Updates from January, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 19:13 on 2022-01-04 Permalink | Reply  

    Twenty-seven homeless shelters in Montreal are coping with Covid outbreaks.

    Unions have forced Quebec to back down on shortening isolation requirements for daycare centres.

    UQÀM has pushed its date for physical return to classes to January 24. Education minister J-F Roberge will give a presser Wednesday at 1 pm about return to classes generally.

    Four more Canadiens players are now under Covid protocol.

    Ottawa is said to be about to send a lot of rapid test kits to Quebec which is good because PCR tests are no longer generally available.

    Update: UdeM is going UQÀM one better, and making its physical return date January 31. But it’s all whistling in the dark, waiting to see how numbers go between now and mid-month.

    Second update: CTV has information about plans by McGill and Concordia.

     

    • MarcG 20:52 on 2022-01-04 Permalink

      I could easily look this up but I’ll ask for fun: Does “Covid protocol” mean “Has covid”?

    • j2 21:39 on 2022-01-04 Permalink

      Note also:

      > On Tuesday, the Quebec also announced new isolation rules for the general population, which allow children under the age of 12 who test positive for  COVID-19 to isolate for only five days.

      There’s additional details in there. As a note, having had a positive rapid and PCR test, it’s six days later and my rapid test was still positive. (Quarantine-extending-symptoms supposedly don’t include coughing and loss of smell but other symptoms, eg my fatigue continues. Never had a fever or very slight if any).

      Source material: https://www.msss.gouv.qc.ca/ministere/salle-de-presse/communique-3371/

    • Kate 23:05 on 2022-01-04 Permalink

      MarcG: yes, but they have a document.

    • Kevin 10:22 on 2022-01-05 Permalink

      Cancelling testing is a giant sign that the province no longer has enough medical workers.

    • Joey 10:49 on 2022-01-05 Permalink

      @Kevin from what’s been reported, the issue seems to be with the testing material – accoridng to La Presse today, the province is set up for 30K tests per day. We’ve been well above 50K per day for a while now, and I suspect that the stocks of testing agents and whatnot are running dry (and, naturally, there’s a global shortage). Not to say that there isn’t also a simultaneous staff shortage in our hospitals, etc., but that doesn’t seem to be the primary driver here.

    • mare 15:37 on 2022-01-05 Permalink

      I read somewhere that labs do batch processing: they mix 5 samples and test them all at the same time. Only when the result is positive they test each of the samples again to determine which one was actually positive. With the current high positivity rate that doesn’t make sense anymore, so every sample is processed separately, thus significantly lowering the testing capacity.

    • Kevin 21:45 on 2022-01-05 Permalink

      Joey
      I have been told that the testers are being reassigned to other tasks, like giving boosters.

  • Kate 13:47 on 2022-01-04 Permalink | Reply  

    The Gazette’s Marian Scott reviews two new books about vanished Montreal scenes. The one about the loss of the Canadian parliament building in 1849 has already been noted, angrily, by reviewers who can’t forgive les anglophones. The other tells how the demolition of the Van Horne mansion on Sherbrooke Street sparked a heritage preservation movement here that still exists.

     

  • Kate 11:53 on 2022-01-04 Permalink | Reply  

    I can’t tell if this is news or not, it feels so meta, but it’s a quiet news day: a crowd of Quebec influencers, including some reality TV figures, recorded themselves having a party on a plane to Cancún and some are now facing fines. Watch out, a noisy video may autoplay.

    Of course, the people involved may feel that any publicity is good publicity, and getting into the paper is worth the fines.

    Update: The charter company has cancelled their return flight.

    Another update: TMZ has the story.

     

    • steph 12:03 on 2022-01-04 Permalink

      I’m surprised they didn’t ’emergency land’ with police waiting as it happened. At this point,with this media coverage, what passenger is just going to innocently take their pre-planned return flight?

    • Blork 17:50 on 2022-01-04 Permalink

      Among the “lifestyle” archetypes that social media has generated, few are as abhorrent as these self-styled “influencers.” Trumped only by the idiots who are actually influenced by them.

    • Max 17:51 on 2022-01-04 Permalink

      So I can’t go walking in the park on my own after 10 pm, but I can hop on a plane to go party with maskless internet celebutards and their hangers-on in Cancun. Got it.

    • denpanosekai 18:35 on 2022-01-04 Permalink

      fucking douchebags

    • Blork 10:09 on 2022-01-05 Permalink

      Update: Sunwing has cancelled the return flight, essentially abandoning them in Mexico. https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2022/01/04/vol-de-retour-annule-pour-les-influenceurs-quebecois-sur-le-party

    • MarcG 14:25 on 2022-01-05 Permalink

      If they stay there long enough and start inbreeding we may end up with a very bizarre and self-involved Quebec-Mexican subculture.

    • GC 18:50 on 2022-01-05 Permalink

      If they are such great influencers, they should be able to find a sponsored flight back.

    • Max 19:16 on 2022-01-05 Permalink

      Sunwing, Air Transat and Air Canada are all telling these travellers to go fuck themselves.

      Which is cool.

      https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/maskless-influencer-plane-party-a-slap-in-the-face-to-canadians-pm-1.5728606

    • jeather 21:26 on 2022-01-05 Permalink

      I’m really curious how all the other airlines are able to identify the influencer group. Did Sunwing share their names? Can Sunwing share names?
      Apparently they were not popular in the hotel — harassed another guest, yelled at staff, had sex and did drugs in the pool. And they are being refused from the planes in part because their (leaked) group chats discussed faking PCR tests with vaseline and getting faked photoshop tests; also, a number of them are actually testing positive. (I’ve been enjoying following this story.)

    • Raymond Lutz 22:53 on 2022-01-05 Permalink

      @jeather aussi joussif to watch as the Fyre festival train wreck? 😎

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ0KNVU2fV0

  • Kate 10:45 on 2022-01-04 Permalink | Reply  

    NPR tells the story of the ploy that turned Montreal into “the Hollywood of video games” and has left Quebec taxpayers held hostage to footing part of the salary of games developers forever.

     

    • steph 11:56 on 2022-01-04 Permalink

      Calling the tax-credit a subsity is disingenious. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but the government does this for many industries.

    • Blork 12:30 on 2022-01-04 Permalink

      It should be noted that a spokesperson for the Quebec Minister of Finance (a few clicks reveals it to be Audrey Cloutier) said, in 2017, that the multimedia sector creates so much economic activity that “the tax revenue for the government of Quebec generated by the sector is greater than the expenditure related to the tax credit.”

    • Joey 12:34 on 2022-01-04 Permalink

      @Blork this is the same argument for building a baseball stadium, right?

    • Blork 13:45 on 2022-01-04 Permalink

      @Joey, sort of, although in the case of baseball it’s speculation, whereas with the tech subsidy it’s proven. (FWIW I am not in favour of a baseball stadium.)

    • Joey 15:40 on 2022-01-04 Permalink

      I was thinking more from a logical/rhetorial perspective. Anyhow, it seems the tech subsidy economic impact is more “asserted” and “taken for granted” than “proven,” no? And of course these economic impact things always overstate the value of a dollar (i.e., the dollar spent by a Ubi employee winds up counting for like $3 of impact as it moves around the Quebec economy) yet they always exclude the opportunity cost: could propping up another industry (like, I dunno, basket-weavers or pro ball players) generate even more economic value for Quebecers. This gov’t seems to think that any $ invested in the private sector that generates at least the equivalent in tax revenue is good enough.

    • mare 18:14 on 2022-01-04 Permalink

      Don’t forget the “made in Quebec” logos on film credits, because some of the visual effects were done here. The whole world we exist now. (I presume games have a similar ‘logo’ placement, but I don’t play computer/console games.)

    • David Senik 12:51 on 2022-01-05 Permalink

      Joey, the positive return on investment associated with tech tax credit is provable. Not sure if it’s been done but one could certainly calculate the costs by subtracting the cost of the subsidies from the additional tax revenue the governement takes in due to an increased number of people working who wouldn’t otherwise be employed or working in alower wage job without the credit. For example, I know they’ve done this for subsidized daycare, which demonstrably generates more benefits than costs.

    • Joey 13:58 on 2022-01-05 Permalink

      @David I get it. That said, the idea that without the tax credit all those gamedev people “wouldn’t otherwise be employed or working in a lower wage” is harder to prove, no? Moreover, the issue isn’t so much “if we prop up the gaming sector we’ll collect income taxes from gaming sector workers,” it’s “which sectors should we prop up (and for how long) to generate the most societal benefit?”

    • Dominic 15:39 on 2022-01-05 Permalink

      @mare Definitely in the Assassin’s Creed series and Far Cry games, the title opens with created by UBISOFT MONTREAL, for what its worth. Large parts of Assassin’s Creed take place in a fictionalized near-future Montreal as well.

    • Uatu 22:26 on 2022-01-05 Permalink

      And some of those ubisoft software engineers are tenants of one of my coworkers who’s also a landlord in the plateau. Apparently they’re great tenants and this landlord is happy to have quiet tenants that pay rent on time instead of the students they had in the 80s and 90s.

    • Ian 09:43 on 2022-01-06 Permalink

      They certainly have contributed to rapidly increasing rents and gentrification in the neighbourhood.
      Saint Viateur is basically a lunch counter for Ubisoft.

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