Montreal City Weblog

Updates from November, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• Kate 22:17 on 2021-11-09 Permalink | Reply  

  Quoting Steve Faguy here, who’s just tweeted the link to the full preliminary election results (PDF) and made the following notes:

  Final margins of victory, pending any recount requests:

  • Outremont mayor (Laurent Desbois, EM): 23
  • CDN-NDG mayor (Gracia Kasoki Katahwa, PM): 212
  • Pointe-aux-Prairies city councillor (Lisa Christensen, PM): 13
  • Ste-Geneviève city councillor (Suzanne Marceau, EM): 41

  There is now a four-day period during which people can request recounts. Otherwise the winning candidates will be declared elected. Unless recounts change the results, Montreal’s next city council will have 34 or 35 women, depending on whether Denis Coderre takes running mate Chantal Rossi’s seat in Montreal North. That’s a majority of the 65 councillors.

  Coderre pretty much already said he wasn’t interested in sitting in council if he’s not the mayor, but either way, he’ll have to decide soon.

   

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• Kate 22:09 on 2021-11-09 Permalink | Reply  

  Carey Price has admitted that his step away from hockey was due to substance use. It still isn’t clear whether, or when, he will be able to play again.

  Inevitable not to wonder what the substance is.

  Kate and dwgs are discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • dwgs 10:27 on 2021-11-10 Permalink

    I’m just guessing but likely opioids / painkillers. He has had a few injuries during his career that have kept him out for long periods of time and he has probably played at times when he shouldn’t have since he’s so important to the team.

  • Kate 13:57 on 2021-11-10 Permalink

    That makes sense.

    People boggle at how much a team will pay someone like Price, but many hockey players must retire in their 30s facing 50 years or more with chronic pain from multiple injuries.

• Kate 22:07 on 2021-11-09 Permalink | Reply  

  Police are being criticized for pepper-spraying a man said to be in mental crisis, Monday morning in Outremont. In the video the man’s wrists are bound, and he only seems potentially aggressive at all when the cops are blocking him in. He’s not armed and doesn’t seem to be doing anything so threatening as to need to be pepper-sprayed in the face twice at point-blank range.

  Reactions in the piece remark on the absence of psychosocial aid, but I’m more struck by how the police were absolutely inept at subduing him physically, especially since there were four of them, two of them men as tall as him.

  At least he didn’t get shot.

   

• Kate 14:50 on 2021-11-09 Permalink | Reply  

  Patrick Lagacé has a good column on Denis 2.0, worth reading. But the detail I like most is this: “les parcs sont le vrai cœur de Montréal, avec les ruelles. Pour les parcs comme pour les ruelles, c’est encore plus vrai depuis la pandémie.” A sharp observation and very true.

   

• Kate 13:11 on 2021-11-09 Permalink | Reply  

  CTV has posted a couple of interactive maps of Montreal election results.

   

• Kate 11:15 on 2021-11-09 Permalink | Reply  

  Yves Boisvert ponders the low participation in our municipal elections – Montreal’s 38.29% is sad, but Laval and Longueuil saw even lower turnouts. Even in Quebec City, where there was an interesting three-way scrum for the chair left empty by Régis Labeaume and with issues like the tramway and the troisième lien in play, only 45% of voters eventually turned out.

  Boisvert looks at why people are so disengaged from the governance of the city around them, but he leaves out an important one: anyone with any interest in Montreal city affairs soon learns that Quebec has its cities on a tight leash, and Montreal in particular. This city is no apple of the Legault government’s eye, nor was it particularly prized under the recurring PQ governments we’ve had. Any mayor of Montreal can only achieve what Quebec allows them to get away with. It’s frustrating to watch (not least after blogging about municipal stories for 20 years) and people could be forgiven for feeling that it makes little difference who’s running city hall. (They would be wrong, but they could be forgiven.)

  He’s also wrong that scandal brings outraged voters to the polls. In 2009, after it was already emerging how much corruption was swirling around city hall under Tremblay, we happily voted his Union Montréal party back in, and participation was just under 40%. It would be nice if scandal did motivate voters, but instead it seems to make them turn away in disgust.

  Boisvert has no solutions, either, except to suggest that civic engagement might be included in the new course the CAQ is preparing to replace the religion and ethics course. Not a bad idea, but if most teachers don’t even live on the island of Montreal (and I bet a lot of them don’t), how can they fire their students up with a passion for its local governance?

  Kate, ant6n, and qatzelok are discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • qatzelok 14:04 on 2021-11-09 Permalink

    I think you identified the problem in your last sentence- “Living in and parcipating in… a neighborhood” is probably the way humans learn to take their role in collective decision-making.

    The burbs don’t offer that kind of education to children growing up. And neither does a car-based lifestyle.

  • ant6n 20:34 on 2021-11-09 Permalink

    Give the city more power. Also make the system more democratic, the parties, the voting system.
    I also wonder whether it would help if provincial/federal parties created municipal off-shoots..

  • Kate 23:01 on 2021-11-09 Permalink

    The issues are simply so different at the city level that making municipal parties take on the burdens and the histories of existing federal or provincial parties as well would be a nightmare. Especially not the Quebec parties, because council would end up being an echo chamber of the endless bickering in the National Assembly over language and nationalistic issues, rather than dealing with city affairs. And there’s not much local support for either the Conservatives or the NDP, so why would they even want to spawn mini-me parties at city level?

    There’s probably some fundamental flaws in the legislation over relative municipal powers that should be changed. As the environment becomes more and more fragile, you could argue that so many environmental issues are tackled best at the local level that the city needs the powers to do so. Eventually this will have to happen, but probably not till it’s too late.

  • ant6n 03:09 on 2021-11-10 Permalink

    @Kate
    That’s not true in the rest of the world. Conservative and Liberal and social and green policies do translate to local policies. And it makes it easier to identify and know what the parties stand for (certainly it’s better than the “parties” that are just centered around one person rather than ideas).
    I feel like it’s a Quebec aberration that ask all three levels of government have separate parties.

  • Kate 10:38 on 2021-11-10 Permalink

    May not be true elsewhere, but you have to admit it’s true here. I see absolutely no merit in the idea of having Montreal sparred over by a mini-PLQ, a mini-PQ and a mini-CAQ. As I’ve written before here, one of the strengths of Montreal is that it has, by and large, kept the whole Quebec nationalist circus out of city hall.

    Yes, there’s no framework for forcing city parties to conform to full Westminster-style parliamentary rules. That they do to some extent is just an effect of expectations. There’s no rule about formal opposition and there’s no mechanism for prolonging the existence of parties once their leader or their initial motivating issue has passed into history. I don’t see that we’d gain by forcing the city to run a mini-Parliament. It’s closer to the people, it’s got to be more flexible over time.

• Kate 10:43 on 2021-11-09 Permalink | Reply  

  Quebec has opened a new centre for chronic diseases in Montreal North. No jokes please about how long the waiting list already is.

   

• Kate 10:41 on 2021-11-09 Permalink | Reply  

  The longshoremen’s union at the port want their workers to be exempt from vaccination which, since they’re federal workers, they’re obliged to have.

  The union says that these workers are alone in the cabin of a crane – what, they never have meetings, eat lunch or otherwise congregate together, and what about shift changes? – and that not wanting to be vaccinated doesn’t necessarily mean they’re into conspiracy theories, and plus, hey, herd immunity. But we don’t have Covid herd immunity. “Everyone else is vaccinated, why should we be?” is not a safe assumption.

  And now the business community is upset over what might happen if these guys walk off the job in protest.

  I keep thinking: you’d imagine, if a disease that can kill you arrives, and people are smart enough to invent vaccines that will, if not protect you 100%, at least render you resistant enough to stay alive and out of hospital, and society is handing it out for free, that everyone would be glad to get it and get on with their lives, wouldn’t you? But you would be wrong.

  Longshoremen, afraid of a little needle. Feh.

  Kate, Ephraim, Mr.Chinaski, and 1 other are discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • Daniel D 10:57 on 2021-11-09 Permalink

    Longshoremen, afraid of a little needle.

    You jest, but when I went to have my vaccination the nurse was telling me in passing how to her surprise it’s often the more “macho” types who are terrified of getting an injection.

    Of course, complete respect to everyone who does have a fear of needles and went and did the right thing anyway.

  • Mr.Chinaski 11:02 on 2021-11-09 Permalink

    Let’s say the true reasons, macho types like longshoremen are in average less educated (these jobs do not require any kind of long-form studying or higher education) and therefore are more prone and gullible to “alternative-facts” and conspiracy theories. With often a higher sense of apathy and self-serving individualistic mentality.

  • Kate 12:43 on 2021-11-09 Permalink

    Daniel D, I used to give blood, and heard similar tales from the technicians – it was the more macho guys who were most prone to fainting.

  • Ephraim 14:57 on 2021-11-09 Permalink

    Maybe it’s time to follow the example of Singapore. You make the choice to exclude yourself from vaccination, you make the choice to exclude yourself for coverage https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/09/singapore-to-start-charging-covid-patients-who-are-unvaccinated-by-choice We certainly shouldn’t be paying them the CRSB, if they choose to be unvaccinated. Vaccination needs to be normalized as part of our healthcare coverage. It lowers the cost of healthcare and we won’t, in the long run, be able to afford those who choose not to vaccinate. (I’ve seen estimations for someone who is completely unvaccinated at more than 100x those who are vaccinated to a healthcare system.)

  • Kate 16:28 on 2021-11-09 Permalink

    Ephraim, I have an urge to agree, but then I remember it would be so easy to slip from there to refusing health care to smokers or drinkers, to people who practice hazardous sports, to anyone over an arbitrary body mass index. But certainly they should forfeit the CRSB.

• Kate 09:51 on 2021-11-09 Permalink | Reply  

  CTV has a list of the election results in the island suburbs, with some mayors back by acclamation, but a few changes in Hampstead and TMR. Notably, William Steinberg is out of the mayor’s chair in Hampstead.

   

• Kate 09:46 on 2021-11-09 Permalink | Reply  

  Montreal has just had a boost in its political life, but its professional sporting side has hit a rough patch with its hockey, soccer and CFL teams all in the basement.