There have been no surprises in the election results: Montreal’s riding map stays much the same – Liberals in the west and north, Québec Solidaire in the middle, and a couple of CAQ ridings in the east end. Some new faces, though, considering how many PLQ MNAs packed it in before the election.
I’ll have a list in the morning when the numbers are more finalized.
The identity of the body found in the recycling bin on Docteur‑Penfield remains a mystery. Investigations continue.
A man was found dead in a Côte‑St‑Luc highrise apartment fire Monday afternoon. It’s not suspected to be criminal.
You guys can laugh at this, but I mean it.
I’m annoyed that the new UK prime minister has made the new king give up plans to attend COP27, the environment conference set for next month in Egypt. Charles has attended previous COP meetings and made speeches, and his concern for the environment is one of the positive points about his very long apprenticeship.
Now, we’re set to have a COP meeting on biodiversity here in December. (This is the one that was supposed to be in China, but was moved here, although this official page suggests that some sessions may still be taking place in China this month. Whatever. Big deal environmental thing here from December 7‑19.)
Justin Trudeau needs to invite the King. Technically, he’s just as much the King’s prime minister as Liz Truss is. If Truss can stop the King going to a COP session, Trudeau can invite him to one.
I think I’ll write him an email.
For what it’s worth, a lot of Brits are annoyed about this too. The Guardian article notes the Queen had given such addresses in the past. You’ll also note Liz Truss wants to reintroduce fracking in the UK, showing where she stands on environmental issues. Put two and two together, and it’s not a good look.
I’m annoyed at it too.
Kate, you’ve raised two separate issues.
One effecting Charles III, King of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, and the other Charles III, King of Canada (since the Act of Westminster 1931, they are two distinct persons).
1. The next COP is #27, and of the 26 that preceded it HM, Queen Elizabeth only ever attend one. That was the one held in the UK (Scotland, to be exact) that she hosted. She never travelled to, or participated, in any of the others held outside of the UK (including Montreal 2009).
The King of the UK & NI acts on behalf of his government. He doesn’t randomly pick countries, or events, to visit officially.
William, his son is completely free to do whatever he wants, as Charles was when he was the son of….
The choice of Egypt as host raises far more questions.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-63086209
2. Canada can’t make its mind up. Honestly that should be our official motto.
Since The Viscount Alexander of Tunis, the last Brit. appointed as Governor General (1946-52), we’ve been working, very, very slowly, towards clarifying what the Canadian Crown means.
As far as I can remember, Queen Elizabeth was never once asked to make an international trip to represent Canada. That was always done by the Governor General.
The last international event in Canada opened by QEII, as Queen of Canada, was the Montreal Olympics. Anybody really think that’s going to happen again?
I guess there’s what’s written down, and there’s what’s been established by tradition. Is there any written rule that Trudeau shouldn’t invite the King, or is it just that no PM has ever done that?
Can he invite Prince William? Queen Camilla?
The answer is completely political.
At COP, wouldn’t Canada be best represented by a First Nations person from our north?
At least one Aussie MP has used the UK choice to argue that they have to end the monarchy so they can have their own Head of State to represent them at the next COP.
The Exo train schedule is not back to its pre‑pandemic level with several departures still missing on the St‑Jérôme and Vaudreuil lines. Exo says ridership is not back to where it was, so the old schedule isn’t justified – but this is a chicken‑and‑egg situation, where if the service is not convenient, people won’t use it. Even the pre‑pandemic schedule was pretty sparse.
It’s election day in Quebec and polling stations are short of workers because a lot of them are out with Covid. The phrase “dropping like flies” was mentioned on CBC radio this morning.
Seems like maybe they should have hired vaccinated people willing to wear masks, after all.
Such people were never excluded.
They were defacto self-excluded if they didn’t want to work next to unvaccinated and unmasked people.
Ding. It’s why I’m not working on the election today.
Is there a way to resolve a divided population? They may have had a shortage from the get-go if they excluded unvaccinated and unmasked workers. Saying ”I can’t hire you because you might call in sick” is a realistic slippery slope to stay away from.
”Élection Québec autorise cette année les jeunes de 16 et 17 ans à travailler dans les bureaux de vote.” surprised me. Next the labor shortage will justify allowing minors to sell alcohol. le dos large du COVID 🙂
steph, we won’t know how many people declined to work for elections when told that masks wouldn’t be required. As I’ve said before – you’re working closely alongside people you don’t know, sometimes in not very well ventilated places, for somewhere between 12 and 14 hours straight, and dealing with members of the public. This is exactly a setting where people should still be wearing masks.
I miss it, by the way. Working on election day can be a grind, but it does give you a unique view of the people around you in the place you live, and how cooperative people can be when called on.
I think the last article I read on COVID suggested that it takes up to 20 minutes for the air to be “clear” after someone shedding was there and that is with proper ventilation. And let’s see, some of the polling places are schools, which couldn’t past the 800 mark, and so we upped it to 1000 mark, but still too many schools couldn’t pass, so we increased it to almost double the European standard at 1500 mark! I assure you, I’m voting with my KN95 mask on and staying as short at time in that building as necessary.
I voted today here in Pierrefonds. I didn’t see any of the workers wearing a mask. In the main voting room, there were about 25-30 people total while I was in it, and maybe three were wearing masks (including a kid who had gone along with his mother, so not technically a voter.)
I think the only people still wearing masks in Quebec are the regular commentators on this blog. 🙂
People really don’t realize that Covid is leading to strokes and lots of long-term effects eh? Too bad for them.
Kevin, I certainly feel for anyone who has long Covid, but at this point 89 percent of Canadians have had Covid [1] and most of them seem to be doing fine. Hence the lax attitude towards masking and another other Covid precautions.
[1] https://www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/covid_briefs/101_briefing_Canada.pdf
There also don’t seem to be many studies of the long-term effects of Covid on vaccinated people infected with Omicron. Everything I can find about increased risk of stroke dates to the first half of 2021 or earlier, which means the study subjects were primarily unvaccinated people dealing with previous variants. And of course the sample sizes were much smaller since relatively few people had been infected with Covid before the beginning of this year.
I won’t begrudge anyone for wearing a mask but I also understand why a vast majority of people in Montreal — seemingly everyone in many situations — have stopped wearing them.
I decided to work this year, and it was a shit show. I applied in early September, I think; they called me Tuesday. Same with the person I was at a table with.Maybe they would have had better results if they called people up less than a week before. I also was called Friday and asked to work in PSC, asked if it was confirmed for sure, they said yes. Showed up there, I wasn’t on the list, and then they called asking if I was en route to somewhere entirely different to work. Once it was all set up, it was fine, but yikes.
I wore a nice high quality mask. One or two other workers wore blue medical masks. Maybe 10% of voters wore any sort of masks. 10 dogs also came to the voting location, none in masks. I did take off my mask to eat or drink.
Why would a dog be wearing a mask?
Pretty sure that was a joke CE. At least I hope so.
jeather, did you even get any training? Pre-pandemic, people selected to work on elections were always given – and paid for – a training session a week or two in advance of the election, but it sounds like this time was more of a scramble.
Even if you’d worked in earlier elections, you had to do the training, because occasionally rules would change between elections, and of course procedures and rules aren’t identical between municipal, provincial and federal elections so it doesn’t hurt to be reminded.
Yeah, I worked at a provincial election some years ago, and we had a training session a week or two before.
Some years ago, yes. I was wondering whether it was all being done in more of a rush this time.
@DeWolf: An article that’s perhaps of interest to you https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01453-0
On reflection, I see that has the same shortcomings you mentioned in your comment, but it’s still too early for the study you’re looking for (Long Covid symptoms in vaccinated individuals infected with Omicron) and in my opinion, given the available research, erring on the side of caution is the wise move.
Yes, exactly. It’s too early to tell. The Nature article is very interesting but it refers to studies conducted in 2021. As the article notes, it was already challenging to get accurate data, hence the wildly different estimates of the incidence of long Covid. These days, doing similar studies is nearly impossible because it’s so hard to find a control group. Going forward, the only way we’ll be able to understand the long-term impacts of Covid is on population-wide studies.
It’s a big unknown, but there are many unknowns in life. For most people, Covid has stopped being an existential threat and is now just one of the many risky things in everyday life.
Training was done online. The training booklet was incredibly well done, and the online course — I skimmed it a bit — was quite good as well though a little video heavy. I’m not sure why it took them so long to call for workers; I think it had to do with the preference for candidates nominated by a party (the vast majority of people were nominated by a party). But on the ground it was a disaster (beyond the confusion about who is working where, a lot of the boxes were missing specific items). In D’Arcy McGee they were so short of employees that all the stations were doubled up, and it made things at my station look well oiled.
As blog readers know – if you read the desktop version, at least – I keep a tally in the sidebar of homicides and deaths of both pedestrians and cyclists in traffic.
It’s October, and the cycling fatality total stands at zero.
An acquaintance recently posted about the death of a bartender he knew who got killed riding a Bixi home from his job. The man was injured, didn’t die right away, but he was a cycling fatality, and I never saw it reported.
I’m wondering if police have stopped giving reports of these incidents to media – or have cyclists here really had an almost unblemished year? Statistically I suppose that’s possible, and it’s great if it’s so – but is it likely?
If someone dies more than 2 days after an attack or a crash, it almost never gets relayed to reporters or to the police’s media relations division.
I was always under the impression that the numbers only reflected deaths resulting from a collision. In the case of the bartender, he fell off his bike and hit his head, which eventually led to his death. If somebody dies in a similar way while walking (eg, after slipping on some ice) I don’t think it would be reported as a “pedestrian death.”
Hmm. Maybe that pedestrian death SHOULD be so categorized if the death resulted while (a) being a pedestrian, and (b) due to some pedestrian hazard, such as ice or a hole in the sidewalk.
Similarly, if someone is driving along and they randomly crash into a tree and die, or fall into a sinkhole and die, those are considered motorist deaths. The defining factor should be (I think) if the accident/death was the result of a road hazard (vs. randomly dying of a heart attack or something like that).
A young man was shot Sunday evening in a gas station in the Village. Cops were called for gunfire, but only found shells on the ground; later, the victim turned up in hospital.
So if you go to hospital with bullet wounds, medical personnel are obliged to call the cops? Health privacy doesn’t apply?
I believe its always been that way, and its definitely the case in the United States. If someone gets medical care for a firearms injury, the police are notified. Not sure how the health privacy exception is carved out is legislation, but logically there hardly seems a legal reason to explain why a human has a bullet wound.
ACT TO PROTECT PERSONS WITH REGARD TO ACTIVITIES INVOLVING FIREARMS
https://www.legisquebec.gouv.qc.ca/en/document/cs/P-38.0001
Section 9 says:
9. A director of an institution that operates a hospital centre or local community service centre within the meaning of the Act respecting health services and social services (chapter S-4.2), or a person designated by the director, must report to the police any instance of a person being treated in the institution for an injury caused by a projectile from a firearm, specifying only the person’s identity, if known, and the name of the institution. This information is communicated orally and as soon as is practicably possible, considering the importance of not hampering the treatment of the person concerned or disrupting the normal course of the institution’s activities.
Here’s an article on Mandatory Gunshot reporting in Canada published in 2016.
https://digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1115&context=scholarly_works
Thank you, H. John!
A body was found in a burned‑out car that had been reported to police, Sunday evening in Griffintown. The victim has yet to be identified and there’s no homicide number yet.
This is the second instance of this kind so far this year. A body was also found in a burned‑out car in May.
Chris 22:13 on 2022-10-03 Permalink
The distortions of our FPTP system are always expected, but surprisingly bad this time.
DeWolf 23:06 on 2022-10-03 Permalink
What a depressing election.
On the bright side, the CAQ is down one seat in Montreal (Camille-Laurin went for the PQ).
Uatu 09:12 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
Legault:” I’ll be the premier for all Quebecers”
Hahahaha hahaha
Kevin 09:38 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
People in rural Quebec are really, really scared of Montreal.
mare 10:00 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
People in rural Quebec are TAUGHT to be really, really scared of Montreal.
By the press, by the police, by the politicians, by the laws.
steph 11:52 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
Can we please seperate from the rest of the province?
Kate 13:16 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
It’s been a dream for decades.
carswell 13:19 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
@Kevin This person in Montreal is really scared of rural Quebec.
mare 13:41 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
@steph IIRC they passed a law a few years ago that makes it impossible to separate from Quebec. Not only aimed at Montreal, but also at the Indigenous Peoples in the North.
carswell 14:03 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
@steph You’d think the separatists would look at the results of the last referendum and realize that, if they just let the Island of Montreal go, they’d win and could have their little Hungary on the St-Laurent. At this point, however, most have come to understand that the CAQ approach of soft separation, of separation in as much as possible except Federal payments and name, is a better means to achieving their goal.
dhomas 14:56 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
@DeWolf the CAQ lost Camille-Laurin, but gained Anjou-Louis-Riel. So, it evened out in the end.
Michael 19:26 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
We need to make english mandatory in all Quebec schools so that rural Quebec can get with the program and enter the 21st century.