CBC News Posted: Feb 23, 2014 11:09 AM ET
Quebec’s agriculture ministry confirmed the province’s first case of porcine epidemic diarrhea Sunday, a deadly virus that has already killed millions of piglets in the United States.

Known as PED, the virus originated in China before arriving in the United States and Canada, where cases have been confirmed in Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Manitoba and now Quebec.

Quebec’s first case of PED was detected in test samples from a herd on a farm in the Montérégie region south of Montreal. The pigs have no clinical signs of the illness but agricultural ministry officials now have the farm under quarantine to prevent the virus from spreading.

by Graeme Hamilton
Published 12/03/13 8:13 PM ET

MONTREAL — As hearings began Tuesday into Quebec’s proposed tightening of its language law, the main union representing provincial civil servants had some horror stories to share about life on the frontlines.

The details were so shocking that employees’ names and workplaces were withheld to protect them from possible repercussions, the Syndicat de la fonction publique et parapublique du Québec (SFPQ) wrote in a brief tabled at the National Assembly.

There was the perfectly bilingual clerk at Revenue Quebec who frequently meets people who are more at ease discussing their tax questions in English. The clerk prefers to go along rather than turn “a tax problem into a language debate” and possibly spark a complaint.

The PQ’s Bill 14, a proposed intensified language law, is now fodder for the paper shredder.

PQ cabinet minister Diane De Courcy, who was steering the dossier, conceded Thursday that there would be no further attempt to advance the project, considering that their minority government failed to get sufficient opposition support for the legislation.