François Legault has announced a partial reopening plan for restaurants, theatres and cinemas. Reading this alongside another article where the fire chief explains that so many of his guys are out sick that it’s verging on dangerous, what are we to think?
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Kate
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Kate
Two properties on Esplanade south of Mont‑Royal, left to rot for decades, will finally be sold. One has already had to be demolished. These were handsome stone-fronted buildings which, had they been maintained, could still be in use. I can only hope that whatever’s built on the empty lot will be in harmony with the buildings already there.
I did a bit of looking back and note that in 2019, the demolished building was taken apart carefully. I don’t know whether they will really be able to reassemble it as it was, or even if they should do so. We don’t construct buildings the same way now. A new building in the same form factor, integrating that façade, would be the ideal. The other building, still mostly standing, could get the same treatment because I doubt it’s worth trying to return the interior to livable condition. But it will all cost someone a pretty penny and those condos will not be cheap.
walkerp
I want to know Guy Desrosiers story, but prima facie, he is going to architectural hell.
Kate
walkerp, you asked the same question 2.5 years ago. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any explanation of what Desrosiers thought he was doing with those two properties.
Max
Thanks for scaring up the 2019 article. I was wondering about that this morning.
I’m confident that the facade will go back up as part of the eventual redevelopment. It’s not like we have a shortage of qualified stonework artisans, and who wouldn’t want to live in a modern apartment, on a quiet tree-lined street, facing Mount Royal, behind an authentic greystone facade? I’d be first in line if I had the means to take on a $1M+ mortgage. That little strip’s on par with Carré St. Louis in terms of desirability.
Could it be M. Desrosiers just aged out of the real-estate game?
Kate
It’s an interesting street architecturally between Mont-Royal and Duluth. Mind you, there’s a real eyesore at 4387 – it looks institutional, and I think it was built as an extension to the one to the south of it, and I have an idea they belong to a religious order. Certainly 4387 is the sort of bad modern architecture the Catholics like.
Also, someone should have a word with the owners of 4219 about that brick excrescence.
Re Desrosiers: quite possibly. I seem to remember he lived in one of those buildings and did not want to leave. Maybe he underestimated the work it takes being a landlord and maintenance guy for a couple of old buildings, even ones that may have been in acceptable condition when he bought them. Something’s always leaking or having to be patched up.
Max
Ouf! There’s one in every crowd, eh? Where’s the architecture police when you really need ’em?
MarcG
What am I even looking at? Yikes.
Max
Retrofitted fire escape is all I can think of. No idea why they would put that monstrosity in front when there’s room in back of the building though.
As for 4387 the internet says it was most recently a 16-bed privately run in-patient mental health / addiction treatment centre. Permanently closed per Google Maps. The older brick building at 4373 is currently a Chez Doris-type women’s shelter / support centre.
Blork
Regarding why that fugly fire escape is at the front instead of at the back, it could be because there’s already something at the back and this one is for tenants whose apartments are at the front.
Or more likely, it was just easier to build it in the front, and the work was done in the 70s or early 80s when nobody gave AF about architectural heritage or built-environment aesthetics.
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Kate
From talks with the authorities, the Journal has estimated that at least 2000 illegal guns are circulating around the city, changing hands for anything from $1,000 to $8,000.
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Kate
Police are asking for possible victims of a foster family accused of years of abuse in their Montreal East home to report in, and strengthen the case against them.
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Kate
La Presse has discovered that three unvaccinated Covid patients at the CHUM have been given double lung transplants after the virus ravaged their own. The ethical dilemma is front and centre in this piece.
Meezly
If they recover, they could show their gratitude by becoming voluntary advocates for vaccinations.
jeather
I didn’t realise we had such a wealth of lungs for transplant. But we don’t, for instance, refuse lungs to people who have smoked if they quit; similarly, these people have since been vaccinated.
The article seems to imply some were not unvaccinated but only had one dose (one is described as unvaccinated, but the term ‘not adequately vaccinated’ is what is used for just one dose), and they got covid 6-8 months ago. As open 2nd doses for <45 started in early July, I'd like more clarity on the other 2.
Clément
I guess there’s a difference between “was not vaccinated” vs “refuses to get vaccinated”.
A related article from the US this morning (relayed by Richard Hétu): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brigham-and-womens-hospital-boston-refusing-heart-transplant-man-wont-get-vaccinated/. Their argument is about “lifestyle behaviour”.
Blork
That’s the same principle as refusing a liver transplant to someone who refuses to stop drinking alcohol.
It’s not the same as the lung transplant issue here, because none of those people were anti-vaxxers, and they have all since been vaxxed, so the risk of being a “wasted transplant” is no different from any other transplant recipient.
This guy in the US (and people who need liver transplants but won’t stop drinking) ARE essentially throwing away their transplants by putting themselves at extraordinary risk of premature death.
It’s not like transplant organs are in abundant supply and we can afford to waste any on people that will not mitigate their risk of dying prematurely.
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Kate
The city wrote a $35M contract in 2018 for IT services that the BIG has condemned as having major irregularities and ordaining it be cancelled as soon as possible. The company does seem to be getting paid a ludicrous amount for hooking the city up to Google cloud applications, but that’s how IT always benefits from the technical helplessness of bureaucrats.
The Plante administration has promised to act to sort this out.
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Kate
Persistent anti-masker and anti-vaxxer François Amalega Bitondo was denied bail Monday after he breached a court order to keep his distance from the premier. The prosecutor cited Amalega Bitondo’s flouting of previous bail conditions.
Max
Let him rot in jail until he comes up with the $60K. What a waste of skin.
MarcG
The guy is clearly mentally ill.
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Kate
This is stuff I’m only seeing on Twitter and not in the main media: according to this doctor’s tweet: Quebec’s education minister dismantled contact tracing in schools, prohibited the closing of classes / the isolation of contacts, prohibited schools from notifying parents of cases, no longer declares or tracks outbreaks, and then announces proudly that no schools have been closed due to Covid.
This is kind of important information, especially with an impending announcement of the reopening of everything. Why is this not being more widely reported and discussed?
What we don’t need: politicians who mistake spin for fact.
Updated to add: CTV found some boards and parent groups doing their own reporting and tracking. Is there anything closer to the heart of most parents than the health and well-being of their kids, and is the CAQ playing games with this to their peril?
dwgs
I was reading that on the way in to work this morning. In order to close a class 60% of the students must be absent for two straight days and anyone who is absent but online isn’t marked as absent.
Tim S.
It’s sort of there in the main media, but phrased as “some parents are worried” and left at that. What’s frustrating is how simplistic the narratives are: “Online school bad, in-person school good.” Online school isn’t ideal, but students still learn far more than they would if they were in bed with a fever for a week, or from a substitute. Switching for two weeks in the event of a outbreak isn’t the end of the world.
Also generally disturbing: that there seems to be no timeline or intention to going back to mass testing and contact tracing. At the very least, how hard is it to set up an website to report a rapid-test result?
Kate
I recall a promise to set up a site to report rapid test results, a couple of weeks ago. But they clearly don’t want the official figures to be inflated by actual case numbers, because it might make reopening businesses look foolhardy.
Joey
QC administered 27K tests yesterday (well, Sunday, reported yesterday). At what point do they re-open PCR testing to all?
jeather
I see a lot of that kind of complaint on twitter, but the regular press is not saying much about this. I assume they are going to continue to restrict PCR testing until the howls from the public get too extreme/the risk to his approval rating is too high. The longer he can do it, the better we can pretend the numbers are.
steph
I take it they’ve crookedly announced that “basically we accpet that everyone will get Covid, so lets stop wasting any more money”…
Kate
steph, it feels like that’s what they’ve decided, yes.
Joey
22K samples reported for yesterday, way down from Saturday (turns out the daily reports for testing are from two days’ prior). If this isn’t an artifact of reduced demand for tests on weekend, there really is no reason to ration tests. Then again, Public Health may have decided that rapid tests > PCR tests for the duration of Omicron. That said, having administered a rapid test, I supsect there are false negatives due to ‘user error’ and the lack of any kind of reporting is nuts. If we had waste-water analysis, I think we’d be OK for a system view, but since we don’t…
Tim S.
It’s interesting to watch the press conferences live, both for the politicians and the journalists. The past couple that I’ve seen there have been a bunch of questions about re-opening restaurants, nothing about re-opening testing. And so the politicians are taking their cues accordingly, I assume.
Joey
Agreed. The questions make me nuts.
Also, while it’s easy for us to criticize the gov’t for not creating a rapid-test reporting tool, I can’t imagine it actually being all that useful. Too much unreliability, voluntary participation, etc. Would probably wind up as useless as the smartphone app the feds were pushing for a year.
mare
(anecdate here, and a bit late comment):
(I know healthcare workers who see patients get tested twice a week, which accounts for a large amount of tests.)
I personally had 4 PCR tests this week while staying in a Montreal hospital, so maybe that’s were most of the current tests are done. We had a Covid outbreak on our floor last week, but when I asked they wouldn’t divulge if it affected staff or also patients. They sold it as ‘routine’ testing, but of course only the patients who were here for a long time know if was that a ‘normal’ routine. We have room arrest, don’t see other patients, so we can’t even ask them. There’s no panic though, and they didn’t tighten the mask-wearing requirements. Patients are still only provided shitty procedure mask (and don’t get a new one every dayn or ever), and they can take them off when in their beds. My test results were never divulged, but I presume I tested negative, because we can still have one visitor. But today my visitor was asked to not sit on the end of my bed, because of Covid (contact) transmission. In the mean time ventilation is not great (baseboard heaters) and the windows are never opened.SMD
Tim S., the ministry of health quietly launched this website to report your positive rapid test yesterday: https://covid19.quebec.ca/autodeclaration/. It is for statistical purposes only, and doesn’t link to your vaccine passport or health file, but at least it is a start.
Tim S.
Thanks SMD.
Chris 22:52 on 2022-01-25 Permalink
I guess that covid is here to stay, and that we have to keep calm and carry on as it were.
SMD 08:08 on 2022-01-26 Permalink
I guess that we have given up, and that we have to keep calm and ignore the suffering of those we have decided to sacrifice.
Reminds me of this pandemic poem:
To learn to live
with the virus
is an easy thing
all it requires
is that you
learn to ignore
those dying
from the virus.
MarcG 11:25 on 2022-01-26 Permalink
Or as in the article above, ignore people dying in fires?
Chris 11:33 on 2022-01-26 Permalink
SMD, is it so different from how we “ignore” the 0.5 million that die of flu? Or the 1.4 million that die in car crashes? Or the 8 million that die of air pollution? (All figures global, per year.)
They aren’t totally ignored, there are some mitigations in place to keep those numbers from being even bigger. It’s a trade off. We accept some deaths for the benefits of industry, car travel, etc. And we’ll surely keep some covid mitigations too. But we can’t stay at red alert forever.
Kevin 14:29 on 2022-01-26 Permalink
There is no question that Covid is here to stay: that’s been a certainty since the fall of 2020, if not earlier.
But we are not yet at a point where it is stable, nor is it going to be manageable without restrictions of some kind for many months or years to come.
John S 16:22 on 2022-01-26 Permalink
Kevin, we are also at a point where we have some very good defenses (vaccines, antivirals, monoclonals) as well as a better understanding of transmission and how to prevent it. We may need some restrictions, precautions, and protocols – but the blanket closures of April 2020 are no longer needed, are likely doing more harm than good, and are no longer considered tolerable by many in the population. Its time to be discussing how to move forward. Not talking about a wholesale return to December 2019 – but incremental steps.
Tim S. 16:55 on 2022-01-26 Permalink
We’re not at red alert, or April 2020, the whole time – most things were open in the summer and fall, we almost made to back to almost normal life, and then the virus evolved and we had to go back a few steps. When it comes to mental health, I can only speak for myself, but accepting that things will go back and forth, good months will follow bad months, is much easier for me than constantly hoping “this is it!”
MarcG 20:41 on 2022-01-26 Permalink
When car crashes cripple our hospital system and cancel cancer surgeries I guess Chris will have a point but until then he’s just racing to the bottom by himself. When I first started following this blog I thought his comments made sense because he was saying “Look at all of this other horrible shit we tolerate – we should be taking politicians to the gallows over climate change, deaths caused by cars, etc!” but it turns out his actual point is “If we accept that 8 million people die of air pollution every year then we should all just die”. Not a philosophy I subscribe to (anymore), thanks anyways.
Philosica 20:52 on 2022-01-26 Permalink
Hospital system was crippled in 2018 too but no measures were deemed necessary then because pharma had no goodies to sell. Sick elderly people die in big numbers every Quebec winter, as the official numbers demonstrate. Stop the convouted silliness and get back to living normal.
dwgs 21:38 on 2022-01-26 Permalink
Every Chris post is a finely blended mix of condescension and naysaying, point finale.
Chris 21:50 on 2022-01-26 Permalink
>but it turns out his actual point is “If we accept that 8 million people die of air pollution every year then we should all just die”.
That is not my point at all. How the heck did you reach that conclusion?
Like Kate said in her summary, at issue here is a “partial reopening plan”. See that word “partial”? I don’t see anyone here (including me) arguing that there should be *zero* covid mitigations. But neither am I in the camp of “we should wear masks forevermore” and “we should do everything possible to save every last person from covid”. My view is we should do more than nothing, but less than everything, just as we do for all those other kinds of deaths. You (I presume, like everyone) accept slave labour making your smartphone and clothing; well, I’m willing to accept a (small!) number of covid deaths to live more normally again. If you think that makes me a horrible person, consider that you might be a hypocrite, if you use an automobile, own a smartphone, buy fast fashion, etc., etc.
nau 10:14 on 2022-01-27 Permalink
I find it odd that you make the argument that we have in the past accepted a certain amount of flu deaths, so in the future we should accept a certain number of COVID-19 deaths. Society only progresses if we use our brains to learn and then act on what we’ve learned. If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that the measures we’ve used to keep COVID-19 somewhat under control are highly effective in controlling the flu. As Philosica has so kindly reminded us, in the past lots of elderly people died unnecessarily early of the flu. Fortunately, we now know that wearing masks and using hand sanitizer are quite effective in reducing the incidence of flu. Should we ever attain a post-COVID-19 future, these are measures we should retain during flu season. We would likely still have to accept some smaller number of flu deaths but the people who would live longer are well worth the very minimal effort required to wear a mask and use hand sanitizer.
MarcG 11:47 on 2022-01-27 Permalink
Nobody is saying “we should wear masks forevermore” and “we should do everything possible to save every last person from covid”. I think at this point everyone could accept that covid is here to stay, and like the flu will kill some people yearly, but at this juncture where the health system is already being crushed is a terrible time to introduce, voluntarily, more people into the ICU.
JohnS 12:04 on 2022-01-27 Permalink
MarcG – in general I agree with you – but pieces like the “pandemic poem” above certainly do insinuate that “we should do everything possible to save every last person from covid.” – and that if you don’t agree you’re somehow callous/immoral/selfish. Its a fairly radical statement that’s as unhelpful as saying “covid is just like the flu”. As for the ICUs – its not at all clear, given the contagiousness of omicron, that interventions like closing gyms and restaurants, and limiting in home gatherings to effectively none, have actually accomplished anything to stem the flow of cases. And in medicine if an intervention is not clearly achieving its goal and is demonstrably causing harm, serious consideration should be given to stopping it.
MarcG 12:53 on 2022-01-27 Permalink
It may not have prevented a flood of cases, but there would certainly would have been more if there were no restrictions. I guess we’ll find out for sure in the next few weeks, oh boy!