Updates from July, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 22:33 on 2021-07-23 Permalink | Reply  

    Use of public parks has surged during the pandemic, although there’s legitimate criticism of the shortage of bathroom facilities. It’s sad to read that visible minorities may shy away from going to the park because of fear of harassment from the public or the police.

     
    • DeWolf 11:21 on 2021-07-24 Permalink

      Montreal has been fairly good at providing chemical toilets to supplement the existing (inadequate) options. Jeanne-Mance Park has a very impressive bank of porta-potties. Jarry Park has them strategically sprinkled around. There are even some on Prince Arthur to accommodate the people eating and drinking on the picnic tables that have been installed in the middle of the street. It’s a stop-gap solution because there need to be way more permanent, accessible toilets, and chemical toilets can very quickly become disgusting. But it’s nice to see the city doing something about this rather than burying their head in the sand.

    • Joey 11:57 on 2021-07-24 Permalink

      Better late than never. I guess all the 911 calls from residents reporting incidents of people using nearby alleys for numbers one and two worked.

      One of the major themes of the consultations on the plan directeur for Jeanne-Mance Park was the dearth of toilets. Sadly we’re about two years on from when the plan was supposed to be presented, with no indication anything is on the horizon.

    • MarcG 13:13 on 2021-07-24 Permalink

      I visited Scotland a few years ago and was amazed at the availability and cleanliness of public washrooms. I was on the South Shore all day yesterday for a series of appointments and errands and ended up peeing behind a dumpster in an industrial park.

  • Kate 21:56 on 2021-07-23 Permalink | Reply  

    Michèle Lalonde, chiefly known as the writer of the angry poem Speak White, has died at 84.

     
    • Kate 09:53 on 2021-07-23 Permalink | Reply  

      Revenu Québec is moving in on illegal Airbnb-type rentals with high fines for breaking the rules. Surprise, some landlords don’t like it.

       
      • david255 18:14 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

        This is a very satisfying read. This level of fine is going to completely kill non-sanctioned Airbnb rentals and thereby return some of the housing stock to the rental market.

    • Kate 09:35 on 2021-07-23 Permalink | Reply  

      The Journal puts a scare headline on this piece about a shortage of health workers: Hôpitaux: fermé pour l’été, faute de personnel. Some operating rooms and other services aren’t available this summer, and there really is a shortage of workers following Covid overwork and burnout, but no entire hospital is shutting down.

       
      • mare 11:25 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

        There has been a huge shortage of nurses and doctors *before* Covid, but now it’s used as the reason. The real reason is that our governments have been cutting healthcare expenditures for decades now. Now it’s just worse and more visible because more people encounter/need healthcare and the press is covering it more.
        I don’t expect this shortage to be over soon, or maybe ever. The usual supply of new nurses coming from France and other francophone countries has virtually dried up, because they can get plenty of jobs at home. It takes 3 years to train new nurses, and the dropout rate will be very high. New nursing interns will be thrown directly into the fray and won’t get the support they need because the nurses who are supposed to teach them are all too busy just doing their own job.
        There are plenty of other study and employment opportunities, why choose to train for such a stressful job, with lousy salaries and a terrible working environment?

        Healthcare is going to be fucked for many years here, and maybe forever. 🙁

        (I don’t work in healthcare but I have friends who do and I’m unfortunately a regular patient. I have seen and experienced things, and they weren’t pretty…)

      • david255 18:21 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

        Brain drain to the US is a big issue for our medical professionals here. Whenever America has a doctor/nurse shortage, Canada’s health system suffers due to a little something called the TN visa. Essentially, a health institution can hire a doctor or nurse and that person can start right away, no issue with the J1, H1B, or anything else.

        It’s funny that during the Trump’s renegotiation of NAFTA Trudeau fought so hard against the renegotiation of any worker mobility scheme. There’s an almost 10 to 1 imbalance (Canada to US over US to Canada) in immigration traffic. The very definition of brain drain.

        I’m not one to deny people opportunities, but I’m also a fairly hardcore technocrat and if you’re subsidizing 80+% of a medical education in Canada, there should be some provision to ensure that investment return isn’t captured by the subject of that investment and a foreign health system.

      • david255 18:36 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

        Trump was never going to touch TN, though maybe limit its application (ie. kill a few categories to reduce competition in some fields/occupations). Trudeau should have been looking to totally eliminate whole categories, with the health ones at the top of the list. Perfect opportunity to blame Trump for something that otherwise would greatly upset an important constituency. Instead, he went hard at preventing any changes. It’s totally consistent with Trudeau’s “we’re not Canadians, we’re citizens of the world” post-national vision. But it’s also super stupid if you’re paying to educate and train medical professionals, you operate the type of health system we do, and you’re facing doctor shortages, despite open immigration of the same from other countries. Basically, it’s high level political malpractice that we should keep at front of mind whenever we’re thinking about these issues.

      • Spi 19:27 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

        The shortage of nurses (actual number of trained nurses that could work) isn’t as apocalyptic as many make it out to be and if memory serves there isn’t a shortage of doctors except maybe for family doctors. The problem is still working conditions, if my supposedly “full-time” 40-hour a week job could impose such restrictions on my personal life, I’d do the same thing all the nurses are doing and walking out the door right into a recruitment agency to make more money and pick my shifts.

        What there’s a shortage of is nurses that work full-time on dependable schedules. Hospital beds and operating rooms are staying closed because there aren’t enough nurses to staff those teams and schedule procedures and maintain patient/nurse ratios. They keep trying to stretch the resources thinner and thinner which inevitably leads more nurses to leave.

      • david255 19:44 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

        ^ If that’s the case, then we’re going to be in good shape when the pandemic ends and people realize that, no, actually you generally have to work if you want money.

        But just note that a “shortage” means a shortage of people able and willing to do the job. It’s inevitable that a certain portion of nurses come out of school, get on the job, then realize that it’s just too hard. Health service providers should do what they can to minimize attrition, but that’s just baked into the profession, which can be exhausting. When you have that natural cycle going, the staffing shortages are exacerbated by these other factors – nursing school places, the lure of work in the US or Canada, etc.

      • Uatu 20:08 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

        Some med school grads leave because they aren’t able to work where they want and why wouldn’t they if more money and not being forced to work in chibougamou was an option? Nurses just want to work in an environment that doesn’t force them to work overtime after a 12hr shift. A shortage of nurses and doctors but hey we got lots of well paid administrators and middle management! That’s what’s important!/s

      • Spi 20:39 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

        @david255 the poor working conditions, obligatory 1/2 weekends, forced over-time being a weekly occurrence and fleeing to recruitment agencies was a thing well before the pandemic. Pauline’s forced early retirement is the gift that keeps on giving even 20-25 years later.

        We’re literally talking about leaving for your shift in the morning and not knowing when you’ll get off. If I remember correctly nurses that actually occupy a full-time position are actually a minority (<50%) of the staff why would anyone want to commit to that when you could stay on part-time and just pick up shifts whenever they are available (which given the shortage is always). Which brings us full circle to the government having to resort to staffing agencies and sometimes pay multiples of what it would cost to have someone come in for a shift.

      • david255 20:45 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

        You seem to be in the know, how are these conditions affected by the recent collective bargain concluded between the government and the nurses union?

    • Kate 09:22 on 2021-07-23 Permalink | Reply  

      Montreal is angling to be chosen as the headquarters for the International Sustainability Standards Board, a new entity meant to enforce environmental standards on business. Some discussion in this discursive Forbes column dissects attitudes toward the mere existence of this entity.

       
      • su 09:27 on 2021-07-24 Permalink

        The Forbes article author is in favor of the newest Neoliberal capitalist “market based solutions” entity, and he imlpies that the only opposition to it is the wacky far right libertarian capitalists.
        No opposition from the other end of the spectrum?

    • Kate 09:18 on 2021-07-23 Permalink | Reply  

      Mobilité Montréal and the Journal deliver your weekend driving notes this week.

       
      • Kate 09:16 on 2021-07-23 Permalink | Reply  

        Levels of vaccination vary a lot depending where you are in town, the older and wealthier west end showing a much higher rate than the younger, poorer folks living in the east and north ends.

         
        • Blork 10:41 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

          Well, ain’t we the microcosm?

        • Joey 13:04 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

          I am surprised La Presse didn’t speculate as to the attitue towards vaccination among Outremont Hasidim.

        • Kate 14:26 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

          That would be more the style of the Journal de Montréal.

        • Joey 15:51 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

          True, though more distinguished outlets (e.g., NY Times) have written about the tendency among certain religious communities to eschew the vaccine (and about how Israel convinced its ultra-Orthodox populations to get vaccinated). La Presse has also covered the incidents of COVID rule-breaking among Hasidim in Montreal. It honestly feels like an oversight – while it may seem fairly obvious that one of the demographic differences (actually *the* demographic difference) between Outremont and all the wealthy parts of town where vaccination rates are sky-higih is the large Hasidic population, it also seems like the reporter just kind of shrugged off the question of why Outremont is an outlier. It also sounds like the local public health officials are also at a loss. They are reported to have produced videos in tens of langauges and to have worked with community organizations; I wonder if they’ve tried to reach out directly to rabbis. You could do a brisk business offering vaccines at, say, afternoon prayers in shuls around Outremont and Mile-End.

      • Kate 09:11 on 2021-07-23 Permalink | Reply  

        Not a Montreal story exactly, but local journalist Taylor C. Noakes has written a terrific piece about the soi-disant victims of communism memorial in Ottawa, a project dating from the Harper years but which has received support as well from the Trudeau government. There’s almost nothing that isn’t wrong with this project.

         
        • Raymond Lutz 10:23 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

          From the article: “A NCC spokesperson said the estimated total cost of the monument is now $7.5 million, with $6 million coming from the federal government after Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland included an additional $4 million in this spring’s budget to complete the monument.”

          I’ll add: Freeland knew her grandfather was editor of Nazi newspaper.

          Bonus points: Ukraine was the sole nation to maintain a non-german staffed Waffen-SS garrison, source, in French. Beware, the pictures in this serie are horrible.

        • thomas 12:35 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

          @Raymond there were more than a dozen of non-German Waffen-SS divisions varying in size.

        • Tim S. 18:46 on 2021-07-23 Permalink

          Given that anti-Communism was at the core of the Nazi electoral appeal, this is not surprising.

        • qatzelok 08:43 on 2021-07-24 Permalink

          Imagine a “Victims of Protestantism” memorial, erected by the Vatican.

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