The rather grim Chabanel district is described here as en ébullition with new artist centres cropping up. Will they be, as they so often are, the advance guard of gentrification?
Updates from December, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Paul Journet writes a Solomonic screed in La Presse, making a case neither for nor against the Loi sur la laïcité de l’État, but against the hardening of positions on both sides.
jeather
Another article that doesn’t mention the very religious names of many public schools. Surely it is no less proselytizing than a scarf.
Ian
The school I voted at in the municipal election is named Saint-Enfant-Jesus. You had best believe my secular kids asked why anyone would name a school Saint baby jesus.
Ian
Strangely neither ever asked why some of their enseignantes wire hijab. Like, it’s clothing, who cares.
Chris
Ian, you’re probably asking facetiously, but: some people care because the hijab is no regular piece of clothing. It’s a piece of clothing forced upon millions of women, and only women, around the world. It’s a symbol of patriarchy and sexism.
Kevin
Chris
women choose to wear the hijab as a symbol of freedom from the overt sexism and misogyny that is rampant in the western world, and laugh at anyone who suggests they are being forced to do so.dhomas
And here we are again, a bunch of men (myself included!) discussing how women should dress.
https://mtlcityweblog.com/2019/04/02/secularity-law-call-the-cops/#comment-102864
@Ian, Chris, Kevin I apologize if I incorrectly assumed your genders. I assumed jeather is a woman, only because their name is close to Heather.
Ian
Let’s pretend loi 21 is really about protecting women. Explain the kipper or turban.
Domain, if it makes you feel any better my children asking questions about sain baby Jesus are both girls.Ian
Sorry, kippah, nrw phone. Autocorrect is still dodgy. No disrespect intended.
dhomas
No need to justify, @Ian. It’s a discussion we should all be having. If anything, there should be women and minorities helping to make these decisions within the government, instead of M Legault and SJB just dictating it from on high.
It just feels like it’s getting nowhere. My original comment was from April 2019, and we’re still at the same spot.Kevin
@dhomas
Yes, I’m he/him/male, although I take no offence when misgendered.
And when I started making friends with hijab-wearing women in the early ’90s, I asked them the reasons why they wore what they wore in order to combat my own ignorance.
Kate
Ian, kipper tie.
Chris, have you ever asked any hijabi why she wears it?
jeather
Yes, some women choose to wear a hijab, some are forced into it by family, and some are forced into it by social pressure. (Or forced out of it.) But if you think that there are no such problems in every culture — with women being forced to wear or not wear specific things because someone in their life has that level of power over them then you are being wilfully blind.
walkerp
“hijab forced upon women” as the only time a male cares about women’s rights is such an old dog whistle it’s basically a trope at this point.
It’s like the “why don’t black athletes say anything about China?” argument. Disingenuous nerd logic arguing.
Meezly
I felt that Journet was questioning the point of Law 21 more than anything else as it seems to be exacerbating social tensions and anti-Muslim sentiment. I appreciated that he tried to humanize the teacher and pointed out that the hijab is not merely a religious symbol for its wearers, let alone a patriarchal one.
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Kate
Foreign Affairs Minister and Ahuntsic-Cartierville MP Mélanie Joly has tested positive.
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Kate
Quebec has a new peak of 4571 Covid cases over the last 24 hours, and it’s expected that schools and bars, gyms and cinemas will be closed as of Tuesday. Christian Dubé is giving a presser at 1 p.m.
CultMTL has a map showing how cases are distributed in Montreal. Are you living in a plague spot? Click here to find out!
Update: I’m seeing a wave of outrage at Quebec labour minister Jean Boulet’s tweet trying to pin the blame for the surge for “ominicron” on asylum seekers.
Update 2: Things are closed as of 5 p.m. Monday.
Mark Côté
So… is our government surprised that cases continued to rise for the days after their press conference last week, in particular given that no restrictions came into effect until today…? Just amazing.
Mark Côté
Actually I recall them saying that they expected cases, and hospitalizations, to continue to rise. So things are going as they expected, which they will meet with more restrictions now instead of earlier. The mind boggles.
Kate
As Tim S. said here a few days ago: “The “cases are increasing but don’t worry it’s all part of the plan” phase is my favourite part of the pandemic cycle.”
Chris
This time around, I’ve tried to get ahead of the hoarders, but my local grocery store is already out of toilet paper. Doh.
Joey
Almost two years into the pandemic and we no longer have the ability to test all who need testing, vaccinate all who need boosters or trace all COVID-19 contacts. Merry Christmas!
H. John
Policy makers have to make decisions before we’re absolutely sure of what the outcome is going to be.
Omicron really is different:
“Gary Whittaker, a virologist at Cornell University, says Omicron seems to behave more like seasonal coronaviruses, which are often hard to grow in cell culture. That makes experiments on the new variant even harder to interpret, he says. “We’ve got to get a system which is much better matched to the virus, otherwise we will very easily get led astray if we’re not careful.”
Getting firm answers from the lab may well take until Easter…”
Quote from:
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Kate
Actor Gérard Poirier died this weekend, as did Quebec country singer Renée Martel.
Wikipedia says Poirier’s first role was as Maisonneuve for a performance in the city’s 300th anniversary festivities in 1942.
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Kate
I gathered from a friend that Jean Coutu would be giving out appointments to pick up rapid Covid test kits as of midnight Sunday. At 12:01, their server crashed. Over the next hour, occasionally I connected, only to be told that none were available or to come back later. So I went to sleep. Evidently I wasn’t the only one to experience this.
Reports also say Clic-Santé is having problems.
dwgs
Huge lineups outside pharmacies on the walk to work this morning. The gov’t seems to have dropped the ball with the booster and rapid test rollouts.
Kevin
About 100 kits per pharmacy.
There are 240 households on my block.
Expect long delays in getting these, and remember, they are not entirely accurate. It’s easy to get a false negative if your symptoms are mild or non-existent.
It’s also possible to get a false positive.DeWolf
It’s not very helpful to point out that rapid tests aren’t as accurate as PCR tests because that’s not the point. The goal is to avoid spreading infection, and in that sense they’re very useful because they alert people when they are carrying enough virus they could actually infect other people:
// These speedy tests, which typically mix nasal or throat swabs with liquid on a paper strip to return results within half an hour, are thought of as tests of infectiousness, not of infection. They can detect only high viral loads, so they will miss many people with lower levels of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But the hope is that they will help to curb the pandemic by quickly identifying the most contagious people, who might otherwise unknowingly pass on the virus. //
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00332-4
The health rules still state that if you have symptoms but a negative test result, you should continue to self-isolate. I know a lot of people don’t follow the rules anymore but still – if you feel sick and have a negative rapid test result, it’s not licence to go out and mingle.
Mark
It’s funny Dewolf, I was just about to post the same article, you beat me to it.
Agreed that they are useful. My concern is that many people will use them as a passport for more gatherings. So people get together on the 24th. They catch covid. They want to gather on the 26th. The rapid test won’t show covid yet, since the load isn’t high enough.
https://media.nature.com/lw800/magazine-assets/d41586-020-02661-2/d41586-020-02661-2_18385362.png
There is a window of effectiveness that is quite narrow with these tests, and I’m worried that people are just going to blindly trust them.
Dubé hinted that it’s almost better to have 1 party with 11 people than it is to have 5 parties with 8 people, even though one is allowed, the other isn’t.
Blork
That’s a really good way to frame it, actually; that the rapid tests are testing for *infectiousness” moreso than simply positive or negative. Basically, how badly (or not) you stink of Covid right now.
Kevin
The people who are going about their day with symptoms aren’t listening or taking rapid tests anyway.
The rapid tests work best if you are using them as part of a regular protocol — say every 2 or 3 days. So having 5 for a month really isn’t very useful. And then you end up with the idea that’s it’s okay to test negative and hit a bunch of parties, which is not smart.
I like the CDC’s idea that if someone absolutely must attend something in person, such as school, you rapid test multiple times a week and if they are negative, even with a cold, you let them attend. And wear masks all day long.
On Ontario, which gave out kits to school kids and told them on which day to do tests over the holidays.
But our government is not telling people to use this protocol.
dhomas
@Kevin if some of those 240 households have school age kids, they might not need as many kits. My kids’ school distributed kits last week. Still not enough kits to go around, but a slightly better situation.
CE 08:30 on 2021-12-21 Permalink
Yes.
Blork 11:16 on 2021-12-21 Permalink
Isn’t there a bit of noise about Chabanel about to get all fancy and gentrified about every four years or so?
qatzelok 12:22 on 2021-12-21 Permalink
Imagine uglifying a City Beautiful neighborhood like Maisonneuve (with an elevated train) while trying to make Chabanel (with about as much architectural charm as Ray Lawson Boul in Anjou ) into a trendy place to live and play.
Money doesn’t seem to recognize reality in either case.
Robert H 16:09 on 2021-12-21 Permalink
« Il y a un cachet, ici, dit Shiffman. Ce feeling brut, underground, on sent le potentiel de développement dans ce genre d’endroit un peu à l’écart du développement urbain qui attire les artistes, comme ce fut le cas à Brooklyn, par exemple. »
He’s right, and I’m sure commercial and residential realtors can sense it too, visions of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg dancing in their heads. Artists and start-ups are pioneers, but they can’t help but bring the changes they’ve already fled. L’embougeoisement s’en vient! Perhaps the bland, blocky buildings, the grittiness, and general lack of charm around Chabanel will hold down prices and keep the area affordable. On the other hand, I’m old enough to remember when Brooklyn was strictly for people who couldn’t afford or weren’t cool enough for Manhattan. I wonder if it’s possible to apply the term «jolie laide» to an entire quartier?
Spi 16:48 on 2021-12-21 Permalink
Reading these comments I really wonder how many of you have been around the Chabanel sector recently?
There have been artist and artist studios there for a decade at least (I toured one ~8 years ago), this isn’t new. There have been big fashion companies based out of the area for just as long (Ssense, Michael Kors, Naked & Famous) with newer arrivals like Canada Goose.
There’s a pretty good brewery on Louvain for 2 years now? A coffee roaster next to it for longer. There’s even an offshoot the best Falafel in town on Chabanel now.
Kate 18:20 on 2021-12-21 Permalink
Spi, it’s been the needletrade district for far longer than 8 years. In fact, those big blocky buildings used to be jam packed with clothing companies, but the production went offshore after NAFTA and other trade deals were struck. Most of what goes on there now is design, marketing and sample making – the actual production happens somewhere in Asia, most of the time.
A lot of what’s happened over the last decade has been an attempt to find some other use for all that space. One of the blocky buildings, at Esplanade, is now condos. More are bound to go that way.
A huge lot was opened up on Louvain when they demolished the old World War II factories a couple of years ago. Somebody held a kind of outdoor hangout spot (“Green Haüs”) and evening rave party there all one summer, 2019 I guess, but it was clearly not going to be revived in 2020.
Best falafel in town?
Spi 18:44 on 2021-12-21 Permalink
Yes I’m well aware of the areas history and Canada Goose’s current operations there are entirely manufacturing. My point is that this is not the Chabanel area of the early 2000’s as some seem to think it is.
Falafel Saint-Jacques is the best falafel in town, unfortunately their Chabanel location is only open for business hours during the week.
qatzelok 11:30 on 2021-12-22 Permalink
For entrepreneurs with space to lease in the Chabanel District, it’s obviously **a really happenning place with everthing you could ever desire.** (Decent falafel? I’m sold)
But future tenants can’t live on narrative alone.
ant6n 17:25 on 2021-12-23 Permalink
That area could have benefitted a lot of the commuter rail lines would have turned into more of a surface metro, but the REM prevented that (…)