City to distribute masks
The Journal says the city will distribute masks but not how or where.
Mayor Plante has been hinting she has plans to make summer fun despite the loss of festivals. To be honest, I think to many Montrealers the festivals are mostly tourist bait, and since there won’t be tourism this summer the city will save money on the intensive policing and cleaning up of the Quartier des spectacles, downtown and the islands that must have to be done normally.
One of Plante’s intentions is to open community gardens with certain safeguards in place. Since most planting isn’t done till May, the season should be pretty much as usual for gardeners.
For myself, I’ll miss the street fairs, which I always used to enjoy, but which I doubt can take place this year.
Spi 10:54 on 2020-04-29 Permalink
Given how those 50 000 masks are intended for the neediest and vulnerable it’s understandable that it wasn’t communicated where and through which organization they’d be distributed. The last thing we need is people lining up for free masks.
Chris 17:19 on 2020-04-29 Permalink
Elated to see they reversed course on the community gardens! Ontario declared them an essential service a couple of weeks ago, the difference was striking.
Stopping people from growing food while there are queues outside food stores seemed really odd to me.
PO 10:21 on 2020-04-30 Permalink
I’m going to have to disagree with you, Kate, on the point about the city saving money. Based only on my own assumptions (and I’m happy to be proven wrong) any clean-up/security/spending costs will probably be negligible in comparison to the amount of revenue that will be lost from not having big tourism in town this summer.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting we re-open anything for the just for the sake of the economy. This all certainly has to be done to protect peoples’ health and to respect the capacity of the healthcare system. But any massive hit to summer tourism dollars will have net negative effects on the economics of the city, directly and indirectly.
Kate 20:04 on 2020-04-30 Permalink
PO, sadly, you’re probably right. I was just trying to see an upside.