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This has been going up over the past week any ideas?

I have it from a very good source. My cousin who works for a major glass curtain wall company in Monteal was at my home last week and he gave me a scoop.The company is presently working on windows for the new additions at P.E.T. and apparently sometime in 2016 a new project to replace the 50 + year old windows on the main building will be launched. I am hoping that he is right. :shhh:

this week 4 years ago: champagne de sensibilisation et re-lancement d'une app a l'appui... - rue de la Cathédrale 13 mars 2012, aujourd'hui rénovée.

Read more: http://www.canadiangrocer.com/top-stories/first-iga-express-c-store-outlet-opens-in-quebec-35314 I hope to see more of these. I am happy to see that they are working on something like this

http://entertainment.time.com/2013/06/15/o-canada-the-cool-pleasures-of-the-montreal-jazz-festival/

Arianna Huffington casts her Net ever wider. Arianna Huffington's life reads like a salacious Vanity Fair profile, the contradictions of her power splayed out on every glossy page, inviting controversy. She's a millionaire who built her Huffington Post online media empire - sold to AOL a year ago for $315 million - on the unpaid work of more than 9,000 bloggers, one of whom is now suing on their behalf for one-third of the value: $105 million. She was a conservative commentator in the 1990s who recycled herself as a freethinking independent (with strong liberal views) for the 21st century. She was married for a decade to a Republican congressman, Michael Huffington, who turned out to be bisexual and started campaigning for gay rights. Author of a dozen non-fiction books, she has been accused of plagiarizing passages for three of them (including biographies of Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso). Since last November, she's being sued by two consultants who say she stole the Huffington Post idea from them back in 2004 (it launched in 2005). What else? She's a woman who has come from far, has hobnobbed with the greats and is known by the company she keeps. A brief sketch of her career arc gives an idea of the distance travelled. Born in Greece (née Stasinopoúlou); educated in England (Cambridge University); longtime lover of the late British journalist Bernard Levin (who was twice her age and, for a spell, a fellow follower of the Indian mystic Rajneesh); a New Yorker since the early 1980s and U.S. citizen since 1990; political TV comedy writer in the 1990s who worked with Al Franken and Bill Maher; unsuccessful indie candidate for California governor in 2003; parent (with her ex, Michael) of two daughters, both now in their early 20s. These days, Huffington is in expansion mode, spreading her media brand - a blend of original reporting and aggregated news and opinion from websites all around the world - to Canada, Europe and beyond. With a staff of 200 employees and its thousands of bloggers, HuffingtonPost.com gets 35 million unique visitors a month, more than the New York Times. Huffington Post Canada, the service's first foreign edition, launched online last May and, with its staff of 20 and bloggers ranging from David Suzuki to Conrad Black, has a monthly audience of more than 1.8 million. A British edition launched last July, Le Huffington Post launched in France last week, Le Huffington Post Québec launches Wednesday, a Spanish edition will begin the third week of March and an Italian one in April. There are also negotiations to start three other foreign editions this year, in Germany, Brazil and Turkey. Huffington, 61, will be in Montreal Wednesday for the launch of the French-language service here. And, true to form, she'll arrive amid a bit of controversy. As The Gazette reported this week, about a dozen Quebec luminaries - politicians like Louise Harel and Pierre Curzi, intellectuals like Normand Baillargeon, environmental activists like Steven Guilbeault - had been lined up to blog for Huffington Québec but have now withdrawn their offers to write for free. Some said they were too busy, but the reason most gave was that they preferred to be paid for their work. When I caught up with her a week ago after the launch in France, Huffington was in a typically upbeat mood, deflecting criticism in her distinctive Greek accent and nasally voice that boomed down her BlackBerry line from Davos, Switzerland. She was attending a supper of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship on the eve of the annual meeting of global leaders at the World Economic Forum. I began by asking Huffington what she plans for the new Quebec site. How will Huffington Post Québec be different from Huffington Post Canada or Huffington Post in France? Every different province or country will be rooted in the culture of the province or country, edited by local journalists. Of course, we are going to be able to leverage the French site and translate stories that are of local interest, like the U.S. election, and lifestyle stories that are more universal. We now have 50 sections in the U.S. and whether it is in style or women or books or parenting, the whole point of the site is very much to embrace the country or the province - in this case, embracing Quebec and the Québécois and what they love. And what do the Québécois love? Do you know? There's isn't just one thing - it's a very varied community. Am I right about that? Yes, but we have certain preoccupations here that are different from the rest of Canada's. Yes, of course, and the Québécois want to read about their own politicians, which is why among the many bloggers we've recruited there's Pierre Curzi (note: who in fact has since bowed out), Yves-François Blanchet, Jamie Nichols, actors like Charlotte Laurier, Évelyne de la Chenelière (note: who has also bowed out), Micheline Lanctôt, musicians. So you know, part of it is hearing from their own people and part of it is addressing their own preoccupations. You're travelling a lot these days? I am, but I think it's worth it. This is the year for us to grow internationally and it's really exciting to be in each country as we launch. We've launched Canada, which is doing incredibly well; we're launching in the U.K., then there's Spain in maybe the third week of March, then Italy in April. We're still talking with Germany, Turkey and Brazil - we don't have finalized partnerships there, but we are in conversations. Tell me about the HuffPost business model - as an aggregator and also producer of original content, including nonpaid bloggers - and what that means for journalism in the 21st century. Well, first of all, the Huffington Post is now both a journalistic enterprise and a platform. You know, we started by doing a lot more aggregating, but now we have almost 400 professional full-time journalists - reporting, breaking stories. We are here, for example (in Davos), with our executive business editor (Peter S. Goodman), who has done some of the best coverage in the States around poverty and how this is impacting the Republican primaries; when we had our political reporter covering the primaries in South Carolina, (Goodman) was covering what was happening with the issue of downward mobility there, which has been one of the issues that hasn't been adequately covered, the fate of the middle class. So what I'm saying is that we don't just do the conventional reporting that we have to do, the bread and butter, covering what everybody's covering, like the State of the Union, or in the case of Quebec, I'm sure covering the Plan Nord, the plan to exploit natural resources in northern Quebec. Whatever the Arianna Huffington issues of the moment are, we'll have to cover them obsessively, because they're of tremendous interest. But we'll need to go to the big issues, and stay on them, and basically generate interest in them. That's what we've done with series like Beyond the Battlefield, which covers the state of the returning vets from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So my point is that to describe the Huffington Post as just an aggregator now is just behind the times. You plan to have seven employees in Quebec. Will that grow over time? Of course. You know, when we launched the Huffington Post (U.S.) in May 2005, we had five staff. So the whole goal is to start small and grow, become profitable and attract advertising. In our case, that doesn't just mean advertising based on CPMs (cost per mile, or 1,000 visitors), but sponsorships, like an entire section we have now with Johnson & Johnson on global motherhood, and sponsorship of a good-news section, and sponsorship of a video series on social responsibility and, since the launch in France, sponsorships by L'Oréal and Orange. It's a different model. Our content is free, we don't have any plans to charge for anything, but the advertising that we bring in now moves way beyond the usual CPM model. How do you avoid the two coming too close together: sponsorship and what you're actually covering? Well, obviously that is very important and the key here is transparency. If we have a section that is sponsored, it transparently says so; there is no mixing up of the content, so no one is left in any doubt as to whether the section is sponsored or not. Tell me about yourself. Did you ever imagine you'd be flying around the world as a journalism executive? You mean when I was growing up in Athens, did I ever think one day I would become a blogger and that one day the Huffington Post would grow and make more babies around the world? No, I don't think so. Don't forget, I was pretty old when we launched the Huffington Post; I had already written a dozen books; I was 55 and now I'm 61. It shows that it's never too late to get involved with the Internet - or any start-up. What electronic devices do you use? I'm a BlackBerry addict. At the moment I have four BlackBerrys in front of me, because I have one for every provider for where I travel. I'm calling you on one. And of course, I have an iPad. But the one I really depend on is my BlackBerry. I have to send you a piece I wrote on the time I lost my BlackBerry in the Mediterranean. It fell into the sea. You just launched in France. How did the appointment of editorial director Anne Sinclair (ex-TF1 TV news host and wife of disgraced ex-International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn) go over with the media there? Oh, actually, amazing. We were all surprised by how positive the reception was at the press conference, where there were 260 journalists and two dozen cameras and television cameras. She's a professional journalist with tremendous cachet in France, and she herself had developed the business strategy of TF1 when she was there in the 1990s, and then had her own blog during the 2008 presidential race. Beyond that, I think there was something else that we were surprised by: If you go to her Facebook page in France, there are all these dozens of women who, even before we launched, came on her page and went (apropos of the DSK scandal): "Go, Anne, it makes it easier for us to get up after an ordeal and get back into the arena." Very often, especially for women, after a setback or a defeat or whatever it is, we want to hide ourselves under the covers. She instead has entered the arena again and been passionate and incredibly dedicated to learning everything and being involved in every aspect of the launch. You seem to have a knack for finding high-profile people to work for you. Is that part of the secret of your success? Well, we have high-profile people and we have thousands of people nobody had heard of before. And that's another thing that I love: being able to provide a platform to people who may already have their own blogs but who can cross paths with us and amplify their voices. A lot of the blogs we have in France now are people like Catherine Cerisey, who's tracking her own struggle with breast cancer, and suddenly this is getting all this traffic that is attracting attention to her own story. Arianna Huffington will launch Le Huffington Post Québec with a news conference Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Gault Hotel in Old Montreal; she'll be joined by her Quebec editor, Patrick White, and two top executives of parent company AOL Canada. From noon to 2 p.m., she'll attend a luncheon at the Fairmount Queen Elizabeth Hotel and speak on How Social Media Are Transforming the World; the event is organized by CORIM (Montreal Council on Foreign Relations); tickets start at $75 and advance registration is required; for more details, visit http://www.corim.qc.ca. A WINDOW ON LE HUFFINGTON POST QUÉBEC Owned by: AOL Huffington Post Media Group Language: French Headquarters (until April): 24th floor of 1000 de la Gauchetière St., Montreal Editor: Patrick White Staff: 7 Freelancers: 15 Bloggers: 120 Some who will blog for free: Charlotte Laurier, Claude Carignan, Louis Bernard. Some who decided not to blog: Louise Harel, Jean Barbe, Évelyne de la Chenelière Launch date: Wednesday Expected audience: 200,000 unique visitors per month Percentage of Quebecers who have never heard of Huffington Post: 82 (November 2011 poll) Sources: Huffington Post, The Gazette Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Arianna+Huffington+casts+ever+wider/6101339/story.html#ixzz1lQYt06nG

Communiqué de presse pas encore dispo sur le web:

Quebec has announced a $34-million renovation for Montreal's LaSalle Hospital emergency room, just a week after resident doctors made an online plea about their decaying facilities. Provincial Health Minister Yves Bolduc confirmed the investment Wednesday, which will be used to modernize and expand the hospital's ER to four times its current size. One of the videos showed a mouldy vent. (YouTube)Doctors at the hospital are declaring victory for their online campaign, that went viral last week. They shot videos of their emergency ward, showing mouldy ceilings and crowded hallways. "We didn't want to go to videos, no one wants to go there," said Dr. Tony Assouline. "We want to have normal relations with the administration and the government. This was a last resort, and it was done." Doctors would have never gone online with their complaints had they known a major renovation announcement was coming, he added. "Fortunately now, we'll have a new ER, and we're very happy." Bolduc said renovation plans have been in the works for years, and have nothing to do with a YouTube and website campaign that went viral last week. The new ER will be ready in 2014

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2510700

Ce fil est pour mettre des nouvelles sur l'industrie automobile au Canada (ventes, etc) Read more: http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=2513062#ixzz0eQ4DFfuA It is indeed a little disappointing that the Big 3 aren't really profiting that much from Toyota's woes. Especially considering how good the product is these days (and how reliable American cars are!).

Source: http://www.frillseekerdiary.com The Next New York City… MONTREAL Want it all? Want it now? Hop off that subway and charter your jet to Montreal. With heavy sophisticated French influence, plenty of amazing eats, and shopping for days, Canada’s finest if nearing it’s heyday. Day trips to major cities and quiet ski destinations included, you could spend a week or a year learning all there is to know from savvy insiders and locals, who have been waiting for the shining light for decades.

Gun registry favoured only by Quebecers: poll Last Updated: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 | 4:06 PM ET CBC News A poll suggests Quebecers are alone in wanting to save the long-gun registry, with most Canadians outside the province appearing content to abolish it. The findings in the latest survey by The Canadian Press/Harris-Decima come a week after the House of Commons gave approval in principle to a private member's bill aimed at killing the controversial registry. In Quebec, a majority of respondents say they're opposed to abolishing the registry, which was created after 14 women were killed at École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989. Fifty-six per cent of Quebecers polled said they oppose abolishing the registry, in contrast to the majority of people questioned in Atlantic Canada, British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba-Saskatchewan, who support cancelling the registry. Residents in Ontario who participated in the poll were split on the issue, according to Harris-Decima's results. Quebecers also held distinctive views about the registry's role in public security, with more than half of respondents believing it has helped fight and prevent crime. That's about 19 per cent more respondents than the national average of the other provinces. The poll comes as the debate over the long-gun registry slowly inches forward in the House of Commons. Last week a key vote was held on a private member's bill that would wipe out the registry. Conservative MP Candice Hoeppner tabled the bill on the contentious registry. The Bloc Québécois caucus voted against it, while 12 NDP and eight Liberal MPs backed the Conservative caucus in voting for the bill. On the same day as the vote, Quebec's legislature, the national assembly, unanimously adopted a motion reiterating Quebecers' reliance and belief in the registry. The Conservative government has wanted to abolish the registry on the basis that it is expensive and inefficient. The Harris-Decima poll surveyed about 1,000 Canadians by telephone between Nov. 5 and 8. The poll's margin of error is 3.1 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Big Apple starting to crumble Janet Whitman, Financial Post Published: Thursday, November 06, 2008 NEW YORK -- The Big Apple is losing its shine. After years of benefiting from consumer bingeing on everything from luxury lofts to US$99 hamburgers, New York is seeing a dramatic turn in its fortunes as Wall Street stumbles. Investment banks and other financial-services firms here have cut tens of thousands of high-wage jobs and many more pink slips still could be on the way as they grapple with the deepening credit crisis. This year's Wall Street bonus pool, which makes up the bulk of the pay for high-flying financial executives, is forecast to be chopped in half to US$16-billion. Businesses are already feeling the pinch. Revenue at some high-end Manhattan restaurants are down an estimated 20% this year and the once sizzling real-estate market is cooling fast. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this week that the big drop in tax revenue collected from financial firms is forcing him to renege on planned US$400 property tax rebates for homeowners and to mull a 15% income tax hike. Economists said yesterday that the downturn could resemble New York's financial crisis in the early 1970s, when the city nearly went bankrupt and crime rates skyrocketed. "Compensation is going to be way down and that's going to weigh on restaurants and retailers and the housing market as well," said Mark Vitner, senior economist at Charlotte, N.C.-based bank Wachovia Corp. "We're going to have a very difficult climb back out of this. The recovery might begin in the middle of next year, but that just means things will stop getting worse." Mr. Vitner said it could take at least three years before New York starts to see strong growth and five years before the city gets back to normal. After the dot-com bust in 1999 and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, New York soon roared back, fueled by Wall Street's recovery. But the city can't depend on Wall Street this time around. "The flavour is different," said James Brown, a New York state Department of Labor regional analyst who focuses on New York City. "It's not clear how much growth we can expect from our financial sector in the next upturn. We don't know to what degree they may not be as profitable and able to lavish the same high salaries in the next boom as they have in the past booms." With the U.S. government looking to avoid sowing the seeds for a future financial crisis by cracking down on executive bonuses and limiting how much financial firms can wager, Wall Street's recovery could be slow. That's bad news for New York State, which depends on the financial sector for 20% of its revenue. The state already is facing its biggest budget gap in history, at US$47-billion over the next four years. The crisis last week prompted New York State Gov. David Paterson to ask U.S. Congress for billions of dollars in federal assistance. New York City has been particularly hard hit. For every Wall Street job another three or four will be lost in the city. Despite the doom and gloom, Mr. Bloomberg assured New Yorkers at a press briefing this week that the city wouldn't return "to the dark days of the 1970s when service cuts all but destroyed our quality of life." The mayor, who is seeking a third term to guide the city through the crisis, said New York is in much better fiscal shape than it was then and won't make the same mistakes. Still, he warned, it could be as many as five years before financial companies have to start paying city or state taxes again because of the half a trillion dollars in write-downs they have taken, which will offset future profits.

Europe Works to Contain Crisis Article Tools Sponsored By NYC Times By CARTER DOUGHERTY, NELSON SCHWARTZ and FLOYD NORRIS Published: October 6, 2008 European nations scrambled further Monday to prevent a growing credit crisis from bringing down major banks and alarming savers as Sweden followed Germany, Austria and Denmark in offering new protections for bank deposits. As troubles in financial markets spread around the world, some governments are eager to act to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s when authorities sat on their hands during the Wall Street crash and its aftermath, Julian Chillingworth, chief investment officer at Rathbone Unit Trust Management in London, said. Sweden became the latest European country to offer protection for bank deposits, after the German government offered blanket guarantees Sunday to all private savings accounts. Austria and Denmark also did the same. Britain’s government on Monday scrambled to find ways to help the country’s ailing banking sector and even considered a partial nationalization of the industry. The chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, continued to consult with advisers on Monday on ways to stabilize the banking sector, which may include a recapitalization financed by taxpayers, said a person at the Treasury who declined to be identified because the discussions were private. Stocks fell sharply on Monday in London, Paris and Frankfurt. New bailouts were arranged late Sunday for two European companies, Hypo Real Estate, a large German mortgage lender, and Fortis, a large banking and insurance company based in Belgium but active across much of the Continent. Under the agreement, BNP Paribas will acquire the Belgium and Luxembourg banking operations of Fortis for about $20 billion. The spreading worries came days after the United States Congress approved a $700 billion bailout package that officials had hoped would calm financial markets globally. The crisis in Europe appears to be the most serious one to face the Continent since a common currency, the euro, was created in 1999. Jean Pisani-Ferry, director of the Bruegel research group in Brussels, said Europe confronted “our first real financial crisis, and it’s not just any crisis. It’s a big one.” Britain is coming under increasing pressure to act. Some investors criticized the government for failing to set up an American-style rescue fund and for its piecemeal approach to deal with each problem. “The government needs to get on their front foot and get control of their own destiny,” Mr. Chillingworth said. “We could well be in a period where we see a quasi-nationalization in the banking sector, where taxpayers are taking equity stakes.” Britain partly nationalized Bradford & Bingley last week after the mortgage lender struggled to get financing and brokered a takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB after its shares lost most of its value. From Tuesday, the government will also increase the amount of retail deposits it guarantees to £50,000, or $88,600, from £35,000. Some analysts said guaranteeing deposits might reinstate client confidence but would fall short of bringing back the trust among banks that is desperately needed to encourage them to lend to each other. British banks remain burdened by their exposure to worthless mortgage assets, but the larger problem remains their unwillingness to lend to one another — even after an injection of £40 billion by the Bank of England. “Liquidity is drying up,” said Richard Portes, a professor of economics at the London Business School. “The authorities have to deal with this paralysis in the money markets.” The European Central Bank has aggressively lent money to banks as the crisis has grown. It had resisted lowering interest rates, but signaled on Thursday that it might cut rates soon. The extra money, aimed at ensuring that banks have adequate access to cash, has not reassured savers or investors, and European stock markets have performed even worse than the American markets. In Iceland, government officials and banking chiefs were discussing a possible rescue plan for the country’s commercial banks. In Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel and her finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, appeared on television Sunday to promise that all bank deposits would be protected, although it was not clear whether legislation would be needed to make that promise good. Mindful of the rising public anger at the use of public money to buttress the business of high-earning bankers, Ms. Merkel promised a day of reckoning for them as well. “We are also saying that those who engaged in irresponsible behavior will be held responsible,” she said. The events in Berlin and Brussels underscored the failure of Europe’s case-by-case approach to restoring confidence in the Continent’s increasingly jittery banking sector. A meeting of European heads of state in Paris on Saturday did little to calm worries, though officials there pledged to work together to ensure market stability. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and his counterparts from Germany, Britain and Italy vowed to prevent a Lehman Brothers-like bankruptcy in Europe but they did not offer a sweeping American-style bailout package. The growing crisis has underlined the difficulty of taking concerted action in Europe because its economies are far more integrated than its governing structures. “We are not a political federation,” Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, said after the meeting. “We do not have a federal budget.” Last week, Ireland moved to guarantee both deposits and other liabilities at six major banks. There was grumbling in London and Berlin about the move giving those banks an unfair advantage. But Germany proposed its deposit guarantee Sunday after Britain raised its guarantee. The German officials emphasized that the guarantee applied only to private depositors, not to the banks themselves. But on Monday, Mr. Steinbrück said the government was considering an “umbrella” to protect the banking sector. Unlike in the United States, where deposits are now fully guaranteed up to a limit of $250,000 — a figure that was raised from $100,000 last week — deposits in most European countries have been only partly guaranteed, sometimes by groups of banks rather than governments. In Germany, the first 90 percent of deposits up to 20,000 euros, or about $27,000, was guaranteed. Even before the Paris meeting began it was becoming clear that two bailouts announced the week before had not succeeded and that UniCredit, a major Italian bank, might be in trouble. UniCredit announced plans on Sunday to raise as much as 6.6 billion euros. Fortis, which only a week ago received 11.2 billion euros from the governments of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, was unable to continue its operations. On Friday, the Dutch government seized its operations in that country, and late Sunday night the Belgian government helped to arrange for BNP Paribas, the French bank, to take control of the company for 14.5 billion euros, or about $20 billion. In Berlin, the government arranged a week ago for major banks to lend 35 billion euros to Hypo Real Estate, but that fell apart when the banks concluded that far more money would be needed. Late Sunday night the government said a package of 50 billion euros had been arranged, with both the government and other banks taking part. The credit crisis began in the United States, a fact that has led European politicians to assert superiority for their countries’ financial systems, in contrast to what Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, called the “speculative capitalism” of the United States. On Saturday, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, said the crisis “has come from America,” and Mr. Berlusconi bemoaned the lack of business ethics that had been exposed by the crisis. Many of the European banks’ problems have stemmed from bad loans in Europe, and Fortis got into trouble in part by borrowing money to make a major acquisition. But activities in the United States have played a role. Bankers said Sunday that the need for additional money at Hypo came from newly discovered guarantees it had issued to back American municipal bonds that it had sold to investors. The credit market worries came on top of heightening concerns about economic growth in Europe and the United States. “Unless there is a material easing of credit conditions,” said Bob Elliott of Bridgewater Associates, an American money management firm, after retail sales figures were announced, “it is unlikely that demand will turn around soon.” Henry M. Paulson Jr., the United States Treasury secretary, hoped that approval of the American bailout, which involved buying securities from banks at more than their current market value, would free up credit by making cash available for banks to lend and by reassuring participants in the credit markets. But that did not happen last week. Instead, credit grew more expensive and harder to get as investors became more skittish about buying commercial paper, essentially short-term loans to companies. Rates on such loans rose so fast that some feared the market could essentially close, leaving it to already-stressed banks to provide short-term corporate loans. Europe’s need to scramble is in part the legacy of a decision to establish the euro, which 15 countries now use, but not follow up with a parallel system of cross-border regulation and oversight of private banks. “First we had economic integration, then we had monetary integration,” said Sylvester Eijffinger, a member of the monetary expert panel advising the European Parliament. “But we never developed the parallel political and regulatory integration that would allow us to face a crisis like the one we are facing today.” In Brussels, Daniel Gros, director of the Center for European Policy Studies, agreed. “Maybe they will be shocked into thinking more strategically instead of running behind events,” he said. “The later you come, the higher the bill.” While the European Central Bank has power over interest rates and broader monetary policy, it was never granted parallel oversight of private banks, leaving that task to dozens of regulators across the Continent. This patchwork system includes national central banks in each of the euro zone’s 15 members and they still retain broad powers within their own borders, further complicating any regional approach to problem-solving. “The European banking landscape was transformed fairly recently,” Mr. Pisani-Ferry said. “When the euro was first introduced, the question of cross-border regulation didn’t really arise.” Optimists say one potential long-term benefit from the current turmoil is that it often takes a crisis to propel European integration forward. “Progress in Europe is usually the result of a crisis,” Mr. Eijffinger said. “This could be one of those rare moments in E.U. history.”

On the job, on solid ground The road to finding full-time employment in Quebec has many twists and turns. It also has lots of rotten bridges and overpasses. And that's good news if you're in the construction and engineering business. JEFF HEINRICH, The Gazette Published: 6 hours ago Shoring up all those massive old structures of rusted steel and cracked concrete is keeping many qualified workers on the job this summer. In fact, 2008 is the costliest year ever for infrastructure renewal in the province. How costly? Just look out your car window. Ottawa and Quebec are spending $3.2 billion to fix bridges and overpasses and repair roads at 1,800 sites across Quebec, including several major projects around Montreal. What began with a tragedy - the September 2005 collapse of the de la Concorde Blvd. overpass in Laval, which killed five people - has turned into a massive, government-financed job boom. Motorists may curse, but the boom has been a godsend for those who, it might be said, need a break the most: new immigrants trying to snag a first job in their adopted land. Since January, The Gazette has been following the progress of six of them, all enrolled in an intensive civil-engineering diploma program of 17 students at CEGEP du Vieux Montréal, their costs covered by Emploi-Québec. They wrote their final exams in mid-July and started apprenticing at Montreal-area companies soon after. The unpaid "stages," as they're known in French, last four weeks. The students are keeping a daily log of the 120 hours they're on the job and will return to class at the end of the month to give a PowerPoint presentation summing up their experience. After that, by the end of September or early October, it'll be graduation time. And diploma in hand, the eager engineers will hit the job market, finally getting off government assistance and earning a decent salary. One of the most energetic of the bunch is Agaton Oba-Buya, a Congolese man who spent half his life in Russia before starting a new life here in the spring of 2006 with his Russian wife and their two children. These days the 44-year-old PhD in technical science - who also had an engineering company in his hometown, Brazzaville - wears the hard hat and workboots of Demix Construction, a Longueuil general contractor. He was hired as an apprentice at the firm's Laval office two weeks ago. For Oba-Buya, Quebec's infrastructure woes spell one word: Opportunity. "Le malheur des uns fait le bonheur des autres," he said with a grin this week, quoting Voltaire's famous maxim. It was Tuesday and Oba-Buya had just spent the morning observing repairs to the 55th Ave. overpass of Highway 520, in Dorval, on behalf of his employer, a unit of Ciment Saint-Laurent. There's plenty of good fortune to be made out of Quebec's antiquated infrastructure, and if Oba-Buya keeps up the good work - and the repair contracts keep coming, which no one doubts - there's a good chance he'll turn his apprenticeship into a full-time job. "There's been a great deal of demand for workers because of all these private-public partnerships, projects like Highway 25 (between Montreal and Laval) and Highway 30 (on the South Shore)," said his boss, Dominic Martel, who also took on three others from the CEGEP program this month. "Usually we make do with apprentices out of the university programs, but this summer that wasn't enough, so we jumped at the chance for more workers when the CEGEP called us," he said. "Agaton has an advantage. He has a driver's licence and a car, which means he can easily get to the sites we're working on," he added. "I'm very satisfied with him so far. He expresses himself well, knows the technical terms we use, speaks several languages. He's autonomous, this gentleman, and that's what we're looking for." Getting his foot in the door wasn't easy for Oba-Buya. He sent his CV to close to 80 companies before his apprenticeship supervisor at the college stepped in to help land him an interview at Demix. It was in the interview that he began to practise the fine art of being accommodating. "They told me what projects they're involved in, such as overpasses, aqueducts, asphalt, sewers and drainage, and they asked me which one I felt most qualified to work on. I had experience with dams in Russia, so maybe a drainage project would have been a good choice," recalled Oba-Buya. "But in the end, I just told them to put me wherever I could be useful to the company, and that's what they did." His first day, he got a 45-minute seminar on health-and-safety procedures - essential to the job. (Three years ago, Demix was fined for negligence by the CSST after one of its superintendents was struck by a dump truck and killed at a job along Highway 40 on the West Island. The site is not far from the Dorval site Oba-Buya visited this week.) After the safety course, the budding apprentice was given a mound of documentation to wade through: details of projects, client profiles, bids from subcontractors, cement specifications, ISO norms - "everything so he wouldn't be thrown into a work site and feel like a tourist," Martel said. But what struck Oba-Buya the most was how his boss made a point of introducing him to everyone in the building. To him, that meant he was welcome - something every immigrant dreams of but doesn't always get. "It impressed me a lot - the kindness, the smiles - from everyone, too. It made an important step - leaving my studies, starting a new phase - all that much easier." Then, at the end of the week, he was taken out into the field, to three sites, including the 55th Ave. site. The overpass is so decrepit, it is slated for demolition in 2010. In the meantime it needs to be properly repaired and supported so that traffic, as well as companies like Bell Canada and Vidéotron that have cables to tend to down there, can circulate safely. To that end, Demix and its subcontractors are installing 64 foundation pylons to prop up the overpass. Behind concrete barriers last Tuesday, the site appeared muddy and noisy, its workers' clothing smeared with dust and grime amid the din of generators and drilling machines. Later in the week, Oba-Buya had a choice of revisiting a project on Highway 25, dealing by phone and fax with an electrician subcontracted for a project on Highway 55, and learning billing techniques using Excel software - all tasks he looked forward to with optimism and good cheer. And why not? He's got a whole new life to look forward to. Fall is coming, a big season in Demix's business. The company's human-resources department will likely offer one-year contracts to some of its summer apprentices, Martel said - salaries for management jobs like the one Oba-Buya has his eye on being non-union and strictly negotiable. Now comes Step 2 in the art of being accommodating: Don't ask for too much. As a permanent resident to Canada, not yet a full citizen, Oba-Buya feels the humility of being a newcomer. From his Moscow days, he retains his Russian citizenship and passport (and speaks only Russian at home in Villeray), and that gives him pride. And he remembers being his own boss in Brazzaville, one more thing to be proud of. In this country, he's not holding out for a barrel of gold. He just hopes that come graduation, Demix will hire him as a technician in civil engineering, whatever the salary. "I'll take what they want to pay me," he said. "The money isn't important. The important thing is to get the work." jheinrich@thegazette.canwest.com THE QUEBEC DREAM: SIX STORIES. Look for Part 4 of this occasional series at the end of August, when reporter Jeff Heinrich checks back in with the students when they return to class to make a presentation about their apprenticeship experience - the final step before graduation. - - - Where they are now Since July 28, the 17 students in the CEGEP du Vieux Montréal's civil-engineering diploma program have been working as apprentices in various sectors. An asterisk (*) appears in front of the names of the six being followed by The Gazette: Real estate and buildings Le Groupe GENINOV Inc., Montreal: *Mohammed Tazi Mezalek, *Marie-Juline Jean-Baptiste and one other student. Construction EBC Inc., Brossard: *Hocine Merzouk, *Lady Alexandra Vega Contreras. Civil engineering Demix Construction (Ciment St-Laurent Inc.), Laval and Longueuil: *Agaton Oba-Buya and three other students. Geotechnical / materials / environment Groupe Qualitas Inc., Montreal: *Ahmed Gherbi. ABS Environnement Inc., Anjou: one student. Labo SM Inc., Longueuil: one student. Solmatech Inc., Repentigny: two students. Industrial engineering GCM Consultants Inc., Anjou: one student. Municipal City of Verdun: one student. Electricity distribution networks Transelec Common Inc.: one student. CEGEP du Vieux Montréal

amNY.com Extreme Commuter: From Montreal to Queens By Justin Rocket Silverman, amNewYork Staff Writer jsilverman@am-ny.com January 28, 2008 [/url] This Extreme Commuter rides a plane the way most of us ride the subway. Professor Adnan Turkey lives in Montreal but teaches computer science at DeVry Institute of Technology in Long Island City. He's been making that commute once a week for nine years, 45 weeks a year. Although the flight itself is only about 75 minutes long, getting to and from the airport makes it impractical to make the ride daily. Price is a factor, too. Flying directly from Montreal is too expensive even once a week, so for half the ticket price he drives across the border to fly out of Burlington, Vt. So every Monday at noon he leaves his house in Canada and makes that 2-hour trip to Vermont. He puts the car in long-term parking ($6 a day) and flies to New York, where he will sleep in a small rented apartment and teach until Thursday afternoon. Then he takes the flight and drives back home. Door-to-door it's about seven hours each way. "After working many years in Canada, I thought, 'why not come to New York City?'" he asks. "It's just next door and it's the capital of the world." Adnan knows of no other commuters on the Montreal/New York City run, and says many of the border guards laugh in amazement when he states his business in the U.S. Although the weekly $150-round trip JetBlue ticket, and the monthly rent in New York takes a bit out of his income (he won't say how much), Adnan says he has no plans to ask his wife, also a university teacher, and two college-age daughters to move to New York. Besides, money has never been his primary interest. "Education is a noble mission, so salary is not the No. 1 concern, at least for me," he says. "When I see the next generation of students learning and becoming skilled, that's my job satisfaction." Know an Extreme Commuter? Transit reporter Marlene Naanes wants to hear the story. Email her at mnaanes@am-ny.com Copyright © 2008, AM New York http://www.amny.com/sports/football/giants/am-commuter0128,0,4574142,print.story

Filmmaker is a Montreal wannabe Brendan KellyCanwest News Service Friday, January 25, 2008 MONTREAL -- When the Oscar nominations were announced Tuesday, the Montreal film community was all abuzz about the best animated-short nod for hipsters Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski and their inspired stop-motion horror flick Madame Tutli-Putli. A little later in the day, talk surfaced that there was another Montrealer in the race in the same category. A few phone calls later, it was ascertained that Josh Raskin -- whose film, I Met the Walrus, is also nominated for animated short at the Oscars -- is in fact a Torontonian. But it's easy to see why some folks think Raskin is from Montreal. On the phone from the Sundance Film Festival, where I Met the Walrus was screening this week, Raskin pretty well pleaded to be considered as a honorary Montrealer. "I think it's easily the best city in North America, except for the 15-month winter," said Raskin. "I worked on a strangely misguided film project (in Montreal) for three months three or four years ago. I've been there at least a few times a year and sometimes for weeks or months at a time. It's really my second home." Raskin has many good pals here, including his longtime friend James Braithwaite, whose striking hand-drawn pen illustrations are showcased in Raskin's five-minute film. The digital animation is courtesy of Alex Kurina. Braithwaite's animation style is reminiscent of the distinctive doodlings of John Lennon made famous in books like In His Own Write and on some of his album jackets. The Lennon homage is no accident -- I Met the Walrus is inspired by an interview with the late Beatle done in Toronto in 1969 by a 14-year-old kid named Jerry Levitan. Levitan, now a Toronto lawyer and the producer of the film, somehow convinced Lennon to do an interview on May 26, 1969, just hours before John and Yoko headed to Montreal for their famous bed-in for peace. For more than 30 years, Levitan didn't do anything with the half-hour interview -- in which the pop-music icon chatted about everything from world peace to George Harrison's place in The Beatles -- though he had plenty of offers from producers hoping to make a film based on the incident. He finally turned to up-and-coming Toronto filmmaker Raskin after seeing some of his animated work. Raskin decided to chop the interview down to just over five minutes and used that as the audio soundtrack for an experimental animation short that mixes the whack-job animation style of Terry Gilliam from Monty Python with Lennon-esque sketches. "Cutting it down to five minutes was easily the hardest part of making the film because everything John said was simple, profound and poetic, and I felt was important for the world to hear now," said Raskin. "It's mostly about peace and what John was up to at the time. But (Jerry) is a 14-year-old kid, so he talks about how he's not too keen on George and he always thought John was the better guitar player. He was probably barely even listening to the answers because he's so overwhelmed. "What I was trying to do with the film was put you inside the head of a 14-year-old starstruck kid interviewing his idol and it's this stream-of-consciousness, free-associative visual interpretation of the words," Raskin said. "The things they're speaking of in the interview are more relevant than they were then," said Braithwaite, who moved to Montreal from Toronto seven years ago to study English lit at Concordia University and now lives and works in Montreal as a freelance illustrator. "We need another John Lennon," added Braithwaite, who is at Sundance this week with his pal Raskin. Lennon was in Canada at the time because the authorities wouldn't let him into the U.S., a state of affairs he weighs in on in the film with some typically barbed social commentary. "War is big business and they like war because it keeps them fat and happy," Lennon tells Levitan. "I'm anti-war. So they're trying to keep me out. But I'll get in because they'll have to own up in public that they're against peace." © Times Colonist (Victoria) 2008 http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=e8d4ebc6-9c62-42d6-be6a-88532c659e7a

(Courtesy of CBC News)