CBC sits in with an UberEats driver, mentioning only as an afterthought that Quebec’s trying to cap the percentage the delivery services can skim off the bill.
Updates from March, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
So much for recent observations that we all calmly accept the curfew and other pandemic measures. A large crowd gathered downtown Saturday afternoon to protest pandemic measures – many without masks, as can be seen in the photo. Signs in the photo claim Covid is a fraud and that we have the right to reject the vaccine (the latter, while a stupid choice, is true).
Update: There were ten arrests and 144 tickets given out at the protest.
Kevin
Lots of the usual suspects among this crowd, including QAnon types. I wonder if the people flying MNLQ flags know what they’ve hoisted.
I would love to know how many in the crowd only come to Montreal to protest.
Tim S.
I think we only escaped the protests because of winter.
Ephraim
The ministry of education’s shame.
qatzelok
Imagine a world where you need to have a parade in order to justify having an opinion on something.
What a high price tag.
GC
I really don’t get the “tired of the restrictions” argument. A) Who isn’t tired of them? B)The virus doesn’t care how you feel about it.
qatzelok
The virus “not caring about anyone or anything” sounds a lot like the fascist governments of the past.
Kate
It’s simply a fact, qatzelok. It doesn’t. These protesters have lost the thread – the restrictions are not about them, and if they have been led to believe that the restrictions are being put in place for some nefarious other reason, they have been misled.
Occam’s razor. There’s a dangerous pathogen in the community so we have to adapt our behaviour not to get sick or risk making others sick. It’s so simple, but some people are too thick to grasp it.
GC
Thanks proving my point, qatzelok. You sound as ridiculous as anyone who assigns political motivations to a virus.
Meezly
So there are those who think the QC pandemic measures are too strict and those who think the measures aren’t proactive enough. But Legault is as popular ever.
So it seems that either side must be in the minority then!
Em
As someone who has diligently respected every restriction and guideline, I don’t think it’s right to brand people as idiots for questioning the restrictive measures placed on them, and whether they have yielded enough result to justify them.
Bill Binns
The problem with this pandemic is that it’s largely invisible. If people were collapsing at the IGA and choking on their own blood while seizing, people would be happy to walk around in full hazmat suits 24/7. Instead, the vast majority of the people who have died had already been placed in storage by their families years ago to await death. Well, death arrived but roughly 12-24 months early. The government and the media are bending over backwards to avoid the truth of this.
Fwiw, I don’t agree with the protesters at all but I understand why they are out there. Young people are being asked to sacrifice some of the most important years of their lives to preserve some of the least important years (or months) of the elderly population. It is sort of gratifying to finally see a street protest that the regular commenters here can’t get behind though. I look forward to the demands for the cops to get tough when these folks start tossing Molotov cocktails and smashing shop windows.
Daniel
I do feel for the people who have lost livelihoods or whose lives have been irrevocably changed by the measures put in place. I won’t get this year(+) back either. I am fortunate in many ways, but it still sucks. And I do think many measures could have been done better (whether stricter or looser).
But, wow. Watching the march go past our place with the Trump(?!) flags and the American(?!) flags and anti-5G placards (sigh) and other flags I’m probably lucky not to recognize, if there were sympathetic protestors in the lot, they were mixed in with a lot of people who did not remotely spark my sympathy.
Chris
Article says: “The assembled crowd numbered in the thousands for the protest, which was the largest held since the pandemic began.” Really? It was bigger than the BLM protest in summer 2020?
>if there were sympathetic protestors in the lot, they were mixed in with a lot of people who did not remotely spark my sympathy
Hmmm, isn’t that rather analogous to saying “I’m not sympathetic to the BLM movement because of the antifa crowd smashing things.”?
>There’s a dangerous pathogen in the community so we have to adapt our behaviour not to get sick or risk making others sick. It’s so simple…
Umm, it’s not that simple. “Dangerous” is not binary, and neither is adaptation. The virus is not infinitely dangerous and adaptation is not without negative side effects. The balance is anything but simple.
Blork
“I don’t think it’s right to brand people as idiots for questioning the restrictive measures placed on them…”
I don’t think so either. We should always be questioning. I’m branding these people as idiots because they DON’T question. They don’t question the ridiculous QAnon, pro-Trump, anti-5G, (etc.) conspiracy bullshit that seems to be the predominant theme at work here. They don’t question their own “question authority” ethic, they just do it robotically because they think they already know the answer. That’s not questioning, that’s sheepling.
I’m sure some of the protesters were there simply to express their frustration with how the measures have affected their lives, and that’s legit. But what’s the proportion of those people to the idiots? If the ratio is any higher than 2:1 (legit:idiot) then the idiots have ruined it for the others.
Blork
Chris: “Hmmm, isn’t that rather analogous to saying “I’m not sympathetic to the BLM movement because of the antifa crowd smashing things.”?”
No, it’s analogous to saying “I’m not going to join that particular protest because it’s been co-opted by people who like to break things.” It’s not about what you believe or support, it’s about the specific protest and whether or not you want to join.
It’s like if I were against the building of settlements in Israel on disputed territory, and the protest about that was clearly overrun with neo-Nazis, well I’m not going to join that protest. But it doesn’t change how I feel about the issue.
Chris
Blork, I think we’re saying mostly the same thing here. I’m saying you can’t tar and feather everyone in any protest just because of the ones that the media likes to pay attention to, which is always the most violent/extreme/weird. Indeed the legit:idiot ratio matters. Do we know what it was? Three photos in a couple of articles doesn’t convince me. There are plenty of articles out there that make the BLM protests look like mostly antifa, but that doesn’t make it so.
Tee Owe
@anybody – I need to know – what is antifa? Can I join? Where do I find them/it – is there a website? Or is this just more left/right binary nonsense?
Chris
Tee Owe, getting off topic now, but just in case you’re asking seriously: It’s generally horizontally organized, into cell structures so you’re not going to find a single authoritative website, but rather many websites. There’s no single group. Search ‘montreal antifa’ and you’ll find a few. The first result (for me) is a website that actually has an article about their opposition to the covid curfew, bringing this sorta back on topic!
Tee Owe
Thanks Chris – it was a serious question, maybe phrased with a bit of an eyebrow-raise. Never sure what to believe.
Kate
Tee Owe, antifa isn’t an organization, it’s just a word that characterizes actions against fascist groups. In a sense, it’s simply a term loosely meaning the people who would feel a need to respond to overt fascist activities. The first time I saw it used here in Montreal was when a right‑wing group (Pégida Québec) was threatening to hold a march through the Little Maghreb neighbourhood and plans were being made for a counter-action. That was 2015 or 2016, I think. In the event, the march was never held.
Before that I had understood “antifa” to be a term used in Europe, although in which countries, I couldn’t tell you. Pégida was also a European import and I haven’t seen the name used here lately, although right-wing groups have not gone away.
Tee Owe
Thanks Kate – sort of supports my left/right suspicion – anti-fa = not-right = left. I am nervous about anything binary, can often find aspects of both sides to agree with – or, why Bill Binns is not always wrong (apologies for the ad hominen, but it’s well-meant). Off-topic too but where else to post this. Thanks for the blog!
MarcG
Chris
MarcG: sure, but that’s not an argument *for* the extra-judicial violence advocated by most self-identifying antifa.
Tee Owe: there’s a whole wiki article, for what it’s worth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)
MarcG
But it is an argument against enlightened centrism.
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Kate
A new school will be built for students with autism. But “the bustling up-and-coming Rosemont neighbourhood”? What?
Spi
I’d say it’s a fair characterization of the Technopole Angus, not necessarily applicable to the whole of Rosemont. It wasn’t that long ago that there was nothing where this new neighbourhood stands today.
Kate
Maybe so. But it sounded so much like realtor-talk that I flinched.
dhomas
Though there is still new construction going on around the Angus yards, I would hardly call it “up-and-coming”. My brother-in-law almost bought a condo there in the early 2000’s. The price for a new construction was about 100k (which seems crazy today). Similar properties are going for 750k today.
It’s been over 20 years; how long does “up-and-coming” last?Kate
I think the only bustling is around the Provigo on Rachel. A long time ago – as dhomas says, the Angus development is not so new – I briefly had a client who lived in the area, and it was a pretty sleepy dormitory area on the whole.
EmilyG
It’s disappointing that I’m seeing several articles about this news item, but so few of them even mention the word “autistic.”
I don’t care if there’s some sort of outdated style manual thinking that “autistic” is somehow a dirty word. “Autistic” is the term that many of us actually-autistic people prefer.Chris
EmilyG, it’s probably woke political correctness at work. Like “homeless person” -> “person experiencing homelessness”. “coloured person” -> “person of colour”. etc. etc. etc.
EmilyG
I’m not sure if all of those situations are quite equivalent, as homelessness, non-whiteness/cultural groups, and neurological groups are not exactly the same.
But yes, I think the persistent use by journalists of “person-first language” in the case of autism is people trying to be overly cautious of not offending people. I say, only half-jokingly, that “person with autism” is a term that people with neurotypicality use because they decided that “autistic” was a bad word.
Many autistic people, myself included, are realizing that being autistic is not a terrible, shameful thing. It’s part of who we are, it IS who we are, we were born with it, and it’s not something that can be cured or that is going away.
For those interested in learning more about this issue and the terminology surrounding autism, here’s an in-depth article. https://autisticadvocacy.org/about-asan/identity-first-language/
Kate
EmilyG, the permissible vocabulary in a number of areas is a constantly evolving matter. Now I seem to have offended by attempting to be scrupulously inoffensive. My apologies.
EmilyG
Kate, it’s not overly offensive, and I don’t think you’re at fault here. I was thinking more broadly, about how few times the articles I’ve seen about this new school mention the word “autistic.”
Kevin
Emily
It’s not an outdated manual: it’s new guidelines/orders saying not to use the word autistic because it is supposedly offensive.EmilyG
I figured as much. And maybe many writers don’t realize it, but using the word “autistic” is more empowering to autistic people.
It’s time that this terminology should change.Chris
These days everything is offensive to someone. Sigh. It seems many people ignore *intent* and instead *choose* to *perceive* offence. It’s quite disheartening.
MarcG
Translation: I miss the good ol’ days when I could say hurtful things and nobody complained.
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Kate
Representatives of the Hasidic community went to court to try to get an exception to the curfew, but have been turned down.
In general in Quebec we’ve been obedient to the curfew, accepting its limitation on our lives. This isn’t so true of other places, where large protests have bucked against similar restrictions.
But the clocks go forward tonight, and with more light in the evening, people may be more tempted to transgress.
Chris
“Le Conseil des juifs hassidiques avance donc que le couvre-feu force des croyants à choisir entre leur religion ou le respect des règlements.” -> Even it true, so what? Their freedom of religion is no more important than my freedom of assembly, or my freedom of movement. If the latter can be restricted, so can the former.
JP
To be honest, I think the curfew should be pushed to 9:30 or 10 pm…it can still prevent certain types of gatherings..while allowing grocery shopping or walks later into the evening…having to cut short a walk because i need to be home by 8 pm…is getting ridiculous.
Chris
JP, oh, I totally agree. But such an extension should apply to everyone, not just to people that have certain opinions/beliefs. It’s not fully clear from the article if this Hasidic court case was arguing for an extension for all, or for themselves only (seems like the latter).
Ephraim
The rates have subsided. There is no real reason that we can’t move, like the rest of the province to 9:30PM. Is there any proof that the curfew did anything at all? The rates subsided everywhere in Canada and only Quebec had a curfew.
Meezly
I wouldn’t be surprised if the QC government has no real data to back this up.
jeather
I saw one chart suggesting that the curfew’s effect was likely to be minor at best, we were already decreasing and the rate of decrease didn’t appreciably increase after the curfew; other large provinces have similar decreases at the same period despite no curfew.
john
I had seen reports that 70% of Quebecers support the curfew. I find that interesting because I have not met any one who does! Setting aside the fact that we are the only place in North America (I think) with the curfew and the seemingly lack of supporting data, isnt the 70% number too high. Do you guys know anyone who supports or any significant percentage of the pop that supports the curfew?
GC
Yep. I know far more people who support the curfew than who support Legault. I’m in support of it, but I’d like to know that it’s actually having a positive effect. It’s difficult to be sure…
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Kate
A man got stabbed in a dispute with neighbours in St-Michel Friday night, but the unusual angle is that he seems to have inflicted the injuries on himself.
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Kate
Gyms, spas and hotel swimming pools will be allowed to reopen in Montreal later this month. I wish I could believe there was science behind this decision and not the government simply bending to lobbying. It was with a sense of creepy déjà vu that I read that Italy is locking down again to avoid a new spike in infections…
Meezly
The article you shared from COVID-STOP the previous day confirms there is no science behind this decision and is based on a defensive pandemic management, and is not proactive at all.
Even Mylene Drouin said that a third wave linked to variants is expected in late March/early April by regional public health – just in time for the reopening. So it makes no sense.
Chris
What do you even mean by “science behind this decision”? Do you require a multi-year double-blind trial?
No one is forcing gyms to open, only allowing them. No one is forcing anyone to go to the gym, only allowing them. The gym crowd skews young, and they are less effected. There’s more and more people vaccinated already for the older crowd. There are zillions of people working in offices/buildings 8 hours a day, is 60 minutes in the gym going to be so much worse?
The ability to get exercise is an essential service.
Tim S.
“The ability to get exercise is an essential service.”
Sure. And it is still possible to go for a walk, run, ski, bike ride, to do your favorite 80s aerobic workout in your living room, toss around bags of flour, and do all kinds of other things. And in a month or so parks should be ready for outdoor groups. Not ideal for everybody, OK., but in a hierarchy of prioritization actual indoor gyms should be well down the list. I suspect opening them is more a product of lobbying than anything else.dhomas
I think the problem here is consistency and messaging.
We’ll be allowed to go to gyms where people move throughout the establishment, go around touching multiple machines, dropping bodily fluids along the way.
Meanwhile, restaurants, where you mostly stay in one place with the same people you came in with, remain closed. This is just an example, but it seems odd that gyms get to open while other businesses don’t.
Meezly
If gyms are allowed to reopen they need to follow strict guidelines, ie. proper ventilation, zero tolerance for taking face masks off, physical distancing. Hong Kong had a recent outbreak of ~40! cases traced back to a gym where a few members exercised maskless. HK is about to enter a, what, 5th wave at this point?
Also you need to ensure that community transmission is low enough to warrant such re-openings. The new variants are also adding a level of complication, which the QC gov’t seems to be ignoring.
Again, the science is there that chances of transmission greatly increases the more heavily you breathe in a confined space despite physical distancing measures. Masks don’t guarantee safety, they can only mitigate.
No one if forcing anyone to workout in a gym, but it’s like Field of Dreams: if you open, people will come.
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Kate
The city is launching a program to subsidize people buying their first property to live in. It’s for people with too much cash to qualify for regular social housing but not enough to buy a place at full market price.
John B
This seems like a weird programme, and I’m not sure how much it actually benefits the people who buy homes.
1) It appears only to apply to new construction, (because the money comes, at least in part, from the developer).
2) If someone who bought in this programme wants to sell they can only sell to people in the programme – so the buyer pool may be very small.
3) When selling, the price is limited to initial purchase price + 3% per year owned. And the initial purchase price was market price minus 20%.These rules last for 30 years.
This feels like it will create two separate real estate markets: one for “rich” people who can play with the big dogs, and a second one for people who have participated in the programme, where the properties will probably be worse. It also seems like it will be impossible to jump from the subsidized market to the “real” market because the bad market can’t be used to build wealth.
I also don’t see anything saying that the city will adjust the tax rates on these properties, so there’s a real risk of having a property that you can’t sell for anything close to the tax evaluation value, and thus you end up paying a ton of tax on something that’s not actually worth that much.
IF this is to buy a “forever home” that you expect to live in for 30+ years then maybe it’s worth it, or maybe if you buy one of these, live in it for a bit, then find somewhere else to live and rent it out at market rates, but otherwise it seems like it’s probably better to keep trying to play the rental market & save to enter the “real” market.
Kate
I imagine those restrictive rules are meant to keep speculators away. These homes are not meant as a first step on the property ladder, as the saying goes, they’re simply trying to find a way to circumvent the constantly inflating cost of housing.
City hall must be aware that the rules they put in place could easily be turned around by a future administration, and the flats put out on the open market. It’s happened before.
John B
> they’re simply trying to find a way to circumvent the constantly inflating cost of housing
Then there should be some sort of tax protection. If taxes go up with the non-restricted market then people risk finding themselves 15 years down the road with a large tax burden that’s difficult to sell. Maybe if the city, in addition to the right of first refusal they have already in the programme, added that they are willing to buy the properties in the future at the fixed max or something slightly below it. That would take away pretty much all risk.
CE
How many places are there in the city where someone could build a new house? Would building a triplex and making an income off the other units be allowed?
John B
It sounds like it’s expected to be mostly condos.
As in: a developer buys some property, knocks down whatever’s there, and puts up a new condo building. If each unit sells for $500k, the developer sells some percentage of units for $400k under this programme, fulfilling his “must include social housing” obligation.
Ephraim
Why not, like CMHC, take a percentage of the house value. If the house is $300K and the subsidy is $100K, then own 1/4 of the value of the house when sold. And that money go back into programs.
david245
This program flows directly from the Règlement pour une métropole mixte law. It’s a form of inclusionary zoning, they got this directly from San Francisco, etc.
Basically, new development projects will be forced to ‘turn over’ a certain number of units to this city program, the broad outlines of which were correctly described in this article.
It’s not as bad as it could have been, if the city had gone with its goofy 30% scheme, assuming the province didn’t just strip the city of its ability to manage such matters at all based on rank incompetence (one lives in hope), you’d have seen a 1990s-style deep freeze in new development, which would have advanced the anti-growth/pro-rentier/gentrification agenda nicely. After someone tapped the kooks on the shoulder and gave them a reality check, PM came in with something they thought was sustainable, based probably on some data this time: developers are going to be selling the 20% or whatever of units at below market rate (BMR) prices, which is confiscatory, but predictable.
Essentially, the city is forcing the ‘greedy developers’ to raise the prices of the market condos they bring to market to subsidize the people going into this ownership scheme.
The scheme itself is straightforward: these units have what are called deed covenants restricting the unit re-sale price, as described in the article. That is, they are meant to be ‘permanently’ affordable BMR units. You buy it for 200k, you sell it for that plus statutorily set interest, no matter the market conditions. The elegance of this scheme is that there’s a very low city administrative cost (this isn’t a bunch of social housing units the city has to repair or whatever), and the number of BMR units grows with each new development.
The big and obvious problem is that, of course, some people will get cheaper housing in downtown highrises, but all their neighbors will pay more, and there won’t be any decrease to aggregate housing cost because of the drag on development.
The cost of housing in Montreal continues to rise because of a scarcity of units relative to demand. New housing is more costly per square foot, but commands a premium for a variety of reasons (newer amenities, location, etc). When people with the means move into these new apartments/condos, they either vacate old ones or don’t compete for old ones, which results either in a phenomenon called ‘filtering’ (people moving up from shabbier to better units) or in simple old softening of demand for the old units. The net result is that the cost of housing decreases overall. It’s not something people tend to believe occurs, but it’s documented in the literature to such an extent that no anti-development activist can actually city any literature to support the position that blocking development makes housing cheaper on aggregate.
Anyway, by raising development costs – which will raise the costs of units brought to market and dump the demand back into the existing units until prices there rise to justify the cost of the new units – this inclusionary zoning scheme will reduce the number of units coming to market, so that no matter the inclusionary zoning offset, it’s unlikely to lower the cost of housing.
To John’s points, John, man, you’re thinking about this the wrong way. Basically, this scheme is emphatically not for an investor. You’re also wrong that property taxes would be punitive – the value of the property is set by statute. Where you’re onto something is the strata or association fees: it’s pretty rare that BMR units get a break on fees, so that if you luck into a discounted unit in a fancy building, you’re also lucking into that extra $700/month in HOA fees to account for the pool and the rest. I haven’t looked at the legislation closely, but I expect that there’s companion ‘in lieu of’ legislation that lets the developers dump cash equivalent to the cost difference on these units into a housing fund. After all this high minded talk, who would it really surprise that this is just another government shake down.
CE – it’s 4+ units.
John B
That makes sense. I realize these are very much not for investors. So long as taxes are based on the actual, re-salable, value of these units and not some other number invented by the valuation department then buyers won’t be taxed out of their homes. I hadn’t even though of condo fees, though ;(
I am interested to see how this plays out. I also tend to agree that more housing units total = cheaper for everyone, so if this system makes fewer units be built that’s bad, but if developers the non-subsidized units are made a little more expensive to pay maybe it’ll work. Of course that’s a choice for the developer to make.
Ephraim
I noticed that many of the real estate agents aren’t listing Condo fees in their online listings anymore. There are a few buildings in Montreal where the condo fees are so bad that it affects the resale value. 5700 & 5720 Cavendish is one of the most famous. They converted from an apartment building and still have centralized heating and electric… no one ever turns off a light! And a few on Nun’s Island on Berlioz where they didn’t save enough for repairs. Some of these condos have $1 a square foot in condo fees/property taxes. That’s $600 a month on 600 sq ft.
Still think you can put a clause into the sale/mortgage documents that make the city a 20% owner with simply veto on sale (to avoid scams). The house can go on to the regular market at any time, but you only get to keep your percentage of the value and the city gets back the money to invest in future apartments.
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