Christopher Curtis interviews the city’s commissioner of Indigenous affairs, a woman of attested Cree ancestry.
Updates from July, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Thirty bar clients have tested positive for Covid in recent days. As we test more, we find more cases.
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Kate
More than a dozen bar customers have recently tested positive with Covid. An Irish pub in the West Island has announced an infected employee and closed to sanitize and other bars have also fessed up.
Jonathan Montpetit examines the situation and asks whether politicians have “jeopardized the return of children to classrooms this fall by seeking to salvage a nightlife in the summer.”
walkerp
I didn’t know about the #schoolsbeforebars but will be blasting it all over the place from now on. If they fuck up the schools because of their stupid desperation to open the economy, I am taking pitchfork and torches to Quebec City.
Ian
I haven’t been to any bars yet and do have school age children, but I don’t see the connection… bars and schools tend to be kind of different demographics.
One of my former students works at that McK, but cegeps will all be online until winter term anyhow.
Perhaps I am being obtuse but unless the author is thinking primary age kids are going to bars, I don’t see the connection.walkerp
Ian, the connection is that the best way for schools to open is to ensure that we have eliminated community spread. Opening bars does the opposite of that.
Ian
Of course opening bars & restaurants contributes to community spread, but the community is not homogeneous or evenly distributed. Demographically I don’t see how the “family with schoolkids” population is going to come in much contact with the “young people at the bars until 3 am” crowd – at least to the extent that somehow opening bars and opening schools can be perceived as a zero sum game. Honestly I think having people return to offices is a way higher risk to school openings.
Kate
Ian, I think it’s simply a question that if we open up nightife, Covid numbers will rise, and it will look more risky to open schools. It’s not about direct contact between the demographic groups.
Bert
Perhaps there is something about reasoning with bar patrons that may be like reasoning a 7 year old?
jeather
No parents go to bars; no parents have coworkers who go to bars; no parents live in multigenerational households with siblings or roommates who go to bars; no teachers or other school employees go to bars; no teachers or other school employees live with people who go to bars; no teachers or other school employees live with people who have coworkers who go to bars. None of them go to the same restaurants or pharmacies or grocery stores.
MarcG
Parents with young children often act like they’re the only people on earth, maybe they are?
Ian
I’m super happy you all got a chance to flex but let’s be real here, the going back to offices thing has way more crossover. Making out like either we can have bars or schools is a real stretch by comparison.
jeather
People aren’t drunk in an office, they can more effectively distance, and many people are still WFH. We can’t have everything — bars and restaurants and gyms and schools and malls — and we need to prioritise. If we try to open everything back up we’ll end up having to close it all back down again.
Ian
I hear you, and I agree with you – but I find the bars vs schools dichotomy weird given all the other parallels that could have been made. In any case it’s pretty obviously that everything opened back up too quick and we need to dial it back so that essentials can be maintained. Granted, to those that own bars and restaurants those are essentials, and that supply chain represents a lot of work in Montreal, but we need to choose our battles a little more diligently than the Provincial Government seems to have in mind.
Dhomas
Sorry, @MarcG, as a father of 3, you don’t exist to me, so I’ve ignored your comment. :p
MarcG
@Dhomas: Sorry I’m just seeing your comment now a few days later because I had to walk a giant D-tour around your massive, inconsiderate family.
MarcG
Here’s a smiley in case it’s not obvious 🙂 and a note to say that I hate large groups of sidewalk hoggers whether or not they’re related to each other.
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Kate
Someone was asking whether public money goes into the Museum of Fine Arts. This piece on how Nathalie Bondil was told her contract would be renewed, shortly before she was sacked, mentions the museum gets $14 million a year from Quebec.
La Presse’s Marc Cassivi gets into the museum’s toxic atmosphere as a workplace and asks whether Bondil’s firing was a brave gesture against workplace harassment, or a clearing of the decks to replace her with a patronage candidate, and concludes it could be both.
Update: Bondil denies the allegation of a toxic workplace.
Another update: More from Bondil in Le Devoir; on CTV; CBC’s account of the situation.
Blork
I don’t know anything about this specific situation, but I know that I have never, not once, heard of a toxic workplace in which the source of the toxin ever admitted it.
Kate
Oh I know, Blork. I simply posted the link, not implying I believe or disbelieve it.
jeather
There may also be a toxic workplace and it may be her fault and I’m sure that’s a good excuse but there is no way that’s the actual reason. The actual reason is that she refused to hire one of the Desmarais clan, wanting instead to hire someone with sufficient qualifications.
GC
I’m with jeather. She was hired in 2007 and it took fourteen years for her to make the workplace toxic? She might have made it toxic, but I highly doubt it would take that long. So, if she did, it’s been like that a really long time and the board has been looking the other way until now.
Ian
Let’s say there really was a toxic work environment, that Bondil only got shown the door after making waves about a scion of the Desmarais clan is rather telling.
Seems like a lit of virtue signalling when they were really just looking for an excuse.
Sim
I’ve heard from an inside source that Mary-Dailey Desmarais was the best candidate for the job there was and that Bondil was not happy about her choice/friend not getting the job.
Chris
>it took fourteen years for her to make the workplace toxic? She might have made it toxic, but I highly doubt it would take that long.
It took longer than that for Harvey Weinstein to get shit-canned.
JP
It can take years and years from the genesis of a toxic environment to whispers of what might be going on to it being widely known but nothing happens to something finally happens. I can believe that.
It’s incredible the power some people can yield, and the type of harassment people are willing to inflict on other people.
MarcG
@Chris: I think what GC’s saying is that if person = bad it won’t take 14 years to make workplace = bad, rather than “I doubt it would take 14 years for a bad person to be fired” as it seems you understood.
Kate
Sim: every report says Desmarais came fourth among the people vying for the job.
Su
Wondering if the Desmarais’ donate more annually to the museum than the ~$15 000 000 that Quebec contributes.
Sim
@Kate Yes she did, but my friend who works at the museum says she was better than the “first choice”. Maybe the hiring process was skewed.
What nobody seems to care about is that Bondil was having two conflictual roles as “conservatrice” and GM. This isn’t a good way to manage a museum as it poses a conflit of interest.
Kate
Sim, whose fault was it that the two roles were allowed to be held by the same person? Surely the potential conflict of interest should have ruled out giving both jobs to one person right from the top.
Alison Cummins
Sim,
I heard from an inside source that there was absolutely no way at all that Appelbaum was crooked. Also that the only possible reason that Robert Rousseau committed suicide after being interviewed by UPAQ was that they blackmailed him with something private – maybe he was gay or something – and he didn’t want to shame his family. Rousseau was a man of the absolute highest integrity and could not have been involved in issuing construction permits to the mafia.
My inside source was a city councillor. Should have been credible. Clearly was not. She was fed lines by friends who she chose to believe. They used her to protect their reputations.
When an “inside source” says that Number Four was the best candidate, you have to consider that your inside source is perhaps being fed a line. Maybe Number Four was the best candidate. But how did that happen? What is wrong with their hiring process that it evaluates candidates so poorly?
Who overruled the hiring committee’s judgement? On what basis? Did they know more than the hiring committee about all four top candidates? What does the hiring committee say about the way they were so misled?
GC
First off my math was terrible. Fourteen years? I should have proof-read that!
Yes, MarcG, you have my intended meaning about correct. All the same, Chris also made my point because in Weinstein’s case people were VERY definitely looking the other way for years and years.
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Kate
A water main broke on St-Joseph near Mentana late Monday – the Journal even has a photo essay. There are also breaks on Drummond above Sherbrooke, and at Sherbrooke and Côte‑des‑Neiges (these are from radio sources, no links yet).
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