The Gazette today began its five-day series Identities about reasonable accomodation, and their timing couldn’t have been better. The Bouchard-Taylor commission is beginning its public consultation tour of the province (Montreal is the last stop on their trip at the end of November), and a pair of conflicting rulings have been issued concerning the rights of Muslim women to wear veils in upcoming provincial and federal by-elections.
Category Archives: In the news
Oh no! It’s the bus pass loaners!
Here’s an interesting one from the Gazette: Apparently there’s “some” people renting out their monthly transit passes to make a little extra money. The article cites the Chinese-language sinoquebec.com website as a source of postings offering bus passes for short periods.
Is this really widespread? I’d never heard of this before and it doesn’t seem to make much sense.
First of all, would you hand over your $65 bus pass to a complete stranger in exchange for a couple of bucks and a promise to bring it back?
Secondly, at $2 a day or $5 for a weekend, these passes are clearly being rented at a loss. Nobody’s going to make any money from that. It’s just some people not using their passes who figure it can make a few bucks.
There’s a lot of borrowing of bus passes between friends, or groups trying to use one pass with more than one person (it doesn’t work for the metro turnstiles, and bus drivers can spot the trick a mile away). And there are certainly lots of people selling passes they bought in error or no longer need. But renting just seems silly, and unworthy of our attention.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the article is from spokesperson Odile Paradis:
“No, you cannot pass the bus pass to the person behind you in line, but it can be loaned to family members and friends,” Paradis said. “Just not for money.”
I can’t find anywhere in the STM by-laws that specifically prohibits borrowing bus passes (so long as two people aren’t using it simultaneously), so I guess that makes it official: Bus passes are transferable, so long as you don’t charge for it.
For senators, working is optional
Two Liberal senators have had their pay docked for not showing up to work.
I mention this because of how the lead paragraph of the story is written:
Two Liberal senators have been fined for spotty attendance in the upper chamber during the last session of Parliament.
Fined. It implies punishment. When politicians or companies are fined, it’s supposed to be a big deal. To act as a deterrent, it’s supposed to result in a net negative for them. The whole point of fining is to make it less profitable for people to break the rules.
But let’s do a quick check of the math:
- Annual salary: $122,700
- Total meetings in the session: 113
- Salary per meeting: $1,085.84
- Fine, per sitting after 21 absences: $250
So let me get this straight: You get 21 freebies (not including sickness or “public business”), and after that you get fined $250 per sitting you miss, which is about a quarter of what you make for that sitting.
Quebec businessman Paul Massicotte was fined $2,750, or 2% of his salary, for missing 32 of 113 sittings, or 28%, without a valid excuse. Had he not showed up to work for a single day this past session, he would still have earned $100,000 or about 80% of his salary.
That doesn’t sound like much of a “fine” to me. No wonder these people have no motivation to show up.
Get your overpasses straight
Well, the Quebec government has started inspections on those 135 structures it says are “at-risk”. And of the 20 they’ve inspected so far, nine require major repairs or complete replacements.
Now here I was all eager to update my map of crumbling Quebec overpasses and bridges using this CBC Montreal story. It lists two bridges that will be replaced and eight more that will need major repairs. (Yeah, I know that adds up to 10 and not 9, but journalists don’t do math.)
It didn’t take long before I started having doubts about the list.
First of all, I can’t find out where they got it. The transport ministry’s website doesn’t have it in any of the documents related to their inspections of the first 20 structures, and no other news organization has any specific list of structures.
Secondly, their descriptions are vague. One of the overpasses needing “major repair” is “Highway 10 overpass in Marieville.” That’s great and all, but there are four overpasses on Highway 10 in Marieville on the list of 135 structures under review.
Finally, some of it is just plain wrong. One of the two listed for demolition is “Route 104 overpass in Franklin, Montérégie.” But Route 104 doesn’t go anywhere near Franklin. The western tip of Route 104 (in St. Jean sur Richelieu) is 59km away from the town. It was probably just a typo (there’s a Route 202 overpass in Franklin on the list), but it’s kind of important to get these things right, and without any other sources to back this already-faulty information up, I can’t use it. (UPDATE: LCN uses the same faulty description, so I guess it must be the transport department that got it wrong)
And that makes me cranky.
On the plus side, I found this proprietary (read: sucky) Google-Maps-style atlas of the 135 structures under inspection. Sadly, it doesn’t give any information about the status of the evaluations of the individual structures. But I’ll use it to pinpoint the location of some of the bridges I couldn’t map exactly.
And I’ve updated the list of City of Montreal-run overpasses which needed inspection to show most of them have reopened to heavy trucks.
Hybrid buses coming
The STM board of directors have approved a plan to buy new hybrid buses from NovaBus and run them on some routes next year.
The list of routes (66, 80, 103, 105, 162, 165, 166, 535) seems a bit biased toward Cote-des-Neiges and NDG (only one of the routes doesn’t travel through that borough), which also happens to be the home of Tremblayite Snowdon city councillor and STM vice-chair Marvin Rotrand. But we probably shouldn’t read too much into that.
Instead, let us celebrate the awarding of a new contract to NovaBus, a company that loves to create lemons when experimenting with new designs for buses, confident that because they’re the only Quebec company in the business, gross incompetence won’t stop the customer from coming back for more.
Benny Farm: cold and mouldy but environmentally sustainable (kinda)
Kazi Stastna has a report on Benny Farm’s building problems which are pissing off its residents and has already helped kill one.
The problems fall into a few very familiar categories: Finger-pointing when more than one organization is involved, low quality from a low bidder, and experimentation with new technologies that inevitably fails half the time.
It’s what happens when you make guinea pigs out of low-income families.
Oh Kurtis
I had an uncomfortable conversation today with a good friend. She said she had some bad news.
“Did you read the front-page story about the fire?”
I hadn’t, since I was still reading Saturday’s paper. I quickly looked it up and scanned it.
“It was Kurtis’s cottage. Kurtis died in the fire.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know Kurtis Hansen very well (I wasn’t sure until today what his last name was), but we’d hung out together many times when we worked at the Gazette. He was an evening security guard who would join the editors in the smoking room late in the evening to gossip. (I quickly learned after joining the paper that important social networking happens while people have cigarettes.) We’d discuss everything from the relative attractiveness of female staff at the paper to his women troubles.
He was our favourite security guard, because he had a very easy-going style and the kind of dry, wicked sense of humour that only copy editors can appreciate.
He left his job at the paper last year to work at Telus, which offered him more money and less boredom. I didn’t expect to see much of him again. But now the absence is permanent.
It won’t affect my life significantly, but I can’t just dismiss it.
What’s worse is the horribleness of the death itself. His two sisters are also gone, as well as two family friends. His father, who tried to drag him to safety and failed, now has to live with the loss of three children, assuming he even recovers from his injuries.
It sucks. Which is why those of us who knew him will be getting shitfaced later, in his honour.
The Gazette’s Katherine Wilton has an obit, which includes some quotes from his former boss. The cause of the fire is still unknown.
UPDATE (Sept. 5): Today’s Day 2 stories concern Kurtis’s 15-year-old stepsister who also perished, and a story about propane safety (even though no cause has been determined for the fire). The latter includes a “test yourself” quiz about propane safety, which like most government safety quizzes is insanely simple to anyone who graduated elementary school (you mean I should light the barbecue after I start the gas? Wow, thanks, because I’m a complete moron). Besides those issues, I’m not crazy about publishing a light-hearted quiz game as part of the coverage of five violent deaths.
UPDATE (Sept. 6): A Facebook group has been setup in his honour. And as he would put it: There’s some fine honeys there.
UPDATE (Sept. 9): Noah Sidel talks about Kurtis in his Off-Sidel column in the Westmount Examiner.
UPDATE (Oct. 6): The Gazette runs a belated obituary notice for Kurtis Hansen, Kelly Hansen and Heather Edelstein. It includes an online guestbook.
OUTRAGE!
Fake outrage is always fun to look at. Political operatives look at anything done by the opposition, put it through as many filters as possible and seek the flimsiest excuse to call something outrageous.
Then they draw up a press release, send it to the media, and hope it sticks.
Of course, in today’s media, rewriting press releases as news is fast, easy and therefore commonplace. So a lot of them start sticking, even if they don’t pass the smell test.
- Guy makes political statement with profanity, for the sole purpose of getting noticed by the media? OUTRAGE!
- Political ad has random letters for half a second spell out “PTORN” over two lines, which looks a bit like “PORN”? OUTRAGE!
- Police keeping an eye on your protest? OUTRAGE!:
“…helicopters, shining bright lights, flew at a very low altitude, at the level of treetops, where the camp was being held. This act demonstrates but one strategy to discourage the direct opposition put into place against the SPP summit.”
When they start finding real people who are actually outraged about these things without the cattle-prod prompting of political campaign directors, they can start thinking that it’s newsworthy.
I used to respect the Globe
Now its writers write articles about how they went to the movies. Apparently Canada’s National Newspaper thinks getting to the point is overrated. Or, for that matter, making one.
But don’t take my word for it. Other people dislike Leah McLaren even more.
McGill metro evacuated after structural fears
It’s not just overpasses. The McGill metro was evacuated this afternoon after work on the de Maisonneuve bike path apparently caused a leak into The Bay next door and that led to the discovery of a large crack in the ceiling.
(The media is describing this as everything from a “crack” to a “depression” to a “cave-in”, but have settled on “crack” and “threat of collapse”)
Service on the green line is shut down between Berri and Atwater Lionel-Groulx. Alternative bus service is being setup (Eastbound on Ste. Catherine, Westbound on René-Lévesque), but during rush-hour with a major artery closed it’s probably faster to walk across downtown. Trains have been added to the Orange Line to help compensate.
The metro is expected to reopen on Monday if there’s no risk of collapse of the tunnel.
Andrée Boucher dead at 70
Andrée Boucher, mayor of Quebec City, just died of a sudden heart attack.
It’s sad, especially because Quebec City is planning its 400th birthday next year, something she was heavily involved with.
Coverage:
- Presse Canadienne/Canadian Press obits
- Michel Hébert of MédiaMatinQuébec has some details.
- The Gazette
- La Presse
- Cyberpresse photo gallery
- Le Devoir
- LCN has thoughts from other politicians, including Pierre Bourque.
- QuebecPolitique.com has some legal analysis of what happens now.
- MédiaMatinQuébec’s 16-page print edition (PDF) is entirely devoted to Boucher (though all the articles are online)
There’s more crap in the Globe
For those of you who wonder whether the new “Globe Life” section of the Globe and Mail is having a detrimental effect on the quality of its journalism, I give you this:
So people are using the informal greeting “hey” a lot.
Thank you Globe. I didn’t know that.
SQ cops to it: They were undercover after all
The Sûreté du Québec are admitting that they did use undercover police officers at the protests in Montebello. The article doesn’t make it clear that they’re referring to the same officers in this video, which has gained traction in the press lately.
But the official SQ statement on the matter makes it clear: They’re cops.
Though I still agree with some that say the evidence was far from conclusive, with the amount of media attention this was getting it was just a matter of time until the government was forced to respond.
Now come the fun questions: Are all the extremist elements of these protests actually undercover cops? Are some of the more recognizable activists (*cough*Jaggi Singh*cough*) actually cops? Were these guys just holding rocks to keep their cover or were they actually expected to throw them at their colleagues? (CP says they never threw any rocks and that’s how their cover was blown)
The biggest question, of course, is what is the point in all this? The police had previously acknowledged that they used under cover agents to tell what plans were in advance. But what’s the point of planting someone who’s going to throw rocks? And if just throwing rocks at armored police isn’t such a bad deal, why are protesters tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, arrested and beaten for it?
In the meantime, union leader Dave Coles should file a complaint of assault against this officer for a shove about 48 seconds into the video.
UPDATE: Great minds…
UPDATE: Oh Aislin…
UPDATE (Dec. 6): Months after the fact, for some reason, the Globe and Mail looks back on this video and the people in it.
Protesters gone wild!
The protests in Montebello this week had one major difference from those in Quebec City in 2001: YouTube. Videotape evidence is the great truth-teller in a world where denials are cheap. It’s what turned Rodney King from just another crazy-talking black guy exaggerating a routine police matter into a media sensation and a giant black eye for the Los Angeles Police Department.
Militant protesters who see police brutality as the norm rather than the exception are increasingly using video cameras to safeguard their rights and prove the police are out to get them while they plant flowers peacefully.
One of the videos out of Montebello shows an interesting idea that seems to be gaining popularity: That those violent rock-throwing mask-wearing protesters are actually under-cover police officers and government agents ordered to provoke a violent altercation between police and protesters to give police an excuse to move in and start beating people up.
Today I received an email from a group which includes Jaggi Singh (who himself has been quietly accused by some paranoid crazy-thinking friends of mine of being an undercover cop), and it links to the video with some conjecture:
Is there a cover-up of the police agents that are revealed in the above video? Were the police trying to create divisions between protesters by provoking an incident?
The video itself shows three such protesters, one holding a rock, provoking the police. What’s interesting is that they’re being stopped by other protesters — some normal-looking suit-wearing Council of Canadians/union leftists, others peacenik hippie mask-wearing-but-not-rock-throwing chant-yellers — and both groups are accusing them of being police officers.
Some other Montebello videos:
- Ron Paul for prime minister!
- CTV News report (use of the phrase “legitimate protesters” really says a lot)
- A quick tour of the street demos
- More miscellaneous photos and video
Journalists, wikiscan thyself
It seems a little online tool called Wikiscanner is generating a lot of media attention. It searches through anonymous edits by IP or IP range, a simple enough concept that in itself would not be worthy of attention (in fact, Wikipedia already allows you to list the edits made by a particular IP address anonymously). What has gotten the media all riled up is the application of this: tying those IP ranges to recognized organizations like the New York Times or the White House.
It’s even got some local attention after a computer from City Hall was fingered as being behind a defacing of executive committee president Frank Zampino — though it turns out that apparently wasn’t the case.
One thing that isn’t really made clear in these reports is that the edits are being made by people who work within the organization, but not necessarily management. In fact, it’s more likely to be some schmuck working a boring office job than a high-level executive wanting to control public opinion.
And like most edits in general on Wikipedia, most of these edits are pretty benign. Fixing spelling mistakes and correcting minor facts on articles about sports teams and musicians.
But some are embarrassing, or just plain silly.
So I’ve applied the Wikiscanner to some Canadian media IPs I know. (Know any not listed here? Let me know.) Here’s some edits I found that were made from within these organizations:
CBC:
- Removing some unflattering accusations about sportscaster Scott Oake (and later replacing them).
- Imposing a name-change on musician Bruce Cockburn.
- Referring to the Mother Corp as “Fort Dork”.
- Blanking a page on the numerology of 11:11.
- Opining that Kimveer Gill is a “loser”
Toronto Star (and related organizations like the Kitchener-Waterloo Record):
- Removing a statement that says the Star’s circulation was increasing compared to the Globe and Mail.
- Four words: “Pants are for chumps.”
- Making fun of TV personality (and former Pulse News reporter) Leslie Roberts dyeing his hair.
La Presse:
- Suggesting the International Olympic Committee is corrupt.
The Gazette/CanWest:
- Removing mention of CanWest’s national editorial policy and unsubstantiated claims that the paper’s quality has gone down recently.
- Adding some marketing-ese about how The Gazette outsells all other papers (including French ones) on the island of Montreal.
- Adding links to CanWest portal Canada.com everywhere they can think of.