When I was a sassy teenager, I used to laugh when my mother bemoaned the rising price of food. She’d have the last laugh at me now, wouldn’t she?
$5.49 today for a bundle of rapini, and not a generous bundle either.
Also, the neighbourhood fruiterie has gaps in its usual range of products – the guys tell me they often can’t get items now because of supply chain issues, or else the wholesale cost is so high they know nobody would buy at the price they would have to ask.
The occupation of the Université de Montréal’s Roger-Gaudry pavilion ended Saturday as the university agreed to present a plan to divest from fossil fuels by 2025.
And y’all can too. If you have money in funds in an RRSP or TFSA, do you know what they are? Or did you get whatever crap the bank sold you? You can start by searching “ESG funds”.
Thanks for the tip, @Chris. I already liquidated the majority of my investments in favour of mostly local “green” companies (Lion Electric, Taiga Motors, etc) in a self-directed account. Now I know what I’ll do with the rest of my investments: ESG funds.
dhomas, you might find these links useful:
https://www.goodinvesting.com/
https://canadiancouchpotato.com/
https://fossilfreefunds.org (US market only)
a few possible funds: XCSR, XUSR, XDSR.
Yet again, a piece about getting people back to the office, with a blanket statement (again from the Chamber of Commerce) that people will be chivvied back into line after Easter (April 17, this year). With the inevitable soundbite also from Glenn Castanheira, the point man for relentlessly boosting downtown.
It occurred to me recently what I find silly about this. “Downtown” exists because people worked there in large numbers. But now people talk about “downtown” as something that has to be supported to go on existing in its familiar old format (which began around the turn of the last century, more or less) no matter what social or technological changes have taken place meantime.
But if you think back, you’ll remember anxious talk about the state of Montreal’s downtown at least since the 1980s, with the exodus of business interests that followed the first election of the PQ in 1976 and the 1980 referendum, followed by a slower dispersal of smaller businesses to more affordable locations outside the city core. It’s a long time now that someone can both live and work in a suburb and never get within a stone’s throw of Phillips Square.
This constant dinning of “back to the office!” feels more like “back to the 20th century!”
Downtown businesses are not in themselves a cause. They have to exist to serve society as it is now, not as it was in the 1940s or 1960s, no matter how nostalgic our memories of Ste‑Catherine Street back in the day.
“Many companies have noticed drops in employee motivation, in productivity and especially greater difficulty in integrating new employees.”
My first question is: how did you measure that?
My second is: what did you do to improve?
Because that statement is a very bold admission of incompetence by management.
Amen to all you wrote, but especially your last paragraph!
The rhetoric that workers should be forced back to the office because we need them to spend money on eating out and the like drives me nuts.
Heaven forbid people save money and work comfortably, that would be terrible.
(I know there is value to working in offices in some cases, but that is not a good reason).
Kevin, are our journalists so bored that they can’t be bothered to challenge those statements by the Chamber of Commerce as you’ve done here? The CoC clearly believes that if they keep saying it, it will manufacture consent, even if it’s something the majority doesn’t want, but journalists keep reporting it as fact.
Em, thanks!
Kate
I don’t think it’s boredom. I suspect ignorance or just deadline pressure (which is nothing like it was even 15 years ago). A lot of people are burned out and don’t necessarily realize it…
Like I said in another post, I spoke to a Ceo earlier this week of a Montreal company that is now fully remote and facing challenges hiring, because the competition is the entire continent.
I have a friend who owns a youth-oriented game company, and he’s ecstatic. Since the pandemic he’s gone entirely remote and is hiring employees around the world…
I think we are truly in a Future Shock situation and a lot of managers don’t realize it.
Since the start of the pandemic, a lot more wild turkeys have appeared on Montreal streets. A page on the city website advises not to approach them or feed them, but maybe push them away with “an umbrella or a stick” without actually hitting them.
The expert consulted by Metro notes that these birds can flap a little way in the air but mostly don’t fly, so the mystery is how they got onto the island at all.
Can’t help thinking of Les Nessman at WKRP….
I never watched that show, but I know the famous scene you mean.
Perhaps the turkeys reached the island of Montreal by trekking over the ice in the winter.
As Romeo Saganash tweeted Friday about the Pope’s apology to a group of Canadian Indigenous people, “That was not an apology! He said sorry for the bad behaviour [of] “some Catholics”!” And Kahnawake’s Ratsénhaienhs Ross Montour says similarly in this piece, that “the Pope apologized for the actions of some priests and nuns and not the church itself.” Some are now awaiting a papal visit to see whether a more complete acknowledgement is made.
So no admission whatsoever from the Pope hinting that **the sublimation of natural sexuality** which is a major part of Abrahamic religions, may cause this type of behavior?
qatzelok, did you think the Pope was ever going to delve into psychological issues in this situation, even if the Catholic church bought into modern psychology, which it never has?
The Pope has clearly been advised, if he hadn’t already internalized the notion, that he must not admit to organizational guilt. In a sense, he’s basically doing a François Legault. There is no systemic racism in Quebec. There are no systemic coverups of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. If the Pope did admit the systemic flaws in his church, the Catholic church would have to pay up, big time – and, even more painfully, change. And it is not going to change.
As Taras Grescoe tweeted Friday, “Sell a Rafael, a Titian, a Michelangelo, and use the revenues to fund a safe and consistent supply of potable water to every living Indigenous person in the land known to some as Canada, Your Holiness. It would be a start.”
Ensemble Montréal chief Aref Salem spoke up this week about the indebtedness of his party. Despite Denis Coderre’s boast that he was leaving the party in good financial standing, this was not the case, and Salem doesn’t care who knows it.
The city has started the inevitable spring cleanup of 4100 km of streets, 6500 km of sidewalks, 900 km of bike paths and 1500 parks. Mayor Plante began by piloting a mini street sweeper in the Village (with a nervous col bleu looking on).
Police raided a downtown apartment Thursday, seized guns and arrested seven people, who’ve been charged with possession of firearms. Kind of a short piece which I suspect is the kind of thing the SPVM badly wants out there to show they’re doing something about weapons.
Some Université de Montréal students have been holding a sit‑in to press the school to divest from fossil fuels. A few of them have attempted a hunger strike, which has resulted in one student taken to hospital. (Do people hold sit‑ins now, or is it described as “occupying”? Either way.)
Kevin 20:44 on 2022-04-02 Permalink
I never laughed, but I do remember waiting in a line for discount bread. Somewhere in St. Laurent in the ’80s?
Kate 20:47 on 2022-04-02 Permalink
I remember a discount bread shop in the Point, but that was when I was working in the Nordelec building in the 1990s. I never went in.
I wasn’t really mocking my mother in a mean way, I should add. Just the usual “oh mommmm” kind of teenage thing from a kid who hadn’t started buying her own groceries yet.
Adding to the situation is that my parents had me and my sister fairly late, so their memories went back further than my friends’ parents, with consequential historic referencing. My mother told me more than once that her mother could provision a family of two adults and three kids on $5 a week.
dhomas 21:18 on 2022-04-02 Permalink
I still go to the discount bread store every couple of weekends and fill up my freezer, like my mom did before me. The 3 kids go through so much bread with their pb&j sandwiches. Even the discount store prices have gone up, though. It used to be 4 loaves for 6$ and it’s now 3 for 5.50$.
CE 21:23 on 2022-04-02 Permalink
When I was a kid, I’d get annoyed that my mom would drag my brother and I around to different grocery stores in our town to get that week’s best prices from the flyers. She knew exactly what to get from each store. We would get impatient but it did mean more samples and free cookies from the bakery departments for us.
Kate 21:30 on 2022-04-02 Permalink
Oh yes, CE. Flyers and coupons. My mom said, early on, that she’d walk an extra five blocks to save a dime. Later we lived in a location with one Steinberg’s nearby but few other choices, and a dime wasn’t worth as much either, so that didn’t apply so much.
dhomas 22:11 on 2022-04-02 Permalink
Anyone else have to pretend they didn’t know their mom so they could buy more than the limit per customer of Javex (or anything else on sale)? Good times…
Ant6n 07:42 on 2022-04-03 Permalink
Perhaps it’s a good time to learn to make bread? Perhaps something simple with yeast. Used to do it as a student, later decided it was easier to just buy…
Kate 09:35 on 2022-04-03 Permalink
Ant6n, does it work that way? A lot of folks I know online got into the early pandemic trend of making your own bread. But between getting ingredients, messing with sourdough starter, buying bread machines in some cases, plus the time it takes, it never sounded like it was for budgetary reasons, but rather to give people something fidgety to do that produced a useful result.
Meezly 10:34 on 2022-04-03 Permalink
Do food prices ever drop once they go up? Knowing the greediness of food industry execs probably not. Maybe this will bring about more demand for food co-ops and bulk food stores, which there are not enough of in this city. I’m hoping that if food prices continue to rise it will force the overhaul of food manufacturing and distribution to be less wasteful and more sustainable.
MarcG 10:35 on 2022-04-03 Permalink
I make a very simple no-knead sourdough bread with organic whole wheat and it costs me around $2.25 a loaf and a bit of effort and cleaning.
Kevin 11:19 on 2022-04-03 Permalink
If you have limited time and cash, plan meals that spin off from one another.
So your leftover rice from having Tofu (or beef if you prefer) and broccoli goes into your enchilada filling for the next day, and so on.
Tee Owe 12:17 on 2022-04-03 Permalink
You can make sodabread in under an hour – no yeast, just flour, soda bicarb, pinch salt, and buttermilk. Tastes great!
EmilyG 17:09 on 2022-04-03 Permalink
I can’t eat gluten. Gluten-free food was expensive even before rising food prices.
dhomas 20:23 on 2022-04-03 Permalink
@EmilyG my wife is celiac, diagnosed in 2005. Gluten-free food has always been expensive, true. It used to be expensive and terrible tasting, too. Then, it got trendy to eat gluten-free, and prices went down (a bit) and quality went up. But gluten-free food has also gone up in price lately.