We have a flash freeze warning in effect, after a day when I counted four people in short sleeves during a saunter around the neighbourhood (and they weren’t together).
Updates from March, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
24Hres asks whether some commercial spaces are cursed, and – leaving out the supernatural – it’s a phenomenon I’ve often noticed. City dwellers are creatures of habit. If a restaurant visibly fails, a second resto in the same location is working against that perception, even a completely different cuisine, operated by unrelated staff. Better for someone to open a different store in that space and effect a reset of perceptions.
Another factor is inaccessibility issues. I remember a resto opened by friends of friends in a space that had been a gallery. The front door was at a weird angle, heavy and hard to open. Strike one. Place failed within months.
Don’t they teach these basics at retail school?
Blork
I’ve never heard of “retail school,” but some people with business/marketing degrees might have studied such things, although not as a requirement for their degree. You can only teach such things as cautionary tales and workshop material. There’s no hard and fast rule that IF YOU OPEN A RESTAURANT WHERE A PREVIOUS RESTAURANT FAILED, IT WILL FAIL, or “RESTAURANT MUST HAVE GOOD WINDOWS” or whatever, since there are so many exception. Those things are a mix of creative work (design) and practical work (marketing), and there’s no requirement for someone opening a restaurant to have studied all (or even any) of that.
In fact, in my experience, there is no requirement at all except for some financial backing. From what I’ve heard and read, most restaurant failures are due to bad business planning, but most enthusiastic young chefs/cooks wanting to open a restaurant only have culinary training, not business training.
If you want restaurants that were created by business people, there are plenty of those around. Boston Pizza, Madisons, Thai Express, Sesame, etc. That’s what you get when you put business thought ahead of culinary thought.
Kate
McGill’s Desautels business school offers a whole lot of retail courses. I’m sure HEC must do as well.
Of course some outfits buck the tendencies I mention, but if you’re going into business, you want to maximize your chances and avoid choices that have been shown to doom similar businesses in the same spot.
Joey
In 2017 McGill announced the creation of the Bensadoun School of Retail Management, following a $25M donation from the Bensadoun (as in Aldo) Family Foundation.
Blork
Oh, I agree that one *should* learn about these things. But from my understanding the majority of people opening new bars or restaurants are doing it with just their practical experience and a dream. It’s usually prompted by wanting to break away from their current gig, or they see a location and have an epiphany, or they get drunk with their friends and pump up their dreams… They don’t want to stop and spend two years studying marketing and merchandising first.
Nicholas
I wonder if this is just probability. New businesses fail more often than mature businesses, and the first year is especially precarious: high debt, variable revenue, inexperienced staff, etc. New businesses are going to open in the empty storefronts, and they’re most likely to fail, so it’s most likely to see that storefront empty again. Now it could be the reason of the failure is the location, but it seems more likely it’s that new businesses are precarious for many reasons and cause frequent turnover, with a bad location being only part of that reason. This is also why a landlord is happier with a long term lease of a dependable business tenant than lots of churn.
MarcG
I always figured there some kinda urban feng shui going on with those locales you always see À Louer. The address I think of is 3475 St-Laurent, nothing seems to stick there very long.
Ephraim
Even sides of the street are different. In Montreal, the North side does better than the south and the East side does better than the west.
Kate
Ephraim, I remember my mom pointing out that the north side of Ste‑Catherine Street always had more pedestrians. I thought it might be because all the department stores of the era were on that side, but is there also something to do with the angle of the sun?
Tim
272 Rue Bernard, at the corner of Parc, has been cursed for more than 15 years…
MarcG
“North” side of Ste-Cath and “East” side of St-Laurent/St-Denis get the daytime sunlight.
Ian
@Tim not do much a curse as trying to do reno without permits. Further east on Bernard is the empty storefront that was a good Korean restaurant and before that a good Brazilian restaurant. Great location, nice building, even a patio…. but totally cursed.
CE
Has any business ever lasted more than a couple years in the space at the south-east corner or St-Laurent and Sherbrooke?
The south-east corner of Mont-Royal and Bordeaux seems to be particularly cursed. I’ve never seen a space host TWO different restaurants in a single year (the second one recently closed).
Kate
Tim, that location was Café Romolo for a long time. It hasn’t had a stable identity since Romolo closed.
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Kate
It’s exactly five years since the World Health Organization declared SARS‑CoV‑2 a global pandemic. Most media have been posting pieces about Covid‑19 to mark this less than jolly anniversary.
Radio‑Canada asks what we’ve learned, not so much about how to handle pandemics in general, but about how the lockdown and distancing period affected people, especially young people. Are they really more subdued than they should be?
The Journal asks whether Quebec is prepared to face any new pandemic, the fear being that people would be less inclined to follow health mandates a second time around, and that people would be more inclined to believe conspiracy theories and false advice. The rate of measles vaccination, for example, has dropped since Covid, although one might have hoped that people would recognize the value of immunizations rather than deploring them.
La Presse has a dossier examining other questions – how the current Quebec government plan is reaching healthcare workers (not well), what healthcare workers think about our capacity to react (not much) – and a few things that are going well.
CBC looked into victims of long Covid.
Blork
It’s important and useful to ask these questions and to study these things. Unfortunately, too many people are doing it judgmentally, without regard for the learning potential. I’m sure many mistakes were made, particularly in the early days. But there’s no point in throwing stones and pointing fingers. We had nothing to go on; so many unknowns and so much to figure out in a very short period of time.
While it wasn’t the world’s first pandemic, it was the first pandemic of the current technological era. Things are drastically different now than they were in, for example, 1919 with the Spanish flu. The extent to which people move around — by air, by car, by public transit — has exploded in the century since then. The level of information exchange — both bad and good — is unprecedented. Our understanding of how diseases spread and how they can be contained, while far from complete, is unbelievably advanced since 1919.
So what happens when you get an unknown disease spreading rapidly through an extremely mobile population, amidst bogs and bogs of new and sometimes conflicting scientific knowledge and information? You get mistakes. You also get miracles (or at least lucky breaks because some things were done right). But when we’re making those decisions early in the process it’s impossible to know which decisions will be mistakes and which will lead to miracles.
So let’s study the pandemic and learn from it, and resist the urge to point fingers and throw stones.
MarcG
The UK Covid Inquiry clearly exposed that a lot was known but not acted upon, and I think it’s fair to want some kind of accountability.
Nicholas
Paul Wells has reported a few times on the lack of inquiry, and the actual inquiry report, which was named The Time to Act is Know, and was quietly released and mostly ignored by those who needed to act.
nau
@Blork In your new role of Arbiter of Permissable Posting, can you advise the rest of us on your ruling as to whether it is cricket to point at our stones and “throw” the finger?
Blork
@nau, please go back to Twitter where it’s normal to be combative and sarcastic without even understanding what you’re replying to.
Internet archivists of the future will understand that my comment above has nothing to do with permissible posting and everything to do with the general discourse around looking back at the pandemic.
Kate
🤨
roberto
Many people seem eager to move on from the COVID era—forget the isolation, the divisions, and the chaos. Forget the massive government’s spending and the massive debts left in the wake. It’s almost as if we collectively wish we could just declare bankruptcy and pretend it never happened, as if the world isn’t already full of enough new challenges to face
MarcG
The denial required to move on from something that is still happening is a heavy burden. From an article in the JdM today: “Le réseau québécois de cliniques pour la COVID longue reçoit encore, chaque mois, une centaine de nouveaux patients, qui doivent parfois attendre jusqu’à six mois avant de pouvoir être pris en charge.”
Kevin
That “massive” government spending prevented millions of Canadians from losing their homes, kept businesses open, and prevented a recession.
It should be self-evident that this is why we have governments — to do the things that private industry can or will not do — especially since we can look to history and see what happens when there isn’t government support to deal with a pandemic.
The division and chaos were amplified by bad actors and too many people fell victim to a lack of online media literacy. That, more than anything else, is the bad legacy of the pandemic, especially evident in the people who insist with utmost certainty their belief in things that just aren’t so. And that should be countered by widespread lessons in civics, in understanding the underlying systems that hold our society together, and in rebuilding community groups instead of reinforcing online echo chambers.
Tim
@kevin: there is no need to put massive in quotes; the spending for covid was huge. Do you have any data that shows it saved millions of homeowners or businesses?
What has been quantified is the amount of fraud that took place, up to 8 billion dollars worth. How convenient that an Access to Information request turned up nothing…
Kevin
Let’s see. About half of Canadians say they live paycheque to paycheque according to multiple surveys.
About 6.5 million received CERB payments of about $80 billion, letting them and their dependents stay home instead of forcing them to go to unsafe workplaces/schools and spreading the disease at a time when hospitals were overhelmed.Roughly 700,000 CEBA loans to businesses for another $31 bilion.
Of course about 190,000 people later had to make repayments and there was some fraud (there is always fraud-what matters is catching it).
But yeah, I think that spending the money so people could stay at home saved a lot of lives.
A lot of people lost their minds and got suckered by propaganda, but we could easily have had 250,000 dead if we look at the proportions from the 1918 pandemic.Chris
Hopefully one of the things we learned is that vaccine mandates, however well-intentioned, are ultimately a bad idea.
nau
@blork You’re taking my post approximately infinitely more seriously than the spirit in which I wrote it. I don’t generally refer to things being “cricket” or come up with nonsense roles like “Arbiter of Permissable Posting” when I’m being combative. Given the absurdity of the age, I will however cop to a certain engrained tendency to sarcasm, which I suppose colours the bit involving you that was the setup I came up with for the dumb punchline I wanted to deliver because my brain has a weakness for inversions. As for the rest, I can’t go back to twitter since I was never on it, and there was nothing difficult to understand about your post.
Kevin
Chris
We’ve had vaccine mandates in Canada for more than a century.What’s that saying? A conservative is someone who gets upset about learning something in middle age something the rest of us learned as children?
Kate
I’m old enough to have had a mandated smallpox vax when I was small. Smallpox is the example I’ve given on the rare occasion I’ve run into anti‑vax sentiments. Ask them, how many people they know who’ve had smallpox. They will, of course, say “none” – and then you point out, mandated smallpox vaccination has eradicated that disease forever. It works.
(By the time I had the vax, smallpox was no longer a threat, but the mandate lingered for awhile, until we were sure it was gone. Unlike measles.)
Tux
Kids are f***ing dying of measles in Ontario right now, because parents that were almost certainly vaccinated against it themselves refused to give their children the same advantage, and that is a situation that came about solely because vaccination was something conservatives used to sow division and fear during the pandemic. Anyone who talks shit about vaccines has the blood of children on their hands.
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Kate
Twenty-one metro stations were closed at rush hour Monday evening after someone released pepper spray at Berri‑UQAM.
Mozai
I have a strong feeling to say something, but I only have misanthropic things in mind.
Blork
It seems like a huge weakness in the system if a gas in one station can cause evacuations in 21 stations across three lines.
Joey
Yeah, I don’t get it either – someone released something that might have been pepper spray at Berri-UQAM, so they evacuated every orange line station from Beaubien to Lucien-L’allier on the orange line and between Guy-Concordia and Prefontaine on the green line. I guess the STM was worried that the perpetrator hopped on a train and might have released more pepper spray at another station?
Bert
I think the CTCUM must also consider how they run the split services. There are not crossovers between every station and they do not use single-track operation. So, the tunnel from Lucien L’allier and Bonaventure effectively becomes a terminus. It might also depend on where major ventilation shafts are, but then thinking about it, would they release pepper-sprayed air outside?
Blork
@Joey, I’m just guessing, but I think it’s more a matter of the potential spread of the gas through the tunnels. While a squirt of pepper spray shouldn’t be noxious over that much territory, I’m guessing there is a protocol in place for when an unknown gas is released, in case it’s something more hazardous. As in, there’s a protocol to assume the worst until it can be confirmed it’s not something widely lethal.
Joey
So we’ve got at least three valid hypotheses right off the bat. Shame none of the reporters covering the story weren’t more curious. Not that I think the STM is hiding anything or made a bad call (by all accounts the whole interruption lasted a big 20 minutes), but it would be interesting to have a fuller understanding of the way these decisions are made.
Kate
You’ve only got to read about the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack to understand why the STM may be jumpy about fumes in the metro.
Blork
I was thinking about that, which is why I speculated it’s a protocol until they identify the gas. But just the fact that the gas could theoretically spread so far so fast seems odd. Are they being overcautious, or can it really be like that?
walkerp
I feel like insurance and senior management are significant factors in the development of their pepper spray protocol.
Nicholas 21:19 on 2025-03-11 Permalink
I saw a guy in flip flops (plus shorts and a T-shirt).