Pandemic limits on bars and restaurants will come to an end after Halloween.
Updates from October, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The Montreal metro opened for passenger service exactly 55 years ago. Radio-Canada ponders things that have changed and things that have stayed the same.
However, the STM is now hurting, with revenues down and its director saying it needs more cash or will have to cut services back starting next year. And as we know from Denis Coderre’s cuts to transit, when you reduce services you also reduce demand by giving many passengers a reason to abandon public transit. It becomes self-perpetuating.
How this pans out will partly depend on how widespread and persistent the trend to work from home remains. If only half the pre‑pandemic ridership is using the services now, as was recently estimated, and those numbers don’t recover soon, it would make sense to cut back services – but not to the point that they become useless.
Kevin
Transit use is down everywhere because commuting is down, and work from home is not going away. (The TTC is optimistically projecting that transit levels will return to prepandemic levels at the end of 2023, but their projections have a very large margin of error)
This is something that should be discussed during the municipal campaign.
We also need to discuss a complete rethink of downtown as a destination because businesses are moving to a new model — in all cities, not just Montreal — and we will never go back to having 300,000 people coming downtown five days a week.
DeWolf
Transit services need to be reoriented towards providing reliable, high-frequency service throughout the day, not just at rush hours. If we want to get people out of their cars, we need to make it very easy to do anything by transit. The fact that isn’t the case even in some of the densest neighbourhoods in Montreal is a big problem.
Orr
Public transport is what carbon tax (and don’t forget to tax the carbon in the actual oil/coal exports, not just its extraction and transport to the ports) should be paying for.
And it should be paying the amount that makes public transport rapid, reliable, and free.
We need to get serious real soon to cut fossil fuel use 50% by 2030.
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Kate
Le Devoir pursues its theme of the law concerning social and affordable housing units in new construction projects. Although city housing czar Robert Beaudry speaks hopefully it’s clear that not much progress has been made on this issue.
Cadichon
While Coderre brags about his awesome negotiation skills, it’s worth pointing out that while he was in office, Couillard was doing massive cuts in housing programs, something he wasn’t able to stop or reverse. Afterward he succeeded in negotiating a “métropole” status for Montréal, which gave Montréal some new powers in housing… but no new money, resulting in the situation described in the article, where Montréal buys land directly or through its by-law, but lacks funding to build anything.
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Kate
Projet is promising to transform at least 15 vacant lots into sports fields. It’s a play for the youth vote – but is there a youth vote?
Blork
Arguably a play for the parents-of-youth vote.
qatzelok
The idea that everyone is completely selfish and only votes for their own advantages… is false.
Anyone who supports an increase in outdoor activities or community events can support this,whether they themselves will use these facilities or not.
Other people being healthy and happy… can motivate people to support something.
Humans are not made exclusively of greed.Meezly
Can some of them have some greenery? Kate shared a recent article that outlines how green space has been steadily shrinking in various boroughs. It’d be nice to have some trees surrounding that soccer field, at the very least.
Mark Côté
I don’t see where it says anything about the youth vote but there is this, in line with what Blork says:
“Every time I go to doors, young families, they tell me that we don’t have enough space for the youth to play basketball, soccer,” said Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce mayoral candidate Gracia Kasoki Katahwa.
Kate
It was me, not the original journalist, surmising this was about the youth vote, because it’s been in the air that candidates are concerned to get the youth vote out.
Any candidate who can activate any demographically definable group of voters in the municipal election is playing a face card, given how few people actually vote at this level.
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Kate
The consortium that built the new bridge wants an additional $379 million from Ottawa to offset unpredictable events and unplanned changes in the project.
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Kate
CBC is rarely so blunt, but this piece says Quebec blinked first and now the unvaccinated healthcare workers know they have the advantage.
walkerp
I find the framing of this story to be excessively adversarial. You are putting a policy in place, it requires negotiation, communications and a certain amount of flexibility. You tried one deadline and the evidence came back suggesting it was too soon. So you go back and re-adjust the policy. It’s not a sports match or a legal fight. All this “who blinked first” macho rhetoric reeks of the media trying to get juice.
walkerp
Just listened to an interview on CBC with a very reasonable head of some health authority saying that this delay gives them the time they need to get everybody vaccinated and find replacements. The CBC guy kept asking questions like “But aren’t you frustrated that the minister backed off the initial policy?”. Just stop with manufacturing controversy.
jeather
On Monday, we were confidently told that the deadline would not be delayed. Wednesday, actually we’ll just do a full delay until Nov 15. But if you don’t get your first shot by Oct 18, you can’t get your second by Nov 15 — so what will be different then? Why did they not make it a first shot deadline on the 15th and a second by Nov 15th?
I absolutely agree that this wholesale caving shows that vaccine mandates for employees won’t happen in Quebec. Unless, I guess, this shows Legault’s popularity cratering.
walkerp
Want to make a wager on that?
I agree that they should have found a compromise that would have pushed for that first dose more, but I think they demonstrated they are ready to shut the door on the anti-vaxxers in the health sector so enough people will get it this time. Plus, I think the professional order did not postpone the date (though I only heard part of this thus the vagueness) so nurses could still lose their certification.
If they truly backtrack on it altogether then yes I would frame it as capitulation, but this change I see as flexibility in the face of data, not any kind of political move.jeather
What side are you taking? That on November 15, they will actually fire all health care workers who are not double vaccinated as of that date? Because I do not think they will do that, no, I think that a few days before it they will change the rules again. I’m willing to wager a donation to a local charity of the winner’s choice, if you were serious.
I think part of the objection is how they announced it. There are ways they could have announced this which would have sounded a lot less like capitulation, especially 2 days after they swore they would never change their mind. Maybe it was the right choice! I guess we’ll see how many health care workers manage to get 2 doses in the next 32 days.
(Curious how many HCWs were single dosed as of now but haven’t had 4 weeks to get the second dose.)
jeather
I checked and the doctors and nurses aren’t suspending licenses as of Oct 15 either.
GC
I was going to say it gives the government an out because they can cast the order as the bad guys. But, since they also blinked–thanks for checking that, jeather–I guess that’s not the strategy here.
I totally agree Legault will be swayed by his approval ratings, however…
Uatu
I’m kinda relieved because my department was getting ready for the worst and was going to redistribute job tasks for the suckers, erm I mean vaccinated employees left to pick up the slack. I just hope they’ll get the message. I already know people who’ve taken early retirement because of the shortages and stress. Don’t blame them at all and wish I could too!
walkerp
Hi jeather, thanks for the correction on the licenses, I must have misheared.
My position is that the government will ultimately impose the mandate on health care professionals. I am not 100% sure they will do that on November 15, but for the sake of a clear wager, I will include that as a factor to win the bet. So if they do impose the mandate on November 15, I will win. If they don’t, you will win. $20?I happened to switch on to the National and they had that board of experts and they were pretty consistent that the postponement of the date was a necessary move given the reality of the health care staffing shortage in Quebec and that while it did not send a good message and may have cost Legault some political capital, it is more about the practical situation than a negotiating backtrack.
jeather
I don’t think it was clear what the professional orders were going to do — I didn’t read it in any articles, I just went on their websites.
I’m inclined to think the mandate will be imposed, or not, depending on how his polling goes, but that it won’t be imposed on Nov 15. (A middle ground might be.) Sure, $20, charity of the winner’s choice.
I didn’t hear that board and I am not going to argue with them about the necessity to do some sort of delay, maybe I will listen to it later. But if this was necessary (and no doubt we will see articles by doctors arguing both ways), the actual framing of this was a complete disaster.
walkerp
How so? Why is making an announcement and then firmly standing your ground no matter what not another kind of disaster?
I am speaking a bit from my own work which while much lower scale and not really important, has a similar pattern going on right now. We announced a major change for our staff after several consultations that made it seem like the ambitious date we had set was doable. When the announcement went out, we suddenly heard a lot more voices of people whose work would be majorly impacted and decided to push the date back. There were still a lot of people who wanted the early date but this wasn’t capitulation or blinking, just an adjustment in responding to fuller and more accurate data about the situation.
I’m not a Legault fan and not a pro-govt follow the rules person. Rather, I am arguing against these kneejerk emotional and simplistic reactions to policy decisions that are much more complex and less extreme to the actual paticipants. I feel the media tries to encourage the emotional reactions, which then tends to push people into more extreme sides, because they get clicks and it makes complex ideas easier to digest quickly but at the detriment of our polity.
jeather
If there is good reason to delay — which I will wait to hear about — then of course you need to delay. But I want to know what changed between Oct 11 and 13th. I want to know what they think will be different Nov 15 and why it will be different (reminder, again, that there is a minimum 4 weeks between doses, so if you don’t have your first shot by Monday, doesn’t matter). That is what I mean by the framing. Because instead of saying “On Monday, we said X, but what we didn’t know then was [whatever], and we believe that [reasons numbers will change], this is why we have delayed the mandate”, there would have been a lot better response than the mess we got. It kills their credibility. But this govt has never been into sharing info into their decisions.
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Kate
This city has become the wild west as far as rental housing is concerned, according to a housing committee spokesman.
Few people are mentioning one of the key problems here: the weakening of the old Régie du logement. I’m old enough to remember a golden age when the Régie sometimes protected tenants, and was not simply a mechanism for enabling their eviction. But successive waves of neoliberal governments sapped its purpose and then the CAQ renamed it “Tribunal administratif du logement” like a name on a tombstone.
Orr
I read recently in lapresse oped letters section from a landlord that the Regie in fact coddles tenants and land lords only get screwed at the Regie.
This was, yes, the landlord’s perspective.
GC 20:05 on 2021-10-14 Permalink
Have people seen a lot of restaurants where the tables are *actually* two metres apart? I’ve only been in a few, but they generally have the same table layout that they had before the Pandemic. In the case of one of my old favourites, I have not been inside yet but I noticed they had hung up new barriers. For all the others…no obvious changes.
Blork 21:59 on 2021-10-14 Permalink
Coincidentally, I had my first indoor restaurant meal of the pandemic tonight (Il Focolaio on Phillips Square) and I was noting how spaced-out it was compared to the before times. A nice ice breaker, and I left thinking “this is doable.” For the record, even before the pandemic I was annoyed at the crowding of restaurants. I don’t like it when the strangers to my left and right are closer to me than my date right in front of me. Maybe I’ll just eat out a lot over the next two weeks and then go back into exile.
BTW I also broke the ice on public transit tonight – first time since March 2020. The rides themselves were fine, but don’t even get me started (again) on the OPUS situation…
Except for this: is it normal that I can ONLY LOAD SINGLE TICKETS onto a new OPUS card? So if I want six tickets I need to do six separate transactions? What the F-ing F!?
Kate 23:46 on 2021-10-14 Permalink
Blork, I have an Opus new since mid-July (when I lost the one I’d had for years). I can load 10 tickets on there no problem. Are you buying special platinum South Shore tickets?
Blork 00:26 on 2021-10-15 Permalink
Not at all. I tried at two different machines – one at terminus Longueuil and one at McGill – and both would only let me buy one ticket at a time.
Spi 09:49 on 2021-10-15 Permalink
Did you chose “new fare” or reload? If I remember correctly if you chose reload then it will only show you the options for tickets previously held on that card and new opus cards have to be issued with at least one fare most of the time it’s a single ticket.
MarcG 10:23 on 2021-10-15 Permalink
OPUS is such a clunky system, it’s like they didn’t do any user experience testing at all
Blork 11:31 on 2021-10-15 Permalink
Spi, I don’t remember, but I’ll keep that in mind next time I try. MarcG is correct that the system is clunky and seems to have zero effort put into usability.