Quebec is to announce new public health measures soon as the Covid numbers grow again. Maybe people should grab dinner on a terrasse while they can.
Updates from August, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
An outbreak of legionnaires’ disease has been happening in east-end Montreal and two people have died from it. This disease isn’t caused by interpersonal contagion: the pathogen percolates in ill-maintained air conditioning systems.
jeather
My father once had it! (It’s unclear from where.) It’s any warm standing water, so malfunctioning water tanks also.
Andrew
That’s a very large area to search. There was a similar story last year in LaSalle ( http://mtlcityweblog.com/2020/09/25/lasalle-sees-legionnaires-outbreak/ ) and they never found the source. People just stopped getting sick.
Ephraim
Doesn’t have to be in air conditioners. It’s water standing at room temperature that isn’t treated. Water needs to be at a very cold or very hot temperature.
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Kate
Tourists are back in Old Montreal, from other parts of Quebec and elsewhere in Canada, and Americans are expected to return starting next week – but establishments there are finding they don’t have enough staff. Once again an employer is trotted out to blame government aid for keeping people away.
If as an employer you’re not offering a rate that competes favourably with social aid in a time of pandemic, you’ve got to man up and make better offers.
MarcG
I don’t understand how the current situation is different from any other time – hasn’t everyone who was collecting CERB been moved back to regular EI where you have to prove you’ve been looking for work?
Kate
My impression is that EI possibly doesn’t have the staff either to keep on everyone’s case about looking for work, as they used to. The reporting system on the government site doesn’t even ask about job searches.
MarcG
I bet the starting salaries are pretty good over there and you can probably work from home – they should start hiring!
AShandy
“If as an employer you’re not offering a rate that competes favourably with social aid in a time of pandemic, you’ve got to man up and make better offers.”
With all due respect, you have no clue how the CERB distorts the marketplace for labour, creating artificial shortages because some people are happy getting paid to do nothing when there are jobs out there for the taking, and how this skewing of the marketplace will affect you in terms of inflation where you are and will be paying higher prices for basic commodities.
The employers being “trotted out” have a point. You, on the other hand, are totally clueless.
steph
the EI job search reporting system was junk anyways. Anyone could just apply for any unqualified million dollar CEO job, and that was good enough as proof you were looking for work.
The pandemic is bringing new living lifestyles, and that will cause a bunch of inflation adjustments in different sectors. Tourism will obviously be more expensive.MarcG
Ok, so then if nothing has changed, then what has changed? Did the pandemic just make a bunch of people aware that they could collect EI instead of get a shitty job?
j2
The employers don’t have a point, otherwise there would be people willing to take the wages. The problem is that the people who did that work moved on to jobs that were there when these jobs were gone. Go visit a bar or restaurant that retained staff for _years_ and look at the fresh faces and for the missing faces. The missing faces LIKED working there.
You’re not paying in the same market anymore, the current market NOW is “pay me enough that when you get shut down by the government that I’m not fucked”.
mare
Funny how commenters are fuming about the CERB, when the last month that was in place was in October 2020. Currently there is the CRB, which is basically EI, but related to your changed income levels because of Covid, compared week by week. Keep up with the terminology guys!
(I’m not qualifying for those myself, having worked freelance with a very variable income week over week, despite of the fact that income has dropped considerably. But I’m also not available for a job in the service industry either, partly because of various medical issues. Thankfully I have savings.)
IMHO One of the reasons, maybe the main reason, of the worker shortage is that out-of-town students that would normally would have staid in the city for the summer, have not been in Montreal for a while. So instead of having jobs in Montreal restaurants and stores to pay for their studies, they might be working in their hometowns instead. And on top of that, happening before Covid, is Quebec’s economy booming. We haven’t made enough babies and limit immigration, the demographic curve is now hitting hard. That was happening before Covid-19, but I know at least a few people who have decided to retire early, sell their house in the city for megabucks and move to the burbs or beyond.
EmilyG
If I were looking for work, I would be turned off by employers blaming CERB or other government aid for staff shortages, and just wouldn’t apply for employers that I knew did this.
Kevin
Anyone who trots out “government benefits are distorting the economy” is looking for a simple solution to a complex problem.
In the best of times many restaurants don’t make it past the three-year mark. In an economy where people can walk into a restaurant, ask for a job, and be put to work immediately — I expect a lot more to fail.
They’re scrambling in a field that in normal times demands logistical brilliance in order to succeed.
It’s routine for badly-run restaurants to have some staff doing 12-hour shifts, and others being sent home 3 hours into what was supposed to be a full day’s work. And people put up with that because what else were they going to do? But a lot of those employees found new fields and more stable work in the past year-and-a-half, and so there are a lot of newbies running establishments who don’t even know how there are best practices for assigning wait staff to tables, let alone what they are.
And now? If you’re sent home after 3 hours, if a manager yells at you for something that’s not your fault, if a customer stiffs you on a bill — you’re not going to put up with that, you’ll find a new job – easily.
Restaurants not only have to pay well and train their staff. They now have to deal with the fact that nobody is going to put up with idiotic managers, abusive owners, and terrible customers.
david874
Especially not going to put up with that if the government is paying them to stay home and play video games.
DeWolf
The CRB pays $1080 per month after the first 21 weeks. Who exactly are all these people sitting at home playing video games with an income that can’t even pay for an average apartment?
Tux
I haven’t commented in awhile so I’m not familiar with the usual poster suspects but the whole “social assistance is bad for the economy” thing feels like astroturfing. What sane person thinks that? People just aren’t willing to risk their lives for minimum wage. Companies that can’t find anyone to work for them can make better offers. If they can’t, maybe they shouldn’t be in business.
Kate
Tux, voilà. Well put.
Tim S.
And maybe we should expect to pay more for the luxury of having a human being perform relatively menial tasks.
Kate
Relatively menial tasks, let’s not forget, still in a mask and taking extra sanitary precautions that were never needed before last year.
steph
I wouldn’t do their job at that salary – I can empathize that they don’t either.
MarcG
Don’t worry, AShandy and David and their ilk will surely get out there and take one, two, maybe three of those jobs since it matters so much to them.
Uatu
The dish pit awaits for all you go getters!
EmilyG
Relevant Toronto Star article, by a restaurant worker, on how the CERB isn’t to blame for restaurant staff shortages.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2021/08/05/as-a-server-hearing-others-blame-cerb-on-restaurant-staff-shortages-is-dehumanizing-if-an-industry-is-harmful-why-blame-low-wage-workers.html
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Kate
TVA reveals the names of the victims in the Rivière-des-Prairies shooting and the fairly obvious theory that gang strife was the cause. They spoke to a neighbour who’s leaving the city – although it sounds like he was already planning to do so before the incident, he now feels he may hasten his exit.
Social workers in the area are feeling the shooting was a last straw, and police are making promises to clamp down, albeit in an atmosphere of being required not to profile people of colour.
The public security minister, the mayor and a police spokesman are to hold a presser this morning.
Update: The minister and the mayor said the appropriate things, and promised that the SQ and SPVM would work together to reduce firearm trafficking.
Faiz Imam 23:51 on 2021-08-04 Permalink
Isn’t the entire point of the proof of vaccination system to take the place of restrictions on public activities? Seems to me the only thing the announcement could be is that various businesses must start asking for proof of vaccination to enter.
Kate 09:25 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
If enough cases of Covid transmission despite vaccination turn up, we may be looking at social distancing measures carrying on much longer than we’d hoped.
DeWolf 09:49 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
The Provincetown outbreak was proof enough that vaccines do exactly what they are supposed to do: they keep you from getting very sick. A weekend of packed house parties and nightclubs with no masks and no social distancing led to 965 cases, most of them in fully vaccinated people. But of that 965, only 7 were hospitalized and nobody died. Now the outbreak is over, unlike what’s happening in unvaccinated party places like the Ozarks.
The UK’s Delta wave is declining almost as quickly as it surged. Cases and hospitalizations are both on the decline despite the abolition of all restrictions in England. And once again, although there was an unfortunate uptick in deaths, mostly among the unvaccinated, it was a small fraction of what was seen in previous waves.
Quebec clearly isn’t about to drop all restrictions, and thank god for that. I really hope the indoor mask mandate lasts until the end of the year at least. But we’ve reached the point in our vaccination campaign where harsh measures like lockdowns, curfews and sweeping business closures are completely unjustified.
MarcG 11:06 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
It’s great that the vaccines are cutting back on extreme reactions and preventing our hospital system from collapsing, but what about a few years from now after a lot of people have had asymptomatic or mild cases of covid and develop long-haul symptoms? My wife has a friend who had mild covid last year and cancelled an online class recently because she couldn’t concentrate. These are things which aren’t very dramatic at the moment but something to ask yourself the next time you’re doing risk analysis.
DeWolf 12:32 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
It’s not just severe illness and death. There’s clear evidence vaccines also reduce the risk of transmission and infection even if they don’t eliminate it. The numbers are pretty clear here in Quebec: in the eight weeks leading up to July 24, fully vaccinated people represented just 4% of new Covid cases.
Scientists are also saying that vaccinated people who get Covid have a very low risk of developing long-haul symptoms. Even among the unvaccinated, long-haul Covid represents a minority. So as vaccination rates increase, we’re dealing with successively smaller minorities: a minority of vaccinated people who get breakthrough infections, and a minority of that minority who suffer from long-haul symptoms.
So I’m not really sure what you’re suggesting. Indefinite rolling lockdowns so that an increasingly small group of people can be protected from long-haul symptoms that may or may not occur?
MarcG 14:15 on 2021-08-05 Permalink
I’m not suggesting any type of public policy. I’m trying to figure things out as a cautious person who would prefer not to have any more problems than I already do, and suggesting that in a few years, after the crisis has passed, we’re probably going to be dealing with the impact of long-covid. It’s clear that the odds are becoming slimmer and slimmer for fully vaccinated people in Quebec but when I see people casually browsing at Jean Coutu, I can’t help but wonder if they’ve considered it might lead, however unlikely, to permanent brain fog. Using your 4% number, say there were around 1000 new cases in the past week, that’s 40 fully vaccinated people who got covid, and if 30% of those have long-haul symptoms, that’s 12 human beings whose lives in the past single week have become really weird, in a bad way.
JaneyB 08:16 on 2021-08-06 Permalink
@MarcG – some unfortunate vaccinated people will have long-haul symptoms but there are always risks to leaving one’s house. There are risks to staying on the couch. Generally speaking, very few people in this society take care of their health at all, as we can see from any comparison pictures of street life today with that of 1960. It is likely that the vast majority of brain fog in society now and post-pandemic will not be from long-haul covid but from poor nutrition, excess isolation and inactivity. Some of it will be side effects from medication.