The street was closed around St-Édouard church, at St-Denis and Beaubien, Monday afternoon, after debris fell from one of the bell towers. Nobody was hurt. Not clear from this when or whether the streets have reopened.
Updates from December, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
STM security has seen twice as many people in crisis this year, but their increased visibility may have been due to the steep drop in other passengers.
JS
According to the article agents “intervened” twice as much since the arrival of the pandemic as before, not that there’s been more crisis reports. Maybe the presence of normal crowds has a mitigating or calming effect on vulnerable people?
Blork
Well it’s pretty common knowledge that mental health issues have soared during the pandemic. It’s not just that many people are out of work or at least have lost their income security, but there is a huge amount of uncertainty at play. Uncertainty about when this will be over, when jobs will come back, exactly how dangerous it is out there, when classes can go back to “normal,” etc.
A lot of people are completely immune to the mental health effects that kind of uncertainty, but many others are profoundly affected by it.
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Kate
It’s worth using an incognito window to read this nice Les Perreaux piece in the Globe & Mail about retired calèche horses and how they’re doing.
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Kate
TVA looks back at 2020 in Montreal and at things that happened besides the pandemic.
La Presse nominates the words of 2020.
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Kate
As of the new year, Kahnawake is barring visitors from buying cigarettes in its tobacco shops, in an effort to stop the spread of Covid.
Chris
Right, wouldn’t want the people they’re selling poison to to get sick! Smoking kills about 45k Canadians per year (covid at 15k). Also, a little late in the game to decide this, no?
Kate
They don’t want to get sick themselves either. Kahnawake closed itself off completely for a period early in the pandemic but reopened in June. I haven’t followed how their policy has evolved since then, and I don’t know why the cigarette stores are not already closed by the current lockdown rules, not being essential, but in general Quebec has learned it’s wiser not to intervene on Mohawk lands.
Michael Black
It’s their territory, their rules. The issue here is they don’t want outsiders coming because of the Virus, and apparently those cigarette buyers can be quite pushy. It’s significant that they’ve chosen health here, since at other times they’ve shown sovereignity in other ways.
There were stories last fall about people being mistreated at the big climate march, so few causes are completely pure.
Chris
>They don’t want to get sick themselves either
Ah, so even more selfless than at first glance! /s
>It’s their territory, their rules.
Which of course doesn’t make their rules any less open to criticism than anyone else’s rules on anyone else’s territory.
Allowing selling totally non-essential things (that hurt the respiratory system, during a respiratory virus pandemic!) while more benign and more essential things are forced closed is insane.
Better late than never though.
dwgs
Also, people drive their cars to go buy their smokes.
dhomas
Allison Cummins put it very well the first time this topic came up about cigarettes during a pandemic:
https://mtlcityweblog.com/2020/03/26/thursdays-initial-corona-stories/#comment-122302Imagine trying to quit smoking now. I’ve quit smoking in the past, and stress is definitely something that makes you relapse. There’s probably no worse time than right now to try to quit smoking.
MarcG
As an ex-smoker and someone who has friends who still smoke I can vouch for this unfortunate fact. The first few years after I quit every time it changed seasons I would think about smoking, taste it, smell it, want it, and then it stopped. When the cold hit this year and I wasn’t feeling great it immediately popped into my mind. This is 10+ years after quitting.
Kate
MarcG, my mother smoked for years then quit, and told me much later that she still got a craving from time to time.
I’m glad I didn’t start, even though it meant sacrificing a large piece of being cool in high school.
DavidH 15:19 on 2020-12-29 Permalink
But the real problem is the bike path, obviously.
Chris 16:25 on 2020-12-29 Permalink
? I don’t see anything in the article about the bike path…
DavidH 16:55 on 2020-12-29 Permalink
@Chris, the priest from that church is on a crusade to remove the REV bike path from the front of his church. Says it’s dangerous for people to cross it when they get dropped of by car. People have to use the St-Denis side of the church only because the Beaubien side is a hard-hat area with scaffoldings where no one ever works on the decrepit building. If the Church took care of its building, the place would actually be safe. Instead he’s been rambling for week about the danger of bike paths.
qatzelok 10:59 on 2020-12-30 Permalink
“Il est venu le temp des pistes cyclables
Le monde est entré
Dans un nouveau millénaire…”