Following from Tuesday’s item, public health’s Dr Luc Boileau held a presser Wednesday warning of rising COVID-19 numbers as the virus spawns new variants. He suggests people go for another booster.
Updates from June, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The only way to deal with chaos at the airport is to reduce the number of flights, according to Aéroports de Montréal. So that’s what they’re going to do.
Ephraim
Next they will complain that there aren’t enough passengers and flights to cover expenses and they will want money from the government, plus an increase in the fees to use the airport… all because they can’t properly manage an airport.
Here’s a wild idea… how about we put up the management of the airport out to tender, with a company bonded to provide the service at a fixed price and a fixed AIF and if the level of complaints go up, we FINE them and give them 90 days notice of the end of their contract. In other words, you fail at management of the airport… you lose your contract and your JOB.
Meezly
It’s not just here and it’s not just bad management. This is a trend we’re seeing with airports across North America.
Demand for travel shrank during the pandemic and the global travel industry is now trying to keep up now that everyone suddenly wants to and can travel, including passport offices, car rental companies, etc.
What we should really be telling everyone is continue to vacation locally, if you can do so.
Bert
But remember a year or so ago when there were all the hub-bub about zombie flights done by the airlines, to keep flight crew current (minimum flight time per period required) and / or to landing / gate privileges. Airlines pay for the number of gates they occupy and do so by landing and/or operations. (to be fair I don’t really understand why an airline couldn’t just continue paying “the rent” with no flights).
Ephraim, I feel that whatever management you might have at an individual airport, it is the cartel of airlines and the overarching national / global regulation bodies’s that have so much regulation (which I am not saying is a bad thing) that just overrides all the rest.
Silly question, but do you think that it is a problem with the number of ground or flight crew, , servers who get you your double-double or authentic Montreal smoked meat or that duty free Channel No. 5, or the security personnel – potentially extended to the Montreal police, the infrastructure people of the airport, or even the air traffic controllers? There are at least 5 distinct responsible groups in there…. The carrier, merchants, CATSA – SPVM, ADMTL, Nav Can. They all need to mesh together and if one or more is out-of-sink all the dominoes fall.
Of course, that said, one will probably need a valid passport… Cart meet horse…. Horse meet cart.
Ephraim
We have a real sickness in this country for “not-for-profits” that are really ripping off the public and AdeMtl and Tourisme Montreal are two examples. They are quasi governmental and aren’t really an open non-profit, they are not for profits that make any profit disappear at the end of the year in management’s pockets.
They aren’t working with locked salaries and move the money to the next year and lower the cost of services (like SAAQ), they instead just increase the salaries of management, make it all go to $0 and voila, they are “non-profit”.
And of course, all you have to do is call out the press releases… https://www.newswire.ca/fr/news-releases/adm-annonce-ses-resultats-financiers-au-31-mars-2022-823217078.html where they show their paper losses… business up 163%, loss down 57%… but of course, if they cut down how much traffic they handle… the losses will be worse.
Tim S.
A pilot acquaintance has been telling me since the beginning of the pandemic that while the pilots would stick around through the furloughs, the ground staff probably wouldn’t.
Ephraim
Let’s see… Air Canada pays full-time ramp agent $21.11 and part time $16.60. Not a lot of money to be slinging 30 kg luggage. Want to clean the planes? $15.55 an hour. Call centre $16.56 an hour. Want to be yelled at while checking people in? That’s $16.56 an hour. It’s clear, the company just isn’t realistic about their pay.
I can’t get someone to clean for $25 an hour and they don’t have to trudge out to Dorval to do it.
Bert
The cost of the SAAQ services hasn’t gone down. The costs of the insurance premiums that are part of the overall fees have gone down, resulting in an overall lower total cost.
Lots of groups leverage the Not-For-Profit status… like the NFL, the PGA, the NFL, various IOC country organizations, and the NCAA. How much do the real workers of the NCAA, i.e. the athletes, make squat.
Daniel D
It would be good for Canada (or at least, Ontario and Quebec) to look at what’s been done in France:
• Build high speed rail links between its major cities
• Make the pricing and convenience competitive with air travel
• When there’s enough critical mass on the trains but enough remaining capacity, ban direct flights between those cities connected by high speed railWhen you look at the number of daily flights between Montreal and Toronto, Ottawa and Quebec, if you removed those this would take the pressure off the airport in a big way and you’ve also removed a tonne of daily carbon emissions as well.
Ephraim
@Bert – The surplus of the SAAQ goes 50% to the Generations fund and 50% to surplus to cover future costs. NONE of it goes to giving management a golden ticket. Tourisme Montreal, for example, gave the leaving manager over $700K. That is NOT how public money should be spent. And when I say public money… every hotel is collecting a 3.5% tax for them. You take public money… you have to have better standards.
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Kate
There have been more arrests in the shooting death of Mereim Bendaoui in February 2021, and details will be given out later Wednesday.
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Kate
SPVM police seized a lot of drugs, cash and guns recently, but La Presse’s writers tell about it in a story discussing how “street gangs” are now competing with bigger players like the Mafia and the biker gangs. Is it even useful to make these distinctions? What makes a gang “street”? I’m not accusing either Daniel Renaud or Henri Ouellette‑Vézina of being racist, but they report unquestioningly on the police assumption that there’s some distinction between the bikers, Mafia and Irish gangs on the one hand, and “street gangs” on the other, which mostly seems to be based on the fact that members of “street gangs” aren’t for the most part white.
steph
What’s with the watermarks on the SPVM pictures?
Ephraim
Without pictures, articles and exaggerated amounts based on the cut street value, rather than the actual wholesale value, the police look like they aren’t doing anything… and it’s hard to request an increase in your budget when people don’t think you are actually doing your job.
Reminds me of how police solve murders… it’s drug/crime/mafia related… solved! It’s amazing how many murders you can mark as solved by classifying them as drug/crime/mafia related, rather than actually leaving them open… because who wants a solve rate of just 5%… it doesn’t look good.
Kate
From my observations doing this blog for 20 years, most homicides are either gang‑related or domestic (some of which stem from untreated mental illnesses). The cops have few actual murder mysteries to solve in the classic sense. They may not immediately know which specific gangster pulled the trigger, but they do usually have a good idea where to look. Our cops have their failings, but triangulating on gang hits is something they’re pretty good at.
Have a look at last year’s incident map. There were 37 homicides last year. The Gazette ran a piece about this, and accorded the cops a 57% solution rate, compared to a 92% rate in 2020. (The rate for 2021 may just have risen with the arrests in the shooting of Meriem Bendaoui.)
I don’t think they can mark a murder as solved if they know it was a gang hit but don’t know who did it.
Ephraim
I don’t specifically know the rules in Montreal, but it’s common in many laces… like LA. Of the 25 murders in 2020, the Montreal police claimed they solved 22 of them. The national average in Canada is 76%. And yet LA has a 50% solve rate, with a lot more resources.
Kate
What I’m not sure about – maybe H. John can tell us – is whether police can consider a homicide solved when someone’s arrested and charged, or when they’re convicted. In the latter case, they’d have to wait a year or two till cases come to trial and are resolved.
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Kate
Maria Mourani tells us that Montreal probably has five rats for every human but hasn’t this been true of most cities since we’ve had cities?
Ephraim
Usually a city has mice or rats, but not both… because the rats eat the mice. But I have rarely seen a rat in Montreal… but see mice all over the place, even running on the metro tracks. Where are people seeing these rats…. other than the CAC offices? 🙂
walkerp
That is weird, because I’ve never seen a rat in Montreal either. I don’t know what the ratio was in NYC when I was there, but they were quite visible, especially if you were out late.
John B
I’ve seen rats walking along in front of the apartments on my block of Verdun street, including my building.
They apparently weren’t doing a great job of eating the mice, because I’ve also had mice in my building.
MarcG
There was a rat hanging around behind my place a few years ago and I’ve seen them scurrying around in vacant lots around town. But tons of mice, too, I think I’ve caught over 20 in the past few years.
CE
I can tell none of you have ever worked in a restaurant kitchen in Montreal. If you want to see rats, you’ll get plenty of them there.
I’ve had mice and voles in various apartments around the city but usually have a cat living with me, so they generally don’t last long. I’ve never seen or heard of a rat in an apartment in Montreal.
GC
I had mice in my first apartment in Montreal and the Super told me the basement apartment had had a rat. I guess they were all living in harmony?
I’ve seen plenty of mice in the metro, but the only time I actually saw rats here was when I cut through Place Emilie-Gamelin at night a few months ago. They were…not small. (Though I definitely saw bigger ones in Manhattan.)
dhomas
Due to some poorly done, DIY-type renovations, the last apartment I lived at in Rosemont had rats coming up from the sewers. I could hear them gnawing/clawing at the walls at night, and every so often they would find their way out and into the apartment. I never left any kind of food out on the counter or anything, because I was worried the rats might come for it. Eventually, the owners got it fixed, but it was kinda nasty for a while. Never saw another test after that sewer repair, though.
At my new place, I will sometimes see what I think are deer mice. My cat will sometimes bring them home. Never seen a rat here, though.Kate
GC, if anywhere in this city was going to have Rodents of Unusual Size, it would be that square.
dhomas, that gnawing is horror movie-esque.
dwgs
Maybe 10 or 12 years ago a rat got into our house, still not sure how. The sewers had recently been redone on a nearby street, maybe that had something to do with it. Nothing quite like lying in bed hearing the thing scuttle around the house in the dead of night, debating whether to get up and chase it (thereby waking up and freaking out the whole family) or try to subtly let it know that you’re there and awake and hope it goes back into hiding. They’re too smart for traps, in the end I called an exterminator. Pro tip, save yourself a couple of hundred bucks and just go buy a lot of poison yourself and place it all over the house. Oh, and be prepared for the poisoned rat to stagger out into public, behaving very erratically and stage a very dramatic death scene. It’s not an experience I would recommend.
Kate
Sewer work can do it. A long time ago, a friend’s residential street was dug up for sewer replacement in NDG and their house became infested with rats. I don’t remember what they had to do about it, just how nasty it was for them.
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Kate
The city says it’s braced for Moving Day with resources to help households that haven’t yet found affordable new digs.
Bert 16:33 on 2022-06-29 Permalink
To be fair, the article states that the recommendation is for the 4th dose, which has been available for a while now. “…..une deuxième dose de rappel – c’est-à-dire une quatrième dose du vaccin …..”
Those who are already quad-vaxed are not being suggested to get another booster.
Kate 21:28 on 2022-06-29 Permalink
Yes, that is clearer. Thank you.