Canada will not be sending athletes to the Tokyo Olympics unless they’re postponed to a safer time.
Updates from March, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
As of midnight Sunday, the SPVM is declaring emergency over COVID-19. Daniel Renaud explains the ways this will change how the police operate.
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Kate
The STM is asking people who suspect they’ve caught the virus not to take public transit, although that leaves open the question how they’re meant to get to a testing clinic if they have no car. If I were feeling woozy I don’t think I’d want to walk to the Place des Festivals from Villeray, but it wouldn’t be fair to expose a taxi driver either.
I’ve just seen a tweet saying the city is closing playgrounds.
Everything I heard on the 1 p.m. Legault talk suggests we’ll be on general isolation at least till the end of April. He announced that schools and malls are closed till May, as well as restaurant dining rooms. Grocery stores, pharmacies and SAQ stores remain open.
Hydro-Quebec is suspending late paying fees, but Quebec could cancel all domestic (and maybe some commercial) Hydro bills for March, April and May, if it really wanted to give us a break.
The number of COVID-19 deaths in Quebec actually went down from 5 to 4, as a postmortem apparently revealed that one of the people who died didn’t have the virus.
The mayor of New York says that city’s situation’s going to get worse throughout April and May. He’s blaming Trump for his inaction, but you can bet Trump is repositioning himself to be the hero of this story, and half the voters in America are already most of the way to believing it. (Trump’s also figuring out how to delay the November election, bet on it.)
I wish there were other news to report. We haven’t even had any police blotter stories this weekend.
dmdiem
The election question has come up often. From what i understand, delaying the election doesn’t extend the presidential term. Once the term ends, the president steps down and the speaker of the house assumes presidential duties until an election can be called.
jeather
Police tape around the apparatuses in parks in St Henri. A number of people walking, but I didn’t walk along commercial stores so who knows.
My mother’s going to be distraught that I can’t just have dinner with her (from 6′ away) at her house anymore.
JP
The “don’t go to the clinic by STM” thing sounds complicated. I feel like the density and crowding of buses and metros being what they are (i.e., not crowded at all), makes it actually better to go by STM and keep your distance, rather than be in a car, in very close proximity to a taxi/uber driver or family member or friend. You can probably even have a whole wagon of the metro to yourself at this point.
Also, lots of workplaces are still running as usual. I know people who work in the St. Laurent St. garment area, and companies refuse to close, and keep running. The people i know wouldn’t qualify for the $573, but they don’t want to go to work. What do you do then? I think the government really really needs to mandate that everything shut down. There are still places refusing to take public health directives seriously in order to profit…I’m not sure what it will take to get them to comply.
Kevin
There isn’t really a federal election in the US—not like we know it.
There are 50 states holding elections, and then it gets complicated.There is a reason no country has imitated the US electoral system…
CE
A friend of mine had to get tested (came back negative) and had to walk (in the rain) from Parc-Ex to Hôtel-Dieu. She doesn’t have a car and they told her she couldn’t take transit or a taxi. I walked with her, it took about an hour. I don’t know what a really sick or older person in her situation would do.
dmdiem
CE. thats horrific. Maybe the city should appropriate all the buses no one is riding to use as mobile testing points.
Ephraim
@jeather – I can’t even see my mother anymore. The apartment building won’t let anyone in, by government order. They were having dinner, one per table, but they switched to delivering dinner to each room.
Maybe we should start doing what they do in China, SKorea, Hong Kong and Taiwan and check everyone’s temperature to enter transit.
jeather
My grandmother’s in one of those homes. I visited last Saturday, the place had planned to close to visitors, but while I was there the new announcement came out. I know she’s worried she’s going to die there alone. It’s horrible. (I’m not saying the rule is wrong. But it’s horrible.)
Ephraim
I talk to my mother each night. She tells us what she needs, so we can look at getting it shipped to her.
I was wondering about the change from 5 to 4… we assumed reanimation 🙂
JaneyB
Don’t most taxis have a plexiglass panel between them and the ride? Maybe a pickup truck could offer transit eg: sick person in the back. There’s hardly any traffic now and off-highways that seems workable. Similarly some kind of bike-powered trailer could be helpful.
The simplest thing would be a mobile testing unit that goes to peoples’ houses. I agree with @Ephraim, there should be/should have been temperature testing everywhere. It will catch everything but it’s better than not knowing.
Alison Cummins
JaneyB,
Not that I’m aware of. I don’t remember ever seeing plexiglas barriers in Montreal.
When you call to confirm that you meet criteria for testing you can make arrangements to be tested if you can’t go to where they are.
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Kate
Hundreds of people attended a wedding at a Westmount synagogue on March 12, and one of them, a Côte St-Luc resident, has since been rushed to hospital with COVID‑19. Now CSL has more cases of the virus and is asking for quarantine to be imposed.
Exo is reducing its train departures as of Monday because of lowered demand. Buses run by Exo will be rescheduled sometime next week.
(Remember when we all thought two weeks would do it?)
Justin Trudeau will be speaking at 11:15 Sunday, and François Legault at 1 p.m. – these are from the Journal’s latest developments page.
Bars are excluded from the federal support program and bar owners feel this is unfair. Is it fair to group bars with casinos, pawnshops, the sex industry and “businesses that incite any form of violence, hatred or discrimination”?
La Presse says a clinique sans rendez‑vous to test for the virus will be opening Monday under a heated marquee at St‑Urbain and de Maisonneuve. It’s to be drive-thru and walk-up and really be sans rendez-vous, unlike so many soi‑disant walk‑in clinics around town.
Alison Cummins
> (Remember when we all thought two weeks would do it?)
Nope. Not me. I started thinking in terms of months immediately. If we’re going to be holed up like Anne Frank for months, what do we need to put in place so that we can stay sane?
My thought was that groups of people who weren’t too popular could arrange to be social with eachother but not other people. But grownups have complicated lives and for most people I don’t think that works.
Chris
>Is it fair to group bars with casinos, pawnshops, the sex industry
Those are *all* legal businesses, i.e. operating with government permission already, and now it’s government forcing them closed. Outrageous.
>and “businesses that incite any form of violence, hatred or discrimination”?
“any form of violence”. ha! Says the federal government that sells weapons to Saudi Arabia.
Kate
Chris, the sex trade has to be in a legal gray area, and besides, by its very nature – unless it’s a booth with a partition (do those even exist any more in the internet era?) – brings people into dangerous proximity. I base this on a recent story about an erotic massage salon getting closed down in Rosemont, because it was “offering erotic services far beyond what its permit allows”. I don’t know what the terms of their permit were, but that little storefront was in and out of the news for awhile, because it’s in a mostly residential area and people were uncomfortable with it.
David100 05:48 on 2020-03-23 Permalink
So lame that Canada is the country to announce this.
Like, those Japanese have been prepping for this for years, and instead of doing the multi-lateral thing, some Canadian Olympic people with their own agenda are trying to make a play here.
walkerp 08:31 on 2020-03-23 Permalink
I thought it was kind of badass and the right thing to do. IOC is super corrupt and clearly hoping to buy time. Insane to think that it is even a conversation at this point whether they will cancel it or not.
Kate 08:34 on 2020-03-23 Permalink
I agree with walkerp. Canada made the right move. Those Games will have to be cancelled, or postponed a year.
Mark 09:21 on 2020-03-23 Permalink
Everything I’ve understood from this story is that the IOC and Japan are both aware that the games need to be postponed, but they are playing a game a chicken to see who pulls the plug first….in terms of saving face, but mostly because of insurance and contracts. They are out-waiting each other to see who blinks first and is left with the bulk of expenses.
dwgs 09:26 on 2020-03-23 Permalink
I have a family member who does a lot of the logistics for the Canadian team (arranging transportation and storage of athletic gear, team clothing, specialized nutritional needs etc etc etc, all the things the team needs to function). That job alone is a massive undertaking, he has already been to Japan twice for periods of about 10 days. If the games are to go ahead as scheduled his crew (and that of every other country) would need to be in Japan by the third week of June to set up. He would also need to make another week-long trip at the end of May.
There is no way one can reasonably expect all this to be blown over in time.
Tim 10:34 on 2020-03-23 Permalink
@David100, this isn’t about Japan. It’s about the clowns in the IOC. Cathal Kelly hits the nail on the head in the following (hopefully not paywalled) column: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/article-canadas-decision-to-pull-out-of-the-olympics-is-to-our-collective/
david100 12:09 on 2020-03-23 Permalink
That’s just rah-rahism for Canada.
In reality, the Japanese should have been left to announce it in their own time, given the huge investment they’ve made – both financially and in terms of national pride.
The Canadians are doing their goofy thing to gain exactly the plaudits they’re gaining from the media, instead of being good soldiers and doing the right thing, which is to let the Japanese do their thing. And in case you’re thinking that the Japanese would be too invested or corrupt to cancel due to a public health crisis, you should learn more about Japan, whose people and government I trust the most out of any on earth to manage a pandemic like this.
Tim 12:24 on 2020-03-23 Permalink
Who will make the decision to cancel the Olympics? Japan or the IOC?
dwgs 13:51 on 2020-03-23 Permalink
Spoke to my relative today, the sea cans with the bulk of Team Canada gear were supposed to be loaded on a freighter this morning to make the journey to Japan. There was barely time to prevent them being loaded. There are many many moving parts here and time is critical. There are many many repercussions if people go through the motions to appease the IOC and the JOC.
dwgs 14:01 on 2020-03-23 Permalink
Aaaaand it’s official, they’re cancelled. If Canada hadn’t pulled the plug when it did all their stuff would be on a cargo ship right now bound for Tokyo, where it would then be put on another ship immediately and sent back.
Kevin 17:41 on 2020-03-23 Permalink
@dwgs
Dick Pound says he expects they’ll be cancelled, but the IOC has not officially cancelled or postponed the games yet.
(People need to be much better at writing headlines)
dwgs 20:08 on 2020-03-23 Permalink
I got alerts from two different sports sites I follow saying that they were cancelled. It seems that somebody jumped the gun.