A woman working on the ground says her group has already seen a rise in drug use and homelessness following from the pandemic shutdown.
Updates from June, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Shots were fired in a hotel parking lot in Hochelaga on Sunday morning. (These reports say “corner of Sherbrooke and Lacordaire” but Google maps indicates that by the time Lacordaire gets to Sherbrooke it’s called Dickson – but let it pass.) No victims or assailants have been found.
Dhomas
Lacordaire does indeed turn into Dickson at Rosemont. However, Lacordaire splits off again about a block later and it does reach Sherbrooke street. The hotel (more of a motel, really) is indeed on the corner of Lacordaire and Sherbrooke. There is no hotel on the corner of Sherbrooke and Dickson.
Kate
Oops. Yes, you are right.
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Kate
This would have been Grand Prix weekend. TVA visits a somnolent Crescent Street and talks to a couple of hotel and resto reps who say yup, things sure are quiet.
MarcG
I can’t be the only one who thinks the Grand Prix is the worst thing about this city – good riddance.
Douglas
I never understood Montrealers that would prefer the city and its businesses be less well off financially.
dwgs
There are those who love it, those who hate it, and those like me. I don’t really like it and think it’s a pain in the ass douchebag gathering but I know people who like it who aren’t douchebags and I know that a lot of local people profit from it so I just ignore it as best I can and avoid that part of town for a few days.
Kate
I’m in agreement with dwgs about it, pretty much.
Douglas, do you simply feel the weekend should be regarded with amoral satisfaction as making a lot of money, and we should ignore the pimping of underage girls and the drugs trafficked to supply that weekend normally?
Kevin
You’ve never heard people squeal with delight so much as when I brought some out of towners to the beach and they realized they were driving on the racetrack in a minivan.
We ended up doing 3 or 4 laps.
DeWolf
Grand Prix is certainly not my scene but I like the way it transforms Montreal into something almost unrecognizable. I can Bixi downtown, walk around for the afternoon and feel like I’ve been transported to Miami Beach. And then it’s over and the city goes back to normal.
CE
What I dislike most about the Grand Prix is how much more dangerous the city gets for cyclists and pedestrians (and probably drivers as well). A few times over those weekends and the days leading up to them, I’ve been nearly sideswiped or hit by luxury vehicles driving incredibly fast and dangerously. Considering many of these people don’t know how to drive a high end car, may not be familiar with the city, and feel a need to drive fast and recklessly on streets not designed for it, you’re bound to have conflict and collisions with the other road users.
Ian
@Douglas as Christmas is to retailers, Grand Prix is to coke dealers and pimps.
Not all business is of equal benefit to the greater good.david882
I used to hate the Grand Prix (I don’t drive, mostly out of animus), but now I love it. The atmosphere is really great, and it folds Montreal into a cool international tradition.
The huge boon to the city’s businesses is worth the cost and disruption, and I can’t help but think that it’s tied in some ineffable/unprovable way except by anecdotal evidence to the resurgence in the city. When the ten projects hit back in 2011 or whatever to kick off this cycle, and the first real construction boom since the 1980s, I just don’t think it’s a coincidence that all ten projects were within a few minutes walk Grand Prix ground zero.
It’s also really neat that over the past decade every year that folks return for Grand Prix, the city has improved and evolved, so that if you’re an even half-observant tourist visiting once per year for GP, it’s impossible not to get the impression of a city on the move in interesting ways.
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Kate
A small group of people in non-ironic face masks gathered Sunday to protest the CAQ’s secularity law, aka Bill 21, which passed a year ago.
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Kate
Mall shops outside Montreal have found business slow and some shops that rely on tourism are particularly hard hit but in town, some local businesses have been busy since reopening.
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Kate
Montreal’s state of emergency has been extended again, this time till June 19.
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Kate
Some bar owners are planning to reopen despite lack of permission from Quebec. Restaurants can begin to reopen June 22, but nothing has yet been said about bars that don’t serve food.
david116
Put succinctly:
“It’s either we open, face the fine or we permanently close,” said Siozios, who is also head of the local merchants’ association. “We have nothing to lose, do we?”
All three bar owners believe that without more help, half or more of the city’s bars are at risk of closure.
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We need takeaway drinks allowed right now! Scrap open container rules city-wide! Save the bars!
JaneyB
In the Franco boroughs, open containers of alcohol are fine…with food. Food includes a bag of chips. I see a solution emerging.
Chris
Even if they reopen, will they have enough customers to break even past of salary of the returned employees? They might just lose even more money.
Take-out seems an obvious compromise. Has the government discussed the idea? Rejected it?
Marco
Bars had a good run but I’m sad to say, it’s over for them. They can only make money by cramming as many people as possible in a space during a few peak hours on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. They can’t ever turn a profit if everyone has to be two meters apart. As for takeout, why would anyone pay $5 for a beer in a take-out bar when they can go to the dep. Cocktails-to-go sounds good but not enough people are going to go out to a bar for a takeout cup so they can stand around outside.Sorry, bar owners but cut your losses and come back next year.
Patrick
Does anyone remember the days when Montrealers made fun of Toronto because you couldn’t buy a drink there on Sundays (and maybe other circumstances) without ordering food? The bag of chips JaneyB mentions recalls the stale sandwich that supposedly was served to customer after customer to get around the law. What is Ontario doing about bars now?
Tee Owe
The solution in Ottawa when I lived there (late 70’s) was to have a bar as part of a bar-restaurant combo, so food was served by the establishment and there was a bar under the same roof – I do not know how this was regulated by the authorities but it seemed to work – I know, cringe factor to learn from Ottawa, but hey, whatever works
MarcG
There’s a Belle Province in Verdun that has a separate room with VLTs and a bar atmosphere where you can order pints but you need to order food from the resto. My father likes to talk about the plastic sandwich that they passed around at bars in Toronto back in the 60s.
david847
1. Open container restrictions are nixed city-wide – you can drink anywhere you want in public, no exceptions;
2. Bars are allowed to serve takeaway booze of whatever sort they want;
3. Streets are closed down every day of the summer;
4. Music, performers, whatever happens New Orleans-style on the streets, parks, plazas, the works a dispersed sort of way;
5. Pretty much every business spills outside.LET’S DO IT!
Kate
Patrick, we’ve always had an odd arrangement in Montreal, where a bar can more easily get a licence to serve alcohol with food than without. I’ve seen suggestions over the years that this historical oddity should be phased out but I’ve never seen any article saying it’s no longer the case. For example, I remember that at Else’s on Roy, you couldn’t just have a drink, you had to order a plate of olives or chips with it, to satisfy the rule.
JaneyB, which leads to: what’s a meal? By all accounts, this is at the discretion of police. They’re unlikely to bust a family picnic where a few adults are sharing a bottle of wine, but they might not look so kindly on a party of 20-year-olds having beer and chips.
Mark Côté
What happened to the law that was passed two years ago that supposedly removed the food requirement for restaurants, I wonder?
dwgs
Story time. I worked at Else’s and would take great delight in forcing our city councillor (Michel Prescott) to order the proverbial rubber sandwich when he would come in for a nightcap.
Better still, one of my colleagues forced a young Justin Trudeau to order food when all he wanted was drinks. He actually asked “Do you know who I am?”, to which darling Annie replied, “Yes, do you know who I am?”
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Kate
Dollarama workers held a protest Saturday against their working conditions, which they say are not safe. Certainly even without corona, having one bathroom for 1000 workers can’t be legal.
The company profited lavishly after being declared an essential service during lockdown.
Kevin
First quarter fiscal results https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/dollarama-reports-fiscal-2021-first-quarter-results-819096190.html
Ephraim
Have you been inside? Unless it’s a particularly large one, it doesn’t feel SAFE. One of the stores that I was at, they weren’t even cleaning the screens between customers.
Kate
There’s a Dollarama on Jarry not far from me, but I’ve only been in there a few times, and not since the lockdown, so no. It is tightly packed with stuff and by no means offering much option to keep distances.
Max
Let’s just say “no” to cheap Chinese shit from now on. I haven’t stepped foot in a dollar store in months now. And I plan to consider country of origin in all my future purchasing decisions. As should we all.
Ephraim
Stepping into the ring, because no one else seems to… Because it’s cheap shit or because it’s Chinese? (Hoping this isn’t racism, because viruses don’t have a nationality.)
Kate
Max, we just don’t make a lot of stuff any more around here. Anyone buying a manufactured item these days is likely to find it’s made in China, and anything technical will be built to pretty high tolerances. I happen to know a little about LED manufacturing in China (don’t ask) and it’s just as stringently tested for safety as anything from Europe or North America, presuming you can find anything from either of those locations.
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Kate
Moving day looms, and the city’s housing crisis continues, with many households not yet settled with a new address for July 1. Park Ex residents are particularly concerned about evictions displacing families that can’t afford to pay two or three times as much rent.
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Kate
So many people are home from work, getting to grips with their domestic situation, that they’ve been generating much more garbage than usual for the city to grapple with.
The map in this piece shows the tendency isn’t evenly distributed around town. This time of year we’d likely see more trash coming from boroughs with a lot of rental properties as people prepare for moving day, but this year it seems like it’s wealthier areas that are doing the sorting.
Also, on thinking about it: won’t some of this garbage be displaced from downtown onto more residential areas? People who can work from home are largely white collar workers, hence the displacement of daytime garbage from office-dense areas to more affluent neighbourhoods.
In any case, the city seems to have resolved its recycling problems with a new contract.
Mark Côté
Garbage is probably handled very differently in a large office building downtown than from individual households. I’m not even sure if it is the city that is fully responsible for office garbage, but even if it is, picking up a tonne of garbage from one place requires a different system from the same amount of garbage distributed over hundreds of households (and even if the volume is roughly the same it’s probably not the same type of garbage).
CE
Since my girlfriend started working from home and I’m in the house much of the day, our garbage output has more than doubled. We used to produce one of those small white garbage bags every two weeks, now it’s at least one a week. For recycling, normally we could go three weeks between changing recycling bags. It’s usually one every two weeks now.
Blork
But isn’t that offset by the lack of garbage being produced downtown and at malls? It’s not like people are eating or consuming more, they’re just doing it at home, minus the disposable dishes. So you’d think overall there would be less garbage.
BTW, have you ever walked down Ste-Catherine st. on garbage day (pre-covid)? It’s ridiculous. Boxes and bags heaped one or two metres high, block after block. There are stretches where you can barely get from the street to the sidewalk because of all the piled up garbage waiting to be picked up.
CE
I’m sure all the takeout packaging has been creating more garbage. Other than pizza, I almost never got takeout or delivery food. Now, whenever I want to eat at a restaurant, there’s not much choice but to produce a bunch of garbage that wouldn’t have been necessary when eating in was possible.
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