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Left alone, as in “colonize” a bit more on the land they are stealing? Ah but we must understand Israelis, they just need a little Lebensraum to “defend themselves” from the people they stole land from.
Israel just need to “colonize” and expand on other people’s land by killing those already living there. They obviously just want to be left alone doing their “colonizing” and bringing civilization to otherwise barren lands.
I’d show you images of Israel expanding and taking more Palestinian land over the decades but you’ll probably say those are propaganda and that since Palestine is not recognized, killing their people and stealing their land is totally fine and in the line of wanting to be “left alone”.
The last liberal government in Québec did that, but for a transit line (the REM).
They killed the only profitable commuter train line (DM) and literally gave it to a for profit entity (CDPQ) so they can transform it into a metro line. So now the public transit entities cannot compete with the private one, and even has to pay it royalties for something like 99 years.
I repeat, the public transit entity (ARTM) cannot compete against the for profit one, AND must pay it royalties for every passenger.
So now the ARTM doesn’t have the revenues from its defunct most popular commuter line, and must pay royalties on top of that. Public money, going straight into a for profit organization.
The new light rail line was not even working in 2023 and the public already had to pay $2.4 million to the CDPQ.
And those defending that model say that the CDPQ is a retirement investment firm that is profiting Quebecers, but their goal is still to make money. Unprofitable lines will be cut or never developed, even if needed.
They are literally privatizing public transit and some people are encouraging it saying that’s how we now have to build transit. It’s the way of the future!
Meanwhile the public transit entity says it’s not sure it can now maintain some of the other commuter lines and will have to look into cutting expenses and/or service.
Sigh…
EDIT: Source for the price the ARTM has to pay: https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/rem-hikes-per-passenger-payment-from-artm-even-before-it-starts-running
And I’m sure they already have a team filtering through that crap. Poor them.
That reminds me that the mayor of Paris decided to just quit that shit hole last year.
It also reminds me that lots of media sites won’t allow comments on their YouTube videos or on some of their articles because they can predict exactly the kind of BS they are going to get, and nobody from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association is saying that it’s unreasonable and limiting people’s freedom of expression.
They can still reach the mayor’s office through official channels. They can write open letters in the media. They have multiple other ways to make their shitty opinions heard. X formally known as Twitter is not fundamental to freedom of expression.
When I saw the title through my news feed, I knew exactly what it was about.
And it’s totally ridiculous and unrealistic to expect her to allow every right wing asshole on X formally known as Twitter to send her heinous messages and ad hominem. She should just quit that cesspool.
I went there for a while and every fucking post that I tried to make, or follow, within my “community” and followers, ended up being flooded by hateful messages, the worst ones being from paying accounts and highlighted by Twitter itself. I really liked the small community of people that were progressives and pro-cycling on Twitter, for Montreal. But every time they comment or if you dare reply something nice, you or them will get flooded by loads of insulting, hateful, shitty replies. I gave up. It’s untenable.
If you spend just a few minutes through her posts and their replies, you can see exactly why some of them are being blocked. The people criticizing her are unrealistic. They are not receiving personal threats and insults as “messages from their constituents”.
Again, I think she should just quit the cesspool that is X formally known as Twitter. There is nothing to gain there.
Yeah, I can understand as I have been car free for over 20 years. At least this route does have a baggage car allowing you to do this. It would be impossible in the Corridor as they don’t take baggage anymore.
With VIA you can bring a bike and lots of checked baggage with you between Toronto and Vancouver, because they have a baggage car and serve smaller communities that need it. But this is not possible between Windsor and Quebec City.
I can’t even bring a bike with me from Montreal to Drummondville, even if their new trains have bike racks. And they can’t say when it’s gonna be possible.
I also sometimes have no choice but to use VIA Rail, and that’s why I’m so critical of them.
Good luck. Bring snacks and water with you, just in case.
They are pretty rare. However, he doesn’t seem that much aware.
As you know, since we lost Greyhound [bus service], people have very few passenger transportation options in northern B.C. and right across rural Canada.
Not everyone can afford the cost of flying across the country, and so we need to have a better balance between the need to ship goods, which is a very real need and connected to the health of our economy, and the need to transport passengers and provide people with safe, convenient, affordable and low carbon transportation options.
AFAIK flying across the country is cheaper than taking a train, priority over freight or not. A flight from Vancouver to Toronto take less than 5 hours, there are daily departures, and is around $150 depending on the transporter. A train from Vancouver to Toronto is $685, takes days, and only has two departures a week. And if you plan a month in advance, it’s “only” $514.
From my point of view, nobody really wants to cross the country on a train, except those doing it for the trip itself. To me, what is lacking is, as he stated, intercity services. Going from one city to another, without a car, is a horrible experience in Canada right now. I’m not even talking about rural places, like he dares. Just cities. Even if we give priority to VIA’s trains, they are still going to require planning your trip weeks in advance to get anything other than exorbitant prices. They will still only have a few departures a day, or a week.
It’s a very good first step to prioritize passenger trains, but it’s going to take much more than that!
The country, especially the central and western parts, was populated by the railways. When looking at old railway maps, it’s just fascinating to see how every little town and village was connected by a rail line.
It’s understandable that through the years the network will shrink and consolidate, but passenger trains have not been consolidated, they’ve been butchered. Freight is king. Even old abandoned railways can’t be converted to bike paths because freight companies, while not using the line, will also not relinquish it. The government gives freight companies like CN and CP(KC) everything they want, and even lowers safety standards and regulations so those companies can make even more profit. Yet, VIA Rail and their passengers have been reduced and cut to pathetic levels.
I doubt that any minister have to take a train on a regular basis or they would be painfully aware of how bad it is. Just the airline model is making me fume a little bit every time that I board a VIA train. VIA (and Amtrak) prefers to make passengers form a long line in the station and insists on scanning every ticket before even being allowed on the platform, then checks tickets AGAIN once the train is moving. I wish they would do like in Europe; allow passengers to board like a metro, and just validate tickets once in the train.
It’s all sad and disappointing that we can’t have ‘normal’ intercity services. Even coaches are bad. The message from our leaders, whether it’s provincial (in my case), or federal, is “get a car, loser”. But get an EV! You know, for the environment,
Uh, VIA Rail is already kind of nationalized?! If you’re talking about the rail network, one can only dream! But those are billion dollar companies so I doubt any minister would dare to do that.
Aside from nationalizing the network though, we could also force freight companies to let passenger trains go before cargo and merchandise.
And thus, nothing will change.
As someone that has been living without a car for more than 20 years, I’m tempted to buy one. I’m so tired of shitty intercity services in this country. The minister is outraged now but was he also outraged when this happened last year? Or the year before?
I was in Europe for the two previous weeks and was ‘stressed’ when I didn’t have a ticket booked for the next day, but it didn’t matter at all. There are plenty of trains and if you miss one, just take the next one. Yet, while being there, I had to plan a trip from Montreal to Drummondville the weekend I got back, for my nephew’s birthday. I checked for tickets with VIA Rail FIVE days before and they were already $60 for the economy class. Guess I had to plan this three weeks in advance, because the five trains a day between Montreal and Quebec City are already “full”.
As for the passengers being stranded, the article mentions it already happened, VIA was supposed to have a plan in case of breakdown, and we can see how it went.
So I took a coach from Montreal to Drummondville. They have a whopping three departures a day.
The investigation will not change the fact that we have to plan an intercity trip WEEKS in advance otherwise it’s going to cost an arm and a leg. It will not make VIA more on time. It will not make them take bikes on the corridor. It will not move them away from their damn airline model.
I don’t like to drive, I don’t like cars in general, but I’m thinking about it. Great job from our leaders. I’m sure others that could also live without a car ended up getting one because we suck so badly at this.
Without mentioning any political party, I can point out one thing that is clearly a problem and will prevent our country from going forward; the constitution.
Want to make electoral reforms? Let’s open the constitution and see if every provinces agrees.
Want to change how anything works in the country, let’s open the constitution and see if all the provinces agree.
Every time we tried to fix that, the country nearly imploded. It’s a ticking bomb that we just ignore. We sweep that constitutional impasse under the rug every election, and ‘everything is fine’.
Again? It also happened two years ago with passengers stuck on a train for 12 hours.
I hate VIA Rail so much, yet sometimes I have no choice but to use them, as I made the stupid choice of not having a car.
I always prepare for the worse with them. Bring snacks and water because they can’t even do that when trains are running “normally”. For example if you have not eaten before taking a VIA Rail train and count on their services, they will probably be late with the food cart and pass 3 minutes before your stop.
And don’t forget to buy your ticket 3 weeks in advance (or more) because god forbid you think of going in another city “only” a few days before. Being last minute for them is apparently about one week before taking the train.
I wanted to make Montreal to Drummondville saturday but I thought about it tuesday and it was already “too late”. So instead of the normal exorbitant price of $35 that it normally costs if you reserve 3 weeks in advance, it’s $60.
They also don’t take bikes on the corridor and they can’t say if they will eventually.
Employees will also threaten to kick you out of the train in the middle of nowhere if they want to have authority on you. Or they won’t let you out when they have an issue. You’re basically at their mercy.
And unfortunately buses are not exactly better. Intercity travel in this country sucks soooo much if you don’t have a car.
It’s so bad that in summer I prefer to cycle the whole 130 km to go visit my family instead of taking a VIA Rail train, or an Orléans Express bus.
I’m in Europe right now and I’m so envious of their trains. I don’t even have to plan ahead a few weeks before! This morning I booked a ticket from Aachen to Liège about 30 minutes before the departure and it went so well. And there was another train an hour after this one. Or a high speed one too. Aaah, we suck so bad at this.
AFAIK the only environmental goal that we met was the Montreal protocol and the elimination of chemicals harming the ozone layer.
As a result of the international agreement, the ozone hole in Antarctica is slowly recovering. Climate projections indicate that the ozone layer will return to 1980 levels between 2040 (across much of the world) and 2066 (over Antarctica). Due to its widespread adoption and implementation, it has been hailed as an example of successful international co-operation. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated that “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date has been the Montreal Protocol”.
I think we also did something about acid rain for a few decades now but I can’t find any specific agreement. All I know is that I’m in my 40ies and thus old enough to remember it was an issue when I was a kid, and that the US and Canada agreed to do something about it.
Some governments, including those in Europe and North America, have made efforts since the 1970s to reduce the release of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide into the atmosphere through air pollution regulations. These efforts have had positive results due to the widespread research on acid rain starting in the 1960s and the publicized information on its harmful effects.
I don’t know what changed but apparently, we don’t really care about the rest now.
Easy. He just has to open the constitution to make those reforms. Nothing bad ever happens when we try to change the constitution. All the provinces always agree and there is definitely no lingering constitutional issues that we haven’t been able to resolve in more than four decades.
He shouldn’t have made that promise. He should have been aware that electoral reforms would need to change the constitution and that every time we try do that, the country nearly implodes. So we just keep status quo until the constitutional crisis will be big enough that we can’t ignore it anymore. I don’t know what he was thinking. Maybe he thought we would all forget about it.
The local grocery owmed by Loblaws is not taking bottle and can refund tickets/coupons at cash registers from their own machines now. You have to go to the customer service counter with the damn ticket and they refund you in POCKET CHANGE right away so THEN you can give it back to them in a few minutes while paying for groceries. But you can’t use the ticket from the machine!
They refuse to honor and refund their own tickets/coupons from their own machines at cash registers because apparently, there’s been too much fraud. It’s such BS.
How should I be fixing it?
I’ve already written an email to the CRTC about this. Should I also write to my provincial MP?
What’s the “correct” way to decide if I want my phone to randomly blast an end-of-the-world alarm or not?
And for anybody finding this, uninstalling the cellbroadcastreceiver package via adb finally worked for me. If successful, the emergency alerts menu on your phone should crash, and no more end-of-the-world alarms.
Good opportunity to test if my phone will now ignore those alerts, after the modifications I had to do using adb because it’s not permitted to disable those annoying alarms on my own devices.
I don’t have much faith since none of the modifications I tried ever worked and the alarms kept blasting, without me wanting to, but maybe one day I’ll find THE thing that finally disables those.
Otherwise I’m thinking of ditching phones completely, since I can’t control when it’s gonna blast an end of the world alarm for a silver alert about an old person 100 km away from me. So far my only solution is to keep my phone muted al all time. I’m missing calls but at least my phone is not hurling a nuclear type alarm whenever the government feels like it.
I’d like to slap the person that decided to send everything in Canada as presidential alerts, even for silver alerts. Or is it just a Quebec thing?!
That’s excellent for their clients. I’m guessing it set a precedent and the industry stopped trying anything else.
I didn’t follow the most recent developments here in Canada but AFAIK, a decade ago the industry tried to sue individuals that were “pirating”, and lost because they couldn’t proof that an IP could be associated with a single person, or something like that. Then the industry pretty much stopped trying to sue individuals from that point. They still send the threatening letters, but they don’t do anything else because past experiences with our courts didn’t go well for them.
Of course, there is a very very slim chance that the industry will try to sue a few individuals to scare others and create a new precedent, but it’s going to be a civil suit because it’s not even criminal here.
Meh. I don’t know about OP but where I live ISPs are forced to relay the legal notice, but nothing more happens. There is no prosecution and nobody will knock on my door.
I have been torrenting on and off since the protocol exists and never once hid my IP. My ISP relays me the threats from the industry, I ignore them, and continue what I was doing before. Same for everyone in my country. Those that end up paying for a VPN and hiding their IP are just intimidated onto doing so, because of the threats. But again, aside from getting that threatening email, nobody will knock on your door for torrenting here.
Have you already tried to use VIA Rail to go somewhere once in a while? It’s absolutely not a commuter service. Tickets have to be booked days in advance, and the cheapest ones are non-refundable and non-changeable. So a person commuting to and fro would need two very specific tickets every day, or pay more to have “flexible” ones that can be used with any departure. Otherwise if a person has a cheap ticket and misses their train, that ticket is now useless.
The argument of living in a suburb where housing is cheaper can be understood if there are real commuter services, like trains from GO or Exo, but otherwise, commuting regularly with VIA Rail sounds like a real nightmare. They are rarely on time, there are even fewer departures than commuter trains, and their ticketing system is totally inappropriate for every day users.
I had to make a similar choice many years ago, with a job in Montreal and me living 60 km away. There were commuter buses in the suburb but it was taking nearly 2 hours to go to work, and 2 hours to come back. To each their own but I most certainly prefer paying more to live closer to work, than having to deal with commuting with Exo or heavens forbid, VIA Rail.
Seriously, I want to reiterate/ask again, do you use VIA Rail often? Because as someone that has to use it a few times a year, the idea of commuting with them, even just a few times a month, is horrifying.
Commuting:
travel some distance between one’s home and place of work on a regular basis.
If we’re comparing the price and convenience of “commuting” by plane versus VIA Rail… erh… do people regularly take a plane to work?
I mean, yes, it can be in competition with planes for this kind of distance but… commuters?! Like, going to work a few times a week using VIA Rail, and we’re comparing it to taking a plane… to work?! And even if we compare driving the whole road instead of driving to a station; who is going to bother booking tickets days in advance for a few times a week in order to be able to drive to a train station? If you just buy the cheapest ticket for going to work one morning and miss your train, you can’t even use that ticket for the next train! Gotta pay extra for that privilege!
I really, really can’t understand the “commuting” part. Maybe if someone goes to the office once a week and doesn’t mind having like, 2 or 3 departures to come back home, it can be a nice addition… but… relying on VIA Rail to go to work, on a regular basis?! What kind of mad person would do that?
Someone on Twitter (I know) said this was mainly for commuters, but as someone using VIA Rail in the Corridor, I can’t imagine commuting to work with their services. Unless it’s for wealthy commuters…
AFAIK VIA doesn’t have monthly passes or any kind of rebates on tickets for regular users (aside from accumulating points and “preference”) and it’s necessary to book multiple days in advance. Otherwise it costs way more if trying to buy last minute tickets. I really don’t know who would commute this way.
I asked the person that said this but never got a reply. Maybe we have a different definition of commuting.
Anyway, one nore departure is good news. It obviously cannot hurt and only add more options, even if limited or slow.
So far I have been lucky.
I live in a tower heated by hot water through natural gas and they have a generator to keep the essentials running. So even without electricity I usually keep heating and hot water. And because my building often cuts water for maintenance, I also keep a few liters in my fridge just in case.
Plus, I go camping and hiking and just having some camping equipment and experience makes me think I would be okay. I have a gas stove (providing I open a window), food for meals, warm sleeping bags, emergency blankets, power banks, etc.
Losing heat for my building would be catastrophic and not my problem but at that point I would need to seek shelter from the city or family.
I like to think that I am a bit prepared and informed. However it’s good to remind people about the essentials because every time an event like this happens, we hear about people that died of CO2 poisoning, or others storming stores to make last minute provisions.
It can be caused by the cold of winter, or the heat of summer, but you always have to be prepared to live a few days without electricity or running water.
Aah yes, more cars. But those will be ecological cars! Green cars! Super good for the economy environment. That way North America doesn’t need to finance or build transit. Just buy more stuff, but green stuff!
No need to change any habit. We’ll even pay you to buy a green car. Buy a green car! It’s good for the environment! Buy buy buy! Don’t stop buying. The more we consume, the greener it gets!
Convincing people that they need EVs instead of reducing car usage is an evil genius marketing plan for car companies.
Ask me how I know we will not reach our climate target goal.
If you own your music, you can have it in a digital format and copy it somewhere else.
I’m an old millennial that started with dial-up and downloaded MP3s from IRC/Napster/Kazaa/torrents.
Eventually I started to buy what I could on CD then ripped them, then bought MP3s when possible. Otherwise I don’t mind using yt-dlp.
Those MP3s have been played by a portable CD player, then a Samsung MP3 player, then 3 or 4 phones. I’m still playing that collection on my actual phone, using Poweramp.
The device that plays the files may not last but you can certainly copy those elsewhere and do what you want with them, for as long as you want.
I’m a tech and not a serious programmer but I really like scripting with bash. It’s an easy way to automate and program tasks while also manipulating data.
For example, I’ve automated reports for my work and made lots of screen scraping scripts.
It’s my go to for anything. I’ve recently started to learn python but often catch myself thinking it would be easier to accomplish most of what I want with a bash script.
And my least favorite has to be Tcl. It’s one of the first serious languages I “learned”, because eggdrops in the 90ies, and I still don’t like it.
Je vais le croire quand je vais le voir.