The first public consultations were held this week on the recent SPVM policy paper on police stops. Questions were asked by the public but it sounds like change will be slow, as more reports are to be made.
Updates from September, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Quebec is being cagey with data on school outbreaks of Covid-19.
Ill wind department: since the lockdown, crime numbers are down across Canada, even reports of sex crimes.
Ian
Strangely violent crime and skeeziness is up in Mile End.
Meezly
“Quebec is being cagey with data on school outbreaks of Covid-19.”
That’s why Oliver Drouin took it upon himself to create a website that compiles all known cases in Montreal and surrounding area, complete with map, which has been steadily growing since its inception: https://www.covidecolesquebec.org
Kate
Good find, Meezly!
Update: CTV interviewed Drouin.
Ian, I’m sorry to hear St-Viateur is infested with goons.
DeWolf
Ian, remember the annual St-Jean party that took place on St-Viateur until 2003? This summer kind of feels like how it did at midnight after the music had ended and the only people left were drunken bozos.
Ian
Haha yeas, good description. Weird screamy dudes that look like they aren’t ready to go home just yet but have nothing else to do.
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Kate
A lot of people in NDG dislike the Terrebonne bike path and have been getting their opinion into the media with the help of the Statler and Waldorf of the West End – Lionel Perez and Marvin Rotrand, both of whom determinedly ignore the fact that these plans were made in haste by the city over a week or two when it suddenly came into focus that we were not going to have a normal summer.
Meantime the Christophe-Colomb path – meant, like the Terrebonne one, to be merely a temporary measure to make personal transportation safer till fall – is so popular that people along the route are agitating to have it turned into a permanent bike path.
mare
Of interest to bike riders and others who want a less car-centric city (e.g. most readers of this blog):
The city has an online survey on the voies actives sécuritaires (VAS). (They’re called “safe active transportation circuits (SATC)” in English which was new to me.)
Everyone should fill it out, maybe it helps. Available in French and English (top right)
https://observateur.qc.ca/sondage_vas_montrealKevin
Aren’t councillors supposed to represent the people?
Because whatever else, Marvin is a fanatic about that. Send him a message and you’ll get an answer back within a day. You can’t say that about many councillors in this city.The other councillors in the borough have been far less responsive. People tell me that Peter Bicycle McQueen answers within a few days, and that Sue Montgomery sends out a form letter several weeks later.
The borough did set up a “survey” about the Terrebonne path after the fact.
It required a gmail account to access and had very loaded questions.
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Kate
Mayor Plante wants downtown offices to reopen even though cases of Covid are starting to rise again – or else she wants support from Quebec and Ottawa for the city’s economy.
Even so, stats show Montreal is recovering pretty well compared to other cities in North America, despite Quebec having been a Covid hotspot.
Mark Côté
The vast majority of deaths in Quebec (and Montreal) were confined to long-term health-care facilities. This is incredibly sad, but it implies that community spread has not been anywhere near as bad and is perhaps comparable to other major cities. However I’m inferring this from deaths, as I can’t find any statistics as to the living situation of people who tested positive, only those who died from the virus.
But maybe they don’t want to talk about this too loudly for fear (reasonably, I guess, sigh) that people will then think community transmission isn’t a big deal and will relax their guard.
Ian
I get it that economically the downtown core relies on office workers but if Plante really wants to help the environment and move forward into the future, telecommuting makes a lot of sense. I realize much of PM’s stance is predicated on simply appearing green with easy wins while still turning a profit though, so I’m not surprised by the hypocrisy.
Kate
It was also a mere week ago that it was announced the city would be having as many as 9,000 of its people working from home indefinitely to save on rent. If city hall can see the potential savings, they should realize other people can too.
Speaking of pandemic savings, I realized recently I don’t need anything like as much wireless data as I had on my phone plan. Changed my plan, and cut my phone bill in half from one month to the next. Should’ve done it months ago, I was paying for GB I was hardly touching.
Ephraim
We still need a land line for the alarm, but cut out all the services. It’s amazing… no one knows what to do when you don’t have call answer. Seriously.
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Kate
Nice piece from Metro looking at various old buildings around the north end, not nearly as well known as those in Old Montreal. I wouldn’t mind a look inside the last one listed.
david266
In case anyone is thinking of it, let me warn that it’s pretty unfulfilling to make any sort of pre-1900 building tour on the island that can’t be done on foot. The vinyl siding, oh god the vinyl siding.
Kate
On and around the location of Île-de-la-Visitation park there are a fair number of older buildings, including Visitation church, the oldest one (still standing) on the island of Montreal, and some of the buildings featured in that piece. Not much vinyl siding.
Gouin is a trip when you get into some of the areas where the nouveau riche have built houses facing the river, but you’d want a bike or car to get there because it’s quite a hike.
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Kate
A car downtown Monday was the target of a shooter, but none of the three occupants got hit; there’s no explanation of the incident.
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Kate
Although we read not long ago that the city’s state of emergency would continue till the end of September, on Monday it was made official to prolong it till September 24.
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Kate
There’s still a lot of reaction about the Macdonald statue. Here, Le Devoir enumerates six other monuments in Quebec that have come to grief: in Montreal, the head of the King George III statue that used to adorn Place d’Armes was thrown into a well in 1775 – it’s now in the McCord Museum, but the article doesn’t say what happened to the rest of the statue; several other attempts have been made to damage or blow up Macdonald, including the removal of its head in 1992; the monument to Dollard des Ormeaux on the northwest corner of Lafontaine Park was daubed with the word “Assacin” this summer. The other instances noted are also interesting, but were in Quebec City.
Was the original Macdonald head found and replaced, or was a new one made? I don’t remember.
The Journal also has a list, including the memorial plaque to Maisonneuve that came down not long ago on Place d’Armes because of its boast about the city founder killing the Mohawk chief with his own hands. Some of the others on its list aren’t exactly controversial, Wilfrid Laurier and George-Étienne Cartier having been men of their time, but not notably evil. They list the James McGill statue, too.
Then there was the memorial plaque to Jefferson Davis, taken down three years ago.
MarcG
The way the head popped off when the statue hit the ground makes me think it was a glued on replacement.
MarcG
Derp. I didn’t read that properly – either way, original or new, the head was just glued on.
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Kate
The city is dishing out thousands for lawyers for Sue Montgomery in the eternal squabble in Côte-des-Neiges-NDG. Is anyone asking whether that borough is focusing too much attention on its infighting at the expense of its citizens and their needs?
Notice also the single-paragraph snipe from Marvin Rotrand. I follow that man’s Twitter feed and all he does is throw in inflammatory remarks on any municipal topic. If he ever knew how to be constructive, he left that behind a long time ago.
Jebediah Pallindrome
If ever there was a borough to be split in twain…
It’s too big to manage effectively and everyone running it thinks they’re hot shit. This isn’t a new problem. Break it up.
walkerp
So with you on this one, Jebediah. Just look at it on the map!
Jebediah Pallindrome
Just keep in mind I also support building a fence around Westmount, topped with razor wire, and with only one entrance (with really inconvenient operating hours)
Not crazy about tax shelters in our midst…
Michael Black
So where will the traffic go?
Jebediah Pallindrome
In a caravan, straight to Westmount City Hall, to ‘negotiate’ their surrender.
NDG motorists are the single most powerful special interest group in the known universe.
david266
Recognize the professionalism of all parties, and their attorneys, by the fact that we still don’t really know what’s going on.
Kevin
Jebediah Pallindrome
I gotta ask: how is Westmount a tax shelter?
Jebediah Pallindrome
It isn’t, I’m being facetious.
I’m not crazy about independent communities within/ around a city where all the communities are essentially dependent on the city centre but can establish their own taxation schemes and/or otherwise not quite pay their fair share. That said, most of the damage was done long, long ago. I honestly think we’d be far better off if all the cities of the metro region were amalgamated into one super city, and then a new taxation formula was set up that was linked to earnings. What we have now is a bit too much of a hodge podge. I think a tax base based on the metro population, collected and administered by a metropolitan revenue agency, could probably get more money and allocate it better.
One island one city was a step in the right direction but it wasn’t marketed well. Given the challenges we face moving forward, more centralized, streamlined administration is going to be necessary.
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Kate
Valérie Plante says she was not elected to please everybody but she still intends on herding this city toward the future.
Ian
Well that’s a pretty easy cop out for someone that got a majority vote. If the PM admin doesn’t plan on pleasing the majority, don’t count on it happening again. Interesting that Plante makes it about being a woman, of course nobody hated Ferrandez I guess. Maybe being autocratic transcends gender? Just a thought.
david266
And Bergeron, who was treated like a mental patient for promoting a platform basically no different from his party’s current platform.
Jonathan
The majority is not the same as ‘everybody’. I think here there is a minority of voices that is being amplified in the media and is not representative of the majority.
Worth noting: whenever I click on an article in TVA, Lapresse, The Gazoo, there always seems to be a huge-ass car ad in my face.
Kate
Turning stories into controversy is what used to sell papers, and now collects clicks. But also, one of the founding principles of modern journalism is you have to have “balance” which leads to ridiculous situations like climate change deniers having a disproportionate amount of influence because journalists “need” to get a balancing opinion for any climate story. So in a case like this, even if the majority are reasonably satisfied, the cranky minority will get the clicks and the story.
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Kate
The Hochelaga tent city was given and end-of-August deadline to pack up and leave, but it’s still there. Residents are being asked to move into shelters, but one man says that in official shelters they’re treated like children and forced to sleep in large groups in spaces like school gyms.
david266
Well, yeah, because if you can’t properly function as an adult, living like a child (shelter, care, food, etc) instead of an animal (scrounging, defecating in bushes, etc) is a significant promotion.
Kate
david∞ that raises a really interesting question: is obedience a prerequisite for mature behaviour? See, I can see both sides of this coin. I can see why the authorities want the tents cleared away and the homeless to become biddable units you can bed down in a big dormitory out of sight – I really can. But I can also feel the undisciplined energy of the people involved, who simply want to be left alone to sleep where they please and associate with who they want to, not who they’re forced to in a big dormitory.
Once you get everybody rounded up, then you have to impose order – people have to eat at certain times, lights go out at 11 p.m., no drinking or smoking on the premises. You have to do this, or you end up with vermin, disease and chaos. But you can also see why some people simply do not want this imposed on them, even if it means hardship and inconvenience.
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