Every cycle there’s some excitement about new players for the Canadiens and every year there’s a flicker of hope followed by eventual disappointment. The start of the NHL season has been put off till the new year at least.
Updates from October, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
In July, an eight-year-old boy was killed in traffic on St-Ambroise in St-Henri. Now an artist has made a mural painting nearby, based on drawings left by the boy in his sketchbook.
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Kate
A woman was killed in a hit-and-run near the Olympic park at the end of August, and police have set up a command post and put up a reward for information.
Every now and then, there’s a news item about police doing a command post some time after a crime. I never see any followup and would be curious to know how often this activity gets results. Not that I’m implying it never does, just wondering.
Ephraim
A sign that we need to reform the police… there is no relationship between the public and the police, because it’s full of mistrust. It’s a public relations move, nothing more, nothing less.
We need the police to be more friendly, more open, more members of the community. They need us to trust them and respect them and that means that they have to be stewards of the law… ie follow the law themselves, look less militarized, etc. They need to be punished when they violate the law, when they discriminate, when they don’t follow regulations.
They should have never repainted the cars with darker paint. They should have never changed the uniforms. There is a long list of things that the police have done that has alienated the public. Honestly, do you respect the police or fear them? Fear doesn’t work, because you don’t communicate with those you fear.
Kate
I agree with you. The whole look has gone both more military and more American in recent years. They’re watching too many U.S. crime shows.
DeWolf
I have never understood why (or when) police stopped foot patrols. Instead of having a couple of officers walk through the park, for example, they cruise menacingly around in their car, blocking the path and sending people scurrying off onto the lawn. They don’t even bother using bicycle cops for that kind of thing. It’s such a simple thing that could show the police aren’t totally contemptuous of the people they’re meant to serve.
Kate
The little I can find out about it, DeWolf, is that, in various places over the period between 1920 and 1950, it came to be felt that police could be more efficient and cover a bigger territory if they patrolled in cars than on foot. I don’t know why sheer mileage was valued so much more than the personal connections made by the cop on the beat, but evidently it was.
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Kate
Quebec is giving Montreal $263 million in financial aid to help with the revenue shortfall due to the pandemic.
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Kate
A statue of Dany Laferrière was unveiled Tuesday in the sculpture garden of the Grande Bibliothèque. Maybe it’s the angle of the photo, but he looks a bit glum.
It also seems a little odd to put up a statue to a living writer.
DeWolf
I would look glum too. There’s something creepy about being memorialized before you’re dead.
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Kate
Even though numbers of new Covid cases are down for the third day in a row, more regions are going red in the Quebec rating system.
On the weekend, police intervened to stop a gathering of a thousand people in Kiryas Tosh, in Boisbriand. Update: apparently there were people from elsewhere at the event, but it wasn’t organized by the usual community leaders, so police are trying to figure out how it had come about.
Update: Numbers were not actually down. Quebec screwed up the count over the long weekend.
Jonathan
According to the data reported by Health Canada and compiled by this project: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6, the total number of active cases has dropped over the last week in Quebec. On the provincial level, that means people are recovering faster than becoming infected.
a) I don’t know why we don’t rely on total active cases as an indicator in media
b) It would be good to know the total number of active cases by region.Kate
Maybe there’s no easy way to verify those who’ve recovered?
Blork
Bear in mind that testing numbers have been down over the long weekend, so it’s likely to tick upward again soon.
Ephraim
You can, but that means that people have to come back and use another testing kit. And then you need to track that it’s not a new case, so you don’t inflate the numbers.
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Kate
Outremont has given the nod to a new project with 91 units of social housing on the edge of the university campus.
Ian
I hope they got it in writing.
Kate
I’m afraid my cynical heart also thought: come back in 5 years’ time and see: 1. did this ever get built and if so, 2. is it being used legitimately for social housing.
DeWolf
There have been a lot of affordable co-ops built in the past few years, including the Coop Mile-End, which opened last year with 93 units, and the Coop Montagne Verte, which is currently under construction in Griffintown with 136 units. What makes you think this Outremont project won’t be built?
Kate
Not saying it won’t, but there’s a desirability factor. It’s near the new campus. And it’s possible that a new city administration could be elected next year whose attitude to housing might be a little more avaricious than Projet’s. I can already hear an argument that the city has to divest itself of some projects into private hands to raise money – it’s happened before. Long bet?
Tim
The lead in references the housing being built on Manseau (which supports Kate’s fear because I swear I read about it years ago in the local weekly that went bust) but the artist rendering shows a building clearly opposite the great new Pierre Dansereau park that has been built on the Querbes extension.
Ian
@DeWolf I was thinking of all the social housing and soforth agreed upon when the permits for the demolition of the old Children’s were granted – but all the agreements were verbal and the developers renegged.
I realize that was before Projet took the reins but if there’s one group of people I trust even less than poitiicans, it’s developers.
DeWolf
That’s fair, Ian – anytime private developers are involved in providing social housing they usually find a way to worm out of their obligations. But in this case it’s a non-profit housing cooperative taking over the Outremont site. They already run some other coops around town.
Ian
@DeWolf that’s good news. What’s the name of the group? I reread the article Kate linked to several times and seem to miss it every time.
MarcG
I can only find info about the archetecture firm http://pivot.coop/portfolio/coop-mil/.
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Kate
Jean Laporte talks about the death of his father 50 years ago at the hands of the FLQ. Text and video.
Patrick Lagacé also interviewed Jean Laporte and Anne-Marie Dussault tweeted her interview on Radio-Canada’s 24-60.
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Kate
Cellist Denis Brott recounts his hard time with Covid earlier this year.
EmilyG
Thank you for sharing this. I’d been wondering how he was doing.
EmilyG
I know I’m commenting on an old entry, but I thought I’d share some very sad news:
Denis’s brother Boris has been killed in a car accident in Hamilton. He conducted the Orchestre classique de Montreal.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/boris-brott-orchestra-conductor-obituary-1.6409479
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Kate
The city has extended its grace period for installing smoke detectors with ten-year batteries.
Faiz imam
Those new 10 year detectors are really cool. Expensive, but if you can afford it it really makes a lot of sense.
Install it and you can forget about it.
Blork
Are they even that expensive? AFAIK they’re becoming the standard model, and last time I was shopping for one I don’t recall it being significantly more expensive than a regular one, without even factoring in ten years worth of Duracells.
Blork
Update: quick survey of Canuk Tire’s website shows the basic 10-year ones are about $20 more expensive. That’s not much when you think about what you’re getting, and I gladly pay $2 a year to not have to change batteries.
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Kate
Aaron Derfel looks at the second Covid wave in Montreal.
Brett
Aaron Derfel is confusing. He claims at the start of the Twitter thread to explain why Quebec is in for a long haul during this “second wave” yet utterly fails to do so; he just presents us with a bunch of PCR test data. Look, the season for respiratory viruses (of which Sars-Cov-2 is one) starts at the end of September, peaks in January, and falls through March/April until we reach the summer safe season (Source: https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/phac-aspc/images/services/publications/diseases-conditions/fluwatch/annual-reports/2019/fig02-fra.jpg ). Deaths often lag behind hospitalizations which is why the curve for deaths is often shifted to the right.
What’s news, or rather, what should be news, is that we are shutting schools for a virus that does not affect kids as seriously as the flu. Yet we never kicked kids out of schools during a bad flu season, even though young children are more at risk of contracting severe influenza complications than severe Covid-19 complications. Go figure.
dhomas
Pretty sure they’re closing schools with outbreaks to avoid having the kids continue spreading the virus to their elderly relatives or anyone else really that could spread it to more vulnerable populations.
walkerp
Brett, are you a corona sceptic or you do you still not understand the real risk factor with covid? As dhomas said, the issue is not primarily to protect the kids from coronavirus. It is to limit the spread out into the community which will then risk making the wider population sick and then impacting our hospital capacity.
I do agree that Aaron Derfel’s threads seem to start with some alarming sentence that the following data or analysis do not actually support.
Dominic
Agree that Aaron Derfel’s threads are over-rated.
Mark
Re kids/schools: Princeton just released a report suggesting kids are pivotal superspreaders (kind of a “duh” for anyone who’s had kids, but still—nice to see the science backing it up).
EmilyG
There are flu vaccines, and not a Covid vaccine.
YUL514
A number of pediatricians in Montreal have come out against closing down schools. I believe we would have to see hundreds of schools with 20+ cases for CAQ to close down the entire system. Right now about 80-85% of the infected schools have a maximum of 2 cases. If anything closes down it will be High Schools. We can’t expect kids in early Grades of elementary to sit through Zoom classes, we’ll have a generation of kids who will fall behind at the most important time of their young education.
Tim S.
I’m going to wait a few months before I’ll agree that Derfel is overly alarmist. He did spend the summer warning us of a second wave, and here we are.
So far the school thing has being going better than I expected, but I really wish they were willing to switch to hybrid schooling at lower grades, just in case.Kevin
Yul514
Just my 2 cents, but the pediatricians signing those letters are missing the bigger picture. They’re looking solely at the kids, and ignoring what happens when those children lose parents, teachers, grandparents to a virus they were transmitting.YUL514
Kevin, that’s why we stay away from our parents. My kids haven’t seen their 4 grandparents in quite some time. No more playing at the park on the swings for the kids. Yes, they can get us sick but I’m willing to take that chance for my child’s education.
There was one kid in the other class that contracted Covid, seems they visted their grandparents last month.
Michael Black
“Old people” aren’t the.vector, they are the ones most likely to see the worst, if infected.
But it’s not just “Old people”. It’s more the state of their health, and I suspect some of the bad cases come because of a previously undiagnosed issue.
Brett
walkerp, there’s been community spread since at least the beginning of the year and yet hospitals have never been over capacity. Since the community spread genie is already out of the bottle, we have to look at Covid being a daily part of our lives now, just as H1N1 is. This means taking a more rational approach and letting those who are healthy get the virus and help the populace build up herd immunity. There is already ample evidence that we will probably never see the huge spike in deaths like we saw in March and April, as long as we keep protecting the most vulnerable. Every day we get news of a handful to a dozen deaths, yet on average 150 people die in Quebec *every day*.
To be clear, being old doesn’t automatically mean you are at risk of dying from Coronavirus. The big risk factor is having co-morbidities, of which old people are simply more apt to have, given their advanced age. There are lots of stories of seniors successfully battling the coronavirus. Moreover, due to the highly seasonal nature or Coronaviruses, people have an even greater chance of getting away with a mild illness. For an example, just look at our dear leader south of the border.
Kate
YUL514
Herd Immunity is as of the last few days the official unofficial strategy of the White House. The damage that can be done regardless of a change in leadership in 21 days is frightening.
Kevin
Brett
There’s a whole lot if “what if” in your statement, along with a lot of spackling over hospital admission rates and some falsehoods.
Hospitals were over capacity: that’s why seniors were sent to CHSLDs.And we are a lot closer to max capacity than you seem to realize. It’s only because so much of society is being restricted that hospitals are not overwhelmed right now
Raymond Lutz
“To be clear, being old doesn’t automatically mean you are at risk of dying from Coronavirus. The big risk factor is having co-morbidities, of which old people are simply more apt to have. There are lots of stories of seniors successfully battling the coronavirus.”
Pour être clair, conduire une automobile soûl ne veut pas dire que vous êtes automatiquement à risque de faire un accident. Le gros facteur de risque est d’avoir un ou plusieurs des effets suivants: la perte d’acuité visuelle, la mauvaise appréciation des orientations spatiales, une augmentation du temps de réflexe ou une motricité fine altérée. Beaucoup de conducteurs expérimentés surmontent ces inconvénients ou en souffrent à des degrés moindres. Have a last drink and “bonne route”!
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