The Canadiens won in overtime Thursday night so the team is back to the Bell Centre Saturday with 2500 fans in attendance, the first NHL crowd in Canada since March 2020.
Updates from May, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The accessible tunnel linking Vendôme metro station to the MUHC will open on May 31. Elevators have also been added to the station. Construction was complicated by having to dig the tunnel under railway tracks in use.
Clément
We need 6 years to dig a 100m tunnel under a few railway tracks, but we’ll build a 9 km tunnel with the largest diameter in the world under the Saint-Laurent in less than 10 years. Yup…
ant6n
Of course the actual tunneling under the railway took 2 weekends, they opened it up and put some pre-fab structures in place (I’m kind of impressed they did it this way).
Uatu
Well at least you can bypass the parking garage now. 6yrs is a long time and I had to watch poor old people walk upstairs step by step with a cane. That kinda stuff is why I think the term world class is full of shit
ant6n
For this station, I had gone to the STM consultations to ask them to optimize the layout and transfers [1]. I heard rumors that internally they had looked into some of the ideas, but the powers that be said its all
impossible. I wonder whether the design changed at all from the consultations[1] http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/03/the-new-vendome-station-long-transfers-ahead/
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Kate
The city is promising 11 oases of animation to be scattered around downtown this summer, with live performances and so on. Schedule to be announced.
MarcG
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Kate
There was a bad bicycle crash May 2 on the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve. One of the riders died this week of the injuries he suffered in the incident.
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Kate
The Jacques-Cartier bridge, which has been lit up with rainbow patterns to signify “ça va bien aller”, will do its last rainbows Thursday night. Friday it will revert to the seasonal patterns it used before the pandemic.
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Kate
A study by Hema-Quebec suggests that 600,000 adults in Quebec had caught Covid by March 2021, twice as many as officially tallied by Santé Québec. A lot of people out there had no symptoms, or didn’t think their symptoms worth testing.
david90
I both caught covid and was vaccinated much earlier than most people as part of some trial, so that as this whole dumb thing is about to end, I’m about to lose a couple topical chit-chat points that make me sound cool.
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Kate
Track and field trials to be held next month at the Claude Robillard sports centre in advance of the Tokyo Olympics in July have been given the green light by health authorities. Covid testing is mentioned – but not vaccination status. I hope these elite runners get their own buses.
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Kate
As we gradually recover from a year-long pandemic, the major local news is the reopening of the Île-aux-Tourtes bridge a little sooner than initially promised.
Incidentally, if you go looking for tourtes on that island, you will look in vain. There used to be a lot of tourtes in North America, but we killed them all. Some went into pies (tourtières) and some didn’t, but they all died.
Alex L
Once upon a time…
” Estimated to have numbered three to five billion at the height of its population, it may have been the most numerous bird on Earth; researcher Arlie W. Schorger believed that it accounted for between 25 and 40 percent of the total land bird population in the United States.”
Cadichon
“Tourtière” comes from “tourte”, but not in reference to the bird. “Tourte” is also an old form for “tarte”.
Kate
The Island of Pies?
Blork
I’d live there.
MarcG
Pieland
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Kate
Stats show that not enough Montrealers between age 40 and 50 are are getting vaccinated.
Blork
Interpretation (that I’m not actually selling): GenX spooked by AstraZeneca debacle.
j2
Don’t care had vaxx, got it ASAP. So many others don’t care about their conduct I’d rather take the minimal risk of vaccine complications than the risk of COVID and long-COVID.
dmdiem
Gen X here. I’m just waiting for the vax to show up at my local pharmacy. I have the luxury/horror of living alone and working from home. The only time I’ve stepped foot outside my house in the past year is to take out the trash. Since the chance of me catching covid is basically zero, I figure I’d let as many other people as possible get the jab first. My thoughts being that if there’s enough vaccine surplus to finally trickle down to my local pharmacy, enough people will have been vaccinated that it’s now my turn. That being said, I’m checking clic sante about a hundred times a day.
Ephraim
Gen-Xer would be from 40 to 56 (those conceived after the assassination of Kennedy, so September 1964). The case rate for complications with AZ is 1 in 60K for the first shot and 1 in 600K for the second shot. Considering that in Canada, we had 668 deaths per million or if you prefer, just under 1 in 1.5K died, it’s still a superior choice. What we should have is a compensation fund/life insurance policy for those affected by the vaccine.
No one should wait. The sooner you get it, the sooner it takes effect, the sooner you get your second shot and the sooner you can stop worrying about it.
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Kate
Louise Harel has been named a citizen of honour by the mayor, for her long career in politics, both at the municipal and provincial levels.
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Kate
Some folks had power outages Wednesday evening, including Blog HQ for an hour or so, even though the promised thunderstorm didn’t materialize, at least in my part of town.
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Kate
As restaurants prepare to open their terrasses, owners are complaining that nobody wants to work for them.
There’s one tried-and-true way to attract more people to work for you. Offer them more money.
steph
Boohoo, Sergakis and his bottom line..
The Quebec bar owners association would do themselves a favor and dump Sergakis as a spokes person. I can’t be the only person with a kneejerk reaction of complete dismissal as soon as I see his name in the press.
What’s the deal with the “Quebec bar owners association” anyways? Did it even exist before Sergakis? Did he create it himself for his self-interest
Ephraim
Ah Sergakis… fined a few times for violations of his licencing including transfering alcohol from one bottle to another, having hard alcohol without a licence and of course there is the underpours… https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/beer-measuring-test-shows-some-bars-served-5-oz-less-than-advertised-1.2668968 and of course, if he skims that way, who knows on what else he’s skimming or skimping. Thanks, but no thanks. Makes the whole association questionable.
GC
You are definitely not the only one, steph. My eyes are primed to roll whenever I see his name.
David530
I hate Sergakis, but there’s an interesting discussion emerging in some economics circles right now around UBI in the US. Basically, as the data there show more and more clearly, it’s not just that people would rather do nothing rather than work if the wage is the same, we’re seeing a phenomenon in which wage increases produce a negligible increase in applicants for open positions, and labor shortages are present in sectors that pay significantly more than sitting at home with the government handout. Basically, the discovery is that there’s a large cohort – far larger than most people anticipated – that will accept a steep reduction in income in exchange for free time. That is, when you give people even a modest UBI that meets their basic needs, a very large number will drop out of the labor force altogether. Biden’s own economics team ruled out childcare as a motivation as well, so it’s really just down to work and more money v. not work and less but acceptable money. While this is not too surprising if you know what sort of deadbeat the average person is, it’s very surprisingly to many economics types, who assume that everyone has the inmate desire to work, strive, succeed, build wealth, etc. that they have.
I don’t really have an opinion either way. On the one hand, redistributing wealth (or plowing thw government into colossal debt, as Trudeau has been doing since he conned his way into office) is good for the economy and will spur investment in automation, which will drive productivity growth and push us toward the Star Trek post-scarcity future. On the other hand, if this type of labor market distortion continues, it’s going to be massively inflationary across the board, and could lead to the non-viability of many businesses on persistent labor shortages – cool businesses like your local shops and restaurants.
At any rate, it seems clear that no matter the situation covid-wise, the labor shortages won’t meaningfully subside until the government turns off the free money tap.
jeather
What I have seen is that it’s very, very dependent on the job. People are perfectly happy to work at Amazon or Costco etc, but maybe they are feeling unsafe about restaurants — full of people breathing out on them, usually no paid sick time, often unpredictable scheduling, plus they were all, you know, fired last spring — or grocery stores — now full of maskless individuals, little to no paid sick time, unpredictable scheduling. We’ll find out more eventually, but “take a pay cut to stay home vs have a shitty, dangerous job with risk but no health insurance or sick days” is not exactly irrational. (I haven’t seen the stats about childcare but am more than a bit disbelieving that it has no effect.)
Kate
david∞, please read what jeather says.
I never like the argument that you need to threaten people with starvation so they will do lousy, dangerous or underpaid jobs.
dmdiem
Ugh. The old “people are lazy” argument against UBI. Every time someone has used that argument I always ask them, “if you got a UBI would you quit working?” The answer is always, “Of course not! I’m a real go-getter! I’m motivated and disciplined!” Every… single… time.
The reason why the “people are lazy” argument is complete bullshit is simple. People get bored really fucking quickly. If you want proof, just look at the past year. Home renovation was through the roof. People learned to cook and bake bread to the point there was a flour shortage. People took online courses en mass to upgrade their knowledge base in hopes of a better job. People started podcasts and YouTube channels in droves. And on and on and on. Now imagine what people could’ve accomplished if they were actually allowed to go outside.
You want people to go back to a shitty job? Let them keep the UBI they getting now AND let them collect a wage in addition. I guarantee they’ll be lining up to work.
dhomas
I guess getting democratically elected is a “con” now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Mitchell
David 530’s remarks don’t link to any sources, only the “there’s an interesting discussion emerging in some economics circles.” Oh really? Which economic circles? Seems like Republican talking points to me.
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Kate
The Go vélo festival, which includes the Tour de l’Île so beloved of our local motorists, is back on the agenda this summer, albeit later than usual, with the Tour itself to take place August 29.
MarcG 22:30 on 2021-05-27 Permalink
Waiting to hear stories about crazy ticket prices…
Hamza 22:50 on 2021-05-27 Permalink
So does this mean the curfew’s over tomorrow night?
Kate 22:55 on 2021-05-27 Permalink
Yes.
mare 00:16 on 2021-05-28 Permalink
I’m glad we can’t have people over in our backyard.
dhomas 08:18 on 2021-05-28 Permalink
@mare: we can now have people over in our backyards, starting today. Up to 8 people from different households or more if it’s only two households/families.
https://www.quebec.ca/sante/problemes-de-sante/a-z/coronavirus-2019/plan-deconfinement
Mr.Chinaski 08:46 on 2021-05-28 Permalink
According to Stubhub, the cheapest single ticket is 1765$ !!!