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Historic Quebec City site blanketed in life jackets to call attention to refugee crisis
CBC News | July 9, 2022
The tide of the St. Lawrence River fills and empties the moat surrounding the historic Royal Battery in Quebec City's Petit Champlain neighbourhood. And from now until October, thousands of life vests of all shapes and sizes attached to the old greystone walls of the battery will float with the tide.
In all, 2,000 life jackets adorn those walls — part of an exhibition simply called Life Jackets, by Chinese artist and humanitarian activist Ai Weiwei.
The display is an effort to raise awareness about the refugee crisis and mass migration, and every single plastic and fabric buoyancy device, neatly aligned in rows, tells one refugee's story.
The Chinese artist collected an estimated 14,000 life jackets in 2016 on the island of Lesbos in Greece. The life jackets were left behind by Syrian refugees as they fled the civil war in their homeland, said Vincent Roy.
Uber deliberately dodged authorities, ignored rules in early years, leaked documents show
CBC News | July 10, 2022
Revenu Quebec agents had been investigating Uber for weeks, including making undercover visits to the company's Montreal offices and following its Quebec general manager to work one day. They suspected the ride-hailing service was improperly declaring that it owed no provincial sales tax and helping some drivers dodge that tax and the federal GST.
On May 13, 2015, they got a search warrant, and the next day they raided the company's premises. But at 10:40 a.m., at two Uber offices in Montreal, investigators noticed company laptops, smartphones and tablets suddenly all restarted at exactly the same time.
Worried that data on the devices might be being manipulated from afar, the agents powered them down. They seized 14 computers, 74 phones and some documents, according to court records obtained by CBC/Radio-Canada.
Uber's Quebec general manager at the time, Jean-Nicolas Guillemette, told the investigators that he had contacted engineers at the company's headquarters in San Francisco who had encrypted all the data remotely.
Quebec environment minister to visit Rouyn-Noranda amid arsenic emission concerns
CTV News | July 11, 2022
Quebec Environment Minister Benoit Charette will travel to Rouyn-Noranda on Tuesday to discuss arsenic emissions from the Horne smelter.
"I will be in Rouyn-Noranda tomorrow to meet with local stakeholders. Our priority is and will remain the safety of citizens," wrote Benoit Charette on Twitter Monday afternoon.
In addition, the Normanda Mine Workers Union (STMN-CSN) is asking Glencore, the owner of the smelter, to agree "as quickly as possible with the government on a precise timetable that will allow for the greatest technically possible reduction of arsenic in the air."
Kevin Gagnon, vice-president of the Fédération de l'industrie manufacturière, said that by "combining several emission reduction measures, it is possible to continue operations at the Horne Smelter while achieving much greater control of arsenic emissions than is currently the case."
This would allow, according to him, to maintain "thousands of jobs related to the smelter while improving the quality of life of the citizens of Rouyn-Noranda."
Nicolas: Quebec's position on asylum seekers is pure folly
Montreal Gazette | July 12, 2022
Picture a mother of young children who has been living in Quebec for a few months. Maybe even a few years. She might be a Congolese or a Haitian asylum seeker. Or a Ukrainian who fled the war. She has a work permit, but not the permanent residency that comes with official refugee status.
This woman would like to work. She’d like to make a living, of course, and provide for her family. It turns out it’s easy for her to find work. She’s even received unsolicited job offers, given the labour shortage affecting the province. She’d be of crucial help for so many understaffed local businesses struggling to stay afloat in the current economic climate.
But she has to turn down those offers. Why? Because she’s a mother of young children. Her children need access to daycare if she works, and the Quebec government insists on shutting her out of the subsidized system.
The Educational Childcare Act stipulates that a work permit holder who is in Quebec primarily to work can access subsidized daycare. But in 2018, in the context of the political panic around the arrival of asylum seekers through Roxham Rd., the then Liberal government of Philippe Couillard decided to reinterpret the act so that asylum seekers would no longer be included in the definition of people “primarily in Quebec to work.” When the Coalition Avenir Québec took office, they did not overturn the decision, which had been decried by immigration settlement organizations and human rights advocates alike.
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