Blog about politics (mideast and pro-Israel, Canadian and local Montreal), world events, and random thoughts.

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The World I Know is updated on a semi-regular basis by segacs.

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11:57 AM
"Spoonman, steal the rhythm while you can"

The city of Montreal can't even get the sidewalks cleared... but they had plenty of time to pass a law aimed at one of the city's best-known buskers: the Spoonman:

Cyrille Esteve, 52, who's better known as Spoonman, has been clacking away in front of the upscale Ogilvy's department store for the past eight years. His regular spot is particularly busy at this time of the year, as passers-by stop to admire the store's well-known, animated Christmas display.

But the local borough council has ordered him to stop playing at the street corner beginning January 1.

The Spoonman is a part of Montreal, much like bagels, smoked meat, and winters.

Last week I got annoyed with the news that the homeless were complaining about art in parks. But it's a far cry from people who think that they're owed something, to buskers who just sit and play their music - in a sense. Esteve wasn't demanding that the city build him a home in front of Ogilvy's. He just wanted to be left alone to busk. The city is at once holding outreach meetings to be "sensitive" to people who are murdering others in parks, and at the same time forcing the Spoonman out of his spot, clacking away. I don't shop at Ogilvy but I'm in the area an awful lot and he's never bothered me - in fact, he's been the subject of numerous city articles and is the perennial winner of the Mirror's Best Busker award. He's even somewhat of a tourist attraction.

But the city found that so offensive, that they've passed a law deeming spoon playing illegal anywhere west of University street. In other words - specifically the spoon (any other instrument is ok) and specifically in that location.

Like most Montrealers, I think this is an outrage. Let the Spoonman play, I say!

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11:47 AM
Linky Fun

If you're not reading Imshin regularly these days, you should be. Here's an example of why.

While you're at it, you can vote for her or Allison for a BlogAward, even though it's pretty much a lost cause for anyone in that category. And while you're at the blog awards site, vote for Meryl Yourish, not just because she asked for endorsements, but because she's also the source of a lot of the material you read here - and a very witty writer to boot. And the best Canadian blog category didn't see fit to include yours truly (who am I kidding anyway?) but you can definately kick a vote or two in for Damian.

Turns out I'm not the only lefty in the blogosphere... in a post reminiscent of this one. You just watch: one day we shall dominate.

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1:03 AM
Speaking of the Blue Collar labour dispute, Paul puts things into perspective:

Gratified as I am that the blue collar workers have seen fit, in their infinite grace, to perform some cursory salting and de-icing on the sidewalks of some major arteries, I don't live on one of those, but on the myriad of small streets in the Snowdon area. Moreover, my street is on a slope.

Therefore, allow me to explain the joy that is my life every time I have to take my dog outside: I open the front door, descend the stairs, reach the sidewalk, and try my damnedest by using a combination of tap-dancing, the Funky Chicken, and walking like a penguin to keep myself from sliding into parked cars, or all the way down the street on my face.

Granted, I'll admit that one can have nothing more than a passing acquaintance with the adjective "funny" until you've seen your dog slip, spin one hundred and eighty degrees in the air, and fall flat on his back whilst taking a leak, but, all comedy aside, this is no way to live. (I should also note that comedy value decreases exponentially if one's dog is still on its leash and one ends up sprawled across the hood of a car whilst laughing.)

Where I live (NDG), it's no better. Even at the best of times, the sidewalk by my building isn't exactly well-maintained. These days, it's a veritable skating rink. If you think it's easy skating in heels, *you* try it while carrying 5 bags of groceries.

The Blue Collar workers who agreed to binding arbitration but kicked up a fuss when it didn't come out in their favour are being petty and nonsensical. They're also endangering plenty of people who have to get around on dangerously slippery sidewalks. They're predicting more freezing rain for tomorrow, and the workers had better get their acts together before the situation gets much, much worse. As Paul says:

To sum things up, I stand by my original statement. Montreal's blue collar workers' union is made up of lazy, overpaid, inconsiderate arseclowns. If they think that the public is behind them, they're very sadly mistaken, and I would like to see them called on the carpet for the massive amount of injury and inconvenience that witholding basic services has inflicted upon the residents of this city.

Couldn't agree with you more, Paul.

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11:33 PM
Strike watch

Strike here:

Quebecers' hopes of an early Christmas gift in the form of an end to the three-week-long SAQ strike were dashed last night as liquor-store employees turned out in force to reject their employer's latest offer by a vote of 88 per cent.

Strike there:

Hoping a strike during the holiday rush will pressure Canada Post into a new contract offer, postal workers have launched rotating strikes in two Atlantic centres. Without a contract since October, the striking postal workers in Fredericton, New Brunswick and Antigonish, Nova Scotia are among 2,500 members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada in a legal strike position.

Strike, strike everywhere:

The dishes, garbage and dirty laundry would pile up for days when Cat and Harlan Barnard's teenage children refused to do their chores. So the Barnards went on strike, moving out of their house and into a domed tent set up in their front driveway. The parents refuse to cook, clean or drive for their children — Benjamin, 17, and Kit, 12 — until they shape up.

Add a labour dispute:

With more freezing rain and snow to hit the city this weekend, Montreal blue collar workers will not rule out work stoppages to protest conditions in their new city contract, a union spokesperson said Thursday.

[ . . . ]

Roads and sidewalks in Ville Marie and Côte des Neiges-Notre Dame de Grâce were especially treacherous after blue collar workers there refused assignments from managers, a task that was handled by unionized workers under the old contract.

And let's not forget the ongoing lockout:

The league and the Players Association held a four-hour meeting Thursday, the first session in three months, with the union presenting the latest proposal for a new collective bargaining agreement. The six-year, six-point offer, which did not contain a salary cap, will be reviewed by the league and addressed on Tuesday at the next scheduled meeting.

With all these strikes, sometimes it seems like I'm the only person who's actually working.

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4:00 PM
Supreme court to Parliament: ball's in your court

The Canadian Supreme Court issued its decision on gay marriage today in a historic judgement that essentially kicked the issue back into the hands of lawmakers:

In a landmark ruling, Canada's Supreme Court said the government was within its constitutional rights to change the definition of marriage to allow gay and lesbian weddings.

[ . . . ]

The legislation is expected to win the necessary support in parliament, after it is introduced by the government early next year.

But the court ruled that religious officials could not be compelled to marry same sex couples, if the practice ran counter to their beliefs.

It also declined to rule on the question of whether a change to the laws regarding same-sex marriage was required by the constitution, a move that could complicate the task of shepherding the draft law through parliament.

This is a nice 'something for everyone' compromise. For those in favour of gay marriage, it cleared the way for a new definition of marriage. For those opposed, it didn't compel the issue on a constitutional basis, nor did it step on the toes of religious autonomy. For those who believe that this was a matter for legislators and not judges, the Supreme Court essentially agreed.

It's a shame that the court didn't have the courage to decisively say that discrimination against gay people is against the spirit of the Charter of Rights. This ruling reminds me that sometimes, trying to be everything to everyone means ending up being nothing to nobody.

The ball's in Parliament's court now. A vote for gay marriage is expected to pass fairly easily, with the NDP, the Bloc, and most Liberals voting for, and the Conservatives voting against. But on principle, I disagree that matters such as rights should be decided by a majority-rule vote.

I suppose I'll have to be patient as I wait for the country to catch up to that thinking. After all, at least we're a lot further ahead on the issue than our US neighbours.

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11:18 PM
Happy Chanukah



Tonight was the first candle of Chanukah. It may not be that big a deal, and it certainly gets ridiculously commercialized and blown out of proportion because of its proximity to Christmas. But I still like Chanukah. Eight days of yummy unhealthy greasy food and presents... what could be bad?

I won't wax poetic about the deeper meaning of the holiday, or the victory of freedom over tyranny or the political implications of celebrating revolutionaries or even the random thought that this may have been the first war in which oil was a big deal. I'm sure you can find all that and more elsewhere in the blogosphere.

Instead, I'll talk about latkes. Because Chanukah, like all Jewish holidays, fits the common theme: They tried to kill us, we won, let's eat.

My mom makes potato latkes grated in the processor, with a bit of onion and flour mixed in with the potatoes. And they're fried small and nice and greasy and crisp, allowed to soak on paper towel so that they're just slightly oozing with oil. With a little applesauce, they're irresistable.

To all my Jewish readers, happy Chanukah!

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11:00 PM
New UTT library opens

The library at UTT St-Laurent, which was firebombed last April, finally reopened today after being completely rebuilt thanks to an outpouring of donations and support:

Sympathy messages and donations of $400,000 in cash and thousands books poured in from across Canada and around the world following news of the arson at the private school last April.

"Unlike (with) many of our students' grandparents who went through the Holocaust, this time the world reached out to us and helped all of us heal,'' said Rachel Cohen, president of United Talmud Torahs.

"It was very reassuring and the impact of this outreach will positively affect students all their lives."

This is of course great news for the library. (I wonder whether they'll be able to put some funds into renovations for the rest of the building, which during my high school years was in a pretty sorry state of disrepair and had a constant smell of rotten fish. The elementary side wasn't much better, though the high school did have a more modern library. But anyway...)

Symbolically this was an important day. And I'm glad to see that things are back up and running like normal. Now when a teacher assigns homework that involves the library, the students will have to think of another excuse of why they couldn't get it done.

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7:11 PM
Freezing rain, go away

As a Montrealer I can deal with pretty much any kind of weather, from July's humid heat to January's bitter cold. But the absolute worst has got to be freezing rain.

Maybe it's the frustration of getting soaked while impatiently chipping away at the layer of ice on my car. Maybe it's memories of the Ice Storm of 98. Maybe it's having all the sidewalks turn into skating rinks. But whatever it is, I absolutely detest freezing rain.

Hey precipitation: make up your mind. Rain or snow. Pick one.

Update: Ok, now the freezing rain is really starting to piss me off, what with the power failure this morning chez moi. I just hope it's back now cause I really am not looking forward to having to throw out all the food in my freezer.

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5:51 PM
Just a typical day's news

Some days, reading the paper can be hazardous to my health.

Take today, for example, where we see the following among the headlines:

Homeless people are angry about art in parks because they feel it's "encroaching" on their space:

To try to clean urban eyesores in the downtown area, the city is using art to attract residents to parks usually frequented by homeless people. But advocacy groups see this as another encroachment on the already restricted space of homeless people.

[ . . . ]

"The people in Viger Park are getting kicked out of their home," said a 30-year-old man who wishes to be identified as Napalm and who used to sleep in Viger Square until he was ticketed by police last summer. "It's more or less the rich who want to make a use of that park. That's pushing the government to do something."

Instead of pointing out the obvious - that the homeless people are living in the parks illegally, the government is working overtime to try to make them feel unthreatened by these projects and even to "include" them. After all, it wouldn't be politically-correct to suggest that people get a job and pay rent like the rest of us instead of choosing a "homeless lifestyle", now would it?

Reading on... I see a headline about blue collar-workers refusing to de-ice downtown cause they're upset about their arbitrated new contract that makes them work a whopping one more hour a week:

Workers responsible for spreading salt and sand on roads and sidewalks stayed home in defiance of the new 36-hour workweek imposed by a provincial government arbitrator.

The union is still angry over an arbitrator's decision made Oct. 4 that increases the workweek from 35 hours to 36 hours. After months of stalled negotiations, a government mediator imposed the rule.

[ . . . ]

The union argued that the new hours would cut into the four-day week currently enjoyed by workers. City officials said the increase amounts to 15 extra minutes of work per day.

Just to recap, the poor babies only work 4 days a week, and are angry about one additional hour that still gives them a shorter workweek than 99% of people in Quebec. The union agreed to binding arbitration but decided it didn't like the deal that was arbitrated so now it wants out. And to prove that point, the workers are letting people walk around on slippery sidewalks. The same people whose taxes pay their wages.

Blood pressure rising, I move on further and see that the SAQ employees are still refusing to deal with management, so the government-owned liquor monopoly will stay closed longer into the holiday season:

Charron called on the provincial government to intercede on the union's behalf. He also asked unionized employees across the province not to cross the picket lines, as a gesture of solidarity with the SAQ employees.

But among the customers milling about the liquor store facing the Atwater Market to stock up on liquor for the holiday, sympathy for the striking workers seemed low.

Well, what did you think, genius... that the public would be happy about having restricted access to alcohol?

All in a typical day's news here in Montreal...

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6:31 PM
Gay marriage ruling expected Thursday

The Supreme Court of Canada is set to issue its ruling on gay marriage on Thursday:

The ruling will be handed down just two months after the court heard a high-profile reference case from the federal government -- an unusually short period of deliberation in such a seemingly complex case.

The reference, launched after appellate courts in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec legalized same-sex marriage, asked the court four questions.

The first question is whether the federal government has jurisdiction to alter the definition of marriage. The second involves the constitutionality of Ottawa's plan to redefine marriage to include gays and lesbians.

The third question involves whether religious institutions are legally protected from having to marry same-sex couples. The fourth question -- added on the eve of last spring's federal election campaign -- involves the constitutionality of the existing exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage.

There's a lot of speculation about what might happen. Canadians are very divided on the issue. I've made my opinion clear, and I don't see how the court could really rule against gay marriage given the trends of legalization of it by province after province. But I wonder if they'll somehow find a way to strike a compromise to avoid antagonizing the conservative right, given the precarious minority government situation of the Liberals. The Supreme Court is supposed to be above politics, but the justices live in the same world we do and see the same polling data that we do.

Here's hoping that the court hands down a judgement that strikes down the discrimination inherent in the current definition of marrriage - of course, still respecting the rights of religions to decide for themselves.

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6:31 PM
Respect or more language policing?

This new rule is designed to increase doctor-patient respect:

The hospital's administration will ask staff to address patients using the formal French pronoun "vous'"instead of the informal "tu."

[ . . . ]

He says staff who repeatedly ignore the new measure will face disciplinary action and could eventually be suspended without pay.

Hey, any hospital that addresses patients by a name instead of by the name of a disease is a positive development.

But as a person who frequently stumbles over her French, I'm a little sensitive to this rule in particular. I'm sure this isn't much of an issue in Saguenay, where French is spoken by basically everyone, but I personally have a particularly hard time with the tu/vous distinction. Oh, I understand it well enough, but when I'm speaking quickly or I'm flustered, the wrong one often slips out. I blame it on my grade school French curriculum, which - ostensibly to avoid confusion - taught us to say "tu" when addressing any person in the singular second person, including our teachers. It's hard to break the habit now and I have made some embarrassing gaffes when addressing professors or even clients too familiarly.

Maybe I'm being over-sensitive, but instituting a rule that could result in suspension seems a bit heavy-handed to me. If the lesson the hospital is trying to teach to staff is respect, maybe they could try having a little respect for their staffers. Most likely, a simple memo reminding people to use "vous" would be enough, rather than a rule. Besides, there's a lot more to respect than pronouns, and any staff members with truly disrespectful attitudes should be disciplined regardless of what exact words they use.

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3:30 PM
Better to burn out than to... burn the house down

New legislation in Canada requires cigarettes to self-extinguish when left unattended, to cut back on the number of accidental fires caused by smoking.

Normally, I'm not in favour of overprotective legislation, but this seems like a good idea. Some smokers are complaining that they'll have to relight the cigarettes when they go out, but it seems like a small price to pay to avoid worrying about falling asleep with a lit cigarette and causing a fire.

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3:22 PM
Only in Israel

An article in the Jerusalem Post talks about B'Tselem's regular talks to IDF soldiers.

I don't know of any other army in the world where a human rights watchdog whose main priority is critcizing the army gets asked by the army to address its soldiers. There's constant tension between the groups, but the tension is out in the open and being discussed. There are some problems with this approach, namely that B'Tselem is often unfairly critical to the point of being inflammatory in order to seek publicity, and that soldiers who have to make split-second life-and-death decisions could jeopardize lives if they hesitate too long. But overall, Israel's commitment to human rights among its military is unsurpassed by any other example that I can think of in the world, and this point only illustrates that further.

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