Category Archives: Opinion

| Opinion, Video

Le français, avant tout

I’m getting a bit tired of the language debate in Quebec.

I feel a bit guilty saying it, because the neverending battle has become so central to the province’s identity that it’s almost like I can’t call myself a true Québécois unless I have a spot on the front lines. What does it mean to be a Quebecer if not to constantly argue about French vs. English, federalism vs. sovereignty, Liberal vs. PQ/BQ?

The most popular post on this blog, by far, in terms of comments is a criticism I made in 2007 about anglo rights crusader Howard Galganov. The comment mark on that post just passed 500 (all of which I had to individually approve), and new comments are added every day. Discussion of the statements made in the post or of Galganov himself have long fallen by the wayside. The four participants who keep the thread going just yell at each other, call each other racist and compare each other to Hitler in their discussions of the great divide. I block those comments that go too far, but if I deleted those that I didn’t think advanced the conversation enough, over 90% would disappear immediately. At this point, I’m just watching the counter go up, in awe about how much time people can waste trying to change the mind of someone who is obviously never going to agree with you.

Autre

I’m an anglophone. Even though I’ve lived in Quebec my entire life, I’m seen as the enemy. No different than the Rest of Canada. It’s assumed that I’m just waiting for my chance to make it in Toronto or New York, and that I don’t really belong here because I don’t really want to be here. Though I love Quebec as much for its culture (which is inescapably intertwined with its language) as its politics (which is inescapably intertwined with language issues), because I use English more than French in my daily life I’m set aside from real Quebecers.

Once, in a conversation with some young francophone journalists, I was asked about my opinion on Quebec politics in a way that gave me the impression I was introducing these people to a culture they’d only read about. I felt like I was giving them a sociology lesson on what it’s like to be an anglo Quebecer.

One of the things that was odd about the conversation is that it came a bit out of nowhere. People don’t stop me in the street to debate politics. I’ve never been refused service at a commercial establishment on account of my language. Francophone bloggers link to me, and I link to them, with little regard to the fact that our posts are in different languages, unless the thing were talking about is language politics. Quebecers are more concerned with daily life, gossiping or getting laid than they are convincing others of their point of view on separation.

I got dragged into a brief debate about my positions on Bill 101 recently, and though I have serious issues with some of its provisions that seem more anti-English than pro-French (and the psychological factor and selective enforcement only exacerbate the anti-English sentiment), part of me wanted to scream out at one point: “I don’t care!” I can read French signs fine. I can communicate fine in that language (just don’t ask me to write in it for a living). In that sense, Bill 101 doesn’t really affect me. Though I cringe at how much the government is spending on language enforcement rather than language education, I think there are far more pressing issues for it to deal with than reforming our language law.

Pure laine

I bring this up because of a couple of debates going on that really make me wonder where Quebec’s priorities lie.

La Presse’s André Pratte had to apologize on Friday for noting that Michael Sabia, the ex-Bell CEO who has just been named to head the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, is (a) not a Quebecer and (b) doesn’t speak French very well. It seems he was wrong on both counts. Sabia has lived in Quebec for 16 years (“how long do you have to live in Montreal before you become a Quebecer?“) and his French, while accented, is fine. He attributed his first error to “un détestable réflexe québécois” – namely that if you’re anglo, you’re not a Quebecer. Believe me, this is a big problem. It’s not just in Quebec, of course. People, media and PR agencies all over Canada will look at someone with brown skin and assume they’re an immigrant. In the U.S., if you’re latino, it’s assumed you’re an illegal immigrant or the descendant of one.

I accept Pratte’s apology, but he wasn’t the only one to bring this up. Sabia needed to defend himself from an attack by Bernard Landry, saying he’s now chosen to live in Quebec three times since 1993.

UPDATE: No, wait, La Presse has gone back to saying he doesn’t speak French well enough for their liking.

Now we know why there are rules against political interference in the Caisse’s affairs. If something as petty as province of birth is a political issue (and deemed more important than making money for Quebec pensioners) then who knows how many ways 125 MNAs could figure out to screw with the system and doom our finances in order to maintain political correctness.

As Martin Patriquin points out, “Quebec must be the only place in the world where it actually matters what language money speaks.”

Not just money, but pucks.

Jeu de puissance

The other debate, which has just started, is over who will fill Guy Carbonneau’s shoes as head coach of the Canadiens. For any of the other 29 NHL teams, the only criterion would be the ability to coach a team of players to a Stanley Cup victory. (Well, that and not being a child molester, hockey gambling addict or 9/11 terrorist, I guess.) But in Montreal, they want to add another: the ability to speak French. And because former Hamilton Bulldogs coach Don Lever is a prime candidate (he was promoted to Habs assistant coach when Carbonneau was fired), there’s already discussion that, no matter how good a hockey coach he might be, he can’t get the job because he won’t be able to speak properly to the media and to fans. Even Bob Gainey, who speaks French fine but with a strong accent, isn’t good enough for the people at RDS.

The Gazette had a little fun with that Saturday, suggesting some intensive training courses and giving a list of simple phrases for an anglo coach to learn.

This debate should come as no surprise. The same debate has been going on ever since Saku Koivu was promoted to be the Canadiens’ captain. Patrick Lagacé complained about it when he was at the Journal (though he’s softened his stance at La Presse – Lagacé the old softy disputes this in a comment below) in a column more notable in media circles for its hilarious follow-up. Of course, there are plenty of NHL players who don’t speak a word of English, but nobody complains about that. After all, their job is to play hockey, not to give speeches. But, in defence of this particular point, there aren’t any NHL captains who can’t at least carry on a conversation in the language of Gary Bettman.

And then there’s debate any time you see a trade, a call-up, a healthy scratch, or even a line-change which alters the makeup of the team to make it less francophone. It doesn’t matter what Guillaume Latendresse, Maxim Lapierre or Mathieu Dandenault’s skills are. What matters is that they can be interviewed in French on RDS during intermission, and therefore they must be on the team and in the lineup. For these people, a Patrice Brisebois is more valuable than an Andrei Markov, and certainly more than a Mike Komisarek.

Fans can demand these things. It’s their right. And Canadiens fans aren’t exactly known for their logic or cool-headedness anyway. And it’s the government’s right to demand that the head of the Caisse is a Quebec-born francophone who watches Star Académie.

Priorités

But when you say that language and nationality is more important than skill, you can’t complain when you don’t get results compared to others. You can’t complain that the Caisse is losing more money than other pension funds when you passed over a qualified anglophone for a less qualified francophone for the job. You can’t complain that the Canadiens failed to bring home their expected 25th Stanley Cup when you cut the field of head coach candidates to less than half of what it was so that RDS viewers don’t feel uncomfortable.

In the United States, the military is mocked because it fires gay Arabic translators even when it’s in desperate need of them. We make fun of the Americans because they put what you are above what you know, to their own disadvantage.

Sometimes, I wonder if Quebec is any better.

Except, I’m tired of debating the point. So I’m just going to hit “publish” and move on to something more interesting.

UPDATE: More discussion of this on Lagacé’s blog, which also talks about Simons’s opposition to that stupid OQLF sticker campaign.

| Opinion, TV, Video

Creamer

Comedy Central blackout

For those who haven’t seen it yet, the full interview between Jon Stewart and CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer has been posted to the Comedy Network website. The Daily Show invites us to go to their thedailyshow.com website, but because of a stupid deal between Comedy Central and CTV’s Comedy Network, any time someone in the U.S. links to a Comedy Central clip, you’re shown the message above and are forced to find the video – from scratch – on the Comedy Network website (assuming the clip even exists on it).

I’ll spare you analysis of the interview, since apparently there is no shortage of journalists who have nothing better to do than talk about what was on television the night before. Unfortunately, while plenty of pundits are liberally quoting the interview, judging Cramer’s body language or talking about how much of a hit it is on YouTube, there isn’t much talk about what this means for CNBC. The inevitable comparisons to Stewart’s appearance on CNN’s Crossfire in 2004 have already been made. Since Crossfire was cancelled months after Stewart’s appearance (and CNN has since moved more toward polite analysis from partisan hacks instead of shouting debate), the reasonable question to ask is whether CNBC will also undergo a radical shift as a result of this public depantsing.

Just pulling this out of my ass here, but I’m guessing there will be some changes to CNBC’s tone, with more confrontational interviews with corporate CEOs, more skepticism of Wall Street companies and get-rich-quick schemes. (Of course, these will be more the result of the market collapse than Stewart’s prodding.) But Mad Money isn’t going anywhere. Jim Cramer isn’t suddenly going to drop his sound effects and start doing more reasoned analysis. And anyone who thinks that it will be doing a lot more serious investigative business reporting in the long term is kidding themselves. It’s hard, and there’s no money in it.

And if any cable network understands the profits that can come from getting high ratings as cheaply as possible, it’s CNBC.

UPDATE: Bill Brioux has the Canadian ratings numbers for the show on The Comedy Network and CTV.

| In the news, Opinion

Students shouldn’t manage student finances

In Sunday’s Gazette, universities columnist Peggy Curran has a piece on the current silliness at Concordia University in which hundreds of thousands of dollars are unaccounted for (so much so even the auditors can’t figure it out), a huge blackmail plot is alleged and everyone is suing everyone else.

In it, Curran points the finger at student apathy, saying people who go to university just don’t care enough about what goes on in their student government:

The truth is, your average student is usually too busy with classes, work, movies, gym and love life to pay attention to student government. So the decision-making and, more importantly, that ginormous bankroll, falls to that small clique of keeners for whom politics is passion and bedside reading is Robert’s Rules of Order.

This argument sounded familiar to me, so I went looking in the archives. Allison Lampert said the same thing eight years ago, when students started to turn on their radical left-wing student government:

It’s a university with a history of political activism, and a group of older, working-class students who feel their social causes are as important as what they learn in the classroom.

It’s also a university that attracts mature working students, who prioritize their jobs and part-time classes over voting for student council.

“The same things that make a small number of students really active also make a large number of students less involved,” observed Concordia University student Zev Tiefenbach, 23.

…Some observers argue the CSU executive was elected because of voter apathy at Concordia – about 7 per cent of students cast ballots in the last election, compared with 20 per cent at McGill University.

Their explanation: Concordia has a larger number of part-time students – 45 per cent of the student population – who are often less inclined to get involved in school politics.

Apathy is certainly a problem, no matter what the political leanings of the student government. And apathy breeds corruption. But the CSU actually gets a lot of students involved. Its elections have gotten as much as 10% turnout, which is very high for student elections in large universities. The fact that these scandals are being uncovered should be considered a good sign in that regard. I’m sure there are plenty of questionable expenses from smaller student groups, like clubs and faculty-specific student associations. But few people care about those.

It’s not just Concordia, either. Dawson’s student union learned a hard lesson last fall when an executive went crazy with a union-financed credit card.

Should the university step in, and take the financial reins? Even if they wanted to they couldn’t. The CSU is an accredited student union that’s separate from the university, and Concordia can no more step in and take control than an employer can take control of a workers’ union.

The decision must be the CSU’s to make, and while they’ve already promised even tighter financial controls, that’s not the answer. After all, financial controls are what got them into this mess in the first place, after almost $200,000 went missing from its coffers in 1999 and 2000.

And it’s been shown time and time again that turnover every four or five years causes an inescapable loss of institutional memory, and the slow deterioration of any good intentions that may have been placed there by predecessors. Outside staff hired to make up for that loss (like the bookkeeper accused of mismanaging those hundreds of thousands at the CSU) end up gaining more and more power through their growing knowledge, and learn how to manipulate things behind the scenes.

Instead, the CSU and other student associations charged with managing any money simply shouldn’t be doing so. They should setup an independent organization to handle their finances, sign their cheques and do financial reports (with another accounting firm doing the auditing, of course). Political decisions would rest with the elected student government, but balancing the chequebook would be left to professionals instead of 20-year-old students with no experience handling a million-dollar-plus budget.

My worry isn’t so much about the CSU, which has a few eyes on it at all times, but more about the smaller organizations getting student money that aren’t the subject of constant attempts at coups d’état. Their financial mismanagement – or just imprudent choices of where to spend money – might go on for years before anyone notices them.

If student government want to be truly proactive about solving this problem, they first have to admit they have a problem, and that they need help to solve it.

UPDATE: A McGill student association executive resigned over personal use of a $2,000 hotel gift certificate that was deemed inappropriate.

| Media, Opinion, Technology

New Media Fund helps new media (as long as it’s television)

The Canadian government today announced that it would combine the Canadian Television Fund and Canadian New Media Fund, two government-run funds that give money to Canadian productions, into the Canadian Media Fund, which would give $134.7 million a year to support both conventional television and “new media”, meaning those Internet things.

It’s being described as removing funding guarantees from CBC/RadCan (the CTF “crisis” started when cable companies refused to hand over money because they said too much of it was going to unpopular programming), though the Mother Corp is happy about the announcement because it allows its in-house productions to be eligible for the fund.

The Conservative government emphasizes that the new “fixed” fund will be focused on funding popular programming like Flashpoint, and not those boring CBC dramas that only get a few hundred thousand viewers. I’m hoping this means there will be more Canadian porn out there, because porn is always popular.

So, where can innovative Canadian new media developers get their cash? Not so fast:

“Applicants will be required to make their projects available across a minimum of two distribution platforms, including television.”

In other words, you can’t apply for the Canadian Media Fund unless “media” is television. It doesn’t matter if you’re popular or not, whether your content is primarily video or not. Canadian productions like LoadingReadyRun or Prenez Garde Aux Chiens are not eligible, because they’re not on television.

Just the kind of forward-looking outside-the-box ideas we’ve come to expect from our federal culture overlords.

UPDATE: Michel Dumais agrees with me, and has other critical comments about the new media fund.

| Opinion, TV

Won’t someone think of the children?

The past few days, the local media (and hence my news feeds) have been inundated with stories about Jean-François Harrisson. If you don’t know the story by now, you’re clearly out of the loop.

Harrisson is a star on VRAK.TV, a Quebec franco youth cable channel. He was arrested this week and charged with possession and distribution of child pornography, as well as drug possession. As you can imagine, being a children’s television star not only makes this ironic but puts the channel in an awkward position.

On Friday VRAK.TV reacted by saying it would pull all programming that features Harrisson until further notice. Similarly, Radio-Canada had to spike an episode of Pyramide with him and a youth employment centre said it would ask schools not to show an educational video for students that features him.

Though I think these decisions are more about good PR and silencing outraged parents than they are about protecting children, it’s their decisions to make. This kind of thing is always arbitrary and tends to have more to do with a cost-benefit analysis than morality (banning Chris Brown’s music is simple after he beat up his girlfriend, but I don’t recall cable channels cutting Seinfeld reruns and Lethal Weapon movies when everyone found out that Michael Richards and Mel Gibson were racists).

But child porn is a pretty serious charge, above most celebrity DUI/assault/drug charges but below O.J.ing your wife. So go ahead and throw the baby out with the bathwater, banning countless hours of television footage because one guy did something bad when he was off the set.

Keep in mind, of course, that he hasn’t been convicted of anything yet. A press conference is scheduled for Monday so his agent can present a public response ot the charges. UPDATE: The press conference was cancelled at the last minute after the agent realized there’s an ongoing criminal investigation and commenting on it is a bad idea.

Let’s talk about kiddie porn, kids!

The measure taken that really gets me is opening up a discussion forum on VRAK.TV about this issue so the children themselves can talk about it. The forum has the rather vague title “Derniers événements” and the introductory text doesn’t mention Harrisson by name or give any clue what it’s talking about.

Maybe I’m missing something here. I understand the need to talk to children when bad grown-up things happen. But how does an anonymous web forum devoted to the discussion of a guy charged with child pornography help children in any way?

Am I the only one that finds it ironic that they consider his face taboo and will pull all scenes with it from the airwaves but seem perfectly content to invite children to comment on a web forum about the child pornography charges he’s facing?

Discussion of things like this online by children is inevitable. If they didn’t have a dedicated forum, the discussion would happen on other forums, or on Facebook or somewhere else. But having an adult explain the issue to them and answer their questions in a heavily moderated forum would make a heck of a lot more sense than this online chat free-for-all, no?

| Opinion, Public transit, West Island

Beaconsfield applies NIMBY to parking

Here’s a really short-sighted idea: Beaconsfield town council has approved a measure that would reserve 30 parking spaces near the Beaurepaire commuter train station only to permit-holding Beaconsfield residents.

While 30 spots at a station in Montreal’s equivalent to the middle of nowhere won’t make much of a difference in the long run, the worry is that this will become a trend. Other municipalities might enact similar measures, making it more difficult to park near train stations. Imagine if Pierrefonds restricted parking near the Roxboro and Sunnybrooke stations to only its residents, or if Montreal did the same for the Du Ruisseau station on the Deux-Montagnes line.

Such NIMBYism (while not foreign to Beaconsfield) is counter-productive to traffic problems and only serves to build walls between neighbouring towns.

| Business, Opinion, TV

Videotron wants more money

I got a letter in the mail today from Videotron saying that they’re upping the basic digital cable price by $1 a month (plus taxes) as of March 15. I wouldn’t have minded it so much (hey, times are tough, right?) if my bill hadn’t already gone up by $1 a month (plus taxes) when Videotron decided to cancel one of my channels and then charged me a new, higher rate when I changed my lineup (because it was a “new” service).

So why are they charging more now? Well, all the investments they’re making in infrastructure (that won’t affect me), including all those jobs they’re creating in Quebec.

And those investments have made a difference, after all (emphasis mine):

Customer surveys indicate that our customers’ satisfaction level remains high; indeeed we are in the top league of suppliers of cable TV products in Québec.

Well, if Videotron is one of Quebec’s top cable TV providers, then it must be good, right? And if customer surveys reveal high satisfaction, I’d be stupid if I wasn’t satisfied too. I mean, it’s not like Videotron has an absolute monopoly over digital cable TV in this area and is abusing that to suck as much money out of customers as possible, knowing full well that their only other option is another customer service nightmare with Bell’s satellite TV.

Taking a look at parent company Quebecor’s latest quarterly financial report (PDF), I see that Videotron made $579 million in profit in the first nine months of 2008. Mind you, most of that money was taken up by amortization and capital costs, which left a paltry $150 million of actual profit from Videotron’s 1.7 million customers (which works out to about $100 profit per subscriber over nine months).

So I can really see how that extra $1 a month is vital to the future operation of Videotron’s services.

UPDATE: Rogers is also raising its cable/internet rates. Coincidence?

| Navel-gazing, Opinion, Technology

10 reasons why Twitter still sucks

I’ve never been a fan of Twitter. Looking at people’s status updates (or “tweets”, as its members have been told to refer to them), all I saw were a bunch of @ signs and TinyURL addresses. There seemed to be very little that was actually there.

But new media experts around the globe were embracing it. Some people who had been star bloggers a few years ago had all but abandoned them in favour of this new service. They heralded it as some holy grail of journalism (a suggestion I’ve already attacked head-on), as the best way to get breaking news and as being better than blogs.

So a few weeks ago, I setup a Twitter account. I did what I was supposed to do, follow some friends and start posting updates. Few of them would be considered really interesting. Anything important went on the blog, where I have more readership.

Before long I started getting messages that people were following me. A lot of people I don’t know. They probably found me through mutual Twitter friends, since I hadn’t posted my Twitter account here until now (mind you, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out). Unlike blog readership, which I’m sure includes hundreds of people I’ve never met, Twitter seems more personal. I get a message whenever one clicks on the “follow” button, and I see an image of that person’s face with a list of their updates.

I installed one of those Twitter programs (I settled on TwitterFox, which I’m not entirely crazy about but will do for now) to facilitate the Twittering, and I setup my cellphone so I could send Twitter updates by text message (unfortunately the reverse isn’t true, so I can’t read other people’s Twitter messages through my cellphone).

Anyway, you’re here to read about why I don’t like it, despite having used it for a month. I’ll give it to you in point form:

  1. The signal-to-noise ratio. When people talk about all the great information available on Twitter, they’re right. But the problem is that all this great information is buried under piles of @ replies, links, corrections, jokes and pointless trivia. It varies depending on the user, but the way Twitter is setup seems to encourage the noise rather than discourage it.
  2. Technical limitations. This is the other biggie, and it goes beyond the 140-character limit, though that’s certainly a big part of it. The biggest annoyance is links. Because most URLs won’t fit in the 140-character limit, various URL shortening services like TinyURL are used. The problem is that this obscures the actual URL. (Some Twitter clients will decode such URLs, but it would be easier if such a thing were handled internally.) Twitter RSS feeds leave a lot to be desired (clickable links would help), and some simple features like “retweeting” need to be done manually or through some third-party application. I realize that text messages are the reason for the 140-character limit, but how much of Twitter’s traffic comes from cellphones?
  3. Single point of failure. Though I haven’t yet experienced the Fail Whale, I expect it will come up soon. Twitter hasn’t yet found a way of making money (though they’re working on it), and the fact that it’s a privately-run service means if anything happens to Twitter’s servers, everyone is cut off. There is an open-source competition in Laconi.ca/Identi.ca (an Evan Prodromou project), but like the old instant messaging wars, it’s not about what service is better, it’s about what service your friends use. Laconi.ca is planning Twitter integration, which might help that, but until then you need to use both services unless you want to be disconnected.
  4. Microblogging vs. instant messaging. This is largely a cultural thing, which means it could change. But the impression I get from looking at Twitter posts is that it’s more of an open chat than it is about open blogging. Lots of replies (many consisting only of useless things like “:)”) or other messages that are more about conversation than information.
  5. Unwritten rules. I’ve seen this previously for blogs as well, with self-appointed community leaders dictating rules for how others should use a medium. Even though we’re not sure how Twitter should be used, there’s no end to the number of etiquette rules. You can’t update too much. You have to follow others. You can’t follow too many people if not enough people are following you.
  6. Duplication. If it’s on Twitter and it’s big, someone (either the twitterer or a follower) will put it on a blog anyway.
  7. Constant plugging. Some Twitter accounts are setup to automatically read from an RSS feed, post the first 100 or so characters and include a TinyURL link. I could just add that feed to my Google Reader and save a bunch of steps. In other cases it’s not automated, but bloggers will point out every time they post something new to their blog. It’s redundant and annoying.
  8. Time wasting. You’re in the middle of a blog post or reading something and bam, there’s another Twitter message to read. You’re interrupted by someone pointing out something they saw on the Internet that was funny. Did you really need this in real-time? You get back to what you were doing and bam another Twitter message. Very little of what gets posted on Twitter needs to be read immediately, and yet that’s the way it is. It’s a distraction and it wastes time.
  9. @ replies and #hashtags look ugly. Sure, you can turn @replies off when they’re not directed at you (or your friends), but then you risk losing important information that’s passed that way.
  10. No privacy. Even if their updates are public, you can’t follow someone without them knowing unless you do so by manually checking their page or putting their RSS feed in your feed reader. In fact, everyone knows who everyone else follows. Perhaps this is a feature, but it doesn’t make much sense for me. Twitter makes no distinction between types of followers, and I don’t want people thinking I’m friends with people and groups I just want to keep tabs on.

Despite all this, I’m not dismissing the concept of microblogging. Laconi.ca solves many of the technical problems (which suggests that Twitter can solve them too), and others can be fixed over time with culture change.

Despite its failings, people still use Twitter and (like Facebook) it’s a source that journalists have to mine for information. It involves filtering out a lot of noise, but there are nuggets of gold inside. So whether I like it or not I’ll still have to keep using it. Unlike David Akin, who is de-twittering, I still think there’s information that can be delivered using this medium.

But I won’t be using it any time soon to disseminate any important information. Follow me if you want, but you’re not going to see much quality. Anything I have to say, even briefly, of any substance will just be said here. There’s no minimum length for my blog posts.

| Montreal, Opinion, Public transit

AMT gives back … with coupons

The AMT today announced that they are going to be compensating users who have been inconvenienced by all the delays caused by train breakdowns and other issues over the past month.

Well, kind of, anyway.

What they’re actually doing is discounting the price of March, April and May TRAM passes for people who take the Deux Montagnes and Dorion/Rigaud lines. (The discounts are steep too, 50% for March, and 25% for the other months – though those are just for Deux Montagnes users.)

And how are they going to determine who uses these lines? Well, the brilliant strategists at the AMT have come up with this:

Un coupon de compensation sera distribué le mercredi 18 février en pointe du matin à l’embarquement dans toutes les gares des lignes Montréal/Deux-Montagnes et Montréal/Dorion-Rigaud.

In other words, they’re handing out coupons to people taking the train the morning of the 18th, and anyone who has the coupon can get the discount (but only if they get their passes at Central Station, Lucien L’Allier station or Vendôme station). There is no way to get the coupon other than using the train during morning rush hour on Feb. 18 (and then you have to repeat the process on March 18 and April 16 for the April and May passes).

UPDATE: The AMT has added Feb. 19 and 20 after complaints from transit users.

I can’t begin to describe how stupid this is. But I’ll take my best shot:

  • Not everyone who was inconvenienced is going to take the train on these days, and are going to get really pissed off that they can’t get a coupon any other way
  • Not everyone taking the train on these mornings will have been inconvenienced by the train breakdowns. And considering that a 50% reduction of the cost of a pass is a huge savings for people living far away (up to $100), some will probably go out of their way to take the morning train that day, making that particular morning commute even more unbearable.
  • This system offers no compensation for those who use tickets instead of a pass, or who don’t plan on using the train in March, April or May.
  • Most importantly, the people who were inconvenienced by the train breakdowns don’t care as much about compensation as they do fixing the problem and getting to work on time. This doesn’t do anything to fix that.

AMT’s train solution: Take the bus

Among the other things contained in the announcement, the AMT is reducing the capacity of trains on the Deux Montagnes line during rush hour, going from 10 cars to eight, so that repairs can be made. Since these cars are already overfilled, they’re setting up special buses to shuttle people between train stations and metro stations near the Deux Montagnes line. The STL is also increasing service to bus #26, which goes between the Ste. Dorothée station and Montmorency metro.

Back from the future

Another measure being taken is reversing schedule changes that were made earlier in the year on the Deux Montagnes line. The morning rush hour schedule, which involved more trains departing from Deux Montagnes, will be reverted to the 2008 schedule starting Feb. 16, since the rolling stock will be unable to handle the increased number of passengers and the increased hours of service.

No information available

Finally, the AMT put on its website a page which gives real-time information about train service.

| Blogosphere, Media, Opinion, Technology

Nothing like a blogger popularity contest

This morning on Christiane Charette’s show on Radio-Canada, three stars of the Quebec web were invited to compile a list of the most influential Quebec web celebrities.

Like most ideas, this one was stolen from a similar worldwide list created by Forbes magazine, which put celebrity gossipist Perez Hilton at the top (just to give you an idea of what criteria they use).

All three of them posted to their blogs asking readers to make suggestions: Bruno Guglielminetti, Michelle Blanc and Dominic Arpin. Their posts got a bunch of comments (some of them wanting to plug their own blogs), and also prompted other bloggers to offer their own lists:

But there were also a lot of comments, especially from other bloggers, about how such a list goes against the entire spirit of the web.

Martine Pagé has the best writeup about the problems with this process, so much so that I feel kind of silly going over the same points. Her comments were also echoed by other bloggers.

Like her, I’ll admit that I scanned the lists at least subconsciously to see if I was mentioned. (Blanc said it best: “on se rend vite compte que les listes, on s’en fou, mais qu’il faut être dedans.”) More consciously, though, I wanted to see what kind of people made each list, and what kind of criteria were used to select them. Did the lists include:

  • Anglophones?
  • Professional journalists (like Patrick Lagacé)?
  • People who are active on Twitter/Facebook/etc. but don’t have blogs?
  • People who are active bloggers but not on Twitter/Facebook/etc.?
  • Executives of web companies who don’t do anything personal online?

They seemed to agree that their lists should be confined to those whose popularity stems mainly from the Internet (so no Lagacé). They also included people like Patrick Boivin and Michel Beaudet of Têtes à claques who don’t blog. Blanc explains her reasoning.

The mutually-agreed-upon top 10 are listed on Charette’s site. Guglielminetti and Blanc also provide their top 25 (Arpin says to look at his blogroll). It’s very easy to see the influence of the three on the list: lots of representation from web video producers (five), and tech/social media/marketing bloggers (three). Renart L’éveillé points out that news/opinion/political bloggers are conspicuously absent from these lists (probably because many of them are professional journalists and were excluded for that reason).

As Pagé points out, the same names tend to come up in these kinds of lists. That’s not because these three experts didn’t do their jobs properly and focused on their friends, it’s because that’s the nature of the Web. Your Web is made up of your Facebook friends, who you follow on Twitter, which blogs you read and which YouTube channels you’re subscribed to. There’s an infinite supply out there, and they’re all of different types, so everyone’s web is going to be different, which makes this list all the more silly (in their defence, the panelists are fully aware of how silly this exercise is).

There’s already an outlet for self-obsessed bloggers who want to rank themselves: It’s called Tout le monde en blogue, and it judges strictly by traffic numbers (participating blogs place counters on their pages, which show their ranking to their readers). It’s stupid, it’s vain, it’s shallow and it’s pointless. But at least it’s objective.

Maybe we should leave the lists to them.

UPDATE: More after-the-fact commentary from Yves Williams, Mario Asselin and (briefly) Patrick Tanguay.

UPDATE (Feb. 11): One of my blog’s loyal readers totally blasts me on his for this post for having suggested that I’m above vanity (which I don’t think I’ve done).

| Media, Opinion

Proulx despecializes

Steve Proulx, who is the media columnist and blogger at Voir, is changing his focus to be more generalist, and asking people for suggestions on what he should call his new column.

Although I’m sure this is a good move for Proulx, it’s a bit sad for the world of media criticism. The move reminds me of when Antonia Zerbisias got taken off the media criticism beat at the Toronto Star.

Proulx says he’ll still talk about media (and there’s certainly lots to talk about these days), but when you’re not focused on one subject, you lose some detail.

Media criticism is hard in this environment, because to do it properly you need to be employed as a journalist, but most of the companies who employ journalists are part of giant conglomerates that control dozens of media outlets. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone working full-time as a journalist who isn’t employed by Canwest, Quebecor, CBC, CTVglobemedia, Gesca, Transcontinental, Astral, Corus or Rogers.

There are exceptions. The Toronto Star is one, though TorStar owns part of CTVglobemedia. The Suburban is another, and it has Mike Cohen who writes about anglo Quebec media. Voir, which also owns Hour and Ottawa Xpress, allowed Proulx the freedom to write what he wished without running the risk of pissing off his employer.

And then there’s Le Devoir, where Paul Cauchon will write more about Quebec media than you’ll get anywhere else. But one journalist at Canada’s only remaining independent daily newspaper is hardly enough to cover the giant media landscape.

Let’s hope Proulx doesn’t let the media stories pass him by as he’s focusing on his expanded portfolio. Especially those stories about my employer that I can’t write without getting into trouble.

UPDATE: Proulx says he’s still editing Trente magazine, so he definitely can’t ignore media issues there.

| Fun, Opinion

Corporatization of fun

Friendly game of tag, or an ad for Orange Crush?

Corporatization of fun: Friendly game of tag, or an ad for Orange Crush?

As an observer of society, I belong to some Facebook groups that may or may not turn into things. One of them was a generic flashmob group, which had hopes of organizing something fun at some point, but never actually did so.

Today I get an email from the group, which has been taken over by a “street marketing company” with big ambitions:

Objet : Hi flashmobers !

I am taking in charge your group.
My name is Ludovic and I am working in Trako Media, a street marketing company. We want to create an EVENT. A giant EVENT with thousands of flashmobers. We are already planning some future events where we would like everybody to activly participate. We gonna work full days and weeks to make it better than any other one in any other town.
Montreal is full of enthousiastic people who love having FUN.
We are already 46 members. Can you send invitation to your friends ? Talk to others ? Print and pomote the group on school or university walls ?

We need 1000 flashmobers for the first offical Flash Mob. Don’t worry, I’m sure you ‘ll like our ideas :D

So let’s start and feel free to message me !

Sorry for my english :P Je parle un peu mieux français…

Maybe I’m just picky, but nothing kills the spirit of a flashmob than having it be organized by a marketing company, which will no doubt have some commercial motivation behind such events.

| Media, Opinion

It’s time to add freelancers to media union contracts

In a half-hour panel discussion with Radio-Canada’s Christiane Charette on Wednesday, some of the most respected minds in Quebec media analysis discussed the lockout at the Journal de Montréal and the debate over whether freelance columnists like Richard Martineau, Stéphane Gendron and Joseph Facal should continue writing their columns.

One comment (there were a bunch of guys there and it’s hard to distinguish them by voice alone) was that unions and freelancers need to come together and not see each other as the enemy. One of the arguments Martineau and others use for continuing to write is that the union does nothing for them, they wouldn’t get strike pay nor would the union intervene if they were suddenly fired.

Now, Martineau is a world-class douchebag. He’s a product of the Quebecor Media empire, with a column in the Journal, a blog at Canoë and a show on LCN. He’s paid to be a blowhard and scream fake outrage at everything while being politically incorrect for its own sake. (This is a stark contrast to his work at Les Francs-Tireurs, which I actually like because there he asks people questions and listens to their answers.) He holds quite a bit of influence and wouldn’t be on the street if he stood with the locked-out journalists. He’s refusing to stop on principle, and to continue being a douchebag.

But he’s right. The union does nothing for him. It does nothing for any freelancer. And neither do most unions.

That needs to change.

Freelance isn’t free

Way back when, before my time, the idea of a freelance columnist was a rarity. Really, it seems like such a contradiction in terms: a columnist is relied upon to have a regular presence in a newspaper, whereas a freelancer is a one-time contributor who’s being given a few bucks for an article.

But freelancing has become such a useful tool for media companies: You can fire freelancers whenever you want, there’s an almost endless supply of them, they don’t take vacations, and they’ll sign just about any contract you put in front of their faces. When taking total cost into account, it’s much cheaper and more flexible to get a freelancer than a full-time or part-time employee.

And so we enter the age of the freelance columnist. Some are that way by choice, because they want the freedom to work for other organizations, or to syndicate their content. Some are former columnist-employees who have taken buyouts but decided to continue their columns under a different contractual relationship. And some are just people who have real day jobs in other industries and don’t want to become full-time journalists.

Along with these vedettes, though, are the freelancers who aren’t that way by choice. Those aspiring young journalists whose souls haven’t yet been crushed. The ones who sign overly abusive contracts, work for peanuts and beg for more. With such a compacted media landscape, and so few corporations in charge of so much media, they have no choice but to accept whatever abuse is thrown at them in order to realize their dream of being a journalist.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

CBC provides an example

Take a look at the contract (which is about to expire) between the CBC and the Canadian Media Guild (PDF), which represents all employees outside of Quebec and Moncton, N.B. (which are represented by another union). The deal was worked out after the 2005 lockout, and speaks quite a bit about contract and freelance work. Specifically:

  • It sets minimum wage rates for specific types of original freelance work, and requires additional remuneration for additional use of the work
  • It provides certain minimum rights (copyright, moral rights) for freelance work
  • It includes a provision which spells out that related expenses are paid by the employer
  • It bans working “on spec”, in which work is done before it is sold, and provides for a minimum “kill fee”, for work that’s approved but then never used.
  • It bans employees working freelance gigs on the side and requires that such work be paid at overtime rates
  • Finally, it states that the freelancer is (for the limited purposes of the contract) a member of the union (the union even has a freelance chapter and a guide for freelancers), and must pay dues from the freelance pay.

The standardized contract is probably the most important part of this. The company can’t go around and start demanding more rights of powerless freelancers without first getting it approved by the more powerful union. It’s part of the reason why the Periodical Writers Association of Canada supported the union in the lockout.

It’s not perfect, and it’s been criticized as not doing enough, but it’s much more than most media union contracts have to give rights to freelancers.

And by protecting freelancers, the union makes it less attractive for employers to use them instead of salaried employees to save money. Instead, freelancers are used where they are supposed to: For occasional work that can’t be done by regular employees.

While regular employees aren’t exactly swimming in cash at the CBC, freelancers at least are not overly exploited (so-called “casuals” are another problem entirely, and that’s another post).

Wishful thinking

Of course, this is the worst time for media unions to start demanding sweeping new rights. A union in negotiation going to the employer and trying to set a standardized contract for freelancers would quickly get laughed out of the room. The time to create a common front between freelancers and employees was years or even decades ago, and it’s not coming back anytime soon.

And so Martineau is right. Sadly. He’s not turning the other cheek, and he’s siding with the employer in a dispute with the employees, making it easier to continue putting out the newspaper and try to break the union. He’s being a douchebag, but he has every right to be.

If the union had focused more on bringing freelancers into the fold and less on protecting their short work week and inflating their salaries, they might not be in this boat now.

| Media, Montreal, Opinion, TV

We must do something about the poor reporters

Despite the dire warnings of cold snaps, the depressing weather forecasts that call for highs in the range of -20 and wind chills that drop right off the scale, there are professionals out there ready, willing and able to brave those awful conditions unnecessarily for the sake of their jobs.

I’m speaking, of course, about television reporters.

Every day, dozens of them roam the city, looking for a suitable backdrop for their story about health care or education or politics, and for many the ideal spot for a stand-up report is standing on a street corner. It’s active, it’s bright, in some cases it might even be relevant to the story.

But in most cases, they’re patently unnecessary.

Something must be done.

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