Category Archives: Slow News Day

| Media, Montreal, Slow News Day, West Island

Census data doesn’t show anything new

As you might expect, the media went crazy over reports from the 2006 census that the percentage of francophones has dropped and the percentage of anglophones is up slightly for the first time in three decades.

The numbers are hardly staggering. The number of Quebecers who speak French at home is still over 80%.

The West Island Chronicle breaks down the West Island numbers, though it does so in prose so it’s hard to tell what’s actually going on. Basically, the West Island is following the trend, with little difference in anglo/franco ratios but a big jump in allophones through immigration.

| Montreal, Navel-gazing, Public transit, Slow News Day

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.

| Montreal, Opinion, Slow News Day, Technology

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?)

| Media, Opinion, Slow News Day

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.

| Media, Slow News Day

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.

| 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.

| Blogosphere, Slow News Day

Don’t blame anglos for mocking Marois’s English

Apparently Pauline Marois has finally become sick and tired of people mocking her inability to speak in English during press conferences.

As I scoured the Internet for examples of this mockage, I noticed something peculiar: the ones doing the mocking are francophones.

It looks like it started earlier this month with a small TQS piece which included some clips of embarrassing stumbles. From there, it was linked to from Patrick Lagacé’s high-traffic blog and from there to a few lower-traffic anti-PQ and anti-Pauline blogs. The next week, the clip made an appearance on Jeff Fillion’s radio show, which had tackled the issue previously a couple of times.

A couple of English blogs also picked up the story, but somehow I don’t think those are the ones she’s complaining about.

Frankly, I’ve always been surprised that even those separatist leaders who are fluent in Shakespeare’s language bother to use it in front of the media, considering their positions on French being the one and only language to use in this province (an idea she brought back into the spotlight this week with proposed changes to immigration laws). If they’re so stubborn about other languages being used on commercial signs, why are they trying so hard to cater to a public that will never vote for them using a language they want all but outlawed?

Or perhaps a more interesting question is why it’s the francophones who are mocking her inability to speak English. Or why she cares.

| Montreal, Public transit, Slow News Day

More suburbanites taking public transit

A pair of interesting bits of information are proving that more people are interested in public transit than even politicians might think. The metro extension to Laval has drawn in 20% more people than expected, enough that the STM has had to add a new train to the morning schedule. A cynic might suggest that the government intentionally lowballed the figure so it could herald the successes later, but that’s just crazy-talk.

The article hilariously compares the unexpected excess popularity to the unexpected excess price, even though the first is 20% over and the second is 450% over.

It also says that this means more cost to the STM because public transit is underfunded by the government. I’m not quite sure what one has to do with the other.

Some out-of-my-ass suggestions on why the Laval metro is getting so much action:

  1. It was hyped, like huge and stuff. Free transit on opening weekend turned it into more than a free ride. It was a circus. People brought their kids to see this thing. It was like a mini Expo. The AMT took advantage and setup special rides of the Blainville train. It was an event.
  2. On the same day the metro open, Laval’s entire public transit map was overhauled. Almost every bus route was changed. Most of the buses that service the western half of the island now go to the Montmorency metro. Most of the buses serving the eastern half go to Cartier. The move forced everyone to rethink how they had to get around, and for many that meant using the metro.
  3. It’s unclear how many people switched to the metro from the bus and how many people actually took up public transit as a result of this huge investment.
  4. There’s just plain more people living in Laval and north shore suburbs.

Meanwhile, ridership is up on the Montreal-Dorion/Rigaud train line compared to September of last year. Though the AMT is being cautious and waiting until the end-of-year numbers, it’s a good sign.

Unfortunately, service on that line is still less-than-stellar, due to scheduling problems with CP who run freight trains on the line west of Lachine, and the fact that the line from Dorval to Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue is rendered redundant by the cheaper and more frequent 211 bus.

| Slow News Day

I’m unconvinced no-fault insurance has to go

The Gazette’s Max Harrold has an interesting feature today on Quebec’s no-fault driving insurance system. He asks whether or not we should consider eliminating it and allowing victims of vehicular injuries to sue in cases where negligence or recklessness directly leads to serious injury or death. It features three interviews with grieving family members (the third is the mother of Jessica Holman-Price, who was killed by a dump truck turning a corner). All three want the law changed so the guilty pay the innocent instead of getting compensation from the government. (See comment below)

The no-fault system is pretty simple: Everyone’s a part of it, drivers can’t sue each other even if one is clearly at fault, and anyone who sustains an injury gets compensated. In exchange, Quebec has Canada’s lowest insurance premium rates.

But the problem, as the article points out, is that even in cases of dangerous driving (speeding) and impaired driving (drunk driving), perpetrator and victim are treated the same, both compensated based on their level of injury. Only criminal charges can be brought, which then result in probation or light sentences.

Despite the opinions of the families (and really, it’s kind of hard to argue with a grieving widow or mother), I remain unconvinced. It’s not that there isn’t a problem of justice here, but I think other methods are more likely to solve it:

  1. Impose stiffer sentences for drunk driving and dangerous driving, especially when such actions result in death. Speed racing that causes death, for example, should be considered homicide. Make license suspensions longer or even permanent in extreme cases.
  2. Use Manitoba’s system where drivers convicted of criminal charges related to an accident have to pay back any compensation they’ve been given as a result.
  3. Increase the number of police cars on the road so these accidents don’t happen in the first place.
  4. Find some way of forcing those found guilty of criminal offenses to pay the innocent, either by imposing a fine or by allowing lawsuits only when serious convictions have taken place.

Nobody wants to get into a car accident. Even those who are insanely reckless don’t expect to crash. So nothing will seriously act as a deterrent to accidents causing injury (though there are ways to attack the causes of those accidents).
In the end, no-fault insurance isn’t always perfectly fair, but it’s a compromise that keeps lawyers from sucking out all our money after we’ve already been hurt.

| Business, Montreal, Slow News Day, Technology

Mike Boone LIES!

Hey, remember back when Gazette columnist Mike Boone was having problems with Sympatico Internet, and because he talked about it in the paper, he got a call from a VP in Ottawa to give him special treatment?

Recognizing that he was obviously getting better service because he was a newspaper columnist, and that prevented him from pretending he was like the rest of us, he promised not to take advantage of it next time he had a problem:

I still have the phone number of the guy in Ottawa who QBed the rescue effort. But as a gesture of solidarity with all the other schmos, I’ll report any future problems to Sympatico tech support – with one small adjustment.

“Next time you call, press 1 right away to choose French,” a neighbour advised. “That way you get connected to a techie in Canada.”

Well, less than two months later, it seems he’s gone back on his word, using the number to short-cut his way to a solution after the common-folk customer service people scammed him into paying Apple to diagnose a non-existent software problem.

I gave up. When I wrote a column, in July, about the nightmare of trying to set up the wireless system that Sympatico sold me, I got a call from the office of the vice-president of customer relations.

They arranged for a house call.

After some initial difficulties owing to unfamiliarity with Apple, the technician got me up and running.

I kept the phone number of the Sympatico’s VP’s office. When I called about my latest nightmare, they promised I’d hear from a senior technician that evening.

To Boone’s credit, he didn’t reach for the Special Treatment Number right off the bat, and the resulting grossly incompetent service gives him plenty of fodder for another column. But it’s hard to think of a columnist being one of us when that magic VIP lifeline is available to him to use at his convenience.

UPDATE (Sept. 24): Letter-writer Ruth Taylor, who had a similar problem, blasts Boone for taking advantage of his journalist status. She asked for a “Mac specialist” as Boone’s column suggested, but got nowhere. Unlike his gold-plated solution, she had to pay her own techie to diagnose her problem.

| Montreal, Public transit, Slow News Day

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.

| Media, Slow News Day

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.