A cyclist reports having been pepper-sprayed by a driver on a street in Rosemont, after an exchange of words.
Updates from December, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Daycare workers have voted to approve an agreement in principle, bringing their strike to an end.
I was at the Little Italy SAQ on Sunday and found the shelves very empty, and wondered whether the shortage of products was being over-emphasized by management to get the public on side in the SAQ warehouse labour issue. The specialty wine shelves were completely cleared, for example. Could they really have been sold out of all those pricey bottles?
steph
overheard at the office “better stock up at the SAQ before they go on strike. I’ll go pick up three dozen bottles, just in case”. I don’t understand these things. I still haven’t opened up the one bottle of wine in my house that I got 3 years ago. shrug.
Chris
What’s not to understand? Many people drink *a lot*.
Meezly
@steph – do you have kids?
Mark Côté
There are liquor shortages across Canada.
carswell
It was the same at the Jean Talon market store on Saturday. Last week, there were reports that the shelves of the Cellier section at the big Place Versailles store were completely bare. A friend sent a photo of the Laurier Ouest store on Wednesday and it was close to emptied out. I suspect many people are stocking up on higher-end bottles in preparation for the holidays.
Stores that serve the restaurant trade are reportedly being prioritized. These include the trade-only stores on St-Zotique and St-Patrick, of course, but also Sélection stores with parking lots like Atwater and Beaubien (the one near St-Hubert).
The problem isn’t only due to the labour dispute, though the short strike didn’t help. There’s a serious labour shortage among warehouse and delivery staff, which has resulted in lots of pressure to work overtime, including weekends — to the point that it’s now one of the grievances the employees are bringing to the bargaining table. In addition, there are significant supply chain backups.
Lastly, sales volume during the holiday season is an order of magnitude bigger than any other time of the year. That’s why, for example, private import deliveries to non-trade customers are suspended for the season, allowing staff to devote themselves to restocking shelves.
walkerp
I’m going to set up a still on the mountain.
Meezly
I had made a bad parenting joke that assumes they would need a lot of alcohol to cope, so I apologize for that.
I haven’t been to a SAQ this month yet, but there are many excellent local distilleries here. I don’t know if local supply chains are being impacted, but there should be some decent alternatives.
Kate
Meezly, I didn’t think the distilleries were allowed to sell direct, but had to go via the SAQ. But I admit not having looked into this.
walkerp, mark me down for 2 bottles of your poitín.
steph: even people who rarely drink might be shopping for gift bottles right now.
DeWolf
Yes, unlike wineries and breweries, distilleries cannot sell directly to customers and must sell all of their product to the SAQ. They’re allowed to sell bottles in their distillery tasting room, but those need to be… purchased from the SAQ. It’s a ridiculous way of doing things.
Meezly
Ah, regulations. I remember visiting a distillery in Nova Scotia and inquiring if they ship their products to out-of-province customers and they did. So I had assumed it might be possible. Dommage!
So out of province distilleries as an option…?
nau
I walked into a local distillery this weekend and bought a bottle. I’m not sure if what DeWolf means is that the distillery has to send their bottles to the SAQ warehouses, then get some sent back before they can sell them at the distillery or just log them into the SAQ’s system but you can definitely buy at distilleries (until they also run out).
Tim S.
@Meezly: I laughed.
And then went out to the local SAQ with my wife.
(Lots of empty shelves, but enough of what we were looking for).Ian
@steph OK captain virtue, the thing is lots of people actually do drink more than one bottle of wine every three years. I don’t smoke dope but I’m not going to begrudge anyone getting upset if the SQDC gets low on stock… we all like different things.
That said the SAQ has the most repressive rules about distribution in the entire country but I digress.
carswell
@Ian You’re right that the rules are regressive but the main ones are set by the government and enforced by the Régie des alcools, des courses et des jeux. The SAQ can be knocked for how it implements some of them but mostly they’re just following orders.
carswell
Er, repressive. Though I guess they’re regressive too.
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Kate
I look at all the usual sites daily for the blog, and read a lot of the news and major opinion pieces. But Sunday, I’m going to spare my mood and my blood pressure after eyeballing the headlines on the Journal’s opinion pieces: Non, elle n’est pas une «pauvre victime» (Joseph Facal), Le Canada anglais en ébullition (Denise Bombardier), La laïcité à l’école, en France et au Québec (MBC), Québec, Canada : notre imparfaite démocratie (Normand Lester). Also a Jacques Lanctôt screed on a new book about the 1849 burning of Parliament, Montréal brûle-t-elle?: “Pour l’historien François-Xavier Garneau, cet acte de barbarie est l’équivalent de la destruction de la bibliothèque d’Alexandrie, en Égypte, durant l’Antiquité.” No, spare me. I’m going out.
Kevin
They are getting in extra shit now because Christmas is coming and the law requires them not to work on that most secular of days.
dhomas
I try not to place myself into an echo chamber by reading multiple different news sources, even (or especially) those publishing opinions that are at odds with my own. But I had to stop reading this weekend, too, for similar reasons as you, Kate. It was beginning to put me in such a foul mood that even my kids were wondering what was wrong. Enjoy your break. I hope it helps!
Uatu
Funny, I would apply pauvre victime to all these writers.
Raymond Lutz
Juste un petit commentaire pour vous signaler qu’il y a quelques “Québécois de souche” (quelle idiote expression) qui dénoncent la loi 21pour ce qu’elle est, un torchon raciste de la pire espèce: celle qui ne dit pas son nom. Zemmour en serait fier… C’est pas pour rien que MBC sévit maintenant des deux côtés de l’Atlantique. Joyeux solstice à tous, and keep an eye on the James Webb telescope launch dec 22!
Ian
That all the “pundits” are lining up to denounce criticism of bill 21 speaks volumes.
As many others here have pointed out, anyone who thinks Bill 21 is about secularism and not about suppressing multiculturalism just needs to consider that this beloved teacher, a woman who wears hijab, was fired in the name of secularism right before school goes on Christmas break. This isn’t secularism, it’s ethnonationalism.
By extension, to insist that critiquing Bill 21 is anti-Quebec also implies that ethnonationalism is a core Quebec value. These pundits aren’t the intellectual cream of the crop they seem to be held up as, it’s nothing but fallacious logic and taking turns saying “we are the real victims here” in different ways.
Meezly
I knew a very respected, highly intelligent Quebec immigrant from France who believed in the laïcité of Bill 21 and couldn’t conceive how people would criticize it as xenophobic or ethnonnationalist. His arguments used some fallacious logic which really surprised me because he’s a very logical person (in technology), but he really does believe in laïcité as an idealistic principle. Fortunately, he’s the kind of person who actually listens and is gracious. I don’t know if I ever got through to him though.
Chris
Meezly, his world experience is probably pretty different than yours. To be blunt, the average North American Muslim is more liberal/Western than the average European Muslim, who is in turn more liberal than the average Middle Eastern Muslim. i.e. the ‘clash of civilizations’ is more pronounced for him than for you. For example, here in Montreal, I don’t think we have stores that refuse women, like happens in France. To say nothing about places like Saudi. I suspect a lot of the support for Law 21 is to keep that stuff at bay. Whether it’s misguided, will work, backfire, we shall see I guess.
Meezly
Chris, I believe this may be the first time I got a semi-thoughtful and mature response from you. There is an Eurocentric belief that secularism will somehow make society more “civilized” by doing away with religions, esp. “less civilized” non-Western religions.
Kate
If Quebec were a person, I’d say they needed therapy to process their obsessive neurosis about religion. Yes, Quebec used to be dominated by the Catholic church. And yes, people are alive who remember that, who grew up in it, and some whose lives were dominated by it in various unhealthy ways. There’s no doubt about that. But going to the other extreme collectively is almost as unhealthy, and they need some cultural therapy to come to a more balanced, nuanced view of the place of religious beliefs in individuals’ lives.
Put more crudely, they need not to take out their resentment of religion on people who had nothing to do with their Catholic trauma.
Kevin
@Kate
Parizeau should have promised a trip to a therapist instead of a visit to the dentist. We’d all be a lot better off.And BTW, Martineau doubled down today by finding some English speakers in ROC who support Bill 21 — because they can’t conceive of anyone voluntarily wearing a hijab. Which just strikes me as bizarre. Like, is nobody else curious enough to *ask* people why they wear what they wear?
dhomas
If I worked as a teacher, I would be half tempted to wear a kippah and a turban on alternate days. If confronted, I would say that I adhere to neither Judaism nor Sikhism so these are not religious symbols but rather expressions of my fashion sense. I wonder who would get to me first, the right with Bill 21 or the left with cultural appropriation.
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Kate
Quebec has shut down some of its government sites following an information leak which has also affected other sites around the world.
Initially I headlined this post “Quebec government sites hacked” but that’s not a fair description of the situation. (The headlines are not visible on the site itself, but show up on Twitter and in the “Recent Posts” list in the sidebar. I do this because I mostly write short posts and it looks terrible with a headline every few lines.)
Update: Saw a tweet saying the city is also closing some web services while this software security weakness gets patched up.
Mark Côté
It’s one of the biggest security bugs in the last decade, maybe ever. Update your Android phones (and Minecraft installations, etc.) now!
dhomas
Log4Shell, as the vulnerability has been dubbed, is definitely a huge security threat. However, Android as an OS does not use the technology affected by it, Log4j. In fact, since it is a Java technology and Android does not natively run Java, it is very unlikely that any client side applications will be affected either. This is definitely a good thing as Android is notorious for having vendors that do not provide updates for their devices. So, nothing really to do on your Android phones. 🙂
If you run any servers with applications open to the Internet (like a Minecraft server), you should definitely check if any of them use Log4j. You mighty not know if they do since it’s mostly an internal logging system, so definitely check it out.
Mark Côté
It’s a funny coincidence that there was an update available for my Pixel today then….
dhomas
I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure Android as an OS is unaffected by Log4Shell as are most applications running on Android.
As for the Pixel update, Google updates the Pixel line very often, usually once a month. I saw in the release notes that a different RCE (Remote Code Execution) bug was corrected in the December 5th security update. Log4Shell is also an RCE vulnerability, but the one from the Pixel update looks like it’s a different bug.Ian
A Pixel update is more likely related to the Teams bug preventing 911 calls that is mostly Microsoft’s fault – https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/10/22828234/microsoft-teams-android-bug-blocked-911-call-go-read-this
tl;dr:
If you are using Android and have not logged into Teams you should probably do so and stay logged in or it might block 911 calls
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Kate
A march was held in Anjou Saturday to protest against a wave of violent incidents in that part of town.
Skimming other news, I noticed a CNN piece on increased homicides in U.S. cities where, of course, it’s mostly guns. But if the U.S. is at grips with this problem, it’s not surprising that the tendency seeps across the border, even during a pandemic.
Note, however, some homicide numbers so far in the U.S. this year: 513 in Philadelphia (population 1.579 million in 2019), 230 in Indianapolis (pop. 864,447) and 88 in Austin, Texas (pop. 950,807), generally regarded as the most civilized town in that state.
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Kate
A ghost bike was installed Sunday morning to mark the spot on St‑Laurent at Liège where a cyclist was killed early last month by a dump truck on the turn.
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Kate
Last year, Quebec refused to outlaw hunting on the island of Montreal at the city’s request, so hunters have been setting up blinds and animal traps in some big parks. But the city is determined to enforce its own bylaws by removing these things. As noted here by the mayor of Ste‑Anne, it’s a question of safety. Nobody wants to be killed by a random bullet because they went for a walk in the park.
JaneyB
This might be the most Montreal post ever lol. Just missing roadworks.
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Kate
A lot of people were plunged into darkness Saturday night as high winds swept southern Quebec. I’m stealing ant6n’s screenshot here (from Twitter) of the Hydro‑Quebec outage map of Montreal, posted around 1:00 on Sunday morning.
Lights did not go out at Blog HQ, but on the map I saw that I was a few blocks from dark zones in several directions. There were outages in blotches all over town for a few hours.
dhomas
The wind was crazy last night. We were out as a family and came home around 23h to find our “tempo” completely out of place. In the 7 years we’ve been setting it up, it has never moved with the anchors we put in place. Our neighbour’s tempo, which they bought this year, might have to be scrapped as the metal frame bent in a lot of places.
There were also a lot of large branches on the road to avoid while driving.
Luckily, we didn’t lose power, though. Doing the math, about 8% of households are without power, which is quite a lot!Kate
I didn’t even think about tempos, because there aren’t any on my street. But there must be tempo carnage this morning!
qatzelok
I guess that’s another reason they’re not called “permanentos.”
Meezly
I heard that this was the tail of the tornado that hit five states in the USA? If so, powerful tornado!
Blork
Normally, if someone in our neighbourhood so much as sneezes we lose power (frustratingly, the places ACROSS THE STREET almost never do; probably 9 out of 10 outages only affect our side of the street). Last night we lost power twice, but only for a couple of minutes each time. I felt like there were big surges, too, but nothing got fried, possibly due to abundant surge protectors all over the house.
And tempos: the neighbour to the left was out in the wind at about 11:00PM removing the cover from theirs because it was half off and flapping wildly. Someone in the neighbourhood FB group posted “Anyone lose a tempo? Because there’s one blocking our driveway!” accompanied by a photo of a mangled tempo skeleton splayed out on the street.
Bryan
Wait. There’s a word for those things!?
I’m assuming a “tempo” is one of those tent shelters that people park their cars in. I grew up in a suburb outside Toronto and I had never seen one of those before I moved to Montreal. I certainly didn’t know it had a name. Is this a Montreal-specific word? Do people in other parts of Quebec have these? I have so many questions.
dhomas
@Bryan Tempo is a brand name. They’re the ones who popularized those car shelters you see all over town. It’s like the “Kleenex” of the car shelter world:
https://abristempo.com/
You wouldn’t have seen them in the Toronto area because they’re illegal there, due to their unsightliness. They’re actually banned in some Montreal neighbourhoods, too, like Outremont I think. For other neighbourhoods, there are usually rules on what dates they can start to be put up and when they need to come down. Some boroughs also have restrictions on the colour of the tarp.
To be honest, I’m really not sure if it’s a Montreal thing or if other towns in Quebec also have them.Bryan
@dhomas Thank you!
qatzelok 19:40 on 2021-12-13 Permalink
First road salt, and now this.