An unvaccinated nurse in the Lakeshore ER was diagnosed with Covid and may have infected a patient.
The health minister says 30,000 workers in the public health system are not vaccinated, which is a stunning revelation. If so many health workers don’t believe in vaccination, what the hell do they believe in?
The city has struck a deal for $158 million over 3 years with Quebec for cultural activities, and the mayor has put up $600,000 for three years for nightlife.
At the same time, Quebec has submitted a shopping list to Ottawa for bigger health transfers with no conditions, more control over immigration to require French fluency from new arrivals, and more money for housing with no conditions.
As has crossed my mind from time to time, Quebec has a tendency to sound like a teenager reaching adulthood who wants to be free to do what he pleases, but still demands his parents fund his activities.
Well, we have a system where the federal government collects lots of taxes, but apart from the military most of the expensive obligations fall on provincial governments. So I don’t necessarily blame Quebec here.
I don’t really get the immigration thing in one sense. Does anything stop a person from immigrating to any other province, then moving to Quebec?
Really Tim? This took me exactly 7 seconds to find, https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/programs/federal-transfers/major-federal-transfers.html#Quebec
Nothing stops an immigrant from moving anywhere once they’re in.
Quebec actually makes it easier for rich people to immigrate, and they then frequently move to another province.
Kevin, does any other province make up separate rules for immigration?
@Kate – yes, a number of provinces have special deals with the feds. I know Manitoba and I assume other smaller provinces tend to lose locals to the big cities so they’ve negotiated special arrangements to fill those gaps with immigrants that will fit with local conditions (specialized labour niches, filling up small towns etc). Of course, QC pioneered this space with Ottawa but other provinces use it too.
JaneyB, that’s interesting. Do people have to agree to live in rural locations or small towns for a specified period of time? Surely their children won’t be bound to the same conditions?
For Quebec, you have to sign a document saying you intend to reside in Quebec after getting permanent residency. At least back when I went through the process, there was no minimum duration specified. Theoretically, those who never intended to stay can have their PR revoked for lying on the application. But I imagine it’s very difficult to prove that someone didn’t really intend to stay at the time.
Theirs no legal force behind the document. In some communities they discuss openly the idea of using the quebec immigration process as it’s easier and cheaper than the ROC. It’s almost like a buisness service and quebec is undercutting the competition. Is it to our advantage that we meet immigration quotas on paper whithout the advantage of the population growth that immigration is supposed to bring us? –I’m certain many quebecers are happy that the pesky foreigners are staying away.
From my own experience it’s not easier to immigrate to Quebec for a permanent resident visa, it adds an extra step —the Quebec Selection Certificate— and coordination between feds and province isn’t necessarily great (in my case it was terrible and they were both waiting on each other for documents). Investor visas are easier, but specifically require investments in Quebec, so harder to immediately move to other provinces.
However Quebec does hand out lots of 2-year temporary work visas with lower requirements than Canada’s, and they can be a stepping stone to acquiring permanent residency, Being a francophone does help (a lot?) to get those visas, and they aren’t outright valid to work in the RoC.
Selecting and admitting unilingual francophones also helps to keep them in Quebec of course, so not speaking English might get you unofficial bonus points.
dwgs – I have no opinion about whether the transfers are sufficient. Just that in peacetime provincial governments need the money more than the feds. Education, health care, welfare, are all provincial responsibilities according to the constitution. They’re expensive.
“Federalisme rentable” is what unites all successful Quebec political parties. If the federal government is going to insist on policymaking in areas of provincial jurisdiction (only for the last 150 years or so), it only makes sense for premiers to develop shopping lists during federal campaigns.
Tim, and if you looked at the link you’ll see that this year the feds are transferring 9.7 billion to Qc for healthcare and almost 3.5 billion for social programs as well as 13 billion in equalization payments so I would say that the province has plenty of financial help for those programs that fall within its jurisdiction.
@Kate – I don’t think immigrants can be legally forced to stay anywhere though for country doctors, I have a hunch there’s a legal obligation connected to their licence eg: willing to stay in Small Town MB for 5 years, gets fast-tracked.
In the Bible Belt of Manitoba, the Mennonites bring in people from the diaspora and those immigrants are delighted to be there. They stay and those towns are booming. Some other towns have a major factory and have filled it full of one group (Filipinos esp). They stay because then they have their own little community but they are free to move and likely some of their kids do. It’s easy to forget that some portion of immigrants are from smaller towns and less busy provinces; they prefer to maintain that lifestyle and if they’ve got a job offer, it’s a no-brainer.
The bike festival takes place this weekend (displaced from its usual schedule at the end of June) with the Tour la Nuit on Friday evening and the main Tour on Sunday.
I was a little shocked to find CBC Montreal’s MTL in Transit feed on Facebook referring sourly to this event as “the annual Take-Streets-Hostage-By-Bikers weekend.”
It certainly was vehement. To be fair, I don’t think that person works for the CBC.
Yeah, anyone in that group can post in it.
That’s good to know. Thank you both.
The Journal has a headline Thursday: Encore un festival de cônes orange à Montréal, writing as if the only purpose of construction sites is to hamper motorists in their God-given right to drive through the city unimpeded. That the work listed is only being done to make things easier and better for drivers in the long run is hardly acknowledged.
The problem is that no one believes that anything will last for the long run. If we’re lucky it might just make it to the medium run. I believe (hope?) there’d be a lot less complaining if we ever had a history of doing repairs that were well thought out and lasted a reasonable amount of time.
Yeah exactly, there’s so little trust that the right repairs are being done correctly at any given time, especially with all the recent controversies over city staff seeming to do whatever they want regardless of what the elected officials say. I realize it’s incredibly difficult to communicate why some projects are prioritized over others but there doesn’t even seem to be an effort (or maybe that kind of stuff just doesn’t hit the news…).
Nonetheless, it’s inevitable that the city has to dig to upgrade its old sewers and water mains – there still must be kilometers of this stuff past due for renewal – and repave the roads from time to time. I don’t think the folks who complain are thinking long term. I think they’re just encouraged to complain about cones and are joining the chorus.
By my count Fairmount between Parc and Jeanne-Mance has been dug up 5 times in the last 10 years, the last time ended just this last week – basically repairing the sinkhole that was caused by so much poorly finished roadwork right where the big trucks for the Jean-Coutu loading go in and out every day. It’s still an uneven patch job, they laid cement (finally) but the asphalt isn’t going to last another 2 years, there’s already a dip.
People noting the neverending roadwork shouldn’t be hand-waved as nuisance complainers. It really is substandard and not meant to last unless it is a large, throughly planned project – which as we all know is rare and has very little oversight.
Last year I called 311 & asked if they had a schedule of neighbourhood intersection closures and I was told that no, they leave that up to the contractors to open and close streets “as necessary” and that they are given a permit for an entire area, not specific work sites. That explains why there are so many work sites left blocked with no work going on, with apparently random detours put together by workers that clearly don’t know the neighbourhood. It’s not just drivers of personal vehicles that are inconvenienced, it’s inconvenient for residents, delivery vehicles & taxis. It also messes with scheduled routes like garbage and recycling collection, street cleaning, and public transit. Not to mention the hassle of just dealing with noisy, dirty, dusty construction sites everywhere al the time, seemingly everywhere at once, over and over again.
I agree roadwork needs to be done and was neglected for a long time – nobody disputes that, really – but the quality is so low it needs to be done over and over again, with little coordination, oversight, or transparency. The city CAN take control of this, why no administration of any political stripe doesn’t is an ongoing mystery – assuming they aren’t all just on the take.
Travel outside Montreal sometime. Other cities simply aren’t like this, even ones that have winter and roads.
It’s one thing to travel outside Montreal, but to stay somewhere else long enough to be aware of its civic problems is another matter.
Toula Drimonis takes issue with Thursday’s MBC column claiming Montreal is a violent city and that there’s no systemic racism in the SPVM. I’m not linking to that piece of drivel but I’ve read it, and it’s meant to strengthen a narrative in which crime only exists here because of immigrant communities.
Ted Rutland has studied this issue in an honest empirical fashion. He is an expert in this field. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02722011.2020.1831139
MBC refers to people like him as “hurluberlus ” which loosely translate to weirdos.
Crime numbers are falling.
Please, folks, no responses saying “most crime is not reported” because
1. I don’t think it’s true and
2. even if it were true, the numbers would still suggest that the falling numbers of reported crimes imply a falling number of “real” crimes, which I don’t believe anyway.
I denounce MBC’s column too, “de haut de mon chaire universitaire.”
MBC has it both ways, he panders to the philistine by mocking intellectuals, while being a cod intellectual himself (especially on visits to France, where being a philistine doesn’t play so well).
CDPQ Infra has proposed an alternative tunnel scenario for the REM in downtown Montreal. Only half a kilometer is considered here, though.
This is even worse than the original plan, because the tunnel portal will necessitate the permanent closure of Jeanne-Mance/René-Lévesque. Walling off intersections is about the worst thing you can do for accessibility and the pedestrian environment.
It’s almost as if the solution isn’t as simple as just digging a tunnel under RL. Shocker who would have thought.
One kind of wishes the good old days back when the province was mostly investing in projects disfiguring areas like the turcot, and kind of neglecting the city other than that.
“It’s almost as if the solution isn’t as simple as just digging a tunnel under RL. Shocker who would have thought.”
Now now, Spi, you’ll make the armchair civil engineers irate with talk like this.
I had a peverse thought recently: if we are so up-in-arms about property prices on the island as affordable housing advocates, why should we care if residential lots around RL and Sherbrooke E go down in value a bit due to having a monorail (Mono- d’oh!) next to them?
It isn’t property values that concern most of us, regarding the elevated train, but the aesthetics, and the damage to the urban fabric.
There will be no criminal charges against the owners of now‑closed CHSLD Herron over 47 Covid deaths early in the pandemic.
Doctors in Quebec (and no doubt elsewhere) are losing patience with vaccination resisters, as hospitals are once again forced to delay other procedures to keep Covid patients alive, most of whom have not been vaccinated.
Public health is warning that we’ll see a surge in Covid in response to school starting up again. Schools will become risky as many students between 12 and 17 have not been vaccinated.
Hearings begin in Quebec City Thursday over mandatory vaccination for health workers.
Daily Hive obligingly presents a list of activities you can do without a vaccine passport.
And every student under 12 hasn’t been vaccinated either.
Thanks, Daily Hive, a list of activities I don’t want to do! Weird that spas are exempted.
Libraries and museums are odd too, although I don’t think they’ll be much taken advantage of by the anti-vax crowd. I suspect “spas and saunas” fall into a semi-medical essential category.
I can see why libraries might get exempted, museums seems unnecessary, especially as school groups are automatically exempted. Real shame about the massages, I would otherwise like one.
I’m not really a spa person, but I’ve enjoyed a couple of visits I’ve made to Bota Bota. I wasn’t planning on going again anytime soon, but I did inquire and they said they were not requiring vaccination (for workers or customers). It’s such a physical experience that I can’t imagine feeling at ease there in a sauna or pool with possibly unvaccinated strangers, or getting a treatment from a possibly unvaccinated masseuse.
Nick 09:30 on 2021-08-27 Permalink
Long term evaluation of the side effects of new drugs, vaccines and medical technologies/procedures?
jeather 09:56 on 2021-08-27 Permalink
I wonder if this story will change their stupid rules about “15 minutes contact” with a patient.
It’s interesting, if they say 97% of doctors are vaccinated but 91% of health care workers, I’d love to see a better breakdown by job.
MarcG 09:58 on 2021-08-27 Permalink
Yeah I suspect these people aren’t medical staff.
MarcG 10:06 on 2021-08-27 Permalink
Although the story is about a nurse so who knows. Lots of people are scared of the vaccine, more afraid than of Covid, maybe because it’s more tangible and something they feel they can control. It’s also fun to imagine that the government and industry are against you, like you’re some kind of superhero, and I guess even someone who did some high school science and went through a CEGEP nursing program aren’t immune to that (pun not intended, seriously).
Kevin 10:24 on 2021-08-27 Permalink
I’ve had many nurses tell me that they don’t get vaccines because they make them sick — demonstrating in one sentence their lack of understanding.
Nurses and orderlies are trained technicians. They can stick a needle into you, but many don’t know why.
Kate 10:30 on 2021-08-27 Permalink
So many people have received the vaccines by now that we would know whether they were dangerous.
How effective the vaccines will be over the long term is still unresolved, but people are not dropping like flies after getting their shots.
I know about nurses. My dad was briefly in respite care in an official facility back in the 1990s. I was waiting in the nursing station to talk to them, and saw books about crystal therapy and other woo‑woo lying around. Dad wasn’t ill at that point so I wasn’t too worried about these nurses using woo instead of medicine, but it undermined any sense that medical professionals are necessarily hard-headed realists.
jeather 10:41 on 2021-08-27 Permalink
Vaccines — not this miracle that is mRNA, but every other vaccine, especially Tdap but also MMR, flu, etc — make me sick every time, too. I also dislike them. So what?
Meezly 14:07 on 2021-08-27 Permalink
My mom is a retired nurse and she adamantly refuses to get her 2nd because she didn’t like how the first shot made her sick.
Kate 14:48 on 2021-08-27 Permalink
A lot of people had a sore arm for a day, and some people felt sort of woozy and prodromal for a day or two. Was she worse than that, Meezly?
ant6n 14:59 on 2021-08-27 Permalink
I’ve had Covid and two shots. The shots weren’t fun, but actual covid was ten times worse. The symptoms were somewhat similar (aches all around, tiredness but can’t sleep, elevated temperature), but real covid was much, much worse (e.g. 8 days of 38-39C vs half a day of 37.5C). Also, there was no cough for the vaccine (vs a week of terrible cough). Overall, for each shot I was out for about a day and a half, for the real thing I was on sick leave for four weeks.
Oh yeah the vaccine feels painful at the injection point for a day or two (later the nearby lymph nodes), you don’t get that from actual covid. I hope whoever picks that trade off, that it’ll be worth it.
CE 16:48 on 2021-08-27 Permalink
I got very sick for about 2 days from my second dose (almost nothing from the first). The whole time I kept telling myself “if I think this is bad, imagine how much worse getting COVID would be.”
Blork 17:16 on 2021-08-27 Permalink
I’m pro-vax and double-vaxxed, but I still try to understand vaccine hesitancy by listening to people and thinking about parallels. (Not talking about anti-vaxxers; I don’t even try to understand them. I mean vaccine hestinants…)
The best I can figure is that for some (or maybe most) it’s a matter of having control over something they fear. They fear the vax will make them a bit sick, and even though they know COVID will make them sicker it’s not a sure thing that they’ll catch COVID. But they can control getting sick by the vax by not getting the vax.
So it’s a bit like saying to someone “if you punch yourself in the face before going into this roughhouse bar you’ll look like a badass and no one will pick on you.” So do you punch yourself in the face or do you take your chances?
Me? I punched myself in the face.
Blork 17:16 on 2021-08-27 Permalink
…point being that someone who is really afraid of face punches might decide differently.
qatzelok 19:48 on 2021-08-27 Permalink
Gene therapy drugs (like mRNAs) have the potential of extending human life well beyond a hundred years. If I were a 90-year-old millionaire I would defenitely like to see more tests done with these drugs on both human and animal hosts.
MtlWeb 08:15 on 2021-08-28 Permalink
Jeather
The INSPQ keeps vaccination data for the various professional orders in medical fields – link shows data as of Aug 26, on p.11
https://www.inspq.qc.ca/sites/default/files/covid/vaccination/vigie-vaccination-20210827.pdf
MarcG 09:45 on 2021-08-28 Permalink
According to those numbers, people in nursing, cardiorespiratory care, “paratechnical personnel, auxiliary services and trades”, office staff, technicians, and administrative professionals are less inclinced to be vaccinated while health and social services technicians and professionals, pharmacists, dentists, biochemists, medical physicists, midwives, and management are more likely.