Denis Coderre is definitely being Mr Law and Order for this election.
In contrast, Mayor Plante criticized the antivaxxers holding protests Monday at hospitals and schools. No news items yet about which hospitals have been assailed by these goons.
Updates from September, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
General foot traffic is still way down along Ste-Catherine Street, and the street fair held over the weekend was apparently rather more low-key than usual. I find this bit absolutely ridiculous: “Montreal centre-ville, a downtown merchant’s association, estimates that 500 thousand people walked along this three-kilometre stretch each day of the sale.” Half a million people? Each day? I mean, go ahead, boost downtown, but don’t insult our intelligence.
P.S. to CTV: The street is not called “St-Catherine’s St”.
JP
Also, the way they wrote “500 thousand” seems weird. They should simply write 500,000.
Blork
…or they mean 500-thousand (between 500 and 1000) and they dropped the hyphen accidentally on purpose so it would look like 500,000.
JP
That’s possible.
thomas
From the video it is clear that they mean 500,000.
Some places did very well, though. I saw a line of maybe 200 people for Korean Kogo.
MarcG
A quote from the Gazette article:
Castanheira said the association’s estimates were about 500,000 per day visited the strip on Friday and Saturday, which he said was “absolutely fantastic.”
“It sounds like a lot, and it is, but this is over a three-kilometre span, and on a pre-pandemic day, we would have half a million people per day downtown. It is a big number, but we are used to having big numbers.”
I remember that massive march on May 22, 2012 had an estimated 200-400 thousand people. Things look different when you pile them all together.
Kate
I didn’t go, but I was looking at the corner of Peel and Ste‑Catherine via the traffic cam at that corner, on and off all weekend. I was curious to see how many folks would be there.
Half a million people? No. Not remotely possible.
ant6n
Usually, over two days, every person in Montreal would have visited (>1Mio per day). In fact, even now the shopping crowds are bigger than those of the 2019 climate protest when Greta spoke (>500K).
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Kate
Nice profile of Carrie Derick, who campaigned for the rights of women to vote and have access to contraception, a century ago.
We have a street named after her, but it’s an empty road paralleling autoroute 10, between Point St Charles and the river, and not one that most of us will ever have walked on. They could’ve found something better.
Although I suppose it may not always be empty.
steph
I hope one day they’ll rip out the autoroute and make Carrie Derick street the beautiful riverside urban boulvard it deserves to be.
Jean Marc Parent has an unrelated funny bit on the 10ouest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUYkTdI8k60&t=390s
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Kate
Sue Montgomery is setting herself up against Bill 96, saying it infringes minority rights. She should know that, as an anglo, it’s none of her business.
david844
Such a perfect spoiler candidate that she might actually get back in. If it were still my old stomping grounds, she’d have my vote.
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Kate
Very good piece by Anne-Lovely Etienne about the phrase “known to police” and how it sweeps victims aside as uninteresting because readers can safely feel they brought the trouble on themselves. Etienne interviews the family and friends of one of the men killed in the triple shooting on August 2, and gives a name and character to one of the victims handwaved as “known to police.”
This links back to the dictum of SPVM organized crime czar Francis Renaud last week: “La victime d’aujourd’hui, c’est le suspect de demain.”
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Kate
TVA notes that it’s 15 years since the attack on Dawson College in which one young woman was shot dead, and the attacker suicided after being winged by police sharpshooter Denis Côté. If anyone is living with physical consequences from the attack, it’s not mentioned here, but families of people hurt in the attack have made a plea to the public not to vote for the Conservatives, who have shown themselves amenable to the gun lobby.
Radio-Canada talked to the mother of Anastasia De Sousa, the one person killed by Kimveer Gill that day – and she too mentions wanting better gun control.
H. John
I thought journalist Martin Patriquin made a good point when he replied to a LPC tweet warning about the Conservatives and the gun lobby. He wrote:
“Counterpoint: the Liberals have been in power for the last six years, and the gun remains legal to buy.”
Kate
True. The Liberals talk about gun control, but don’t do much about it. I suppose it’s pragmatic for them in not wanting to alienate the kind of people who would turn against them, but I wonder how many gun nuts would even consider voting Liberal anyway.
H. John
The Liberals aren’t lying to the gun nuts to get their votes, they’re lying to the people who want a party that will provide better gun control.
Kate
But why would they promise gun control and not deliver it? On whose side are they really, and why?
H. John
Sorry, I understand why you’d ask that question; but making a promise is very easy – it doesn’t come with a best before date. The LPC are running on promises they made the last time, and the time before that. The difference is they were the government for 6 years, and yet that gun can still be purchased legally in Canada.
Mark Côté
It’s just like their promises about environmental change. I don’t think they’re lying exactly… but as H. John says, it’s easy to make promises and way harder to deliver on them.
Kate
Yesterday CBC had Francis Scarpaleggia on the noon-hour radio show. He’s been an MP in the West Island Lac St-Louis riding since 2004, but has never been a minister. I texted in a question, then someone phoned in with the same question: one of Justin Trudeau’s original campaign promises was electoral reform, and Scarpaleggia was chair of the committee to deal with this. In the end it came to nothing. The phone questioner was quite sharp and Scarpaleggia flailed around, claiming a) electoral reform was too hard and complicated, b) not enough people were interested in the matter to make it worth doing and c) first-past-the-post was a fine system so why would we want to change it anyway?
It made me wonder how dominant that kind of fatalism is, in the federal Liberals. In many ways they’re quite happy with the status quo, even when it’s clear that, as with pipelines and guns – and electoral reform – a fair number of people actually would like to see the situation change or at least be given a push in a better direction.
I suppose this is still marginally preferable to a party like the Tories who want to actively pilot the country back in time, but status quo isn’t very impressive as an aim.
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Kate
The ARTM wants to figure out a new kind of transit pass for people who go to the office a couple of days a week, but work from home the rest of the time.
Seems to me if you’re going to use a half dozen trips a week, putting tickets on your Opus should work fine. You just have to remember to recharge it when you’re running low.
jeather
I think if you’re going 3x/week the cost is about the same for individual tickets vs a monthly pass.
Andrew
Was there ever any update to the project to pay by phone? ( http://mtlcityweblog.com/2020/09/09/more-on-the-bus-fares-by-phone/ )
If your commute doesn’t include the metro and you still apparently need to buy a $20 thing to do it online, adding tickets is still kind of a chore.Kate
I haven’t tried paying by phone on the bus. I’ll look into it.
As for getting tickets onto your Opus it may depend where you live. I can get mine bumped up at my corner dépanneur. You may not have to go to a metro station.
Oof. Back in 2016 they were already promising paying by phone, and a year ago MTL Blog was posting about it. But despite promises, my Transit app doesn’t offer to sell me tickets, so I don’t see any mode for using my phone.
Has anyone used Apple Pay? Neither of my cards will register with Apple Pay so I can’t experiment.
Joey
How old is Opus? (Checks: Wiki says it was deployed en masse in spring 2009.) Twelve-and-a-half years in and we’re still using cards that don’t update in real time, that can’t be reloaded automatically or online, that are linked to byzantine fare structures that require you to predict with considerable precision how often you’ll be using public transit to avoid overpaying, that require a physical card that cannot be stored on a mobile device, etc. How is it that we’ll inagurate an entirely new light rail system before we implement fare-card technology that was common *before* Opus was introduced?
As a former daily commuter who has switched to an occasional transit user, I’m always relucatant to hop on a bus because I never know which, if any, of the four Opus cards I have (a) still work and (b) have any fares on them.
Aside from making the tech meet the standards that are expected today (described above), the various transit agencies would be wise to adopt a fare structure that adapts as you use your card. So in any given month, you’re charged $X for the first Y number of fares until you reach a threshold that lowers your rate. The first fare might be equivalent to the price of one ride. After, I dunno, five fares in a week you are shitfed to a weekly discounted rate. After say 20, you pay the maximum monthly rate. It’s easy enough to tweak the amounts and thresholds; the benefit is allowing users not to have to worry about refilling cards – you use your pass as much or as little as you like and you pay the optimal price depending on your use. If you want to be fussy you can plan your trips to max out your savings, but if not you don’t have to worry about all this nonsense.
MarcG
‘shitfed’ might well be the best typo ever
ant6n
Classic non commuting passes in Europe are “9 o’clock” or “10 o’clock” passes, which are monthly passes that are not valid during weekdays morning rush hour.
Conceivable would also be some monthly pass that allows u to pay reduced fares, which have a break even of perhaps 10 trips per month.Uatu
I bought virtual tickets for the exo south shore bus via the transit app. It was just a qr code that I showed the driver as I got on.
Jonathan
I thought that the STM was considering doing a maximum fare structure… meaning that a person would pay whatever the price is (3.75 a ride), when they’ve done a round trip in a day, the next cost is the difference to the ’round trip’ fare, if a few more are done, then it’s the ‘unlimited day’ fare, so on and so forth until you reach the maximum monthly cost of a transit pass. I’ve seen this in a few cities. I think perhaps Portland Oregon has this structure?
Anyway, all to say that this seems to be the most useful way given the change in commuting habits.
Ephraim 16:59 on 2021-09-13 Permalink
Hospitals should invite them into the COVID ward, see if they want to go.