Every pedestrian’s worst nightmare: a man was seriously hurt Saturday after two cars collided on St-Michel Boulevard, ricocheting a parked car into the passerby.
Updates from November, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Quebec has decreed that the EMSB school board election must be held next month – in fact, five days before Christmas. People involved say this decision is absurd.
dwgs
Deliberately absurd I’d say.
Jack
That was transparent.
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Kate
A day shelter for the homeless, capable of welcoming 300 people at a time, will open on Monday on the Grand Quai of the Old Port, and presumably run all winter. (The Grand Quai used to be called the Alexandra Quai, in case your mental map of the area is at all like mine.)
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Kate
The city’s blue collar workers, without a new contract for three years, are meeting on Saturday to decide about pressure tactics.
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Kate
The Journal is not letting up on the issue of getting served in English in stores in Montreal. Mayor Plante is said to be concerned about it. How to create a vaccine against an invasive cultural pathogen? It’s a tricky one.
Update: 54 recommendations on enforcing the use of French, which mostly applies to Montreal, after all.
Uatu
I’m going to do my part by boycotting shopping downtown from now on…… Oh wait…
Kevin
That’s actually a very detailed article.
I’m glad they point out that Montreal is less than 50% francophone, that there is a serious labour shortage in retail, but I’m not sure most readers realize that the foreign companies are ignoring the law.denpanosekai
How many of these offended journalists actually live here…
TC
From an outsider point of view, I’ve always thought the “bonjour/hello” greeting is a nice way to offer both languages, and one I have experienced in Montreal. I’ve traveled a bit, and have family in Italy. Often staff in restaurants, stores, post offices or on public transit have greeted me using the language they thought I spoke. Sometimes correct, sometimes not. As someone who works in bars and restaurants, by the end of the article I was feeling very sympathetic to the workers. Not the best paid jobs, there is a pandemic, you are at risk and you are supposed to be fluent in two languages.
Kate
Well exactly. “Bonjour, Hi” just indicates that a store employee is prepared to serve you in the language of your choice. Store owners know they make more sales if people feel comfortable asking questions in their own language. It makes no sense to enforce French-only in downtown Montreal where (in normal times anyway) there are tourists and students more comfortable in English. It’s not reasonable for politicians and op-ed writers to expect store owners to alienate potential customers by refusing to speak English to them on principle.
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Kate
Free parking on weekends throughout Montreal is now a fact till the end of December. This sprightly Time Out piece says “across the island of Montreal” but I never saw indications that other towns on the island were following suit.
Bill Binns
I’d rather see them give free parking to everyone than to hand it out selectively based on religion.
CE
What the hell are you talking about?
dwgs
Sunday parking has always been free until 1 pm. I believe that is what Bill is referring to.
Kate
Also, parking around synagogues tolerated on Saturdays and holy days.
dhomas
Other than offending some people’s sense of “fairness”, free parking on Sundays or Shabbat affects those same people zero percent. Complain about something that matters, please.
Bill Binns
Don’t forget the ancient festival of the suspension of alternate side parking rules called Purim.
Kevin
Go by suburban churches on Xmas Eve for true madness.
Jonathan
Paid parking was originally ‘invented’ at the request of businesses who saw that people would just park there cars for extremely long periods of time without necessarily buying anything. I think it was in San Francisco.
With paid metered parking you actually have a high turnover which means more customers per parking spot. I think the only effect this will have is limit the amount of parking available per space hour and increase the number of people looking for spaces (both because of the more limited spaces due to less turnover and the increased induced demand from everyone thinking it’s now easier to park). I feel like it’s only going to increase the frustration of those who already have the loudest voice and due a disservice to local commercial streets.
YUL514
When I first heard the city announce the free parking initiative I too understood it as across the City, there was no reference to just downtown. I entered a spot on the parking app and it’s free but I was at Jean Talon Market yesterday and the outdoor parking was free. I assumed their system was down as it often is but now that I think about it they are probably taking part of the “free parking” as well.
Kate
YUL514, it’s the City of Montreal doing this. I’ve seen nothing either way on whether the other municipalities on the island are joining in.
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Kate
Covid is still partly a black box. Some people hardly experience any symptoms while others get very sick and don’t shake it off so easily, and we don’t yet know why. These long Covid patients will be studied at a new clinic to open soon in town.
The Gazette has a photo essay on things that have been changed by the pandemic.
I was chatting with a friend (on the phone) this week, and found we’d both been thinking the same thing: the hundred-year span from the end of Spanish flu to the beginning of Covid was a fortunate bubble. We grew up in a time when we didn’t have to think much about contagion, but that hasn’t been the usual human experience, and it no longer is. The Gazette calls this “the new normal” in its headline above, but it’s more like a return to the old status quo.
(Yes I know: the 1918 flu wasn’t Spanish, and people had concerns about tuberculosis, polio, AIDS and Ebola, among others, during that century, but there wasn’t anything forcing the whole world into masks.)
dmdiem
I recommend Dr. John Campbells youtube channel for all things covid. He provides daily, fact based, no nonsense updates. While he is UK based, he does present global info and has talked about “long covid” a few times.
Woh K. Upphalen
One question that must never be asked:
Are the 1% “robbing the till” during the onset of a depression and using a “pandemic” as a distraction?
Don’t ask this, and you’ll come out fine.
Bill Binns
There are little clues here and there that this situation may be permanent, vaccine or not. I was in the Berri metro the other day and noticed a new vending machine selling masks and other PPE. The machine itself looks like it cost 40k or more. Somebody is betting a lot of cash that this thing isn’t going to be all wrapped up by summer.
As a mild germaphobe I welcome the new normal with open arms. It’s kind of a dream come true to be able to wear a mask in public and not attract attention. I have been following COVID guidelines in the metro (stay as far away from people as possible and try not to touch anything) since 2003 without even knowing how heroic I was being.
DeWolf
Masks will be here to stay. Not universally and not in every situation, but I think we’ll become more like places in Asia where if you have a cold or the sniffles, you’re encouraged or even expected to wear a mask in public places. Mask use is also widespread in Japan due to seasonal allergies and I’ll bet you some people here will adopt that practice next spring.
I also can’t help but think of Hong Kong post-SARS. During the epidemic, everybody wore masks, there were hand sanitizer dispensers installed all over the place and elevator buttons were covered in sheets of plastic with signs saying they were disinfected every hour. After the epidemic ended, so did universal mask wearing, and gradually, as the years went by and SARS receded from memory, those hand sanitizer dispensers never seemed to be refilled and the elevator plastic was not cleaned very frequently. People grew relatively lax about hygiene.
But the memory of SARS was still there, so as soon as Covid happened people reacted very quickly and picked up their old habits. Now that we have this experience here in Quebec, we’ll also be able to react more productively—at least on an individual level—the next time there’s some kind of epidemic.
Kevin
Woh K. Upphalen
Who is stopping anybody from asking that question?
It’s pretty obvious that local companies are suffering. there have been countless news reports about this in countries around the world.We are seeing a shift in society because of a terrible disease.
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Kate
The underground metro garage at Côte-Vertu is a year behind in its construction and the consortium doing the work has presented no explanation or excuse. The article finds a tiny silver lining: there’s still a chance the extension of the orange line to Bois-Franc could be done while the excavation is active.
david103
That’s a very important silver lining, but there’s no indication at all that we have forward momentum on this file.
Personally, Plante should be banging the drum publicly, and constantly pestering the province and the feds, up to and including Trudeau himself, about this. She should also have a czar for this file, and she must get a bunch of nice splashy renderings out to the west and north side public before her reelection campaign begins.
Not only do would be we get a much faster west side connection to the REM, and connection to the west side from the west island, we get an entirely new metro station in a part of town that’s basically tabula rasa. This area could become an important Vancouver-style high density, transit-center oriented neighborhood, with connections both downtown, and to employment centers in NDG, Côte-des-Neiges/Côte-Saint Luc, and Westmount (including the new hospital complex). Great!
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Kate
Eighteen families are still without housing since Moving Day, and are being put up at hotels.
Ephraim
You know, the quickest way to fix this… force Revenu Quebec to actually the AirBnB regulations. Every single listing is supposed to have a permit number. As soon as they find out that they can’t get a permit (and can’t) and are going to get fined… they will decide to put it back on the market.
Bill Binns
@Ephraim- I don’t know what’s going on but it looks like AirBnb landlords have found another way. There are 3 houses on my street that are clearly being rented out as weekend party houses but there are no corresponding listings on AirBnb. AirBnb doesn’t show addresses until you purchase (this should be illegal – it makes snitching almost impossible) but they typically show almost nothing in the Village.
Ephraim
There are plenty of other places, like VRBO and Booking to list. All ads now have to have the permit number. They just need to make reservations and send out the fines. And it’s a perfect time too, AirBnB is doing their IPO and they can’t handle bad publicity at the moment. (Not that the IPO is actually worth anything, it’s being done so they can cash out on their warrants and options, not that business is going well at all.)
The fine is still $2500 a day private and $5000 a day commercial. All you do is make a 4 day reservation and send out the $10K fine or $20K fine and soon enough AirBnB will finally do something, like make everyone post their permit number, really really quickly. And most of these people can’t get a permit number, because you have to prove that you have your city permit to do it.
As for those around you. Find out if they are using a keybox. The lockpicking lawyer on youtube has a video on how to open those and just leave with they key. 🙂 How often do you want to rekey a door?
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Kate
Drivers who were stranded overnight in the snow in a massive traffic snarl on Highway 13 in March 2017 will finally get compensation between $400 and $1,400.
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