Category Archives: Opinion

| Media, Montreal, Opinion

NDG Monitor news article actually a press release

NDG Monitor

The NDG Monitor, which shut down in February and became online-only, and recently criticized a borough-produced newspaper for being nothing but press releases, is now itself cutting and pasting press releases to create news stories, as evidenced by this story which is identical to this release from Concordia University (and doesn’t mark it as such).

I’d say I was shocked, but I wasn’t. I’d say I was disappointed, but my expectations for this Transcontinental project were low to begin with.

The Monitor’s deterioration as a legitimate news outlet began long before its last issue came off the presses. It started in 1996 when it was sold to Transcontinental, which gutted everything to save money.

Now all it does is list community events and republish open letters, while contributing whatever news articles can be churned out with as little effort as possible. The rest of the website is filler from Transcontinental and its other community weeklies.

The Monitor is going to die eventually as a forgotten relic of a time when small communities could sustain local newspapers. Though I mourn the loss of any voice and the job of any journalist, part of me thinks they should just put it out of its misery.

| Montreal, On the Net, Opinion, Web design

Tourism Montreal up for Webby Award

I’ve never really been a fan of the Webby Awards, the anual awards for Web design. It’s not that they charge hundreds of dollars for entries (and then more hundreds to actually attend the ceremony) or because that source of income encourages them to inflate the number of winners, but for the simple fact that the judges for these awards always prefer style (or should I say “Flash”?) over substance.

Looking at the list of nominees, it seems clear that Flash-heavy multimedia ad campaign sites are held in higher regard than genuinely useful boring HTML. The famous websites and bloggers get their nods, of course (assuming they’re willing to pay or their fame is high enough that the Webbys think they’ll add prestige and eyeballs to the event), but everything else seems to be judged on looks alone. In fact, many entries don’t even link to the websites themselves but to special awards pages that explain how awesome the Web campaign is instead of just pointing people to the sites and having them figure it out themselves.

That is reflected in the nominees with Canadian connections. Officially there are 13 Canadian nominees, making Canada the fourth-most nominated country behind the U.S., U.K. and New Zealand, and just ahead of Australia (notice a trend there, perhaps having to do with the primary language of these countries?) Metro has links to them. But nationality is judged by the organization which created the site, not the site itself, so there are actually others.

Here are the Canadian website nominees I’ve found:

  • Tourism Montreal, by local outfit Sid Lee, in the tourism category. Best known for its slick (and expensive) Montreal in two minutes video, it also has an event search that warns you not to use the basic functions of your browser.
  • Adidas 60 years of soles and stripes, another Sid Lee joint, in the fashion category. Appears to redirect to another Adidas site. In any case, it’s a flashy site for a company whose business model relies on being lashy and cool.
  • Visual Dictionary (Merriam-Webster) from Montreal-based QA International, in the education category. A quality nominee that’s both good-looking and useful.
  • Smartset’s Fashion at Play, by Toronto-based Taxi, in the animation/motion graphics category. A completely useless site, it encourages people to spin boxes around to reveal new outfits, and then plays a video. That “unlocks” access to a downloadable ZIP file which contains a desktop background, ringtone and video, all of which are connected to the campaign and aren’t interesting at all. And when you unlock everything … nothing happens. Fantastic. But hey, the boxes spin.
  • 1000 Awesome Things, a Toronto-based one-person blog about things that are awesome, in the personal/culture blog category. (Hear an interview with its creator with Terry DiMonte on Q107)
  • Kaboose, a Toronto-based parenting site, in the family/parenting category. No complaints here.

I should also point out that the Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog, a very simple idea simply produced, is also nominated.

There are also nominees in advertising, video and “mobile” categories, but I don’t care about those (except to note that my favourite remix of all time is nominated as a viral video). Here are the Canadians:

Interactive ad campaigns

  • Russian Dolls
  • Nokia Accessories Portfolio Video
  • The Big Wild Email
  • Let’s Change Insurance – Aviva Banners
  • Coffee Cup

    • Online videos

  • Follow Your INSTINCT (2 nominations: Best Editing et Best Sound Design)
  • The Curse of Degrassi
    • | Media, Opinion

    Still working on “hyperlocal”

    The New York Times, which from what I understand is some sort of newspaper, has an article about “hyperlocal” news sites, and the startups behind them that are trying to reinvent local news.

    From what I can see, most of these sites come in one of the following categories:

    • Turnkey “insert town name here” sites with computer-generated statistical data (crime maps are a common example), crowdsourced DIY journalism and aggregation of links to traditional media and local blogs
    • Foundation-supported small journalism outlets with actual hired journalists, mixed in with some community activity and link aggregation.

    The latter version I can respect, even though such a funding formula isn’t sustainable in the long term. Some of the projects starting up are small but interesting and show a lot of promise.

    It’s the first version that annoys me, the sites like EveryBlock and Placeblogger. While I’m sure their hearts are in the right place, they represent a philosophy that journalism isn’t something you pay for, but rather something a computer can just compile and some CEO can suck the profits from. (I’ll note that this is the philosophy behind a lot of automatically-generated spam sites, and they have about the same rate of success.)

    Some of the most telling lines of the piece are near the end:

    One hurdle is the need for reliable, quality content. The information on many of these sites can still appear woefully incomplete. Crime reports on EveryBlock, for example, are short on details of what happened. Links to professionally written news articles on Outside.in are mixed with trivial and sometimes irrelevant blog posts.

    That raises the question of what these hyperlocal sites will do if newspapers, a main source of credible information, go out of business. “They rely on pulling data from other sources, so they really can’t function if news organizations disappear,” said Steve Outing, who writes about online media for Editor & Publisher Online.

    But many hyperlocal entrepreneurs say they are counting on a proliferation of blogs and small local journalism start-ups to keep providing content.

    “In many cities, the local blog scene is so rich and deep that even if a newspaper goes away, there would be still be plenty of stuff for us to publish,” said Mr. Holovaty of EveryBlock.

    In other words, when they can’t live off the backs of dying newspapers, they’ll profit off the backs of bloggers (who themselves had profited off the backs of the dying newspapers).

    This is why I dislike the term “hyperlocal”. It seems so parasitic in nature. Some computer-generated information, like crime maps, are great ideas. Tagging stories with computer-readable location information is also a good idea. And I’m not against content aggregation. But these should be combined with quality original content – the work of skilled journalists – to create a website that can truly be a local destination for news. These strategies should complement the work of journalists, not replace them.

    Otherwise, why would I go to a blog that has links to stories in the local paper when I can just go to that paper’s website directly and leave out the middleman?

    | Media, Opinion

    Officer Anonymous

    By law, I am now required to obscure this officer's face in this photo taken from last month's police brutality protest

    By law, I am now required to obscure this officer's face in this photo taken from last month's police brutality protest

    I have sympathy for Montreal police officers Jean-Loup Lapointe and Stéphanie Pilote. On August 10, 2008, they were patrolling in Montreal North when they spotted some young people engaging in a benign but illegal activity. Doing their duty, they proceeded to arrest one of them, who was breaking a bail condition. The situation quickly got out of control, and fearing for their safety (combined perhaps with inadequate training), they fired at their attackers, mortally wounding one of them, a kid named Fredy Villanueva.

    Activists saw this as yet another evil police shooting by bloodthirsty cops. The Villanueva family quickly found that police were more interested in protecting their own than getting answers. And Lapointe and Pilote not only have the death of a young boy on their conscience, but live in fear that they might become the target for revenge because of a situation they never asked to become involved in.

    The officers in question took what seemed to me to be a rather odd move in response to this fear: they petitioned the court to issue a publication ban on their names and images, arguing that there were credible threats on their lives and leaving their identities public would make them vulnerable to attack. Perhaps even more shocking, the court agreed and banned publication of their photos (but not their names). Newspapers, TV stations and websites had to scramble to remove the photos from any publicly-accessible archives and add warnings that the photos are not to be published until the ban is lifted.

    Even I had to act. The photo above was taken during the police brutality protest last month. One of the protesters took a photo of Lapointe and made a wanted poster which was turned into a picket sign. I’ve deleted the photo from my Flickr collection and obscured his face in this post, because otherwise I could have been found guilty of contempt of court.

    I knew about the publication ban because I read the newspaper (and I take a keen interest in media issues). But plenty of others aren’t aware of it yet (or perhaps just choose to ignore it) and so there are still plenty of copies of these photos online. A quick Google search will turn them up pretty quickly, and they’re no doubt part of many photo collections taken from the protest.

    This just serves to underscore the absurdity of it all. The photos are already out there, and even the long arm of the law won’t be able to wipe out all traces of them. Those who would do harm to these officers could easily find copies.

    More importantly, though, this isn’t about protecting the identity of an underage rape victim, or a police informant, or a child involved in a divorce custody hearing. These are police officers. They have to wear their names on their uniforms when they’re on duty for a reason. They have some expectation of privacy in their private lives, but in a professional capacity they don’t have that freedom.

    Again, I have sympathy for the fear Lapointe and Pilote feel. But the threats against them are hardly conclusive, and even if you include the Mafia, premeditated attacks on off-duty police officers are extremely rare here.

    I disagree with the decision to impose a publication ban in this case. Of course, in the end it doesn’t matter. The public can live without pictures of these officers for a few months, and anyone who really needs a copy probably already has one.

    I can just imagine what will happen if that picket sign makes another appearance at a protest and officers try to arrest the person carrying it for breaking a publication ban.

    | Opinion, TV

    Low on cash? Just ask the gummit

    The federal government, apparently spooked enough by Canwest and CTVglobemedia’s cries that the mediocalypse is here, is reportedly considering a $150-million fund that would help small-market television stations. This would be in addition to the Local Programming Improvement Fund which has the same goal.

    As much as I’m not a fan of consumers paying for local TV stations they already get for free, even that would be preferable to a government bailout with who knows how many strings attached.

    | Montreal, Opinion

    Let’s hear from youthy people

    The City of Montreal is holding hearings about youth participation in the democratic process, and it wants to hear from young people. It’s not really clear what it wants to hear from young people exactly, but it has something to do with “their capacity to influence the development of their neighbourhood, their involvement in collective actions, and their interest in municipal affairs.”

    Being a soulless pit of bureaucracy, it issued a public notice (in PDF format, because young people want to print out everything they read online) inviting people to open forums where all questions have to be pre-approved 30 minutes before the meeting. Those wanting more information can see this page, deep within the city’s vast website (it took me a while to find it even though I knew what I was looking for), which has a bunch of other PDF documents.

    I’m just going to go ahead and predict that young people aren’t going to flock to this meeting in large numbers.

    For those who do want to go, the first meeting is April 20, 7pm at Verdun city hall (4555 Verdun St., right outside Verdun metro).

    | Media, Opinion

    CBC isn’t afraid to talk about itself

    By now just about everyone has heard about the 800 job cuts at the CBC and various other cost-cutting measures being taken. The cuts got quite a bit of attention, both from the media and from politicians. More than similar cuts from CTV, Canwest and others that preceded it.

    The main reason is that the CBC is publicly funded. Nobody can do anything about private media cutting jobs, but the government can do something about the CBC’s budget (and, of course, opposition MPs can grandstand and complain about the government without offering any budget-friendly suggestions on what they should be doing differently).

    Perhaps the media outlet that best covered the CBC cuts is the CBC itself. In fact, some might argue that CBC News spent a bit too much time talking about its own financial troubles to the detriment of other news stories, though others argue that Radio-Canada hasn’t been quite as vocal as its English counterpart.

    Second perhaps only to Canadian Press and certain bloggers, the CBC has been very interested in stories about the media. There’s even a section on its news page devoted to it (though it unfortunately throws in pop culture stories there too).

    I would argue that there’s a different culture at the CBC when it coms to newsgathering and transparency. When they said they were laying off 800 people, they put the word “layoffs” right in the headline of the press release. They didn’t talk about “streamlining” or “reductions” or “stop gap measures” that try to obscure the truth. CBC’s president, Hubert Lacroix, became a willing interview subject on just about every news show that would have him, explaining what this decision meant without any marketingese.

    The CBC not only tolerates but endorses a blog about the corporation that (while it’s accused by some of toeing the party line) is the most liberal such blog I’ve ever seen, with the freedom to criticize the CBC where such criticism is deserved.

    There’s an element of not just legally-mandated transparency but honesty at CBC that I think is sorely lacking at other publications and broadcasters. Bad news sucks, but news consumers are adults and they’ll understand decisions if they’re explained properly and honestly. They’re certainly much more willing to accept such decisions if they feel that they are part of the conversation and their concerns are being heard.

    One of the latest decisions to come to light is the cancellation of CBC News: Sunday, which has spawned a Facebook group in protest. Rather than try to pretend it doesn’t exist, the show’s website opened up a forum for viewers to express their feelings about the decision.

    I think there are lessons here for private news companies. Those who will survive the media collapse will be those who can connect with their consumers on a human level. It’s much easier to do that when they can trust you. Having a human face, warts and all, is a good way to start.

    | Opinion, TV

    CRTC newspaper ads are useless

    CRTC notice of consultation (March 30)

    CRTC notice of consultation (March 30)

    If you’re one of those people who still reads the newspaper, you’ve probably seen ads like this pop up every now and then. Thankfully, even with a recession, various government departments still feel the need to take out ads in the paper as a matter of policy, in the name of transparency.

    The advertisement above lets the public know about a public consultation about a request from TVA Group Inc. to amend the broadcasting license of a French-language cable channel.

    Except this ad doesn’t say anything useful from a consumer standpoint. It doesn’t say what channel TVA wants to amend the license for, nor does it say what the nature of that amendment is. These would seem to be pretty vital details in a public notice. You don’t have to get into too much detail, but an executive summary couldn’t hurt.

    For the record, CRTC-2009-94 is about a request to change the license for Prise 2 to add two programming categories, decrease the amount of time they have to wait before they can air old movies (it’s a “classic” movies channel) and reduce its Canadian content requirement.

    That certainly tells me a lot more about what’s going on than what you see in that ad.

    | Montreal, Opinion

    The audacity of gripe

    Campaign ad at Crémazie metro

    Campaign ad at Crémazie metro

    With only seven months to go until the Nov. 1 municipal election, Vision Montreal leader Benoit Labonté has launched his campaign, which includes ads like the one seen above as well as a blog which his duties as Ville-Marie mayor apparently leave him plenty of time to keep updated. (There are also the requisite YouTube, Twitter and Facebook pages)

    Labonté, whose public persona is so poor he’s being outpolled by the city’s equivalent of Ralph Nader, has a lot of work to do in those seven months if he’s going to be competitive in this fall’s election – both in his race for mayor and the downticket races for city councillors and borough executives that his party’s future depends on.

    His main fault is that nobody knows anything about him or what he’s about, other than his rather public falling out with Mayor Gérald Tremblay. That’s a problem entirely of his doing. When you see interviews or campaign videos, you hear words like “audace” and “espoir” and “intégrité” and whatever. But Tremblay could say the same about himself. There’s no differentiation between the two of them.

    It’s not a question of message. The two men simply don’t diverge enough in their opinions. Labonté is big on sustainable development and green policy (for the most part – see below). But so is Tremblay. Labonté wants the private sector to contribute to make this city better. But so does Tremblay.

    Labonté’s image problem stems from the simple fact that Tremblay has actually been a pretty good mayor. Sure, he’s had issues with the demerged suburbs, his executive committee performs far too much of the people’s work behind closed doors, the municipal bureaucracy is horribly bloated and the unions all hate his guts. But none of that would change in a Labonté administration.

    I tried to look at Vision Montreal’s platform to see what kind of policies they would follow, what kind of bylaws they would pass and what kind of budget they would create that would be different than the current administration. But I couldn’t find one, either on Labonté’s website or on the Vision Montreal one. Even his political “manifesto” doesn’t include any specific ideas in its 2,347 words. The closest thing I could find were a couple of videos posted a year ago, including the one above, which outline some things he’s done as borough mayor. But I’ve already pointed out the flaws in these (to recap: his plastic bag recycling system creates waste where there was none before; his Parco-Don is a gimmick that isn’t bringing in much money; and to add a new one – his commitment to pedestrianization of streets is tainted by his demand to get rid of a reserved bus lane in the Old Port because it interferes with traffic and parking).

    UPDATE (April 11): Spacing Montreal has links to show Labonté’s inconsistencies when it comes to his policies.

    Labonté needs to figure out what he’s about. Perhaps my view is tainted by the fact that he lied to me the one time I interviewed him, but I don’t think I’m the only one whose first impression of him is of a self-obsessed politician who will pander to whoever is necessary to win an election.

    Fortunately, he has seven months to fix that image and present a vision that has more ideas and fewer vague political clichés.

    Benoit Labonté's blog has lots of pictures of him

    Benoit Labonté's blog has lots of pictures of him

    Oh, and since I criticized Tremblay’s party website for having too many photos of him on it, I should probably point out that Labonté’s website has half a dozen photos of him on it too.

    | Fun, Opinion

    There’s no such thing as a flash mob

    When I interviewed Newmindspace co-founder Kevin Bracken after Montreal’s first metro party in 2007, the Torontonian told me he hated the term “flash mob“, mainly because it was created in order to make fun of it.

    After following various events that have been referred to as flash mobs in the media, it’s hard not to concur, if only because the term has been used to define almost any public gathering of strangers organized online.

    Most events of this nature can be split into one of two groups:

    1. the Improv Everywhere-style stunts in which people who may or may not know each other get together and pull a prank on unsuspecting bystanders in a public place
    2. public fun activities like metro parties or silent discos or snowball fights (such as the events Newmindspace organizes on a regular basis)

    The latter more accurately fits the description, but is hardly worthy of the rather negative term “mob”.

    I bring this up because of an event that happened yesterday: a public spectacle at the Berri-UQAM metro station that the public was invited to participate in. It was described as a “flash mob” by its creator, but it was really just a PR stunt.

    A PR stunt for cancer prevention, which I’m all for and everything, but a PR stunt nonetheless.

    What bugs me most is that this was organized through a “flash mob” Facebook group which was taken over by a marketing company without its members’ permission. I suppose it’s not the end of the world. People can just remove themselves from the group if they don’t like it. And who’s going to oppose a public event for cancer awareness?

    But it’s an example of grassroots fun being usurped by corporate interests. Instead of “flash mobs”, they’re now “street marketing” events. Yesterday, it was a yellow-scarfed song for cancer research. Will the next one be shilling for Doritos? Will commuters have to live in fear every day they go to work because they might be forced into some ill-conceived marketing stunt in which they’ve been made the sucker?

    We’ll see.

    Meanwhile, if you’re looking for non-corporate fun, Montreal’s pillow fight is Saturday at 3pm at Phillips Square.

    | Opinion

    The end of a Concordia dynasty

    From my archives in 2004: On the right, the thrill of victory; on the left, the agony of defeat

    From my archives in 2004: On the right, the thrill of victory; on the left, the agony of defeat

    In 2003, a slate of moderate (what their opponents would label as right-wing) student politicians called “Evolution, Not Revolution” achieved what had seemed impossible: winning Concordia University’s biggest student vote of the year and taking control of the Concordia Student Union executive against an established radical left-wing that had controlled it for years. Even though public opinion was clearly on their side, the mainstream of the student body didn’t vote, because they didn’t care.

    Continue reading →

    | Media, Montreal, Opinion

    Time to cut back on messages from the mayor

    In case you missed it, last month the borough of Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-dame-de-Grâce-de-our-borough-name-is-too-long relaunched its quarterly newsletter, renaming it “Le Citoyen” and giving it a newspaperish look. It also moved to a five-issues-a-year schedule instead of four.

    This caused some concern from those who saw this as the borough attempting to replace the NDG Monitor, which recently decided to stop its print edition, with a government propaganda machine which would never be critical of the borough.

    The Gazette’s Henri Aubin takes a critical look at the first issue of Le Citoyen, which is available as a PDF in English and French on the borough’s website. The Suburban’s Dan Delmar also looks at Le Citoyen, with quotes from journalist-turned-borough-PR-director Michel Therrien.

    A direct comparison is somewhat silly here. One is a quarterly newsletter, and the other was a small, understaffed weekly newspaper that had maybe one article a week that provided anything resembling interesting local news.

    Still, there’s a larger question here: If the private news media is unwilling or unable to provide loal news, will it be up to the towns themselves – and their seemingly limitless communications budgets – to provide it for us? Could future newspaper shutdowns be followed by newsletter startups that try to fill the gap in information about local events and (uncontroversial) informtion?

    It’s not the borough’s fault that The Monitor shut down, so there’s no sense in blaming them for it, or calling it unethical, as The Monitor’s Toula Foscolos does.

    What should be outraging people (like former councillor Jeremy Searle and Aubin) is that the borough is spending $73,000 a year (and probably more in editorial, design and other costs) to distribute a newsletter to 80,000 people who won’t read it because it’s filled with self-congratulatory messages that don’t say anything even remotely useful.

    Take this from borough mayor Michael Applebaum:

    Applebaum message in Le Citoyen (Feb. 2009)

    Applebaum message in Le Citoyen (Feb. 2009)

    Now, other than the fact that Applebaum is now on Montreal’s executive committee, responsible for sports and recreation, did you learn anything from the text above?

    This isn’t a problem limited to CDN/NDG. All the boroughs have these kinds of newsletters, and they’re all filled with messages from elected officials talking about how honoured they are at something or other. Some include messages from each of the councillors as well, wasting untold amounts of space and money.

    Not only do our highest elected officials have to spend time writing (or, in Mayor Gérald Tremblay’s case, hire writers to compose) absolutely pointless messages, but they then must be edited, translated and laid out in these newsletters, which are then printed and sent out.

    There’s a usefulness to borough newsletters. The last one in my borough gave details about changes to garbage and recycling collection schedules. But nobody in my apartment building read it because these things get tossed away as soon as they arrive (just like the local Transcontinental weekly and the Publi-Sac).

    Perhaps, during this time where everyone is cutting back their budgets, it might be a good idea to spend less time on these self-congratulatory messages and only distribute printed newsletters that contain information that’s actually useful to citizens.

    And maybe the city can spend its communications budget making its website easier to navigate instead of patting itself on the back in print (or putting up ads everywhere asking people not to move to the suburbs).

    | Montreal, Opinion

    Parking meters: It’s all supply and demand

    So it seems the Association des restaurateurs is in a tiff because the city suggested that its opinions on parking meters (namely, that they shouldn’t exist) are “marginal”.

    Okay, they’re only saying that their hours should be reduced, but business-owners groups always comes out against increases in meter rates or hours, and in favour of their reductions. They also oppose most reserved bus lanes because those take parking spots away.

    The argument is that drivers’ are frustrated at having to pay excessive meter rates, and this encourages urban sprawl and moves to the suburbs.

    Really? I’m not a driver, so I can’t speak from experience, but it seems to me drivers aren’t annoyed at paying meter rates as much as they are annoyed at having to drive around the block 50 times looking for a spot. After all, as pissed off as they are about paying meter rates, they’re not pissed off enough to stop using them to capacity.

    Parking spaces are a finite resource downtown. Trying to accomodate drivers is a strategy that is destined to fail. Therefore the alternative is to encourage other forms of transportation, like buses and taxis (which don’t need to be parked) and bicycles (which don’t take up much space).

    Even if you reject that conclusion, parking meter management should be simple, conforming to the rules of supply and demand. If the meters are used to capacity, the rates should go up until the demand is reduced. If demand is so low that the spaces are unused, rates should be reduced to encourage more use and keep those businesses happy.

    What’s so complicated in all this. I mean, besides the political grandstanding?

    | Opinion, Video

    A lack of decorum in the House of Commons

    Ian Capstick points out this Macleans post which points to this video of House of Commons speaker Peter Milliken reminding members of Parliament that they shouldn’t be attacking each other personally in the House.

    It’s kind of sad that this video exists at all. I haven’t watched question period recently, and I don’t know what specific incident prompted this, but I’ve watched enough to say that this could be read after question period on just about every day the House is in session. Members are banging their hands against their desks, applauding, booing, yelling incoherently, and just plain heckling people on the opposing side.

    Why is this?

    Is it tradition? We take our parliamentary system from the British, and a look at their house shows an even worse situation when it comes to respect of honourary members. But we’ve grown past a lot of our traditions.

    Is there some other reason that this background noise is necessary when people are asking others politically-loaded questions? Maybe it’s like a laugh track on a sitcom. The cheers and jeers tell us subconsciously whether we should accept or reject a particular person’s point of view, since we’re too stupid to judge the questions and answers on their own merits. But, of course, for every cheer there’s a boo, so it all kind of washes out in the end.

    Is it to keep the ratings up? Nobody wants to hear politicians asking and answering questions. But when they quiz each other to the background noise equivalent of “OH NO HE DIDN’T!”, it suddenly becomes more fun to watch. The rest of parliamentary sessions, which include statements from members, petitions, or the dedication of National Honour Your Garbage Collector Day, are dreadfully boring. The yelling might just be to wake us up so we know to pay attention, the equivalent of those sound effects machines on morning radio.

    Sadly, none of these explanations instill in me much pride at being represented by this government.

    | In the news, Montreal, Opinion, Photos

    Brutality

    Sunday was the annual march against police brutality, traditionally the most violent of the year. It’s when people who want to break things and yell “FUCK THA PO-LICE” gather to do exactly that. Then, when some of them are arrested for vandalism or throwing rocks at police officers, they yell “POLICE BRUTALITY!” because they were roughed up a bit during the arrest.

    Here’s a slideshow of photos I took (I was late because someone – probably a protester – killed power to the tracks just before it was to begin, but Luc Lavigne has better photos from the beginning of the protest anyway).

    The Collectif opposé à la brutalité policière, which organizes the protest, is outraged (OUTRAGED!) that the city and police are now demanding that they be provided with the route the protest takes so that streets can be closed ahead of time. They say they did their best to minimize violence and property destruction because they asked people not to break things when the protest started.

    Of course, just as the police protect their colleagues who surpass their authority, protesters protect the masked vandals who are more interested in getting away with what they can than they are making a point. So we get wanton property destruction (which only serves to sway public opinion away from one’s cause) and mass arrests (which no doubt caught a bunch of innocent bystanders in its huge net – La Presse is trying to track them down).

    What’s sad, of course, is that police abuse of power is a real issue that deserves attention. The Fredy Villanueva case is already the subject of a public inquiry (which makes me wonder what exactly the protesters want in this case) and the death of Robert Dziekanski brought police procedure and Taser use to strong public criticism.

    In the end, the public sympathy for victims of police brutality is undermined by protests such as these, because they show that when properly prepared for an onslaught of rock-throwing anarchists, cops (for the most part) keep their cool and keep the peace.

    Similar thoughts from Patrick Lagacé,