Is Montreal facing another lockdown as Covid cases climb again? With a gym in Quebec City blamed for an outbreak of as many as 140 cases, the wisdom of forcing high school students back into class and allowing a lot more people into places of worship begins to look thin.
Updates from April, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Users of the Lachine marina have abandoned their attempt to convince the city not to convert the area into a park for more general use. However, they also say they will continue to fight.
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Kate
The man always referred to in the franco press as le caïd Raynald Desjardins will be out on parole on April 19 after serving one third of his sentence for conspiring to murder Salvatore Montagna. But he won’t really be a free man. People on all sides are watching him; TVA says police are on edge waiting to see what happens.
Minor trivia: I noticed the other day in Little Italy a fairly hefty metal barrier has appeared on the doorway to the law offices of Loris Cavaliere even though Google Maps thinks the office is permanently closed.
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Kate
Phyllis Lambert is not happy with Denis Coderre’s proposals for skyscrapers taller than Mount Royal and an elevated REM line through Old Montreal.
Em
Couldn’t agree more with her. There are plenty of other ways to build density.
Uatu
Unfortunately the only way things get done in this city is with a mayor willing to bend the knee to Quebec city
Mr.Chinaski
This has absolutely nothing to do with “Quebec city”
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Kate
The developer of the huge Children’s Hospital condo site is taking the city to court because it wants to break a promise it made to Denis Coderre in 2017 to include units of social housing.
MarcG
This script is getting pretty tired
steph
Can we make sure the penalty is punitive? for One Billion dollars I’d leave them off the hook.
Tim
If I understand correctly (and I might not because I miss subtleties in French), the original contract said that the developer could drop the social housing for a payment of 6 million dollars. Last year when they tried to do the payout, the city changed the maximum height of the building from 20 stories to 4 (or did the city decline a request to add 4 stories to the building?). Now there is a lawsuit to resolve this.
How much housing does 6 million dollars buy these days? I’m guessing that they should have asked for more money in the original contract or simply excluded the ability to drop the social housing.
su
I so miss the days when Montreal was a “Mafia” town, and we could live on the cheap pursuing our own creative ventures and grassroots cultural activities undeterred by the current cost of housing . RIP Montreal.
MarcG
Free idea: build a seperatist movement around the concept that it will bring housing costs down. Vive le Québec libre et peu cher!
Ephraim
It’s time to add two new classifications to properties. Unoccupied properties, residential and commercial should have a higher tax rate and that money can go to social housing. And a second, second home, which again have a higher tax rate. The same should be true of STR properties. If it is not the primary residence of someone… tax it higher and put that money towards social housing. The STRs are taking their tax as a cost and deducting it from their income tax anyway… might as well capture something for the city.
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Kate
Easter weekend is imminent. Here’s an open and closed item.
Also, summer parking rules are now in force.
MarcG
Last night I noticed a staggered row of parked cars, half in the bike lane, half in the street – this explains it, thanks!
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Kate
Two of the city’s well-known homeless shelters are banding together to find locations for permanent housing for the homeless.
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Kate
Valérie Plante says she wants the Grand Prix to run this year, but knows it’s likely to be tricky.
MarcG
Trying to appease the car cult? Throw the Grand Prix in a deep hole.
Bert
Maybe trying to put 1000 people in hotels and getting a bit of catering and related services running.
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Kate
The SPVM’s communications guy André Durocher is retiring, and Radio-Canada does an in-depth interview. Also in La Presse.
JP 20:01 on 2021-04-01 Permalink
Most of us knew it made no sense…maybe it was announced for optics…
none of that should have changed…the main thing that needed to be shifted was the 8 pm curfew…that is the main thing I hope we don’t go back to. Not because I have anywhere to go in particular, but we should be able to step outside if we need to, even just for a walk…like at 9 pm or 10 pm even.
Ephraim 20:24 on 2021-04-01 Permalink
The curfew at 8PM… why? 9:30PM is fine.
JP 20:44 on 2021-04-01 Permalink
I meant that I don’t think we should go back to 8 pm (if that is being considered)
Meezly 21:31 on 2021-04-01 Permalink
All Mr Gym Guy had to do was follow the sanitary protocols. Just before gyms were to reopen there was that expatriate gym in Hong Kong that had an outbreak because of lax rules – a few people not wearing face masks was enough to infect 47 – and that number was considered bad. One-third of that gym in QC!!
We can find real life situations all over the world, but we never seem to learn from any of them.
“Now his Facebook page is being bombarded with angry comments as people blame him for the provincial government’s decision to close all non-essential businesses, including gyms, in Quebec City until at least April 12.”
At least there is some online justice being meted out.
SMD 22:05 on 2021-04-01 Permalink
Update: Mr Gym Guy has learned exactly nothing: https://www.lesoleil.com/actualite/la-capitale/le-proprietaire-du-mega-gym-affirme-avoir-respecte-les-mesures-sanitaires-3a38c0e890824db1a9bf1d82d471e69e.
Ephraim 04:18 on 2021-04-02 Permalink
The owner of the gym is trying to save his gym. Nothing more and nothing less. His facebook, twitter and reviews are now full with angry messages from the citizens of Quebec City because he’s the central reason for the lockdown in the city. But it’s clear, to everyone but him, that he didn’t do what he’s writing, because at 9AM he was ordered to shut down and it wasn’t until the cops went at 3PM that he actually closed.
He’s also known for supporting an end to wearing masks, to flouting the laws and marches in the anti-mask parades. He’s been on the radio about it. Even the radio station is trying to distance themselves from it, because a whole city now sees him and his gym as the source.
No one is going to believe that he took cleaning seriously. No one. Even the photo he put up of someone cleaning gym equipment is stock… he couldn’t even manage to have a picture of his own staff cleaning. And the other gym owners that he convinced… they too are walking away.
If his business survives, I’ll be in shock at how stupid people are.
Bill Binns 10:39 on 2021-04-02 Permalink
I’m feeling less and less hopeful that this is ever going to end. Maybe we should just start remaking society around the idea that you can not safely pack human beings past X density. No more stadiums, no more elbow to elbow restaurants, no more buses with people packed in like sardines.
Kate 11:08 on 2021-04-02 Permalink
Bill Binns, I’ve felt for some time that the world had an incredibly lucky break between 1920 and 2020. Yes, there were outbreaks of polio, Ebola, SARS and so on, but no worldwide, life-changing pandemic for a century. Despite the wars and other troubles between those years, we may come to look back on it as a golden age.
Tee Owe 11:21 on 2021-04-02 Permalink
Kate, Bill Binns – you touch on an uncomfortable reality – there are way more people on the planet than ever before. I am not proposing an immediate solution but we may need to keep it n mind for future (family?) planning
DeWolf 13:02 on 2021-04-02 Permalink
People often have the tendency to extrapolate from the present in a straight line. But the status quo is always shifting. Two years ago, despite years of warnings from public health experts, few of us could have imagined being in the midst of a major pandemic. Now that we’re in the middle of it, some people seem to think the pandemic will somehow go on forever.
But we’re talking about a virus, not some magical super-villain. The one lesson from past pandemics is that, one way or another, they have all come to an end. That was true with the Spanish flu and it was also true for the 1968 flu pandemic, which for some reason nobody talks about despite it having more similarities with our current pandemic. We have two mRNA vaccines that are extraordinarily effective – and they were developed in record time, just a couple of weeks after the Covid-19 genome was mapped. I don’t know why so many of you seem to think they don’t work, despite all the clinic trials and real-world evidence, but they do. They’re even highly effective against variants, even the most troublesome ones like P1 from Brazil. Eventually this will end.
Also – I’m not sure the golden age Kate describes ever existed. The average human being living in 1970 or 1990 was probably more likely to die from an infectious disease than the average human being in 2021, even taking Covid into account. There may not have been a huge pandemic, but there were far more problematic diseases that hadn’t yet been controlled or wiped out.
Kate 13:05 on 2021-04-02 Permalink
Compare it to the 19th century though, DW. Smallpox, typhus, cholera, typhoid. We beat them all, and we were pretty blasé for a century.
DeWolf 13:14 on 2021-04-02 Permalink
That’s kind of my point. We managed to wipe out those illnesses in most parts of the world. There’s no reason to think we’re suddenly going to lose two centuries’ worth of scientific knowledge in disease control and vaccine development.
Incidentally, typhoid is still common and kills a huge number of people every year – about 150,000. We’re just insulated from diseases like that by virtue of living in Canada. Which is another reason why even if Covid drags on for some unfortunate countries, we’re likely to be done with it here sooner rather than later.
Blork 14:31 on 2021-04-02 Permalink
Sit down folks, as you’re about to experience a rare Blork comment that is not on the pessimistic side (although I wouldn’t go so far as to call it optimistic).
DeWolf is right that these things historically DO pass, but the way Kate and others feel is not unusual. After a year (and I suspect another year to go) it’s easy to feel there is no end to it. But imagine what it felt like during the Black Death, or the Spanish Flu of 1918.
Imagine how people felt during the world wars, where the fighting and bombing went on week after week, month after month, year after year. Entire economies changed during those wars; how people worked, how people spent their money and their time. Some people benefited (e.g., people who got those jobs in munitions and aircraft factories) and some people lost (those who were killed or maimed, dependants of those killed or maimed, people who worked in industries shuttered by the war, etc.) Imagine the uncertainty of an economy that’s been based on war for the past five years and then the war ends… what now?
Think about how it must have felt a few years in (say, 1943 or ’44); it must have seemed like it would never end, or that when it did end we would never recover from the damage and the possibility of an economic collapse as the war industries dried up and the civilian industries lay in tatters.
Imagine what the various cities of Europe that had sustained prolonged bombing and fighting looked like: Warsaw, Berlin, Dresden, parts of London, Coventry (which lost its entire downtown core in a single night of bombing), Tokyo, Nagasaki, etc. In 1945 how would the survivors of those cities ever imagine their city would recover? Yet they did. (Similarly, look at Aleppo and Homs in Syria now… how will they ever recover? Let’s check back 40 years from now…)
My point is just that we feel doom and gloom in the thick of it and even as we pull out of it, but historically we’ve always bounced back one way or another; not always as individuals, but certainly as a group. There is undoubtedly change, and change is scary and can bring out people’s fears of uncertainty and their resistance to the unknown, but we always manage.
Tee Owe 15:11 on 2021-04-02 Permalink
Thanks Blork for this positive post – we need to be reminded sometimes
Nick 15:28 on 2021-04-02 Permalink
Spanish flu never went away. It’s descendants is what hundreds of millions of people get every year.
Blork 15:39 on 2021-04-02 Permalink
The Spanish Flu didn’t go away but the PANDEMIC of Spanish Flu went away.
Raymond Lutz 18:26 on 2021-04-02 Permalink
It seems I’m the only one here following Paul Beckwith… The inconveniences we’re living now are NOTHING compared to those we’ll encounter in a decade or two with ecological and climatic systems collapsing right before our eyes.
Invasive venomous species and infectious disease previously unknown in our latitudes, famine, civil wars, (small) nuclear conflicts between tiers nuclear nations, new zoonotic diseases, geoengineering gone wild, massive climate refugees movements, anoxic oceans, new volcanic regions triggered by ice loss over Greenland and antarctic. Large methane eruptions in the East Siberian Sea from destabilized clathrate. Most geological and climatological papers conclude nowadays with the words “faster than expected”.
Fetch the popcorn… https://paulbeckwith.net/
MarcG 21:18 on 2021-04-02 Permalink
Raymond, most of us are barely coping with not hanging out with our families and going to the movies for a year – do you really think we can deal with that? Can you say “cognitive dissonance”?
Raymond Lutz 23:12 on 2021-04-02 Permalink
Well, we’ll have to deal with it anyway. Sooner or later we’ll have to extract the head of our politicians off their butt (or put them on spades). Cognitive dissonance? What do you mean? I’m not “holding any contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, and acting contradictory to any of them”… And I, too, am barely coping being stuck at home with three teens zooming for their classes and giving mine online, but the melting permafrost doesn’t care. FWIW, I’m more subtle in front of my students and fairly concerned about not pulling them off their ignorance to simply push them into abysmal despair. Be sure of one thing: if your sole source of information about our climate crisis is mainstream media coverage and snippets from the IPCC, you know next to nothing of our predicament. Au passage, Kate, encore bravo et merci pour votre fil Enviro Montréal, il me reconnecte aux réalités locales.
Su 09:07 on 2021-04-03 Permalink
It is shocking that there was no corporate media coverage of the recent scientifuc study concluding that the Amazon rainforest is now a carbon producer and no longer a carbon sink.
Grateful to Paul Beckwith.
MarcG 12:33 on 2021-04-03 Permalink
Raymond, I was suggesting that we’re all suffering from cognitive dissonance because we know how dire the situation is but continue trying to live normal lives. Thanks for that link about despair.
Raymond Lutz 13:00 on 2021-04-03 Permalink
Ah, yes… collective cognitive dissonance. « Thanks for that link about despair» : De rien! Il y a aussi Despair Inc.. 🙂