Segacs’s World I Know

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

Special thanks to Radio-Energie for hosting Ed Roland and Joel Kosche from Collective Soul for an hour-long live acoustic set in studio… and for picking my name as a winner of tickets to attend.

It was my first Collective Soul fix in over 4 years, and I don’t think I realized how much I missed it until today. One interview, a bunch of great music, some autographs, photos, and chatting with the band later, I’m a very happy person right now.

Please please please let this new NHLPA proposal be a real option, containing some sort of concession towards a salary cap, and not just another political nonstarter. We want our hockey back, not more Movie Night in Canada.

Between the NHL lockout, the SAQ strike, and the UPS strike, to name a few, I’m considering jumping on the strike bandwagon myself – not against my job, but against all the strikes.

Come back, hockey! We miss you!