4-5 cm of snow

The word according to the meteorologists was that we were expecting 4-5 cm of snow overnight and partly throughout Monday. Instead it snowed and snowed all day Monday and all night and we got a pretty serious dump of over 30 cm. The city (and its citizens) was caught a bit off guard. They are saying the snow should be cleared off in at best 5 days (a tip of the hat to the always reliable Montreal City Weblog for that link). Only problem, we're supposed to be getting another 10+ cm next weekend! Bring it on! Man, the commute must have been a beast this morning!

This is what you see when your toque has blocked your hearing until it's too late while stumbling along the narrow rut of an uncleared sidewalk snow path. It's a stoned and drunk sidewalk snowplow operator barrelling up from behind you and he is stopping for nothing! Quickly find some balcony stairs or dive into the snowpile on the street side!

Phew, you just made it. And you happened to arrive at the foot of my stairs. What a pleasant suprise, a frail, shivering university lad! Why don't you come on in and warm yourself up some, sonny boy? That ferocious snowplow must have given you quite a scare. Here, have some hot chocolate. Go on, drink it up. Yes, that's right. Drink it all down. There's a lad. You're safe now...

I think I saw a dude stealing a bike yesterday

I was riding home for lunch and right on the corner of my block a dude was bent over a bike attached to the pole. When I stopped and looked to see what he was doing, I saw that he had a short piece of rebar and was using it to leverage out the U-lock. He was about 6' tall, with polarized glasses, a beard and a big hooded blue puffy coat. The bike was a newish, standard-quality silver mountain bike and there was a red helmet attached to it. It looked sort of feminine and he definitely did not. So I asked him why he was doing that (in french) and he said "I lost my keys" (in accented english). I stood and watched him and he definitely was watching me. I was maybe 20' away. He succeeded in breaking the lock. He picked up the rear fender he had knocked off and the helmet and quickly rode away. I followed him, but he lost me heading the wrong way on St. Laurent. He rode on to the sidewalk and since I am trying to abide by the law on my bike, I hesitated and got blocked by oncoming traffic.

This whole episode has left me with bad feelings. I really feel like I should have stopped him. The problem and most reasonable people agree with me, is that I had no way of knowing for sure that he was stealing the bike. It could have been his girlfriend's who lost her keys and he was pissed about having to go get it. But now looking back, I'm pretty sure the guy was a thief and I should have just jumped in and beat him with my own u-lock. It doubly bugs me because this was right on my block and it would have been a very good opportunity to send a message about where junkies and thieves should and should not feel comfortable getting up to their shenanigans. And finally, I'm bummed that the guy got away from me. There was a time when I could have stuck with him all the way to hell and back, but I'm getting older and careful and I was aware that I only had 45 minutes left on my lunch hour. If I had followed him to an address and it turned out the bike was stolen, then I could have left a sign on the pole and the police could have tracked the dude down.

So what should I do next time? Get more aggressive and ask more questions? Pretend I know whose bike it is? Just prevent anyone trying to unlock a bike with a piece of rebar as a general rule?

Petition to improve animal welfare services in Montreal

Actually, more specifically, it is a petition to force la Berger-Blanc to improve its services. Le Berger Blanc is a private, for-profit animal shelter and euthanasia center (i.e. "the pound") that has the municipal contract for all stray animals that are found in greater Montreal. For those of you who have never looked for a lost animal, or found one and tried to deal with the system of handling lost pets or their corpses, I tell you now that it is a terrible mess.

My first experience was when I found a dead cat in the gutter right around the corner from my house. I knocked on some doors, but nobody seemed to know whose it was and it didn't have a collar. I spent hours (really, literally hours) on the phone going from service to service, trying to find what you are supposed to do. My hope was that we could find out the owner but at the very least, it had to be taken away as it was the summer. It ended up being a failure, but later that day somebody did recognize it and it was taken care of. I spoke to my vet about it and she said that usually the garbage men just pick up dead animals and they are thrown into the dump. Sentimental issues aside about respectfully treating the body, they should at least have a system to see if there is a collar or an RFID tag (which all animals taken from the SPCA get) and let the owners know the fate of their animal.

My quest did lead me to le Berger-Blanc and I learned that they are basically the pound for all of Montreal. The allegations in the petition are pretty damning and I have heard similar concerns from a past vet. But I do wish the people behind the petition would be more transparent. In any case, it looks fairly thoroughly done, correctly written in both french and english. Some of the items are totally basic and it is insane to me that they don't provide those services. For instance, the petition claims the Berger-Blanc doesn't even have an RFID scanner. It sounds like they have had this contract from the city for a long time with no real strings attached beyond "be a place we can send the animals we don't know what to do with". The result is that it the euthanasia rate is super high and lots of people don't get their pets back.

Ultimately, the problem here is with the city administration. We should be spending money on a better system of licensing and sterilization. We should also have smaller, regional shelters within public transport reach of everyone. In the meantime, putting pressure on le Berger-blanc to start to provide decent services to the public is a good start.

You can find the petition here.

(scroll down to the english details of the petition.)

First snow of the 2010-11 winter season

Took a great long walk up on Mont Royal today. Most invigorating!



This is the bath that Charlie jumps into when the weather is warmer.











This did not seem to deter anybody. I guess it's just their way of absolving responsibility if you wipe out, which seems like a fair deal to me.

Charlie grooving out to some stalwart out of season drummers.

Parking Anxiety

So the latest freak-out in the saga of Luc Ferrandez' eco-fascist municipal administration is his attempt to take control the parcomètres in the Plateau. Earlier, Montreal mayor Gerald Tremblay announced that the administration and revenue from street parking would be turned over to the Boroughs. I am actually ill-informed of the reasoning behind this insane decision (from the mayor's perspective at least) and I can well imagine the boroughs pounced upon it.

Luc Ferrandez, our borough mayor and member of the ecologically-minded and forward thinking Projet Montréal party (with the radical platform of hey guess what urban cores are not giant shopping malls or waypoints for suburbanites to drive to and through), seized on the opportunity and announced an extension of parking meter hours, locations and a price hike. Merchants freaked out about this and put up a bunch of retarded posters. Today, the mayor balked and announced that he wasn't giving up control yet. I suspect the business lobby has a lot more power over Tremblay at the city level than they do over Ferrandez at the borough level. I can only imagine the many levels of pressure the business lobbyists applied to Tremblay and his people.

Emotionally, I can sympathize with drivers to some degree. The few times that I've driven around town and had to pay for parking, I'm shocked at how expensive it has become. You might as well use a credit card, because coins won't do the trick anymore unless you have a pirate-sized bag of loonies and toonies. On the other hand, compared to other North American cities I've parked in (Vancouver, San Francisco-Bay Area and New York; though this last has its own special craziness that isn't all bad), the availability of parking is really good here.

That being said, financially, if you can afford to drive a car, having to pay a bit more for parking should be well within your budget. I'm sure there are a percentage of people who drive for a living or need a car to get to work (though I am very hesitant to say "need" there given the ease with which people who have public transit, bike and foot options use it to justify their owning a car) who have very tight margins and a parking increase will cause them to sacrifice. I suspect that percentage is very low and most people can afford the hike.

I'm a resident here in the Plateau and cars for the most part are not welcome in my world. They are polluting and dangerous (no children play in the street on my residential road) and take up space. More importantly, I pay a lot of municipal taxes to live here. A big chunk of that money goes to road repair and road cleaning and I don't even drive. So if you are driving your car into my borough, then you need to be paying for the costs that creates. My block is full all day with people who work nearby. They pay nothing for that space. I'm glad they have jobs in my neighbourhood or come and do shopping. But they need to throw a little in the piggy bank to pay for the repairs to the road and the snow clearing, just like I do.

It's the reaction of the businesses that I don't quite get. For the shitty, faux-fancy restaurants on St. Laurent south of des Pins, I can see how they are worried about losing their weekend suburban meal tickets, but don't those people usually park in some pay parking lot anyway or take a cab? It was really surprising to see Sakaris have the anti-Ferrandez poster in their store. Most of their clients come on foot for sure and the ones who come in car are usually the older Portugues ladies whose husbands drive around the block while they buy the entire store. I wonder if a lot of these proprietors just got browbeaten by a few vocal leaders of this business group.

It's amazing how profoundly attached people are to their vehicles. It's an ignorance and short-sightedness that goes far beyond any other consumer item (about which we all have our blinders and loyalties to one degree or another). Car owners can seriously equate a parking rate hike to an attack on their freedoms, likening the Plateau administration to "maoist guerrillas". I kid you not, this was a comment over at the Montreal City Weblog. It used to be the left that tended to make those kinds of hyperbolic historic comparisons, but more and more it is the people who fear change who are starting to talk like this. Maybe they should spend a month with some real Maoist guerrillas (if there are any left, maybe in Tibet?) and then make the comparison.

Mile End Weed

For those of you who lack confidence about speaking french here

I realized last night during a work discussion around beers that after 5 years on my job, a part of which entails me dealing with a wide range of the public, on the phone or in person, I have only had one person give me shit about not being a true francophone or not speaking french correctly and he was already in a rage about our organization and our phone system (and rightly so on the latter). Quebec is, very broadly speaking, still an insular society and often reverts to a self-defeating defensive stance, but the people are fundamentally generous and accepting. My french can be rough at times and I have to talk about a crazy range of things with some of the calls I respond to (geothermal, cats stuck in trees, taxes, government databases, real estate to name just a few from the last couple weeks). People are always very patient when I am lacking a vocabulary word. Sometimes I can even hear them trying to make me feel like there is nothing wrong with my french, when I know that I have just said something completely incomprehensible. The worst that has ever happened is that sometimes people switch to english, but strangely, this is very rare over the phone. Maybe there are some visual cues that help people determine what your native tongue is?

In any case, if you feel insecure or worried that people are going to laugh at you or be offended when you try and speak french here in Quebec, push those worries aside, go forth and speak your mind. When you slip, the francophones will be ready to grab you and make sure you don't fall.