The police Quiétude squad, tasked with getting illegal arms off the street but queried recently for a tendency to arrest Black individuals, is getting an extra $1.5 million from Ottawa and Quebec to get on with the job.
Updates from October, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Highway 20 is going to close through Dorval for several weeks for emergency repairs.
A bit more from La Presse: the closure’s expected till the end of November and it’s necessary to repair two old overpasses.
Kevin
Oh that’s not good
Kevin
And I have to wonder what the hell is going on at Transports Quebec that we are shutting down highways without notice.
Ian
There has to be a back story they aren’t sharing, otherwise the incompetence is absurd.
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Kate
The REM isn’t nearly operational yet, but Quebec is dreaming up extending it through the South Shore.
Uatu
This should have been in the plan in the first place
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Kate
A new study is going to track Covid among children, find out who has it, how many have had it, and how they’re doing.
The mayor of Westmount announced that she and her family have Covid.
Summary of latest numbers Tuesday.
Meezly
Thanks for sharing, Kate. Looks like it’s backed by the feds and the city, but no involvement from the provincial government.
Ephraim
It looks like they are STARTING to find out some of the longer term effects of COVID-19 on people. Of course, we may not know the real long-term effects for years. The connections for things like Post Polio Syndrome (PPS) and Chickenpox/Shingles weren’t known for a long time and well understood either. It might be 50 years or more before we fully know the effects of COVID-19.
And what a shame some of this is. WHO was just months away from finally eradicating Polio from the world. They had finally gotten it eradicated in Africa, just Afghanistan and Pakistan was left. And they had to stop… and if the US pulls out, they won’t have the funding to finish the job. (That would be the second disease that WHO has eradicated from earth, Smallpox being the first.)
Raymond Lutz
Googling PPS.. Yikes. “Researchers estimate that the condition affects 25 to 40 percent of polio survivors. Most often, thwy start to experience gradual new weakening in muscles that were previously affected by the polio infection. The most common symptoms include slowly progressive muscle weakness, fatigue (both generalized and muscular), and a gradual decrease in the size of muscles (muscle atrophy). Pain from joint degeneration and increasing skeletal deformities such as scoliosis (curvature of the spine) is common and may precede the weakness and muscle atrophy. Some individuals experience only minor symptoms while others develop visible muscle weakness and atrophy.” (NINDS)
Ephraim
And that’s the point. The only viruses in the Coronavirus family that we have actually dealt with before are the common cold, SARS, MERS and COVID-19. We really don’t know what the long term effects of any of this is. Herd Immunity means a herd of people who may have to deal with problems a lot later. But even some of the shorter term. From SARS, people reported fatigue even 3 years later and impairment of exercise ability. See https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/415378
dmdiem
Male fertility may be a future covid problem.
Kevin
Nowhere on Earth is close to herd immunity from Covid.
MERS still has outbreaks in the Middle East.
No researcher has ever before managed to come up with a vaccine for a coronavirus.Chris
>and if the US pulls out, they won’t have the funding to finish the job.
There are lots of other rich countries on Earth that could step up if they wanted to. Maybe Saudi Arabia could put some oil money to good use (ha!).
Ephraim
@Chris – The US (under Reagan) ruined the budget of WHO. Bill Gates’s foundation actually provides 9% of the WHO budget. Most of the funding for WHO is actually voluntary. The budget is less than $1 per human, considering that they protect us from diseases and pandemics… See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization
Raymond Lutz
Oh, and THIS. Thanks Obama for sabotaging International efforts to eradicate polio! CIA organised fake vaccination drive to get Osama bin Laden’s family DNA
CTL Narr
Wow, Raymond. A fake vaccination drive. What other fake things will powerful people use to control people?
Po
Wondering if a lot of people on this blog are just very well informed, or if they get their talking points from John Oliver…
Raymond Lutz
@CTL, a fake democracy? A bunch of fake economic theories?
@Po, it’s the other way around! Oliver is reading Mtlcityweblog: John, I’m still fuming about your dishonest mockery of 2016 Jill Stein campaign and don’t follow you any more. Fun fact: MORE people cancelled their US presidential ballot than people who voted for the Green Party, so don’t blame Stein for allowing Trump (nor Susan Sarandon…). John Oliver’s Smear Tactics Exposed As Establishment Propaganda.
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Kate
TVA says that a company with a troubled history is solely in charge of the city’s two recycling centres. Seems our recycling is often on the brink.
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Kate
A computer virus is afflicting the STM, making it impossible to reserve adapted transit. The website is also down, but buses and metro are running normally.
Ephraim 21:09 on 2020-10-20 Permalink
Which job? Getting the illegal arms off the streets or arresting black people? I mean, it’s the question we all want to ask..
Raymond Lutz 08:50 on 2020-10-21 Permalink
Hmm… je me demande s’il y a autant d’argent disponible pour désarmer les groupuscules de droite dans les régions de Québec, du Saguenay/Lac St-Jean ou de la Beauce… ?
De radio-can: “il existe également de milices axées sur les armes à feu et d’autres mouvements de droite. Ceux qui se font le plus remarquer à la lumière de la pandémie sont sans aucun doute les théoriciens du complot. Vous avez quand même un certain nombre de membres, de gens qui étaient dans ces groupes d’extrême droite, qui sont tranquillement en train de s’inviter dans le débat sur la pandémie. On en voit par exemple dans le mouvement anti-confinement, on en voit à l’heure actuelle dans le débat sur la loi 61 – et comprenez-moi bien, la loi 61, il y a certainement des critiques pertinentes à faire à son endroit – mais donc, on voit quand même cette volonté de ces groupes-là d’essayer de s’infiltrer dans tous les débats qui peuvent créer des polarisations sociales, souligne-t-il.”
Quel est le portrait de l’extrême droite au Québec?
Meezly 10:39 on 2020-10-21 Permalink
Well, so much for defunding the police.
Chris 11:28 on 2020-10-21 Permalink
>Well, so much for defunding the police.
It’s just not something most people want. For example, only 19% of black Americans want police to spend less time in their neighbourhoods: https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx
Meezly 12:05 on 2020-10-21 Permalink
How do the conclusions of this American gallup poll correlate with the additional funding towards our local Quiétude squad?
dwgs 13:20 on 2020-10-21 Permalink
False equivalency Chris.
Ephraim 15:35 on 2020-10-21 Permalink
Chris – First of all, defunding the police isn’t about getting rid of the police at all, nor cutting the time they spend in the neighbourhoods. It’s about reallocating the funds. But somehow reallocated the police budget just doesn’t resound when yelled. It’s bringing in social workers to help with family arguments, using funds from policing and ticketing the homeless into actually providing them shelter, and so on and so forth.
It’s also about stopping police corruption (for example, arresting people just before the end of the day to get overtime, even though the charges won’t stick) and policing based on facts rather than prejudice.
Meezly 08:41 on 2020-10-22 Permalink
@Chris. False equivalency usually results from lazy thinking. I see the posts you make here and I know you have the intellect. I’m not that smart, but I try to do my research before I make an argument.
If you read the final paragraph of the Gallup link you shared:
“These results correspond with Gallup’s previously reported findings showing that only 22% of Black Americans favor abolishing police departments. However, the vast majority believe reform is needed, with upward of 90% favoring specific reforms aimed at improving police relations with the communities they serve and preventing or punishing abusive police behavior.
In these findings, policymakers may find a path forward that helps the police both protect communities and establish relations that make all citizens feel good about their presence.”
These findings actually support a need to defund the police, which Ephraim explained, is to divest from programs that target certain people and/or does more harm than good, and reallocate funds to programs that better serve communities.
So that extra 1.5 million bucks to Quietude? If you do a gallup poll, likely not something that many of us, especially black people, would actually want.
Chris 10:56 on 2020-10-22 Permalink
>How do the conclusions of this American gallup poll correlate with the additional funding towards our local Quiétude squad
I can’t find any Montreal-specific polls on the general topic. (If you can, please share.) So of course we don’t for sure know how well it correlates with Montreal opinion. But we do know Canadian opinion is generally similar to the US on many things. I’d wager, with all that’s going on in the USA, that opinions towards to police are _less_ favourable than here.
>Chris – First of all, defunding the police isn’t about…
I’m well aware.
>…It’s about reallocating the funds.
By “reallocating” you mean reducing, right? And if police funding were reduced, do you think the end result would be less, same, or more officers?
For sure there are lots of issues with policing, but I struggle to think of other examples of where we think giving less money to something will make it better. There are issues with our health care system. Let’s reduce their funding! There are issues with our education system. Let’s reduce their funding!
There’s an argument for spending more on policing. Spend more on training, spend more on salary (so they don’t need side gigs), etc. etc.
>So that extra 1.5 million bucks to Quietude? If you do a gallup poll, likely not something that many of us, especially black people, would actually want.
I’m not so sure. It will depend how you ask the question of course. 76% of Quebecers think there should be a strict ban on guns in urban areas:
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/poll-suggests-majority-of-canadians-backs-ban-on-guns-in-urban-areas
If this $1.5 million actually gets guns off the streets, then Montrealers could well be in favour.
Meezly 10:32 on 2020-10-23 Permalink
Again, defunding the police is essentially about accountability and reform. This is same conclusion that was drawn from the American gallup poll you referenced. Reform can entail defunding, reducing or reallocating funds to programs that better serve their communities, not programs that would alienate subgroups of given communities.
How programs get funded reflects the politics of the government. Healthcare and public education almost never get enough funding they deserve because the government holding office simply does not value them enough.
Hundreds of millions of dollars went to the language police because the government feels that has a higher priority as it appeals to their base. And money that goes towards programs that uphold racist policies like Quietude gets funding instead, why? It may be what the public wants, but HOW this is being executed is the question. Is the funding going towards accountability in how the police are profiling and targeting citizens for gun possession?
So it’s ok to destroy some people’s lives unnecessarily by criminalizing them for having some rec drugs at home even though they didn’t own any guns? Programs that involve racial profiling should be defunded and in turn, those funds should be reallocated towards better police training (as you said), not only in how to be a better enforcer, but being in service to the community, which includes better de-escalation training and things like how to properly do a wellness check without killing anyone, and how to objectively profile a suspect without falling on racial biases. Even salaries, if necessary, because the police. like the citizens they serve, should also find value in their jobs.