readership is up 2.4% and Saturday readers up 0.1%.

It takes the opportunity to make fun of The Gazette, whose Saturday subscriptions have gone down 4.3% in just one year.

Good for you, Devoir. But maybe you shouldn’t be too arrogant about your subscription numbers, especially since your readership is fourth out of four daily newspapers in the city (sixth out of six if you include Metro and 24 Heures).

UPDATE (Nov. 13): A similar piece from the Toronto Sun, whose numbers are also up. Notice how it’s the papers who are improving who publish stories about circulation numbers?

| Media

Canadian Press wants attention

Canadian Press

For some reason, Canada’s biggest news service has decided it needs to “brand” itself. Canadian Press, the nationwide, not-for-profit wire service, is running ads through member organizations such as CTV, Transcontinental, the Toronto Star, Sun Media (Quebecor) and others to “add value for Canadian Press member daily newspapers and media clients by ensuring more of their news consumers recognize The Canadian Press brand as the credible source of Canadian and international content in their papers, newscasts and websites.”

Perhaps I’m missing something about the newspaper industry in Canada, but I honestly don’t understand what the point of this is. Canadian Press is a wire service, and it doesn’t sell anything to the public directly. So who cares if the public is even aware of its existence? And why would media outlets want to publicize the fact that they’re too cheap to hire their own journalists and have to rely on the same wire service their competitors get their news from? It’s like if CJAD ran ads reminding people that its morning news headlines were read straight out of The Gazette.

I know CP is sad about CanWest’s empire pulling out this year, and it’s constantly annoyed by the fact that people refer to it as “Canadian Press” instead of “The Canadian Press”, but this advertising campaign looks like a giant waste of money.

The end of the CP press release also adds that the organization will be “phasing out” the use of (CP) and (PC) for Canadian Press and Presse Canadienne stories, in favour of the wire’s complete name. I find this funny because the wire has little control over how its stories appear in print, online or on the air. Many websites use the full name already, while many print publications use the shortened form to save space (especially on briefs that are only a few lines long to begin with). Whether member organizations comply with this edict remains to be seen.

| Blogosphere, Canadiens, Montreal, Web design

Habs Inside/Out redesigned

The Gazette’s Habs Inside/Out blog (which is liveblogging the game going on right now) has undergone an overhaul, switching from Movable Type to Drupal. Among the sweet stuff coming in as a result are user registration, comment threading, comment rating, avatars, comment preview, and those annoying social bookmarking links on each post.

The design still needs some ironing out, so expect the look to change slightly (hopefully including getting rid of that awful sea-green). I also noted that “associate blogger” Kevin Mio has been promoted to having his picture on the homepage again.

The backend of the site, administered by techies John MacFarlane and Dru Oja Jay, is separate from the CanWest online canada.com nightmare, and that’s a good part of why it’s so successful.

| Media, Montreal

Saint-Laurent News needs to get off its high horse

The Saint-Laurent News (one of the Transcontinental-owned community weeklies) has an article this week putting some perspective on the “veritable media circus” surrounding their arena after an “alarmist” article in “a Montreal English-language newspaper” exposed the fact that many local ice rinks have been shown to have unsafe levels of carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide. The toxic gases are caused by ice resurfacers (Zamboni machines) which run on gas.

A few things:

  1. There was no “media circus” around the St. Laurent Arena. There was an alarmist article in The Gazette (“Poison in air at rinks” in giant letters on A1) as well as a matching editorial, but neither focused exclusively on the St. Laurent Arena. The article grouped it with two others as those which showed dangerously high levels of the gases, but even then it fingered Sportplexe 4 Glaces Pierrefonds (an arena used by the Canadiens) as the worst offender. A short article by 940 News didn’t mention St. Laurent at all. And a Suburban article about the situation even defended the arenas, giving their side of the story, and a La Presse piece downplayed the risks, saying the quality of air was improving.
  2. The implication is that the news coverage was unjustified or even incorrect (and they needed to “uncover the real story”). The list of arenas was taken right out of a government report (PDF), and while it may have been sensationalized (the report actually said the quality of air was improving at the rinks), the fact remains that seven arenas had levels of CO and NO2 which were above what is considered safe. That’s clearly a matter of public interest that deserves news coverage.
  3. “A Montreal English-language newspaper”? Can we please stop with this B.S. coyness about naming other media? How many people read the Saint-Laurent News and have never heard of The Gazette?
  4. The article points out that now St. Laurent has a new electric ice resurfacer, toxic gas detectors and better ventilation and their air quality has improved. It’s debatable whether the Gazette article caused these things to happen faster than they would have, but either way the coverage did more good than harm, no?

Pointing out the flaws of other media is fair game (in fact, for many, it’s a sport), but before you do that you should make sure you’re actually pointing out flaws.  Self-important snark, especially when you’re in the wrong, makes you look like a douche. (Trust me, I should know.)

| Montreal

The tuition debate is over

As if to deliberately underscore how chaotic and disorganized the student activist movement is, two separate, competing protests are being organized over the next two weeks concerning tuition and accessibility of higher education.

The first, by the CEGEP-heavy, highly militant unlimited-strike-at-the-tip-of-a-hat ASSÉ, is this Thursday afternoon. (The event’s tagline is telling: “Parce que la lutte continue, tabarnak !!!”)

The second, by the bigger-budget, more organized PR-savvy FEUQ, is the following Thursday.

The reason behind the two protests is nothing more complicated than the two groups engaging in a pissing contest with each other. Rather than put aside their differences and come together, student groups prefer to fight and sue each other.

But even if this wasn’t the case, the protest is pointless for one simple reason: They’ve already lost the battle.

In the last provincial election, Liberal leader Jean Charest made it abundantly clear he intended to unfreeze tuition and raise it by a small amount. ADQ leader Mario Dumont even wanted to go further. Those two parties took over 2/3 of the seats in the National Assembly.

The public, meanwhile, made it very clear that keeping Quebec’s tuition the lowest in Canada is not their top priority. Even some students think our tuition is too low, and would prefer to see more student money go into the education system.

These protests (and the laughable “unlimited general strike”, which hurts no one but the few students participating in it) are organized on the assumption that the public supports them. But it doesn’t. And tying up downtown traffic so that some hippies can yell how $200 a course is too much to pay for university education isn’t going to help their cause at all. It will just piss people off and make them think that these students have far too much free time on their hands that they could be spending earning money to lessen their tuition load.

The tuition debate is over as far as the government is concerned. If you’re going to try to revolutionize the way Quebec finances post-secondary education, you have to convince the voters to think like you. That means a big, honest education campaign, not a protest.

And don’t hold your breath expecting attitudes to change overnight.

| Montreal

Montreal Screwjob 10 years later

Dude, WTF?

The Montreal Screwjob was 10 years ago today. That was the day the highly choreographed fake drama of professional wrestling took on a real-life fake drama backstage. (YouTube, naturally, has a clip)

Though it was a huge scandal at the time (it even has its own dedicated website), attempts to recreate it in wrestling storylines and otherwise capitalize on it for profit have probably lessened its significance.

Nevertheless, its star, Bret “The Hitman” Hart, has released an autobiography, and is doing interview tours promoting it. His timing couldn’t be better.

Like it or not, this is one of the greatest stories in Montreal’s search-engine-indexable lore.

| Media, Montreal, Slow News Day

Angryphones and frangryphones

CBC has a story about a new protest by French-superiority groups Impératif français and Mouvement Montréal français: They want to change when “For English, press 9” appears on government-run automatic telephone menus.

As it stands, many government departments have it at the beginning of their menus, so that anglphones don’t have to sit through French options they don’t understand. But the French groups want the option to be read only at the end of the French menus.

I honestly have no words to express how stupid this is. Arguing over automatic telephone menu orders is trivial enough, but what exactly are they trying to accomplish? Save time for francophones who have to endure that two-second delay? Help anglophones learn French by forcing them to sit through menu options?

No, this is just a pointless power grab and pissing contest. And unfortunately for us, the government actually listened. So if you have to wait through a five-minute list of menu options before finding out what number to press to get English service, you know who to blame.

Shouldn’t journalists correct wrong information?

During the CBC News at Six report on this scandal, it featured a few man-on-the-street soundbites from Montrealers about the issue. Naturally, the people interviewed said what the journalists could not: That this is a stupid issue to focus on and people should get a life.

But one of the interviewees defended the English language (because in Quebec, English needs a defence), saying it was the most commonly-spoken language in the world.

Of course, as any knower-of-pointless-facts would tell you, that’s incorrect. Mandarin (Chinese), with over a billion speakers, is spoken by more than twice as many people as English (which is second or third with over 300-500 million, depending on your source). French is ranked in the teens with 130 million (60 million natively).

But this apparent misinformation went uncorrected by the journalist. Why? Did she not know this (in which case, why didn’t she confirm it?), or are statements from random people on the street not subject to the same fact-checking treatment as those from journalists?

Quebec Office of the English Language

Another thing mentioned on the CBC evening news today was the creation of the Office québécois de la langue anglaise, a bad joke grass-roots English rights group that hopes to pressure businesses into providing bilingual services. Considering the word “racism” appears on their forum, you can guess what kind of people this website is attracting. No doubt it will serve to hurt its cause more than it helps, by propagating the angryphone stereotype.

(UPDATE: Patrick Lagacé and his commenters have some things to say about this new group)

UPDATE (Nov. 10): We should send the Anglo Rights Brigade to Laval University, where it seems they’re clearly needed.

| Business, TV

The Globe on TQS

The Globe and Mail has an interesting article today about the state of TQS. The network is in pretty bad shape, sitting a far third behind RadCan and TVA, cutting jobs and desperately looking for a buyer.

One idea being thrown around is to have TQS be bought by Power Corporation’s Gesca, which owns La Presse/Cyberpresse/Le Soleil. Apparently some would find it funny if Gesca was running the station behind Bleu Nuit.

UPDATE (Nov. 10): Le Devoir looks at Radio Nord, which owns two TQS affiliates in Gatineau and Abitibi.

| Uncategorized

School boards: What will we do with them now?

Now that school board elections are over, with absolutely atrocious voter turnout, the inevitable we-have-to-do-something leadership-by-hindsight begins.

Some of the options being considered:

Abolish school boards entirely: This is the ADQ’s solution to the problem, and the excuse for reason why they want to force a real election. Administration of schools would fall to municipalities, the provincial government, and the schools themselves, removing a layer of bureaucracy. Unfortunately, as municipal mergers should have shown us, it’s not that easy. The bureaucracy created by the change might be as large or even larger than the bureaucracy it’s replacing.

Give school boards more power: For those (like me) who complain there aren’t any issues to be decided here (things like school taxes and curricula are set by the Quebec government), this might make elections more interesting. But it would also make the boards inconsistent, and that could lead to problems down the road.

Tie school board elections to municipal elections: I can’t see how this isn’t a good idea. Let’s reduce the amount of times we need to go out, update a voters’ list and wait in line to cast our ballots.

Here’s one I’d like to suggest adding to the list: Have school board commissioners appointed by municipalities instead of elected by the populace directly. This may sound anti-democratic at first, but the system it’s replacing isn’t perfect either. This solution would keep the bureaucracy as is, but the decisions about how local schools would be run would be left in part to the municipal governments they’re in. (Municipal politics aren’t high on voter turnout either, but it’s better than school board elections — and most people can name their mayor at least.)

Just a thought.

| Business, Media

Journal de Québec problems not hurting bottom line

A new financial report from Quebecor Media thumbs its nose at striking and locked-out Journal de Québec workers, saying that profits have exploded since the work stoppage in April.

It’s funny how giant media conglomerates are swimming in profits but still feel the need to cut cut cut journalism jobs.

And while the Journal is saving a lot of money in salaries, it’s hard to say how sustainable it is to run a newspaper without journalists. (Though no doubt Quebecor would love to find a way to make it work.)