Taylor C. Noakes tears into the city budget, which – as he points out – tends to get forgotten by the media because it’s launched right before Christmas. His comparison of the increased police budget vs. the funds promised for “green” projects is particularly sharp.
Updates from January, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The Canadiens have announced they’re taking a break, although only till January 6, which may be a tad optimistic.
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Kate
The current curfew makes no exception for dog-walking as the last one did.
Update: an exception for dog walking is going to be added. I think they just forgot about it.
j2
Announcement: https://www.quebec.ca/en/news/actualites/detail/covid-19-pandemic-additional-measures-will-come-into-force-tomorrow-37242
I also saw the document that mentioned dog walking, at least previously. Eg it specified a 1km radius to the owners home.
EmilyG
This is ridiculous. The people making this rule don’t understand basic biology.
Can you really expect animals to be asleep at a particular time?
Imagine someone told you you couldn’t go to the bathroom after 10 PM.
(Well, my landlord didn’t like me doing that, because it involved walking across the floor and waking him up, but he was a jerk.)jeather
They will reinstate the dog-walking exception after some complaints. (Is it really that common that a dog must go outside between 10 pm and 5 am? I’ve always been a cat person.)
mare
I was 100% sure I had read the exceptions after the press conference and that there *was* a dog walking exception in there. And I was right, according to the internet archive it was still in there on 31 December at 14:52 GMT
https://web.archive.org/web/20211231145239/https://www.quebec.ca/sante/problemes-de-sante/a-z/coronavirus-2019/mesures-en-vigueur/couvre-feuSo it was either deleted by someone who hates dogs, hates people with dogs, or in error.
“[…] réseau de la Société des traversiers du Québec.
• Une personne qui doit sortir pour que son chien puisse faire « ses besoins », dans un rayon maximal d’un kilomètre autour de sa résidence ou de ce qui en tient lieu.
Une personne […]”
IANAL but it seems that if someone was fined for walking their dog they have a very strong case.
Chris
How very secular. The CAQ knows dogs are not allowed in Islam and this is clearly just another example of favouring Christians. /s
Ian
The Hassidim don’t have dogs either FWIW if you’re running out of breath for your “just kidding” dogwhistle
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Kate
Given that Covid testing is said to be overwhelmed by the tsunami of cases, it’s a little shocking to read that funding for wastewater analysis ended in December just as the team observed a spike in the presence of SARS‑CoV‑2 in Montreal’s wastewater.
Who chose to cancel a project that collects such valuable data, and why? Journalists need to find out.
Raymond Lutz
Don’t look up! And don’t look down… 🙂
Kate
Raymond Lutz: I liked it until they prayed at the end.
DeWolf
Sounds like bureaucratic inertia. There was only funding for a six-month pilot project, so extending the project or implementing it on a permanent basis would have required somebody at Santé Québec to champion the project and justify the extra money required, likely in the face of superiors who are trying to cut costs after so many extraordinary months. In other words, it probably wasn’t an active decision to shut down the project, it’s just that nobody could be bothered to prevent it from withering away. Anyone who has worked for or dealt with bureaucratic institutions will understand that there’s often little reward for taking risks, rocking the boat and pushing for change, especially when that change will cost money or upset existing processes.
One thing this pandemic has exposed is that when Quebec’s institutions work within existing parameters, they work pretty well. (The centralized vaccination campaign is a good example. When it kicked into gear last spring, it went far more smoothly than in Ontario, which was pretty shambolic, and we have a higher two-dose vax rate as a result.) But when it comes to doing something new or out of the box, things don’t go so well. School ventilation, wastewater analysis, etc.
Raymond Lutz
Moi, aussi Kate! Cette séquence m’a déçu… avec cette prière ils ont pissé dans le punch!
dhomas
I think the prayer was pretty realistic. It was obvious none of these “people of science” knew how to pray. The exception was Timothy Chalamet’s character, who led them in prayer. When faced with your inevitable imminent demise, you might pray or at least go along with someone else’s prayer because “why not”, as Jennifer Lawrence’s character so often said.
Chris
Pascal’s wager got them in the end.
Raymond Lutz
C’est justement parce que nous avons cette aptitude à socialement construire et à perpétuer ces entités fictives (dieux anciens ou divinités modernes: croissance, libres marchés, “économie”) que nous risquons de disparaître, alors pour l’invocation divine au souper, non merci et les atomes de Blaise Pascal peuvent continuer de circuler en paix dans les grands cycles du carbone et de l’azote.
Et pour ceux qui argumenteraient que la psychologie évolutive est une pseudo-science, je vous signale que la falsifiabilité de Popper date de 1930 et tombée depuis en désuétude. Search “Watt about falsifiability?” for an interesting essay on this.
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Kate
The SPVM says that although many cops are out sick with Covid, the force is still able to respond.
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Kate
The New York Times profiles the unlikely man who has become the city’s bar mitzvah photographer.
qatzelok
“I guess you could say I’m the Canadian dream.”
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Kate
La Presse’s Lila Dussault writes a nice description of New Year’s Eve in the city under curfew. With some good deserted photos. TVA also has a photo essay.
We start the year with a smog warning and a fog advisory from Environment Canada. As of 10 am the fog advisory is over, but it’s still misty up here in Villeray and the air outdoors has a faint smoky smell.
At 4 pm, Villeray is still foggy, or maybe smoggy.
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Kate
CBC has an aperçu of notable Quebec news stories of 2021.
La Presse looks back at a year with 37 homicides, the highest it has been in ten years.
Jeff 08:45 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
At first, I was outraged by the increased police budget. It flies in the face of calls to defund and explore alternatives to the police, but this morning I had an alternate theory. What if the money is to help the police take down the mob? It’s kind of an open secret that Montreal has to deal with organized crime, and building a cases against mob leaders can take months and years of dedicated resources, and that can get pretty costly. If you were the mayor, you probably wouldn’t want to announce that the money is for taking down the mob because then it would indicate that we have a problem with organized crime, and perhaps not enough money to fight it. It would make the police’s job harder because the mobsters would be more cautious, and in the worst-case, it could make the mayor a target for criminals. Indeed, the best thing would be to sneak a police budget increase and not say exactly what it’s for. Does this sound plausible?
dwgs 09:02 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
@Jeff… No.
Jeff 10:39 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
why not? @dwgs
SMD 10:57 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
Jeff, this is the province where the police, with the backing of a major political party, do approach the mafia… to ask for their help in reducing gun violence: https://www.tvanouvelles.ca/2021/10/21/lutte-contre-les-fusillades-a-montreal-la-mafia-doit-simpliquer-dit-le-plq.
steph 11:46 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
@Jeff, you’re pulling at strings. Giving corrupt cops MORE money to have them do their job properly? just no.
dwgs 12:46 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
Well first of all Jeff because that would require a level of organization, cooperation, and confidentiality heretofore unseen in the history of this fine city.
Chris 14:01 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
>It flies in the face of calls to defund…
There are in fact few such calls. Mostly a vocal minority. Even amongst African Americans, only 28% support the defund movement.
Ian 19:00 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
First off, it’s not a movement. The right-wing media always insists on seeing social justice concerns as organized movements, it makes it easier to manufacture “sides” since of course intersectionality is a conspiracy.
More importantly, Plante herself talked about “a big, big conversation” around redistributing funds that go to police back in 2020. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/plante-police-defund-discussion-1.5603076
Was she lying? Is she a girouette? Did the police union put pressure on someone? We will never know, but we say with absolute certainty that Plante is an opportunist and a hypocrite with no real political convictions other than getting re-elected.
Kate 21:17 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
Ian, I don’t think her motives are that cynical. But she made a serious mistake in letting Denis Coderre dictate the terms in that part of the election campaign. She must have worried about the electoral appeal of his promise of law and order, and tried to cut him off at the pass. Unfortunately, it left her holding the bag, a promise of hiring more cops, that she’s now stuck with.
Under the right circumstances I think Projet could sell the case for, if not radically defunding the police, at least readjusting the budget so that more of the cash could go to mixed squads with social workers and others who don’t lead with their firearms. But the surge of recent killings including several teenagers is inevitably provoking calls for more policing – even when we know that putting more patrol cars out there is not a solution.
Max 23:28 on 2022-01-02 Permalink
> the SPVM [is] eating up nearly 20% of the municipal budget
Can someone confirm that this figure is factually accurate?
If a safe and civilized city such as Montreal is spending 1 in 5 municipal tax dollars on security, something is seriously, seriously wrong. I’ve known for years that things are screwy, that we’re paying a lot of white folks $100K+ / year each to basically play with their phones and push traffic light buttons on street corners. That they work only 25 years or so, before retiring to collect generous pensions for as many years or more. But to the tune of 20% of our municipal tax dollars?
Please tell me that I’m on drugs and that the SPVM is not a mafia holding our entire city hostage.
Kate 13:55 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
Max, the pie chart on page 5 of the city budget document gives 17.7% as the proportion for public security.
Ian 14:29 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
Regardless we already have more cops per capita than any other major Canadian city. Just putting this out there but maybe our problems could be solved with clowns instead.
https://twitter.com/TedRutland/status/1478006254614233089?t=2Q8MB7oNk0cRVJCWHJy7tg&s=19
Jeff 14:48 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
According to Toronto’s 2019 budget, $703 out of the average $3020 paid in property-tax goes to police services (Chart 3, pg. 112). That’s 23%. Vancouver’s 2022 police budget is 20% of the overall budget too (DRAFT 2022 OPERATING BUDGET, pg. A-10). In Ottawa, it appears to be 43% of their budget, though their report for 2022 is harder to understand (2022 Draft Budget Operating Summaries).
Kate 16:25 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
Here’s a page showing some U.S. cities for comparison.
CE 17:24 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
What is the obsession with clowns? Am I missing something here?
MarcG 20:27 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
CE: Do you live in Montreal? 🙂 Ian is riffing on the fact that one of the city’s big ideas for reviving the downtown in 2020 was to have clowns walk around scaring children.
Ian 22:18 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
In the past couple of years clowns have been part of most city funded “animation” revitalization projects.
Ian 22:24 on 2022-01-03 Permalink
To be fair, we love the clowns.
It just seems funny that no matter what, whether business is bad or there’s a lot of construction or there’s a plague or whatever, the city’s answer is clowns.
For years this has been the deal, and yes I understand we have circuses and circus schools and circus fests. They are a big part of the Montreal identity now.
As Babs says:
“But where are the clowns
Send in the clowns
Don’t bother, they’re here”