Don’t get sick. Emergency rooms are over capacity. Global illustrates the story with a photo of the Lakeshore hospital, which is also in the news because of breaches in protocols exposing patients to Covid.
Updates from August, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
See how Denis Coderre talks Projet into a corner. It was his administration that oversaw the award of permits to Ray-Mont for a logistics terminal in Hochelaga. Now Denis has airily promised to buy the lot, he’s forced MHM mayor Pierre Lessard-Blais to point out it would cost several hundred million dollars to buy the land and compensate the company for jerking it around for so long.
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Kate
It’s several years on a waiting list if you want a gardening allotment, so the city plans to increase the number of urban farming spots. The mayor talks here about food production, but I think she needs to also stress the value in terms of mental health and physical activity.
JaneyB
That’s great news!
Kate
I know, and I hope it’s not just campaign talk.
John B
I’m on the board of a community garden, so I have some experience here! It’s been at least a couple of years since any of the messaging we’re getting from the city mentioned anything other than food security. Gardening as a way to improve mental health seems to have been forgotten. It’s to the point where the city requires some minimum portion of the garden to be food production in most community gardens – so if you’re a gladiola lover or something you’ve got to have a bunch of tomatoes & zucchinis in there with your glads.
In the more populated boroughs I feel like funding isn’t as much of a problem as finding space that isn’t contaminated and doesn’t have a building on it. Funding may still be an issue, but this announcement gives me something to go to the borough with and say “let’s find some site for gardens,” which will be hard, but is easier than “lets find gardens and money.”
I feel like the city could do more to encourage gardening on private land. For example, make it easy to test the soil in your yard for contamination, or require all new construction to have a green roof. Roofs are great places to grow sun-loving vegetables.
The article mentions school gardens and fruit treed. I was involved in trying to set up a new school garden before the pandemic hit, and the school board told us we we weren’t allowed to plant fruit trees because they would be too messy and allegedly need more maintenance than non-fruit trees, (pro-tip: they don’t), never mind that the whole point was to get the kids out there looking after them, so it’ll take some arm-twisting or education to get more fruit trees out there.
This sounds good, but hopefully it means there will actually be more gardens in the central boroughs where they’re needed, not a bunch out in the suburbs where land is cheaper and everyone has a back yard anyway.
Kate
John B, I had a garden for a season in the Plateau, but it was just at the point I was moving to Villeray so going there became more inconvenient – so I lost it. They had a lot of rules about not growing flowers and not much fruit, and about having to plant not just food plants but a variety of them. Apparently this stemmed from one gardener who came in, planted his entire lot with tomatoes, disappeared for a couple of months, then came back and harvested his tomatoes with a sort of “Later, shitlords!” attitude. I guess he was lucky because tomato plants can totally collapse if it’s too dry or if they get particular pests, as I’m sure you know.
So they instituted all these rules making sure people had to show up and work on their plots. I see why: if you do get pests or very invasive weeds on a plot, it can affect the whole garden. And some of those gardeners are fierce.
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Kate
Valérie Plante has a piece in the Journal on Tuesday defending her approach to public safety in response to recent gunfire incidents.
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Kate
Last week was a bad week for drug overdoses with one death and multiple emergencies around town.
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Kate
Sébastien Simon, who stabbed a young gas station worker to death in 2006, is seeking early parole. Simon was meant to serve 25 years before being considered, but is asking for clemency after 15. Not surprisingly, the victim’s family is against any lightening of his sentence.
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Kate
Part of McGill College Avenue will be named for Oscar Peterson after work on it is completed. (Part? The street is 2.5 blocks long.)
Dominic
Seems like a strange location. Something like Guy street below the Ville Marie would have been a better choice
DeWolf
McGill College will be turned into a series of parks and plazas after the REM station is finished, so it will be an entirely new public space given the name, rather than a random stretch of street.
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Kate
Adil Charkaoui has been preaching in support of the Taliban in recent weeks. Wikipedia has a decent summary of Charkaoui’s earlier brushes with Canadian security laws, and the unasked question in Vincent Larouche’s piece is whether Charkaoui is again flouting laws against radicalizing people in favour of a terrorist group.
Faiz Imam
The USA leaving Afghanistan is the best thing to happen to that country in 20 years. The suffering due to the international occupation has been devastating, and as Canadians we have not at all faced the consequences of our own actions there.
The fact that it’s the Taliban that kicked us out is unfortunate, but it was basically guaranteed the moment we landed in 2001.
We survived 4 years of Trump, Afghanistan will hopefully be able to get through this change and a political process can advance to create a permanent social change the military occupation could never manage.
Kate
Faiz Imam, is there any sign that the Afghan people would be able to resist and oust the Taliban on their own, unaided? I’m not even sure how many of them basically agree with the Taliban philosophy on imposing the strictest religious rules on daily life.
Mark Côté
Considering the army basically just gave up immediately I doubt there will be much popular resistance, for now at least. There is one group of resistance fighters still holed up in one tiny province but it’s doubtful they’d be able to hold out for long. There is also the Islamic State there, which are enemies of the Taliban, but I doubt anyone here would be cheering them on.
FWIW the Taliban appear to be moderating their political stances a little bit in the hopes of getting more international cooperation. Of course they still fully reject democracy and are a far cry from a liberal state, and there’s no telling how quickly they might revert to their previous policies.
The Economist has a bunch of good articles on the situation over there (while I do not share some of their political views, it is a very well written magazine and they are very clear about their biases and opinions).
ant6n
The Taliban taking over Afghanistan is the best thing that happened to the country on 20 years? I must be reading wrong news.
I guess 100K-500K ppl fleeing the country now is just an expression of exhilaration.
I suppose the best thing that happened in the 20 years before that is when the Taliban first took over in 1996.
Mark Côté
Faiz did say “the USA leaving Afghanistan”, not “the Taliban taking over Afghanistan” is the best thing to happen to that country in 20 years. I know those things are synonymous in a lot of minds, but I (honestly) don’t know what the alternative was. Continue to occupy Afghanistan for another 20 years? Whatever the Americans did there clearly didn’t have any real effect.
mare 22:00 on 2021-08-31 Permalink
Most emergency rooms are *always* over capacity in and around Montreal, even before Covid. Not so strange when you need an appointment for every walk-in clinic. So people are going to the ER for regular things, that could/should be handled by a GP. On top of that there’s a lot of people who needed urgent care months ago, but ignored the symptoms because they didn’t want to be in hospitals during Covid.
If you need to go the the ER, and have a choice, this page might be useful. https://gowell.ca/en/emergencies/s/montreal
DisgruntledGoat 03:08 on 2021-09-01 Permalink
@mare – This is a very cool resource! “Emergency wait time estimates are based on open data provided by the Ministère de la Santé et des services sociaux.”
I didn’t know the government provided open data for things like this.
JaneyB 19:59 on 2021-09-01 Permalink
@mare – agreed. I did a stint as a clerk in an ER in Toronto years back and about 60% of people should have seen a family doctor instead. People who’d had symptoms for many months would come by at 2am. Madness. Every city needs 24hour walk-in clinics. Those folks should not be in ERs.