Category Archives: In the news

| In the news, Montreal, Opinion

Montreal West wins this round

Montreal West has won a judgment in its favour concerning the whole Broughton Rd. Montreal West/Ville Saint-Pierre saga. Already Montreal West is being cheered by its residents and Lachine is vowing to appeal.

The dispute is over concrete barriers Montreal West put up at the border between the two towns in March. MoWest said it was to curb dangerous traffic that speeds through town as a shortcut to Highway 20 West. Lachine/VSP said it was class warfare, designed to separate the rich residents of Montreal West from the poor working class down the hill.

Of course, they’re both right.

The barrier will stay down until the appeal is decided.

| In the news, On the Net

The Gimli Glider retires

The Gimli Glider had its last flight yesterday, almost 25 years after a metric conversion error (along with a few other mistakes) caused an Air Canada 767 to run out of fuel in the air and glide powerless onto a runway at an old military base in Gimli, Man. As the final trip to the Mojave, CA airport (the desert airplane graveyard) took off from Montreal, it flew past the Air Canada hangar to salute the employees who gathered to celebrate its retirement.

For those who didn’t read the book or see the made-for-TV movie about the incident, an Air Canada flight from Montreal to Edmonton in 1983 had a malfunctioning fuel gauge, and ground workers fuelling it manually miscalculated the amount needed through a metric conversion error (the plane was among the first all-metric ones to be flown here). The pilots didn’t find out they were low on fuel until just before the engines died, and ended up landing it without engine power, flaps, half their instruments, a locked nose gear and most of the power assistance for flight controls.

This line from the first article linked below sums it up best:

As Pearson began gliding the big bird, Quintal “got busy” in the manuals looking for procedures for dealing with the loss of both engines. There were none. Neither he nor Pearson nor any other 767 pilot had ever been trained on this contingency.

The story goes on to even more craziness: turning the airplane on its side to lose altitude quickly while on final approach; landing on a decommissioned runway with hundreds of people celebrating a family fun day at the other end (the plane stopped just a hundred feet short of spectators), and the maintenance crew driving up from Winnipeg in a van who got lost and ran out of gas along the way.

But other people recount this story much better than I do. Here are some of the better ones:

It’s one of my favourite airplane stories, and definitely my favourite one that hasn’t yet been featured on my favouritest show ever. (Though they’re planning 10 new episodes this year, so maybe it’s time?)

Amazingly enough, it’s not even the longest recorded engineless glide of a commercial airliner. That honour goes to Air Transat Flight 236, which took off from Toronto and lost fuel over the Atlantic due to a fuel leak. The pilots in that flight had a similar crisis to contend with, only the runway they were headed to was on a tiny island in the middle of a very large ocean.

But the Gimli Glider came first. Before then, nobody had even (seriously) conceived of flying a large passenger jet this way. Its crew instantly became test pilots, and the aircraft itself one giant guinea pig pushed to its limits. After what was sure to be a devastating crash, it required only moderate repairs and left the runway on its own power, going back for repairs and continuing as a passenger aircraft for another two decades.

And for that, we salute you.

| Media, Montreal, Opinion, Slow News Day

The boring bagel brouhaha

Everyone’s gotten into a tiff over Hamilton (a small Ontario town, I think Sheila Copps came from there) selling what they call a “Montreal-style bagel.” Problem is it’s not a Montreal-style bagel. It’s got an icing sugar coating, which Montreal bagels don’t have.

Seeing an opportunity to make themselves relevant to the world, the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce has proposed a blind taste test so that we can tell which is the better bagel. The Gazette has accepted the challenge, confident that Montreal bagels will prevail.

There’s three problems with this:

  1. We’ve been through this before. A year ago, The Gazette and the Toronto National Post had a blind taste test of bagels by their staffers. Montreal won, and the Post ate crow. Why do we need to repeat this experiment with a lesser city?
  2. The entire point of the controversy was not, as in the Toronto case, that the other city claimed their bagels were better than ours. The problem is that they’re labelling something a “Montreal-style bagel” when it’s not. Call it a “Hamilton-style bagel” and the controversy is over. Everyone will accept its inferiority.
  3. How do you do a blind taste test for this? One is coated with sugar, the other is not. Even the most undeveloped tastebuds will quickly tell the difference and be able to detect which group the bagel belongs to. And if the Hamilton bagels are stripped of their sugar coating, then we forget the fact that the sugar icing is the point of the controversy in the first place.
  4. Bagels are meant to be served fresh. There’s simply no logical way to do blind taste tests of fresh bagels from two different cities simultaneously. The best they could do is set themselves up in Toronto or Kingston and have bagels rushed down on trains or planes. They’d still be a few hours old at that point. Of course, they’re not going to go that far for a friendly experiment like this, so either one set of bagels is going to be fresher than the other, or everyone is going to be eating stale bagels.

Why are we wasting the time of so many journalists repeating something we’ve already done, that has no journalistic value and above all doesn’t make any sense?

UPDATE: On Sunday, the paper prints this article, which is a cut-and-paste (typos and all) of this discussion forum, complete with thoughtless opinion from whoever had a minute of free time that day and wanted to rant.

| In the news, Montreal, My articles, Public transit

TWIM: Kenya and bus schedules

This week’s Bluffer’s Guide concerns the unstable political situation in Kenya, which has already claimed hundreds of lives in a country that was supposed to be one of Africa’s democratic leaders. Worth taking a look in case you feel bad knowing more about the status of Jamie Lynn Spears’s pregnancy than about the difference between Kenya and Rwanda. For more, check out the excellent special sections from The Guardian and BBC News.

This week’s Justify Your Existence concerns the STM’s bus service improvements I mentioned a week and a half ago. Asked why three buses (18 Beaubien, 24 Sherbrooke and 121 Sauvé/Côte-Vertu) had reductions in service (primarily on the weekend) when they were announcing service improvements, the response was that these are normal seasonal variations in service for these lines. The STM changes schedules four times a year, and compared to the winter schedule of January-March 2007, there are no reductions in service:

At each schedule change, we look at the weekend offering, and we adjust based on customer demand. The 24 line, for example, mostly serves business workers, so fewer people take it during the weekend. There will be about 14 hours less service on the weekend for those three lines, but we’re adding over 115 hours of service to those lines during the week.

| In the news, Montreal, Technology

Kahnawake Gaming Commission on both sides of slaps on the wrist

The Kahnawake Gaming Commission, which takes advantage of lenient gambling rules on the reserve and access to a fat Internet backbone to host a gazillion online casinos, has been blacklisted denied whitelisting in the U.K. for undisclosed reasons. That means their casinos and poker sites (which represent over half of all such sites in the world) won’t be able to advertise there legally. Naturally, the commission isn’t pleased, throwing out some bullshit about indigenous peoples’ rights.

Tristan Péloquin suggests it might have something to do with the Absolute Poker scandal, in which company insiders cheated, checking others’ hidden cards and betting based on that information. The Commission eventually fined the company $500,000 (PDF report) and forced them to pay for surprise audits, among other things. But the commission’s reputation is of an uninterested party sitting on its hands while fraud goes on.

| In the news, Public transit

Communauto, your government-funded car

The STM and government-run car-sharing service Communauto have come to an agreement that allows people buying a year’s worth of transit passes to get a significant discount on membership fees for car-sharing.

It makes sense. The point of Communauto is that the car is used only when necessary, and public transit is used at other times.

But since both are largely government-funded services, the money is inevitably coming out of our pockets. Communauto is heavily subsidized, which is what allows it to have such low prices. With less revenue from users, they’ll have to rely on the government even more.

| Media, Montreal, Opinion, Slow News Day

Journal does it again

The Journal de Montréal has a … let’s call it a talent, for creating news with its investigations. Usually it involves a reporter going undercover, tricking a group of people into doing something they shouldn’t and then proudly writing an exposé about the whole topic.

And it gets everyone talking. People chat about it on the bus (as I heard this week), other newspapers comment on it and run follow-ups, and politicians react with promises to deal with the situation somehow.

The latest one involves a young reporter going out and pretending to be a unilingual anglophone while applying for jobs. Despite telling them she speaks no usable French, about 15% of them agree to hire her. Rather than focus on the 85% who thought that not knowing enough French was reason enough not to hire someone with experience during the busy Christmas rush, they proclaim that anglophones have it easy here, even in such predominantly French areas as the Plateau. (Really? The Plateau?)

There’s also a video with the journalist in question which basically has her explain what she did and what the legal implications are (apparently, none). Though she proclaims to be able to speak English without a noticeable accent, she didn’t give an example during the video, which would have been nice.

Like most of these pieces, there is a certain amount of legitimate public interest and a certain amount of needless sensationalism involved here. You really don’t need to know that much in either language to work at a coffee shop, especially in Montreal where most people are bilingual. The Gazette points out that the 85% who denied her employment because of her language is more interesting, while denouncing the whole idea as the kind of journalism “we do not need.”

At the same time, I think a lot of the criticism comes from people who compete with or just don’t like the Journal. Had La Presse done the same experiment and treated it with less sensationalism, their reactions would probably have been different. The ability of people to be served in their own language is a legitimate public concern, even if it seems nobody actually ran into problems here.
Either way, now the issue is out of the hands of the media and in the hands of the hot-button reactionary provincial politicians who would bathe in giant buckets of horse manure if they thought it would win them votes in swing ridings.

Let’s hope they don’t go overboard on a minor issue like this.

UPDATE (Jan. 17): Affiliation Quebec says they’re filing a complaint with the Quebec Press Council:

That the Journal de Montreal, in it’s (sic) front page expose on January 14, 2008, intended to inflame the already tender sensibilities of Quebec’s political and social balance, by acting as an “agent provocateur”, in its worst sense.

As a leading daily newspaper, Journal de Montreal has acted in an irresponsible and reckless manner by featuring an article of questionable news value, placed in a position where the editors knew a maelstrom would ensue.

Further, the story’s headline is quite unrelated to the subject of the material, and fails, in any way, to prove that customers are unable to be served in French.

Gosh, to think the Journal would be so bold as to print an article that provokes public debate on a controversial topic. Those bastards.

| Business, Slow News Day, TV, Video

I know it when I see it

LCN’s Mathieu Belhumeur has exclusive video that cellphone service providers allow their customers to purchase images of scantily-clad women.

The video report is, of course, filled with examples of such images, just in case you’ve forgotten what a scantily-clad woman looks like.

The real scandal here is that people are expected to pay $2 to download a thumbnail-sized image of anything.

| Business, In the news, Montreal, Opinion

SOS Ticket expanding its ethically-questionable services

S.O.S. Ticket, the service setup by former Montreal police officer Alfredo Munioz to help people defend traffic tickets, has launched a new service. For 50 cents per message, drivers can subscribe to a radar trap alert service, which will notify them by text message when and where police officers are checking people for speeding.

The service says they find this out through the use of “road agents” (spies) who look around for them and report them.

Aside from the inherent problems essentially keeping track of every police car in the city and every SQ vehicle on the highway, there are serious ethical implications as well. Defending people in court is one thing. Helping them to (essentially) avoid police while committing a road infraction seems a bit more serious.

Not to mention that it encourages people to speed.

| In the news

Those wacky Concordia kids are still at it

“I believe it’s time to set petty politics aside and come together to build a stronger Concordia community.”

— Angelica Novoa, Concordia Student Union president, during the election campaign

If you’ve been anxiously awaiting more news about Concordia student politics (and we all know you have), the student media have returned from the holidays and they give you the latest:

  • An appeal was filed about the blatantly leading referendum questions in last November’s CSU by-election. It was summarily rejected by the brand new judicial board for apparently technical reasons. Now the CSU can get all the money it scammed out of students.
  • Minutes of a suspiciously-called student council meeting last April that suspiciously disappeared without a trace have now mysteriously reappeared. The meeting was nothing important, just the legislative branch of a political organization arbitrarily overruling the judiciary over a common-sense judgment that two politicians were ineligible to run in the category they filed for because they were not part of that category of student. Convinced that everything has been resolved now, the council has voted to restrict itself from ever discussing the issue again.
  • The Concordian features a mid-term report card of the CSU administration, focusing on the things they’ve accomplished.
  • But their assessment of the CSU’s commitment to accountability is scathing at best.
  • A loser in the November by-election (and, for that matter, March’s general election) publishes an open diary in The Link in which I guess she tries to be funny, but comes out sounding like the kind of get-a-life bitterness that has consumed Concordia politics for far too long.
  • The Graduate Student Association had to call in mediators because the executive and council refused to speak to each other. The meeting was held in secret so we don’t know what they said.
  • Concordia’s Board of Governors (that’s the corporate CEO grownups who should know better) apparently found it necessary to rename its “Interim President” position. Well, actually it “abolished” the “Interim President” position and created the position of “President for an Interim Period.” The person filling that position, whatever it’s named (wasn’t it “acting president“?) is Michael Di Grappa.
  • Meanwhile, administrators still refuse to acknowledge the existence of the “risk assessment committee” that was setup after the Netanyahu protest in 2002. The Acting Interim President for an Interim Period has refused to testify at an access-to-information hearing about it.
  • The search for a new provost and VP academic (the No. 2 administrative position at Concordia which is also being held on an interim basis) has drummed up a whopping two candidates: Katherine Bergman, who has been dean of science at the University of Regina since 2001; and David Graham, who was appointed dean of arts and science at Concordia in 2005.