Category Archives: In the news

| In the news, Montreal, Video

CUPFA using YouTube

After six years of failed contract negotiations, CUPFA, the Concordia University Part-Time Faculty Association, has instituted “rotating strikes” which sound more like “picketing between classes”. Among their demands are pay equity with full-time teachers (represented by another bargaining unit, CUFA) as well as basic job security, if only so that students don’t see “TBA” listed as their professors for upcoming courses.

Concordia University has declared that the show must go on though they will tolerate CUPFA’s tactics. Students must still complete all work, handing it in to departments directly if necessary.

Part of CUPFA’s tactics include setting up a YouTube channel and posting videos.

Here, head honcho Maria Peluso explains the skinny on CUPFA’s position.

| In the news, Montreal, Public transit

Attention: Un feu dans l’autobus nous oblige à … run for your lives!

Ouch:

Bus on fire

The text, in case you can’t read it:

COOLING IT  Montreal Transit Corp. crew and a city firefighter check a 211 bus that caught fire outside the Lionel Groulx métro station yesterday. The fire was caused by mechanical problems, police said, and no one was hurt.

Death trap? What death trap?

(As I mentioned to a concerned fellow traveller yesterday, nobody is seriously injured in these kinds of fires, since they take a while to get this intense and the buses are pretty well designed to be able to get everyone out quickly. Still, spontaneous combustion is a concern.)

| In the news, Montreal

School roofs are safe… no, wait

Hey, remember yesterday when school boards were reassuring everyone that its schools’ roofs had been inspected and were perfectly safe?

Funny story: The EMSB CSDM evacuated its schools today because of fears their roofs might collapse.

(Note: An earlier version of this post — and I suspect also the article I linked to — said the EMSB evacuated schools. In fact, it’s the Commission scolaire de Montréal that did so. That board wasn’t reassuring people yesterday that their schools were safe, though most of the others were)

| Business, In the news, Media, Montreal

Saputo is cheesed off

Cheese magnet … err, magnate Lino Saputo is suing three newspapers (and their owners) for defamation after articles in November and December said he was a target of an Italian investigation into money-laundering. The stories quoted an Italian weekly newspaper, usually with vague words like “published reports.”

Besides embarrassing the man and painting him with the dreaded Mafia brush, the news sank his company’s stock price and just plain pissed him off.

The newspapers involved are:

  • Le Journal de Montréal, owned by Sun Media
  • La Presse, owned by Gesca
  • The Globe and Mail, owned by CTVglobemedia

This makes me want to attend Concordia’s next Board of Governors meeting, where Patricia Saputo and Gesca’s Jacques Tousignant both sit as members. Awkward…

| Opinion, Slow News Day, Technology

Online survey shows people are online

I just got alerted to this OMG EXCLUSIVE OMG story at Branchez-Vous, which claims that 1 in 4 francophone Quebecers over 18 is on Facebook, and that number goes up to 54% when you limit it to adults 18-24.

Those numbers seemed suspiciously high to me, especially since before this week Facebook was an English website and therefore its reach in Quebec was lower than the rest of Canada.

Then I came across this:

Ce sondage a été effectué en ligne auprès de 1257 répondants du 11 au 15 février 2008. Sa marge d’erreur est de 2,8%.

So this was an online survey. Not only does that outright dismiss the non-trivial (albeit dwindling) portion of Quebecers without regular Internet access, but online surveys are notoriously unreliable. More importantly, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that those willing to take online surveys are more likely to have the kind of free time to waste online that would make them more likely to be members of Facebook in the first place.

So take those results with a grain of salt.

| Montreal, Slow News Day

Do it for Oscar

Because they have nothing better to do, Mike Citrome’s band of history-rewriters are to descend on the Sud-Ouest borough council meeting tonight to demand they change the name of Lionel-Groulx metro to Oscar Peterson, a campaign that has already gained national attention because it’s being organized on (gasp) Facebook.

Date: Tuesday, March 4
Time: 6:30pm
Location: Sud-Ouest borough hall
815 rue Bel-Air, about three blocks west of the station

And if you can’t come up with an opinion on your own, feel free to check out what other random uninformed people think.

No word yet on whether there will be a counter-protest from the anti-name-change group.

Previously: Oscar Peterson metro won’t be easy to accomplish

| Media, Montreal, Opinion, Slow News Day

Montreal wins Montreal-bagel war

The Journal de Montréal’s Benoît Aubin took a shot at my dear Gazette last week for its big feature taste test between Hamilton and Montreal bagels. (Via Steve Proulx)

The Gazette, you’ll recall, had taken the Journal to task for its “exposé” on businesses that dare to hire anglophones, calling it bad journalism. (I still think the fast food thing was worse.)

Needless to say, the dual-blind taste tests (which involved flying bagels from one city to the other to maintain freshness) ended in Montreal’s favour, and the city is now 3-0 in Gazette bagel taste tests. Hamilton is licking its wounds, or at least it will be once its Chamber of Commerce CEO realizes that coming in second in a two-man race isn’t “like getting the silver medal in the Olympics.”

Of course, I might point out that this had nothing to do with taste and everything to do with naming. But trademark lawyer battles aren’t as interesting as blind taste tests I guess.

So now you can sleep tight, confident in the fact that the best place to get a Montreal-style bagel is Montreal.

Now what about this “Montreal-style” steak spice mix?

Oh, and if you’re captivated by pointless newspaper gimmicks like I am, be sure to check out the most boring video ever made, featuring the Hamilton Spectator’s taste test and some bad pronunciations of “assuage” and “St. Viateur”.

| Montreal, Opinion, Slow News Day

Oscar Peterson metro won’t be easy to accomplish

The local media have been all over plagiarizing The Gazette reporting on a Facebook group that advocates renaming the Lionel-Groulx metro station after Oscar Peterson. Groulx was a racist, the suggestion goes, and Peterson would be much more befitting of a metro station name.

The group has exploded in popularity, due to both the media coverage and regular word-of-mouth. It has over 1,000 members now.

The idea isn’t new, actually. It’s been going around for quite some time. Other proposed new names for Lionel-Groulx include Yitzhak-Rabin and Gabrielle-Roy.

Unfortunately, it’s somewhat of a non-starter for two reasons:

  1. The Lionel-Groulx metro, like most metro stations, is actually named after a street nearby, namely Lionel-Groulx Ave.
  2. The STM currently has a moratorium in place against station renaming, thanks to the rather unpopular Longueuil-Université-de-Sherbrooke mess.

And that doesn’t get into the whole mess about renaming something from a francophone name to an anglophone one.

Personally, I think it should be renamed The-Jackal.

UPDATE (Feb. 28): The inevitable backlash group has already been formed.

UPDATE: Elsewhere in the blogosphere:

| In the news, Opinion, TV

TQS still on life-support

I know this will shock and amaze you, but TQS has gotten another extension. Like that kid in college who could never get an assignment done on time, they went to the teacher’s office, cried their eyes out and explained how complicated the situation is and how they were working really hard getting it done.

Good thing TQS doesn’t owe me any money.

Meanwhile, the Only Reason For TQS’s Financial Problems is back in the news, with CTV and Canwest (full disclosure: Canwest is the Gazette’s — and therefore my — corporate overlord) deciding they, too, want cable and satellite TV providers to give them money for their over-the-air channels.

I don’t buy Rogers’s argument that Canadians will leave cable TV if they have to pay a few bucks more a month for it.

But that’s not the point, is it? Why should I have to pay for channels I can pick up with an antenna? Those broadcasters have already decided to broadcast those channels free to everyone. They can’t change their minds now and say it’s pay TV (but only for some).

Don’t expect the companies fighting over this to bring that minor but up, though. Principle doesn’t bring them money.

| Media, Opinion, Slow News Day

Journal discovers fast food is greasy

The Journal de Montréal loves to manufacture controversy to sell papers. It’s what they do best. Sometimes it works, and leads to government action political grand-standing.

Other times, it just leaves you shaking your head.

Today, I was handed a Journal free outside the metro station. On its cover (while everyone else was talking about this silly Kosovo thing), a special EXCLUSIVE report about fast food.

It seems the Journal had “grand chef” Thierry Daraize (actually, he’s more of a chef-turned-food-columnist, for newspapers including the Journal, which makes me wonder why he didn’t write the stories himself), and had him apply UNDER COVER to work at fast food restaurants like McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC.

His conclusions:

  • The restaurants’ policies emphasize speed over quality of food
  • Fast food is prepared in advance and kept warm for hours at a time
  • Fast food is greasy
  • Burgers are not prepared carefully — ingredients are just slapped onto the bun
  • Food ingredients come pre-cut so employees don’t waste time chopping veggies
  • Soft drinks are dispensed through a machine that combines a concentrated syrup with carbonated water — and those drinks are watered down

That’s it. No rats, secret poisons, spitting into the burgers, crimes against humanity. Nothing but a bunch of tidbits that any idiot who’s worked in the industry already knows.

And yet the Journal devoted their first four pages this morning, plus the cover, to this non-story. And they’ll be continuing the series for two more days. Somehow I doubt his findings will suddenly become more interesting.

The Journal doesn’t have a monopoly on overblown giant features that waste journalistic resources stating the obvious, or talk about insanely uninteresting things, for days on end (*cough*). But they seem to have turned it into an art.

| Business, In the news, Media, Montreal, Opinion

The McKibbin’s kinda-non-story

I should give fair play to Jamie Orchard. My last post about her blog was unflattering. But her latest post, about the whole McKibbin’s language-police debacle, is much more interesting:

The OLF insists that all the owner has to do is write back and explain that the signs are artifacts. In fact, when the OLF saw our TV footage of the signs, they said right away the case could be solved easily – here’s the quote from Gerald Paquette:

There are many Irish pubs in Quebec that have these kinds of artifacts and they have all asked for an exception.”

We told this to the owner of the pub on Thursday, and he seemed relieved. But then, on Friday, the co-owner of the pub was on talk radio insisting that he would have to go to court to fight this, making a big show of inviting the premier to his pub to look at the signs, insisting he would refuse to pay the fine. He was getting all the sympathy in the world from the host, from the callers, from everyone, and never once did he mention it could all be solved with a simple letter.

I like this post (especially compared to the previous one) for two reasons:

  1. It’s a simple, rational, thought-out opinion rather than an uninformed reactionary “stupid OLF” rant
  2. It brings some new information to the table (Global’s conversation with the bar’s owner) that is perfectly placed in a journalist’s blog.

I’m not going to leave the OLF (actually the OQLF) off the hook entirely, since they did, in fact, bring up these signs in their complaint (which was from a customer who said he wasn’t served in French and an outdoor menu was in English only).

But it’s clear the media (and I have to include myself here, since I edited the big article in Friday’s Gazette about it) played up the signs and outrage campaign while burying the other complaints and the comments from the OQLF that they could easily get an exemption. (Second-day stories are pointing these things out, but that wouldn’t have been necessary if they weren’t buried in the first place.)

And McKibbin’s owners are clearly using this as an excuse to launch an anti-OQLF publicity campaign to boost anglo business and line their pockets with outrage money (or just get their name in the news). They’ve already got a Facebook group. And another. And another. And another. And another.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere:

UPDATE (Feb. 27): A video on YouTube shows the original letter from the OQLF to McKibbin’s, which clearly is much more about the posters than the office later suggested to reporters. Also plenty of discussion on some franco forums.

| In the news

Concordia’s first woman president?

The Gazette’s Peggy Curran apparently has the scoop on Concordia’s new president, quoting anonymous sources (no doubt among the search committee) that confirm it’s Judith Woodsworth, the current president of Laurentian University and a former Concordia professor and administrator. It’s unclear if this is supposed to be the “interim” job to be filled while a full bureaucratic search committee does its job, or if it’s the “permanent” position which would carry a five-year term (renewable for another five years). The wording seems to imply the latter.

If this is the case, it follows a disturbing trend in which search committees for Concordia University senior administrators have selected only a single candidate to present to the community for comment, instead of three or four shortlisted candidates. The first time they did this was also for the position of president, when they came up with only Claude Lajeunesse.

And we all know how that worked out.

UPDATE: Concordia confirms the recommendation in what I suspect was a rushed press release after the Gazette article.