st. paddy’s day “too english”

I had a story in today’s paper about complaints by a new sovereignist group, the Réseau de Résistance du Québécois, that Montreal’s St. Patrick’s day parade is too English. The RRQ plans to crash take part in the parade even though organizers say the group is not authorized. RRQ members will be distributing leaflets and waving [...]

art imitating life

I’m three weeks behind on my TV watching so I just caught the Jan. 26 episode of 3600 secondes d’extase, Marc Labrèche’s show on Radio-Canada.
One of the skits involves an anglo pretending to be a francophone who tries to bring a petition to Air Canada to complain about its lack of French language services. It [...]

the world turned upside down?

Is it the world turned upside down or is an election in the offing?
Yesterday and today, Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois has been talking up the need for – wait for it – more English in French elementary and high schools in Quebec, so that young people are bilingual by the time they hit the [...]

speak what

La Presse columnist Rima Elkouri has a column today with a different twist on the recent language dust-up. She interviewed to Marco Micone, an Italian-born Montreal writer. He has an interesting take on immigrants in Quebec and how statistics are being manipulated. More about Micone here (a bio) and here (a description of his poem, Speak [...]

lost (and found?) in translation

It’s amazing to me that after so many years of co-existing in Quebec, anglos and francos are still involved in a “dialogue de sourds” when it comes to language issues. At least, it’s that way in much of the news coverage and political discourse. Overall in day-to-day life (I think) most people get along quite [...]

franco comme moi

I had a piece in today’s paper about my personal undercover language investigation. I was initially going to write it as a blog item but it turned into a feature for the paper.
Here’s the top of it:
Speaking French in anglo ‘hoods
‘Francophone’ goes on shopping spree
ANDY RIGA, The Gazette
In Quebec’s long, tumultuous history of language squabbles, [...]

just what we needed: another reaonsable-accommodation debate

On the final day of the last provincial election, I mused in my campaign column about whether Mario Dumont and “the ADQ (would) have to declare as an election expense the Journal de Montréal’s sensational reasonable-accommodation exposés.”
This week, the Journal set its sights on the scourge of unilingual anglos working in downtown stores, and this [...]

i need steak frites and a kronenbourg – now!

This morning, CBC Daybreak’s Mike Finnerty had a follow-up item on disgruntled French immigrants to Quebec. Quebec plans to set up an “emergency hotline” for such residents. Click here for the the audio.

jean dorion and the hijab-wearing babysitter

I got an unexpected email in May from Jean Dorion. It wasn’t the source that surprised me but the content – a defence of the hijab by the head of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal. The last thing I expected from the nationalist group was a level-headed appeal for calm in the middle of the [...]

quebecers and the maudit français

 

Quebec would love to get more immigrants from France. They obviously speak the right language and presumably won’t demand pesky “reasonable accommodations.”
Well, it turns out many French immigrants who come to Quebec leave in a huff, according to this interesting story in today’s La Presse. Among other things, they complain that 1) they are [...]

protection for quebec drivers

Today, an association that represents Quebec snowmobile users (the Association des motoneigistes du Québec) announced that it’s testing the AirBag Hélite jacket, made by a Belgian company.
The association says the jacket (initially targeted at motorcyclists) may help save snowmobilers’ lives by protecting them when they crash, or fall or are ejected from their vehicles. [...]

halal dogs and goat burgers

On the off chance someone from Le Journal de Montréal is reading this, I’m passing on a story idea. The Journal helped alert Quebec to the “reasonable accommodations” crisis with a series of articles, including one about a cabane à sucre that was serving soupe aux pois and fèves au lard without the pork, to [...]

copyright issue or political tussle?

Le Québécois, a hard-line sovereignist website, says it will no longer allow visitors to post articles from La Presse, a federalist newspaper, in its forums. 
No, it’s not because its editors find articles by La Presse writers such as André Pratte, Alain Dubuc et Vincent Marissal ”insipides et propagandistes.”
The tussle is over copyright issues, or so La Presse warned Le Québécois in [...]

roadside quebec: invasion of the muffler men

I came across an entertaining site while doing research for a travel column about road trips.
The site’s called Roadside America and it describes itself as a ”guide to uniquely odd tourist attractions.”
There are 14 Quebec listings, including four about a giant Coke man (see picture above). Two say he’s in Iberville, Quebec; the others spotted him [...]

11 things people are dying to do in quebec

A fat book landed on my desk this week: 1,000 Places To See In The USA And Canada Before You Die, not to be confused with another tome by the same author – 1,000 Places to See Before You Die.
In other words, there are a lot more than 1,000 places you should see but [...]

léa and william are top quebec baby names

 
Stop the presses: the annual list of hot Quebec baby names is out.
Léa was the most popular girl’s name in 2006 and William was the top boy’s name. The one that always surprises me is Océane (number 9 this year; last year it was 13th). Océane? There’s a database here that lets you look up [...]

24: a spoiler

I hate spoilers – especially about the TV series 24. And the last place I would expect one is on LCN, Quebecor’s 24-hour news station (and on some topics Quebec’s answer to Fox News). But there it was a few minutes ago on the news ticker scrolling under a talking head.
Apparently, some of the [...]

forget the snow – dig through quebec election poll numbers

I spent yesterday digging through numbers from the election campaign’s biggest poll yet – 3,101 Quebecers were surveyed by Léger Marketing between Saturday and Wednesday night, for The Gazette, the Journal de Montréal and TVA.
The bottom line: Mario Dumont is surging, André Boisclair is tanking and Jean Charest has plateaued. If the election had been held earlier [...]

quebec’s internet police

I wrote a story last week about efforts to curb illegal Internet use during the provincial election by Quebec’s Director General of Elections. Now comes word that the DGE has forced a couple of guys to take down YouTube videos in which they took shots at Jean Charest’s Liberals.
The guys, who [...]

vote for me and i’ll take those pesky kids off your hands

André Boisclair today said that under a Parti Québécois government Quebec kids would go to school from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. This two days after Liberal Premier Jean Charest promised to add an hour to the school day.
Mario Dumont’s Action démocratique du Québec, for its part, wants the province to go back to report [...]

quebec’s road to ruin

OK, I’m going to say it: it’s time to stop all these reasonable accommodations. Give these people a centimetre and they take a kilometre.
We let them speed. We let them barely touch the brake pedal at red lights. We let them consider stop signs optional. And we end up with the second highest accident injury [...]

a guide to driving in quebec

During my online travels today, I found 15 rules for driving in Quebec. A few are funny and they all seem to describe Quebec drivers well.
But a bit of quick research indicates the list has been bouncing around the Internet for years, with just about every jurisdiction in North America used as the punchline. Check [...]

quebecers hooked on speed

What do you think of this ad? And are Quebec drivers really as bad as people say we are?
I’m working on a story about a new campaign to get Quebecers to slow down and generally follow the rules of the road. The centrepiece is an ad that looks like a clip from TV hospital drama [...]