Following last week’s announcement of more housing inspectors for the city of Montreal, TVA talks with a housing inspector about some apartment-dwellers who live in inhabitable piles of garbage. The worst cases tend to involve people who have compulsive hoarding syndrome, a mental disorder that causes people to hold on to things with little or no value.
Category Archives: In the news
Labeaume wins Quebec City mayor’s race
Despite her YouTube prowess, Ann Bourget lost the Quebec City mayor’s race today to a 60% landslide by “local businessman” Régis Labeaume, who apparently doesn’t have a website.
UPDATE: Apparently he does have a website, but it’s completely hidden from Google, which is odd because it’s very well designed, with YouTube videos of his own, and regular campaign communiqués (sadly in PDF format, as if people are going to print them out and post them) about issues, like this one vowing to use his political influence to keep Quebec media local in the wake of recent job cuts and the ongoing labour dispute at the Journal de Québec.
We’ll see how well he does on that promise.
There was a suicide on the metro today
Low on fruits and veggies, I headed to the Jean-Talon market today to replenish. Since my legs have been mostly vegetables themselves from lack of exercise, I decided to walk the 2 km, enviro-green shopping bin in hand.
I was disappointed to find that my standard fruit store, Sami Fruits, was empty. Not closed, but empty. All I could see inside was a forklift. No worries, though, the market proper had more than enough to satisfy me (though I managed to snatch the last bag of seedless red grapes at $2/lb).
As I walked back to the metro (I’m not walking 2km with 20 lbs of fruit in tow), I noticed police cars and ambulances parked outside, and an unusually long line waiting for the 31 St. Denis. There’s only one reason these things would happen: Someone has died, or gotten seriously injured, in the metro.
The “incident” (as the police described it to curious onlookers) happened about 5:30pm today on the Côte-Vertu-bound platform of the orange line at Jean-Talon. By 6pm the entire station had been evacuated and passengers flooded adjoining streets, looking for cabs, calling friends for lifts and trying to get on buses that were woefully unprepared to take on the traffic of multiple metro trains.
At about 6:15, the station was partially re-opened, allowing people access to the blue line platforms. Service was cut completely between Berri-UQAM and Montmorency. Police officers standing guard in front of orange tape were instructing people on how best to get to their destination, repeating the situation to everyone who walked by: “Only the blue line is open.”
As I stood outside the ticket booth, I could get a narrow glimpse of the platform, where a train had stopped about halfway in the station. The nature of the “incident” became obvious: Someone had either thrown themselves or been pushed in front of the train at the end of the platform (where the front of the train would be travelling at its fastest relative to the platform), the train ran the person over and took about 75 metres to come to a complete stop.
When a fatality occurs in such a way, it’s not a simple matter to deal with (though the police sadly have had a lot of practice). First aiders have to intervene, the train has to be evacuated, the station has to be evacuated, police have to take photos and compile a report, the train itself has to be taken out of service, the driver has to be treated for shock, and the area needs to be cleaned up.
Finally, at 6:35, the orange line platforms were partially reopened (the far sides still being cleaned), and it was announced that the orange line was back in service. That turned out to be a bit premature, as there were still workers on the tracks. The next announcement clarified that service was delayed but not stopped. It wasn’t until 6:50 that the first trains, packed pretty tight, entered and left the station and service began to return to normal.
This kind of story isn’t one you’ll hear often in the media. Journalists don’t talk about them, for fear that reporting on them will encourage other, more extravagant suicide attempts. It’s a sensible policy, and no part of this is particularly newsworthy (beyond “metro shut down for an hour”).
I don’t know whose blood now sits between the rails at Jean-Talon, and I don’t particularly care to know the name of the person who decided to end his or her life in such a selfish way.
But I was delayed for an hour today, half of that standing in the cold. Just what did that accomplish?
Nothing. That’s sad.
What did Benoît Labonté really say to me?
This week’s Justify Your Existence is Benoît Labonté, the mayor of Ville-Marie who quit Gérald Tremblay’s Union Montreal party in September and last week joined the Vision Montreal party (which is so dormant that knowing the name of its current leader would win you a prize at a trivia contest).
The interview is actually a composite of two interviews, and for a very good reason.
I first spoke to Labonté about two weeks ago, asking him about being an independent now that he’s had two months of it. His answers were surprisingly candid: explaining that to be part of a party you have to accept certain compromises, but that he’s OK with that as long as you agree on the fundamentals.
A week later, while the article was still in the bank waiting to be published, Labonté announced he was joining Vision Montreal, making about half the article moot. So I had to talk to him again. (This time trying to squeeze in between the dozens of Montreal journalists trying to get a few words.)
I asked him how long he’d been talking with Vision Montreal, and he said a couple of weeks, though he later clarified that there’s no “official beginning to talks”.
I mention this because I asked him during the first interview whether he had discussions with Vision Montreal, and this is what he said:
No talks with Vision Montreal?
No, since I left I have talked to so many people, elected officials or not, and leaders in the economic sector, cultural, social, environmental sectors, you know, I have had many many discussions with many different people about their views of Montreal, the future of Montreal just to help me reflect on the situation of Montreal and consequently of what I want to do regarding that, so yes I have had many contacts with many people. I’m not staying at home at night watching TV.
So my question to you is: Was this a denial?
(Apologies for sound quality. This was to check my quotes, not for broadcast. Certain parts of the audio have been amplified for easier listening, so if you hear what sound like cuts that’s what they are. It’s my first uploaded audio clip of an interview.)
Finally, I’m glad to see Labonté kept his promise to me, not to change parties again before the article was published.
What is a wireless spectrum auction?
It’s perhaps notable that two blog posts I’m linking to about the announcement by Industry Canada that part of the wireless spectrum auction will be set aside for new entrants to the market start with the word “finally”.
Though Michael Geist did a good job explaining the issue back in June (certainly better than Industry Canada’s very technical policy framework document), I take a crack at it in today’s Gazette.
In short, it means some wireless frequencies (which cellphones use to communicate with cell towers, and for which wireless providers need licenses from Industry Canada to operate) will be reserved for new companies in the market, like Shaw or Yak or Videotron (which currently re-sells Rogers service under its own brand). This wasn’t the idea of the current oligopoly (Bell, Rogers, Telus) because they say it gives an unfair advantage to newcomers (even though many of their licenses came through similar breaks given to their predecessors).
So now, the only thing standing in the way of at least one new entrant into the business (either regionally or nationally) is the opening bids, which for a high-bandwidth national frequency could reach past $200 million.
Videotron plans to use $500 million to setup a Quebec-wide network (including the cost of the cell site equipment and administrative costs of running an entire wireless network), which might expand to other provinces if successful.
Also included in the decision this week is a requirement for existing cell providers to share tower space with new entrants (which will significantly lower their startup costs) and a requirement to allow roaming (so, for example, new Videotron customers will be able to use their phones outside Quebec with reasonable fees being billed for use of the other company’s network).
Read more of my article here.
Inspectors alone won’t solve rental housing problems
The City of Montreal has promised to do something about slumlords in the city, who rent woefully substandard and disgusting apartments to poor families. They’re hiring more inspectors to inspect more buildings, and promising to get tough on landlords who are delinquent.
Landlords who don’t make needed repairs will be warned, then fined, and then billed for the work that the city does on its own.
That’s certainly welcome news, but it doesn’t tackle the bigger problem facing both landlords and tenants when it comes to rental housing here: disputes take far too long to resolve.
That problem is with the Régie du logement, a provincial agency that deals with disputes with landlords and tenants. These disputes usually revolve around the same themes:
- Tenant is not paying rent
- Landlord is not performing needed repairs
- Tenant is contesting a rent increase
- Some other part of the lease agreement has been broken (or is found to have been illegal in the first place)
But depending on the nature of the issue, it might take up to 17 months for the case to be heard at the Régie. This upsets both tenants and landlords who play fair, because in many cases justice delayed is justice denied. When the wait time is longer than the length of the lease in the first place, the wronged parties find it’s easier to just live with the injustice than wait so long for a hearing.
Only a serious investment that will bring down Régie wait times will make a serious difference in some of these cases. It’ll help get rid of both deadbeat tenants and slumlords who rely on the fact that getting rental justice in this province is just too damn hard.
The other problem is that these slum apartments are rented to low-income immigrant families who either don’t know their rights or are afraid to assert them for fear of losing what little they can get at low rent. More low-income housing, combined with serious outreach and information campaigns are needed to solve that problem as well.
Hydro-Quebec wants more too
‘Tis truly the season of giving. As if transit fare hikes wasn’t enough for you, Hydro-Quebec is also asking for fee increases: 2.9% starting in April.
The increase needs to be approved by the government before it can happen. That decision should come in February or March.
Transit fares going up (but down in Laval)
It’s about to hit December, which means it’s that time of year when the STM announces its fare increases for the coming year. It’s required to give 30 days notice of fare increases, so that’s why it happens now.
The skinny:
| Adult fare (Jan. 1, 2008) |
Now | Increase | Reduced fare (Jan. 1, 2008) |
Now | Increase | |
| Monthly CAM | $66.25 | $65 | 1.9% | $36 | $35 | 2.9% |
| Weekly CAM Hebdo | $19.25 | $19 | 1.3% | $11 | $10.75 | 2.3% |
| Six tickets | $12 | $11.75 | 2.1% | $6.50 | $6.25 | 4% |
| Cash fare | $2.75 | $2.75 | No change | $1.75 | $1.75 | No change |
| Tourist card (3 days) | $17.00 | $17.00 | No change | |||
| Tourist card (1 day) | $9.00 | $9.00 | No change |
The STM argues that these fare increases are modest (average of 1.9%, and lower than last year’s increases), and combined with a hefty increase in the amount Montreal is giving the corporation will help pay for increased capital expenditures and better services, some of which have already been announced or implemented. These include:
- Running six trains all day on the Blue Line
- Replacing 40-year-old train cars (currenty operating on the green line) with new ones
- Increased metro service (26%), especially before and after rush hour on the green, orange and blue lines
- Increased bus service on its 30 most popular lines, including the 121 Sauvé/Côte-Vertu, 18 Beaubien and 24 Sherbrooke
- Longer service hours for rush-hour expresses 470 Pierrefonds and 194 Rivière-des-Prairies (running both during the day between rush hours), and running the 12 Île-des-Soeurs on Sundays.
- General budget expenses to cope with a 2% increase in ridership.
Laval cheapens up
| Adult fare (Jan. 1, 2008) |
Now | Increase | Reduced fare (Jan. 1, 2008) |
Now | Increase | |
| Monthly pass | $74 | $72.50 | 2.1% | ? | $43.00 | ? |
| Eight tickets | $18 | $21 | -14% | ? | $12.25 | ? |
| Cash fare | $2.50 | $3.00 | -17% | ? | $1.80 | ? |
The Laval transit corporation, meanwhile, is going in the opposite direction, reducing its single-use fares. A single fare will now be $2.50 instead of $3. There will also be cute little incentives like increasing the age at which children can travel freely from 5 to 11 on weekends and holidays.
The decrease makes sense, especially because now it’s cheaper to take the metro from Montmorency to downtown Montreal ($2.75) than it is to take an STL bus down the street ($3). The change will reverse that. (The fact that neither STL nor STM tickets are valid at the Laval metro stations is still a huge annoyance though.)
On the other hand, the price of a monthly pass is going up, from $72.50 to $74. This changes the math of how often you have to use transit for the monthly pass to be worth your purchase. Right now, if you use public transit fewer than 28 times a month (14 round trips), it’s better off to get tickets. That number goes up to 33 (16.5 round trips). So in the unlikely event that you travel by bus exactly 14, 15 or 16 times a month, you’re now better off getting tickets than passes.
The STL is also dramatically reducing fares on smog days to just $1, if a smog warning is in effect as of 3pm. That sounds great and all, but it takes effect during the evening rush hour, when people either have their cars at work with them or they don’t. It will also require some system to inform travellers (and drivers) when the reduction takes place.
Still no word from the AMT, which controls prices of regional transit passes, on what its 2008 rates will be.
Internet providers have better things to do than monitor my bandwidth
Le Devoir has an article today claiming that Bell and Videotron deliberately ignore unusual increases in clients’ Internet bandwidth usage which might tell them that someone is gaining access to their connection without their knowledge.
The logic is simple: They can see clearly when bandwidth usage goes up, but they don’t warn the customer because they profit heavily off bandwidth overage charges.
Thing is, I’m not terribly convinced that’s the answer.
First of all, there’s an assumption that Internet Service Providers like high-bandwidth users. But they don’t. They hate peer-to-peer networks and other bandwidth-intensive activities. The vast majority of Internet users are well below their monthly quota, and the difference between the two is free bandwidth the companies are not eager to give away. There’s also the problem that a high-bandwidth user will slow the connections of other users on the network.
Secondly, I have no reason not to believe the providers’ PR-clouded appeal to their own laziness. They say they don’t have the resources to check every account for unusual activity (and if they do for one customer, they’ll be expected to do it for all). They’d have to hire tons of new people just to do this (and they won’t, of course; they’ll just pull people off technical and customer service). They’d have to do it on a schedule more often than once a month (because that’s when people are billed for excessive bandwidth use), and that’s really not feasible.
Similarly, the comparison with credit card companies and banks is a bit silly. These organizations deal directly with money, which is very important. You might get charged $30 for maxing out on bandwidth for one month, but it’s hardly the end of the world.
Finally, this isn’t an exact science. An increase in bandwidth usage might mean someone’s stealing your Wi-Fi, or it might mean your grandson is over for the holidays and is playing Halo 3 all day. And how many Wi-Fi leechers really run up the bandwidth meter anyway?
Just my two cents. (That doesn’t put me over the limit, right?)
The EMSB soap opera continues
Commissioners at the English Montreal School Board, elected less than a month ago, have already started back-stabbing, alliance-breaking and back-room dealing.
Don’t tase me, ho ho ho
Sorry for the headline, but it’s all I could think of after seeing this ad (via Muddy Hill Post) from the Taser folks:
The ad is for the Taser C2, which comes in different colours and is apparently marketed as a form of self-defence mechanism for infants when they’re separated from their mothers.
It’s also “police proven”, as shown from the great Taser–saves–lives stories we’ve seen in the news lately. It’s a track record to be proud of.
For those of you unfamiliar with the cultural reference, Wired educates.
If only bus drivers had writers like these
Via Martine, the WGA, the American writers union which is currently holding us hostage by denying us House-isms on strike for the rights to more than mere pennies from DVD sales and all of nothing from online publishing of TV shows and movies, isn’t lying down or holding useless marches with picket signs. They’re creating media to rally support for their cause.
In essence, it’s a tactic we’ve seen before but on a much larger scale. When CBC employees were locked out in 2005, they started producing blogs and podcasts to keep communication going. After it was over, the blogger for CBC Unlocked, Tod Maffin, was given the job of running Inside the CBC, a decidedly uncorporate, uncensored blog about the inner life of the Mother Corp., with its blessing.
Locked-out journalists at the Journal de Québec are still, since April, putting out a competing daily newspaper as part of their pressure tactics. The move has rallied support among other unions (who have helped them financially) politicians and newsmakers (who refuse to deal with Canoe reporters, a fly-by-night “wire services” and other scabs) and readers (who have cancelled subscriptions and are picking up the competing paper).
With Hollywood, the tactic that’s getting the most play is online video (ironic since the dispute is over how little they get paid for online video). Writers for popular shows like The Office, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report have been cracking jokes on YouTube, and the actors are coming out to support them. Some like McDreamy and co. talk calmly about the issues, others like Sarah Silverman make the funny, and then there’s Sandra Oh.
The latest campaign, called “Speechless“, involves short black-and-white clips of actors in a world without scriptwriters. Most of them are of the actor-stands-blank-faced-and-says-nothing variety. Others are pretty funny. There’s a new one every day.
Some of my favourites below:
Molson flub was about marketing, not Facebook
Molson, the U.S.-owned company that wants to make us feel Canadian, has pulled the plug on a Facebook campaign that encourages college students to submit photos of them drinking the company’s beer.
Because it uses the bloody F-word, this story is getting all sorts of attention from the blogosphere. Thanks to a Bloomberg wire story, it’s getting attention in international media as well.
Molson, for their part, blames this whole new social media thing and how unpredictable it is because it’s so new and stuff.
Oh please. Encouraging college kids to take photos of themselves partying and drinking is obviously going to lead to excessive drinking. For that matter, everything beer companies do encourages the party atmosphere of excessive drinking (not that college kids need much encouragement in that area). To claim that this was some sort of shock is a lame face-saver that all these new media bloggers are eating up because they want to turn this into something more important than it is.
Contests gone embarrassingly wrong is nothing new. (Whether this actually went wrong or not is a matter of judgment — I think they knew exactly what they were doing, and it was the media coverage that caught them flat-footed.) Either way, there’s nothing about this situation could not have happened if it didn’t involve Facebook.
But don’t let that stop the media and blogging firestorm that is ensuing, followed by analysis piece after analysis piece about the dangers of advertising in a medium you have no control over.
Loonie tunes
Apparently on Thursday, for the first time (in recent history, I’m guessing), there were more stories worldwide about the Canadian dollar than about Paris Hilton in the mainstream media. Apparently for no particular reason either.
Talk about a horrible job, counting Paris Hilton articles on a daily basis.
And take a wild guess which of these two topics La Presse used to illustrate the story.
Gas company critics are hypocrites
Think the Quebec government isn’t doing enough with its time to pass meaningless laws that don’t change anything?
Well, I give you Bill 41: “An Act to foster transparency in the sale of gasoline and diesel fuel.” This bill will do two things:
- Force gas companies to justify increases to gas prices at the pump
- Force gas companies to display the minimum gas price calculated by the Quebec Energy Board at the pump.
This will accomplish two things:
- Waste a lot of time
- Waste a lot of money
It’s a stupid solution to a stupid problem. You see, Quebecers (and most North Americans) hate the sky-high gas prices they see at the pump every day when they fill up their car to go to work. They reject the idea of supply and demand and want the government to do something about it. Change the laws of economics I guess.
But they also care about the environment and want the government to step in to do something about that too.
News flash folks: the No. 1 deterrent to carbon-emitting wasteful motor vehicle use is high gas prices. It’s fair, it’s self-regulating and it’s transparent.
Yes, it’s a bummer for suburban soccer moms who use their gas-guzzling minivans to bring kids to school. And it sucks for the transportation industry, which will increase the price on goods (and especially fruits and vegetables). But it’s still the best method available.
The ADQ has quickly panned on the idea (not because they don’t pander to the lowest common denominator, but because they can easily criticize a plan without offering any better solutions). If they can convince the PQ, that’ll put an end to the bill.
Greener doesn’t mean green
Meanwhile, a think tank has argued that a federal “freebate” program, which offers economic incentive for people to buy less-polluting cars, needs to be extended to pickup trucks.
This program isn’t as obviously stupid as the Quebec gas plan, but it’s based on a faulty assumption: That the economic incentive will cause people to buy vehicle X who would otherwise buy gas-guzzling vehicle Y. That may be true for some people, but others will probably choose to buy a cheap hybrid car they can afford instead of not buying a car at all. That will have a net negative impact on the environment.
The problem is that while many of these cars are better for the environment than their non-hybrid, fully-gasoline powered cousins, they are not good for the environment compared to public transit, biking, walking and other methods of getting around.
If you’re interested in a zero-emissions car, you can look at Zenn Motor Company, which builds zero-emission, no-noise cars in Quebec. But their cars weren’t even legal in Canada until this month.
These are the kinds of vehicles that have to be promoted, not Toyota’s slightly-less-emissions hybrid car or a bus that runs on 3% biodiesel.