Updates from September, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 18:53 on 2020-09-11 Permalink | Reply  

    A protest was held Friday against Mayor Plante outside the temporary city hall. Radio-Canada notes that one of the protesters was some guy called Jean‑François Tremblay from the Coalition pour la qualité des logements à Montréal, which is chiefly concerned about fighting new bylaws against turning duplexes and triplexes into single dwellings – and he doesn’t live in town. Various others had kvetches about other things they don’t like – bike paths and so on.

    I’m wondering who got these people with diverse complaints together to make noise, though. I wish the journalist had found that out. La Presse doesn’t mention it either.

     

    • Ephraim 20:43 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

      Well, standing alone with a sign doesn’t make the news 🙂
      The same reason that protests are often earlier in the day… otherwise they don’t make the 6PM news.

    • david3333 18:37 on 2020-09-13 Permalink

      If it’s the same guy (looks like it), this Tremblay scumbag exists as a parasitic sort of property flipper, self-styled real estate investment type, etc. Might be on brand for this hot dog eater to complain about PM boroughs’ basically non-existent plans to prevent the sort of gentrification of which he’s in favor. This sort of scum is why we need Ferandez back, or someone like Ferandez who could take a cretin like this apart at the joints.

  • Kate 18:44 on 2020-09-11 Permalink | Reply  

    You can get postage stamps printed with your image of choice for a fee, so a guy had a sheet printed with the severed head of the Macdonald statue. Now Canada Post is apologizing, although I’m not sure to whom.

     

    • JaneyB 11:31 on 2020-09-12 Permalink

      Ah, the Boaty McBoatface problem. I think it was supposed to be about puppy photo stamps for the grandkid’s birthday.

    • Michael Black 12:09 on 2020-09-12 Permalink

      One could just use Red River resistance stamps, which were legitimately issued

  • Kate 12:03 on 2020-09-11 Permalink | Reply  

    Where not to drive on the weekend. Further notes on the same topic.

     

    • Kate 12:01 on 2020-09-11 Permalink | Reply  

      Christopher Curtis’s first piece as a Ricochet writer is about industrial waste from Montreal and elsewhere being dumped in Kanesatake, where it’s polluting soil and water and making residents sick.

       

      • Kate 11:56 on 2020-09-11 Permalink | Reply  

        Covid cases and hospitalizations are rising in Quebec although the trend is mostly outside Montreal this time.

        After Quebec crossed a threshold of 20 infections per million people this week, a line it previously described as serious, it moved the goalposts. Quebec should have 170 new cases or less per week to be safe; we’re now over 200.

         

        • David63 18:21 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          Not clear if the increase in positive test results signifies an increase in risk to public health, or just reflects increasing testing, which is catching asymptomatic cases that went undiagnosed when testing was less pervasive. You look at the hospitalizations, running at ~100 total.provincewide for the past month or whatever, and it’s looking like these new cases are far less severe than before, so that the relative value – measured as a health system use dollar or fraction of a death or whatever – of a positive test is far lower.

          Basically, seems pretty clear that in June a positive result had once value as relates to extrapolatable deaths/other negative health outcomes, and that value associated with the positive result had changed significantly. Back then, it might have been 15 positive tests corresponded to 1 hospitalization, but that now it’s 60 to 1.

          Basically, a positive development.

        • Ian 13:58 on 2020-09-12 Permalink

          That’s not true.

          “When testing is common, those with a lower probability of testing positive also receive tests (e.g., asymptomatic people). Thus there are diminishing returns for detecting positive cases as the # of tests goes up, assuming the underlying outbreak remains the same size.
          But the underlying outbreak is not remaining the same size. It’s growing. And it ain’t just because of the testing.”

          https://twitter.com/JPSoucy/status/1303682089112530945

          But more importantly, since you claim that more cases does not necessarily mean more hospitalizations so who cares, I quote Aaron Derfel who has been following the stats very carefully as you may be aware:

          ” If the hospitalizations were to continue to rise, this would signal a disturbing turn for the worse in the #pandemic, but it’s too early to draw conclusions. Still, at least one Montreal hospital is recording more new #COVID hospitalizations than it has in weeks.

          The hospital (I’m afraid I was asked not to disclose its name yet by a source), admitted four patients Thursday. Last week, it admitted eight. What’s noteworthy is about half the patients were not admitted for #COVID but other reasons, and they tested positive in hospital.

          These latest developments underscore the #pandemic’s utter unpredictability, and are cause for concern and greater vigilance. Yet the Quebec government appears to want to wait for more #COVID outbreaks before imposing any more restrictions. ”

          https://twitter.com/Aaron_Derfel/status/1304608182673833984

        • Tee Owe 09:12 on 2020-09-13 Permalink

          If someone is admitted to hospital and subsequently found to be Covid-positive, is that really a ‘Covid hospitalization’? I mean, it’s not why they went into hospital.

          Since I’m here, I wonder whether we should be more consistent with use of the word ‘case’. A case of the flu is usually diagnosed as symptoms and maybe a doctor’s OK that that’s probably what it is. AFAIK we don’t routinely test for flu eg by throat swabs, PCR or antibody tests. However, a case of Covid is a positive PCR from a throat or nasal swab, regardless whether there are symptoms. Can be misleading when discussing relative numbers of cases of flu vs Covid, no?

          Anybody know more about this?

      • Kate 10:30 on 2020-09-11 Permalink | Reply  

        The pastor of St Jax writes about how to handle church ownership now that there’s so little demand for their original purpose. I agree with him that the churches should be seen as belonging to the communities which supported them for so long with tax breaks, if not additional tithing.

         

        • Michael Black 10:57 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          It’s badly written, and using too much political jargon.

          As I’ve said, churches have always been used for community purposes, they were often the first shared spaces in an area. But it was a broad piece, he should have had examples. The Westmount Park United Church had a meeting last fall to turn it into a community space, though I’ve not seen anything since.

          Given this guy is connected with an organization about this issue, surely his church downtown is in the forefront? But no mention. And let’s not forget that when that church was rebranded, they wanted to clean up the homeless that were there (I can’t remember the outcome there either).

          The Open Door had to move when the church it was using was sold. The NDG Food Depot moved into the Trinity Church in NDG when they lost their lease, then to another church when Trinity was sold (and then to a commercial space for other reasons). I can think of two churches in NDG in recent years where the community groups using the space were a bigger issue when the churches were sold than the actual religious use.

          This piece was vague in intent, and implementation.

        • Kate 11:52 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          You’re right, Michael Black. St Jax was rebranded – it’s the exact word. I seem to recall the homeless were dispatched to St John the Evangelist (the red roof church behind Place des Arts) but am not sure of that.

        • PatrickC 14:57 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          I agree the article is vague and that he should have spelled out a community vision for his own church–or better, said how he was going to get input from the local community about what it would like to see. I hated the rebranding too, though I supported the initiative for the Writer’s Chapel there: http://www.writerschapeltrust.com/home.php

          A church I know in LA that had to be closed because the congregation dwindled has also been rebranded with a cutesy name (Saint Barnabas –> Saint Be.) but with some help they developed a decentralized community vision with a preschool, a community garden, yoga and dance classes, along with both Jewish and Christian worship groups. A work in progress, but at least a way forward.

      • Kate 09:39 on 2020-09-11 Permalink | Reply  

        Karaoke is now banned in bars and ‘strongly discouraged’ in private parties. One of the first things we knew about Covid is that singing transmits the virus, so this makes sense.

        School sports and other activities will be allowed as of Monday – in response, as Radio-Canada said austerely two weeks ago, to public pressure.

         

        • Ian 16:22 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          And now lap dances, too.

          It seems nutty that somebody had to say “hey this is a bad idea” but here we are.

      • Kate 09:04 on 2020-09-11 Permalink | Reply  

        Terse but cromulent urbanist op-ed in La Presse gives two reasons Montreal can’t be a city of the car: it’s too dense, and the city centre is too residential.

        A less terse urbanist op-ed in Le Devoir asks who the city belongs to – the people who work in it, or the people who sleep in it?

         

        • DeWolf 11:42 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          The op-ed in Le Devoir is infuriating. First he accuses Valérie Plante of being Trumpian in character (huh?) and then goes on to say she is too ‘montréalocentrique’. I’m sorry, but it’s part of the job description for the mayor of Montreal to be Montrealcentric. She has no business serving the citizens of St-Lambert or Terrebonne or Mirabel – people who may think they have some claim to Montreal, but who don’t live here, don’t pay taxes and don’t vote in local elections.

          If this is the kind of stuff he was teaching in his urban planning classes at UdeM then it’s no wonder why we had some disastrous urban planning policies in decades past.

        • David777 16:18 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          The tabula rasa of Griffintown is fairly autocentric, a major mistake. Back during the initial public info sessions at ETS (2008, I want to say), I asked Serge Goulet whether they had considered car-free buildings to keep costs down and boost affordability, he did this hand waive and said nobody would buy them, and that the proposal already had fewer spaced than anticipated demand called for. It’ll take action on the city’s part to limit off street parking, and we should have a ratchet type plan to keep reducing parking maximums in new construction each year. Force the builders and the people to be ‘free,’ in the Rousseauian sense of the word.

          Once the car is largely evacuated from daily use in the lived of central city dwellers, and the number of said dwellers is sufficiently high, our businesses will feel confident that they don’t need drive-in customers to survive. And a major fifth column for the suburbanites will fall away.

          At least, one lives in hope.

      • Kate 08:05 on 2020-09-11 Permalink | Reply  

        Is it just me, or is the weather feeling like we jumped from August to mid-October?

         

        • Blork 08:39 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          I recall September 2019 being particularly warm, and commenting that September is the new August. Seems like it’s been flipped this year and September is the new October.

        • JaneyB 10:06 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          Same. I remember asking the city to hire people to staff the pools in Sept. Don’t know what happened this year but I’m out a good 4 weeks of summer and feeling a bit bereft.

        • Michael Black 10:32 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          It’s still early in September, there’s time for a warm spell. It’s not uncommon to get some almost hot days in mid-October.

        • DeWolf 11:45 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          We had one genuine month of summer this year – a very hot July. But June was chillier than normal, August felt like September and now September feels like October. At this rate we’re going to be blanketed in snow by Thanksgiving.

        • MarcG 12:09 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          I bet on a freakish heat wave in the coming weeks.

        • Dhomas 14:00 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          We’ll probably still have our “Indian Summer” in a few weeks, though, I hope. Also, is it just me that feels awkward calling it that? We don’t call First Nations people “Indians” anymore, but Indian Summer is still ok? Or is this going too far?

        • MarcG 14:35 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          I quickly read over this document and it seems like the origin is hazy and not necessarily slanderous. https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/indian-summer.html

        • Michael Black 15:03 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          I don’t see a logic to the term, which makes it more suspect than because it includes “indian”.

          Note that in the US they don’t have “first nations”. And I get email from Indian Country Today, and the National Congress of the American Indian so they haven’t shelved the word completely.

          The Canadian Encyclopedia still says my great, great, great grandmother was an “Okanagan Indian “princess,””.

          That’s redundant (aside from the princess bit), which is a reminder that there was never a monothilic people here. So even beyond whatever might be the current term, they’d rather be identified by who they are, Syilx, Mohawk, Cree, Metis.

          I just sidestepped it by mentioning “almost hot weather in mid-October”.

        • j2 15:27 on 2020-09-11 Permalink

          “Second summer” or “Late summer” are clear and cost nothing to use.

          Using the States as an example of maybe-its-not-racist seems a poor choice.

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