Two engineering reports on the downtown REM state that it could be built as a tunnel but CDPQ Infra says tsk tsk, nope, not viable. That is to say, not sufficiently profitable.
Updates from September, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Eater reports that some restaurants are openly flouting the vaccine mandate, risking fines at least. I don’t know whether they also risk being shut down by public health.
Adding a second story here: a judge has refused to suspend the mask mandate. It’s another of CTV’s oddly written pieces: “The Superior Court has rejected a request by Quebecers to immediately suspend the requirement to wear face coverings.”
A request by Quebecers.
And then, “The judge’s refusal does not put an end to their legal action, as they want this health measure to be abolished for good. Eventually, there will be a trial.”
A trial?
jeather
I am one of the weirdos who never liked Adamo pizza. I did like Campanelli, but no thanks.
DeWolf
There are a number of places that seem slow to start enforcing it. Maybe they’ll get their act together after September 15 when fines and enforcement kick in. Otherwise it’s like those obstinate people who refuse to get vaccinated – they’re only shooting themselves in the foot.
I’ve been going out a lot in the past few days, partly by coincidence, partly out of curiosity as to how the passport rollout is going. And most places I’ve visited are enforcing it. The whole process is remarkably fast and easy – not even 10 seconds.
j2
Guess I’m done with Adamo and Campanelli. That’s $20/week I’ll save.
MarcG
These business owners must genuinely have strong feelings about it if they know that they’re only really appealing to 20% of population and turning off a bunch of the other 80%.
j2
What angers me most about this is if it had been before I would have just thought “they gotta do what they gotta do” – but TurboHaus showed us that a business can do better, be better.
MarcG
It’s too bad that the anti-vaxxers who die of Covid aren’t able to be more vocal about it.
jeather
Look I’ll probably still consider going to places that do takeout only because I don’t know if they are doing it for anti vaccine passport reasons or just because it makes more sense. The instagram stories appear to have been removed though.
j2
I was wondering if the second article was written by anti-vaxxers or maybe children but it appears to have been translated and thus the simple idioms are likely a byproduct of said translation.
“ — This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Sept. 3, 2021”
Jeff
@marcg twitter has a way of convincing you the whole world feels strongly about something, and I think some of these restauranteurs have been caught up in that. They think there will be mobs of supporters endeared to their business because of this defiant stance against a despotic government.
Leagle
We need better civics classes teaching people about the law and civil procedure. People are woefully ill informed.
The applicants in that suit are seeking injunctive relief against the mask mandate.
When an applicant seeks injunctive relief, they usually attempt to have the relief granted provisionally, on the basis of summary evidence supported by sworn statements, pending a trial on the merits after which the court decides whether to grant the injunction on a permanent basis.
In order to obtain the injunction on a provisional and interlocutory basis, the litigant must show 1) an appearance of a right, 2) irreparable harm, 3) the balance of inconvenience tipping in their favour, 4) urgency.
If the urgency criterion isn’t met at the provisional/interlocutory stage the status quo remains in place until the injunction application is decided on the merits on a permanent basis after a trial.
As it pertains to children, they have a point. Masks have not shown to be effective in children and can cause serious social and academic harm.
This journalist took a close look and it’s worth the read:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/the-science-of-masking-kids-at-school-remains-uncertain.html?
Tim S.
Interesting link, Leagle. It seems as though that the author will only be satisfied if there’s a study done with a control group – comparing kids who wear masks with those who don’t. This hasn’t been done yet, for obvious ethical reasons. I’ll be thrilled when my kids (and the rest of us) can ditch the masks, but in the meantime I’m dubious of arguments that demand we wait for absolute proof.
Tim S.
Having said that, what does seem to work, based on the cited study, is ventilation. If people would spend their time taking legal action to force the government to increase ventilation/air filtration in schools, rather than arguing against masks, they might get more of my support.
steph
I’m in the 80% doubly vaccinated and I value my privacy (this post is anonymous). I won’t be frequenting buisnesses that ask me for a passport – my buck stops here.
Leagle
Hello Tim S., in any free and democratic society, the burden ought to be on those who wish to impose restrictions (such as mask mandates for children) to show that the restrictions are actually serving their intended purpose, and not the other way around.
This is especially the case when it is quite obvious (and understated in that article) in the case of children, that they suffer developmental harm from wearing masks, in terms of language acquisition and socialization. This is all the more true with less privileged children, who may not have supportive home environments to compensate for the harm done to them by having to wear masks in the classroom.
mare
The application that checks the validity of the vaccine passport, named VaxiCode Verif, works off-line and doesn’t send any privacy or location data to the government. It just reads the QR code, does a validity check with some other numbers in the QR code, and then displays a green screen and your name. That has to be manually compared against the name on your photo ID, but that step is often skipped, but so be it.
So the complaints of Steph and other people that “the government tracks my whereabouts” are nonsense. Your Opus card and cell phone (and Google if you’re logged in) *really* track you, and that data is actually used but is totally fine by most people.
The government should have pointed this out more prominently in their communications.
Kate
steph, please read mare’s comment above.
walkerp
A lot of people pulling the “what about the children!” card with the masks except of course the children themselves, who recognize that they are needed and with childlike flexibility just wear them and don’t complain. The alternative is the risk of greater social harm in the short term. I, of course, do not want masks to be a permanent element in schools, but while we are in an emergency we need to be using them.
Great point, Tim S. about the ventilation. It demonstrates perfectly that the real agenda behind the child’s development argument is the cult of extreme individualism (combined with classic fear of change) and not actual care about the children. The target here is the masks and not greater public health or children’s health, otherwise we would be seeing the real hue and cry about putting proper ventilation systems in schools.
Daisy
I am with Steph on this. I don’t wish to reveal my full name to every Tom, Dick and Harry, who might or might not be saving the information (apparently you can do this with another app). I don’t know if the app is truly secure anyway (some security flaws have already been found and apparently fixed, there may be others). I also object to having to share medical information with non-medical personnel.
I don’t have a cell phone, Facebook account, my Opus card is not registered, etc. so no I am not being inconsistent.
On the subject of children and mask wearing, here is an interesting article from the Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/school-mask-mandates-downside/619952/j2
You could at the least screenshot someone’s information for sure. It is less risky than writing it down in a log anybody can read as is commonly done.
The information in the QR code contains (taken from the app’s privacy policy):
Last Name
First Name
Date of Birth
Liste of vaccines administered
Vaccination Dates
Test Dates
Latest positive COVID-19 resultThe app’s displayed information is first, last and protection status.
So yes, be careful with who gets to see it but, and I hesitate, the biggest privacy risk appears to be the DoB, and I suppose the rest could be weird spousal abuse territory (location control etc) but otherwise uninteresting from a identity theft perspective, maybe?
jeather
If you don’t want to show your vaccination status, that’s fine; you’re deciding that your privacy is more important to you than eating in a restaurant (for instance) and that seems like a reasonable tradeoff for some people.
The article about how horribly harmful masks are for children is discussing children under 6, who are in fact not required to wear masks at school (it’s only required as of grade 1). I also note that though the article insists on excellent proof for the benefit of masks, it has no such proof for the harms of them.
Kevin
After two years of this—kids don’t care about masks. There is no stigma to wearing one.
And if the prospect of telling your name is enough to dissuade you from going to a restaurant, well, you’re out of step in a society where 90%+ use loyalty cards, credit cards, and more in normal times, let alone during a once in a lifetime pandemic where extreme measures are justified.
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Kate
Judge Louis Dionne has ruled that there was no racial profiling when Mamadi Camara was arrested in January.
Saturday, Yves Boisvert points out that Dionne’s report was not just about soft-pedaling racial profiling, but rather a sharp criticism of the fumbling of the investigation by the SPVM.
jeather
My memory is that the arrest was legit enough, probably, but then everything else was just terrible (jailed for a week despite video proof), and THAT was, I will bet, due to racism.
Kate
The judge does admit that police botched the investigation.
jeather
But I suspect they botched it because of racism.
Meezly
Doesn’t mean the police and city are off the hook for owing him compensation.
walkerp
And yet still no actual narrative on the supposed attack. And nothing on Vig’s reputation for shaking down Park Ex residents. The rot keeps going higher.
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Kate
Quebec has 750 new Covid cases in the last 24 hours, just before a long weekend, when we won’t see any new numbers for three days.
DeWolf
Santé Québec has been posting the numbers every weekend on their Twitter feed. And the data is still posted daily on the open data portal, even on the weekends, so some other Twitter users like Fagstein are making their own charts.
Today, 83% of those 750 new cases are from people who are not adequately vaccinated. That’s a similar proportion to what we’ve seen since the start of the fourth wave. So if you’re fully vaxxed and you take all the usual precautions like wearing masks indoors, you really don’t have much to worry about.
MarcG
127 fully vaxxed people tested positive yesterday and 9 went into the hospital. It would be interesting to get more details about their cases. Did they do something stupid? Are they old or otherwise immuno-compromised?
DeWolf
In a recent news article, an Israeli doctor was quoted as saying that most vaccinated people who were ending up in hospital were very old and in poor health to begin with. As opposed to unvaccinated people, who were of all ages and in all kinds of health.
As for cases, I haven’t heard anything about any sort demographic trends. It may just be luck of the draw. But an American doctor was on CBC the other day explaining that vaccinated people with breakthrough infections tend to have mild symptoms that last for two or three days (which was the case for him), as opposed to one or two weeks in unvaccinated people.
There was also a UK study published recently that determined that vaccinated people with breakthrough infections are 50 percent less likely to develop long Covid.
Bottom line is that the vaccines turn Covid into the relatively harmless flu or cold that pandemic deniers always claimed it was. If we got the vaccination rate up to 90 or 95 percent of eligible people, we’d be in the clear. Luckily we’re already at 87 percent first doses and 80 percent second, so it’s a realistic goal.
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Kate
Some functional stuff here: what’s open and closed for Labour Day; where not to drive this weekend.
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Kate
More caps were popped Thursday night, this time in DDO, with nobody turning up injured.
Around the same time, a man was stabbed downtown, non-fatally.
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Kate
Metro usage is down since the pandemic, although “boudent” is a bit strong when the numbers show that, in the past, 47% of commuters used the metro, while now the stat is 40%.
mare 08:57 on 2021-09-04 Permalink
A tunnel —and underground station— would also potentially open up a future section of the REM by extending it to the West and connect it to the south of the West Island via the Vaudreuil-Hudson corridor. (If the REM was part of an actual transit plan and not a money making operation.)
ant6n 17:02 on 2021-09-04 Permalink
The whole idea of having a downtown terminus for a metro is silly to begin with. Metro lines, if they touch downtown, go through downtown, and connect to somewhere on both sides.
Kate 17:06 on 2021-09-04 Permalink
Because of where I was wandering around Saturday I went past the ongoing dig for the REM near UdeM, where a large poster brags that it’s the deepest transit tunnel in the world. That can’t have come cheap. And yet they can’t do the same downtown?
Daniel D 22:01 on 2021-09-04 Permalink
You’re right. I suspect:
(a) They’re saving an insane amount of money by having requisitioned an existing deep level tunnel instead of having to build a new one.
(b) As I recall, there were no original plans for connections at McGill and Eduard Montpetit, but they ended up being coerced into implementing them.
ant6n 04:19 on 2021-09-05 Permalink
It’s not the deepest metro station in the world, a 1s google search reveals deeper stations, e.g. Arsenalna in Kyiv with over 100m vs Edouard-Montpetit REM which is around 70.
There have been plans for stations at McGill and Edouard-Montpetit from the time the Metro was built. The Mont-Royal tunnel was planned as line 3, and at least Edouard-Montpetit was placed at the intersection with the tunnel. There were also studies to build commuter rail stations there, when the tunnel was still commuter rail (2007), the study can be found online.
The REM folks were planning to include the metro stations from the get-go, but the studies, plans and financing were unclear when the project was rush-announced in April 2016 (who knows why, perhaps to make sure the VIA rail announcement to build the High-Frequency-Rail between Montreal and Toronto using the tunnel would come afterwards). In the end it provided a very convenient obvious error in the project that most people complained about first, which could be fixed, while pulling in some extra financing, and hiding all the other problems.
Kind of now with the REM 2.0: propose something that has a bunch of issues, but have a big glaring issue that everybody jumps on (elevated train on Rene Levesque), so eventually fix it by pulling in some external financing (‘if you want a tunnel, you pay for it, but we still own it’), and the most obvious issues just get swept under the rug (like, does this fit into an overall regional transportation plan, is this the best cost-benefit-project we can build, are just shoveling a boat load of money into cdpq’s infrastructure and real estate divisions, does the city want or need this project or something else).