The city’s expenses connected with the pandemic have already exceeded estimates by $20 million.
Updates from May, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The A20 downtown will be closed for three days starting Thursday evening.
Work planned this weekend for the Jacques-Cartier has been delayed because of rain.
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Kate
André Boisclair, the Outremont boy who led the PQ to a stunning defeat in the 2007 election, has been accused of an armed sex assault back in 2014. Compare the CTV photo to this one in La Presse: fair enough, everyone ages, but this really looks like the wrong side of the picture of Dorian Gray.
Friday morning, Boisclair turned himself in.
david202
Knew he’d lose that election when at a bar I used to frequent (now gentrified into oblivion, he was called simply “la tapette.”
Ian
If only the PQ had some sort of warning, way of knowing that they weren’t actually a progressive party, like the attitudes of their party faithful around race and ethnic identity or something.
It’s always been one of their greatest failings that they try to position themselves as socially progressive, without actually being tolerant of diversity.
Hamza khan
I just remember him for admitting he was doing lines off his desk while in office as PQ leader
Michelle Daines
Allegedlly.. f he is found guilty he will go to jail…where he will be deprived…where there is no coke…no men…no booze…no sex…wadeaminute…..
walkerp
Damn, he looks rough! I give you a laughing emoji for the Dorian Gray reference. I can imagine Boisclair wilding in back alleys of the London docks. That guy has seen some shit for sure.
dwgs
While I am no fan of Boisclair I will say this; he and I are the same age and there’s a helluva drop between 40 (about when we saw him last) and 54. It ain’t pretty.
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Kate
La Presse (via AFP) says Wednesday was the hottest day in Montreal history.
Cooling stops are open around town. (What’s a better translation of halte-fraîcheur?)
ProposMontreal
Beside the subject, La Presse is taking a text of 227 words and a video I could pump out in about 30 minutes ( I know I make some of those) from a French agency on a subject that just happens to be from their own hometown. That’s actually kinda sad.
DeWolf
Small clarification: it was hottest May day in history, but the absolute hottest remains August 1, 1975 at 37.6 degrees.
Kate
The headline did say hottest, until Propos tweeted La Presse.
david202
I’m amazed it’s not higher – some days I can remember almost hallucinating from the heat.
Blork
Bear in mind we were spared some discomfort yesterday because the humidity was only around 35%. Had it been up around 80%, which isn’t unusual in the worst days of summer, it would have been unbearable.
curious
Toronto calls them “cooling centres.”
Ian
I’ve seen anglo media in town calling them “cooling stations”
Max
Let’s go with “chill spots”. That way we can dispense with one extra term.
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Kate
A small synagogue in Côte St-Luc was ransacked and its ritual items defiled at some time before this week, but like other religious sites it has been closed so the exact time of the incident is unknown.
ProposMontreal
Hate crime or just hooliganism?
Kate
It’s a pretty specific action, to locate a synagogue in a residential setting and defile its Torah.
dwgs
…and write anti Semitic graffiti on the walls…
Chris
Definitely seems like more than mere hooliganism.
A bit weird though that the article says both: “This disgusting act of antisemitism comes on the eve of our holiday of Shavuot” and yet “she did not know when the ransacking occurred … The synagogue had been closed since mid-March due to the pandemic.” Seem unjustified to link it to this holiday, when it could have been done months ago.
Kate
Chris, if you read the statement as “Knowledge of this act comes on the eve of our holiday of Shavuot” it’s understandable. She wasn’t saying she knew when it happened, only that discovery of the damage came on the eve of the day Jews celebrate the Torah, making it particularly painful.
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Kate
A study shows Quebecers are the most nonchalant people in North America about the consequences of a second wave of Covid, but computer modelling shows that we need to maintain social distancing to keep a lid on it.
One single health care professional who took a trip to Quebec from Covid-free New Brunswick has sparked an outbreak there.
Quebec is having to back away from its plan to slash immigration now that it’s been shown we desperately need immigrants. As someone said on Facebook (I can’t find the cite again), Simon Jolin-Barrette has discovered that his bcbg white Francophone folks are not lining up to change diapers in CHSLDs.
Uatu
Increase number of immigrants, give them jobs and make them wear masks. Karma’s working overtime…
JaneyB
Lol. Ain’t that the truth. Can’t write this stuff fast enough.
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Kate
Following our discussion on libraries: the hall at the Grande Bibliothèque is still being used as a day refuge for the homeless but that arrangement will end on June 1. After that, the library needs time to sanitize its books and its whole building, and possibly change aspects of its operations, before its proposed reopening a month later.
Faiz imam
My local library (brossard) is opening next week. The process will be pretty convoluted though.
You have to call or order books online, and after a few days they’ll call you back to tell you they have it prepared. Then you’ll go and they’ll hand it to you in a safe way at the front. No entering inside.
And when you return the books, they will be quarantined for 72 hours.
Kate
City libraries had been branching out into lending musical instruments and other objects as well as books, but the pandemic may make any form of lending less appealing, for a long time.
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Kate
A survey made for Remax shows that Quebecers prefer the suburbs when they decide to buy property – bad news for those who see urban densification as the way forward. However, in Mont St-Hilaire, a judge struck down two anti-densification bylaws, saying they contravened the urban agglomeration’s PMAD (Plan métropolitain d’aménagement et de développement), so there may be some hope the arable land around Montreal won’t be completely covered in concrete by 2050.
Jonathan
I can’t seem to find any more information on that survey. My first thought is that it only represents the views of people wanting to buy new property, not representative of Quebecers. It doesn’t include people who are quite happy where they are (regardless of whether they live in the city or in the suburbs). Also not clear as to what is considered ‘city’ and ‘suburbs’ and how they by that.
When I try to talk to my folks about moving to the city, they right away think I am talking about having them move ‘downtown’, though I may be thinking of VSL or Verdun. If they answered this survey and all they had was ‘city’ or ‘suburb’ as qualifiers, they would have said HELL NO to the city… but may just as well have had Verdun as a possible location to move to.
Bert
Perhpas this is the survey…. https://blog.remax.ca/canadian-housing-market-outlook/
Jonathan
Also a note that it surely doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of Quebecers who can’t even contemplate purchasing property in the province, never could and surely can now never due to the affordability crisis. This survey just highlights the obvious – that yard space and house size is a marker of class and status.
CE
People in the suburbs often have a different idea about where downtown is. I had a co-worker who told me he was moving out of his parents’ house to the West Island to move “downtown.” His apartment was in northern CDN, not somewhere very many Montrealers would consider downtown.
JP
So true. My mom’s friend from DDO would say she was going downtown, when she was actually going to Plaza St Hubert.
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Kate
It’s getting more medieval here by the day: with businesses closed, rats are multiplying in empty spaces.
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Kate
Inuit in town are coming in for anti-Asian hate crimes presumably deriving from Covid paranoia.
I overlooked this story last week about the Korean man stabbed in NDG in March. He is an academic and researcher who came here to work for a year at what the Gazette calls “a local university” – or he was. He has left and taken his family back to Seoul.
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Kate
The mayor is asking Quebec for a $5 million fund to help people move house this summer. The city may even use a hotel it booked in case of Covid overspill to house people who have to leave their digs at the end of June with nowhere to go. Some say requests for help may double this year.
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Kate
The orange line was down for an hour Thursday morning, which makes me wonder how they’ll safely manage the crowding that happens when there’s a stoppage at rush hour.
JaneyB
That is tricky. Right now, they’re probably wondering if making metro masks compulsory would help to fix that.
JP
I’ve been wearing a mask, but I’m not sure that masks would really fix anything in this case. They may diminish risks a little or somewhat, but a crowded metro, even with masks, seems risky.
I would wear a mask if I had to use the metro, but I can’t imagine how uncomfortable and unpleasant it would be to wear one on a crowded metro during the heat wave.
Also, I’m seeing a lot of discarded masks on the street, which makes me wonder if the buses and metros will also be littered with used masks. Those worn masks are pretty much a biohazard at this point. I’d hate to see them on seats or on the sides between the bus wall and seat, where people like to leave their trash.
As someone mentioned here not too long ago, people are also slipping their masks down to gab on the phone. People who talk on the phone on the metro, talk particularly loudly to overcome noise. If they pull their masks down and scream into their phone…I wouldn’t want to be the person next to them. There are also people not wearing them properly or perhaps not discarding or washing them after every use…
Maybe trash cans on metro platforms could help a bit with any issue of littered masks there.
Kate
The STM removed all the trash cans from the platforms a few years ago. I think the premise was they were unsafe because bombs could be hidden in them, although the city wasn’t under particular threat at the time. Now it looks like it may have been short-sighted of them.
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Kate
A man and woman were stabbed in a brawl in Montreal North in the wee hours. The man is in critical condition.
david642 03:03 on 2020-05-30 Permalink
Cut it all off. Dump the responsibility on the province, nobody will know anyway, since the city takes such a backseat, and Legault et al. are running the show anyway.
Instead, the city should drop all spending to life support levels, and plough absolutely every possible resource into getting as many worthwhile projects – especially rail rapid transit expansion – as close to shovel ready as possible before the end of summer.
It should be an all hands, around-the-clock operation, just drop into that hole hard, purpose-oriented work to get the file ready for our people to lobby the feds, up to and including Trudeau himself.