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The Russians know about Afghanistan. The Soviets spent a decade vainly trying to prop up their puppet government there while the Americans gleefully funded the Taliban. We called them mujahedeen — holy warriors — back then, but they or their sons, brothers and cousins are the same jihadis blowing up our Canadian soldiers in Kandahar.
Anyway, the Russkies took great pains to warn us NEVER to pick a fight with the Pashtun nomads. They warned us that the nomads will avenge every death they suffer in our hands, or the hands of our NATO allies. So when the Americans killed 20 or so nomads this week, it's as if Canada killed them. Their deaths will be avenged.
And so it goes. This morning, we read Brigadier-General David Fraser, telling Canadians that Canadian blood spilled in Afghanistan will prevent Canadian deaths on our shores. That same refrain will be used to send our CF-18s, our helicopters and plenty more military hardware to Afghanistan. So much for the battle for hearts and minds and the $100 million a year earmarked for the Canadian International Development Agency's friends in Kabul. It's all money for nothing.
John Manley, the Foreign Affairs minister in the Martin Liberal government, warned NATO yesterday that Canada can't continue to spearhead the mission to keep the jihadis from flooding into the rest of the country. Canadians are among the best fighting men and women in the world, but 2,300 troops are a drop of blood in a very big, thirsty bucket. Will Europe volunteer? Of course not! Why should they? Russia enjoys America's discomfiture, Germany is still heavily invested in the north and France...well, let's just say France's finest hour ended at Waterloo and Trafalgar.
We ignore the Russian warnings at our great peril. They've spent centuries dealing with Afghanistan and the Pashtun long before the West had ever heard the words 'militant Islam.'
Our military knows the truth, but the politburo at the Department of National Defence ensures the generals know how to sing Ottawa's official fight song.
There are two ways to win aznd we're following neither course. Either send in massive ground reinforcements, carpet-bomb the mountain passes and pursue the jihadis across the border into Pakistan, or deploy special forces to strike hard and fast at selected targets, then get out. We're sitting ducks hunkered down in Kandahar and pretending to patrol areas we can't control.
Will our government or those in Opposition tell us that? Of course not, because to speak out would be to disrespect our men and women fighting and dying. Can't have that.
To my way of thinking, isn't it showing them greater disrespect to send them on a mission based on a lie?
The Soviet Union did that in the last mission under the USSR hammer and sickle. It resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The federal Liberals are tearing themselves apart over whether it should be official party policy to recognize Quebec’s nationhood.
Within Canada, of course.
A sizeable chunk of the federal party’s Quebec wing backs leadership contender Michael Ignatieff in insisting that it was the party’s will all along to make this concession to Quebec nationalists who might otherwise be tempted to vote Tory or Bloc.
Is Quebec a nation?
Even Stephane Dion, the architect of the Clarity Act, equivocates when asked.
Conservative PM Stephen Harper dare not say what he thinks for fear of losing more Tory support in Quebec.
If we’re referring to the cohort of old-stock, white, French-speaking Quebeckers, Quebec is definitely a nation. There’s a collectivity of thought and opinion, of shared cultural and linguistic interests and concerns that is intensely nationalistic and self-absorbed in its expression.
How closely circumscribed is this collectivity? The best demonstration lies in the fact that the candidates for the Parti Québecois, the political entity that touts itself as the only legitimate protector of Quebec’s interests, are overwhelmingly Québécois de souche. Giuseppe Sciortino wasn’t allowed to run in poet-politician Gérald Godin’s old riding, nor will May Chiu be permitted to run anywhere she might have a chance of winning. Ditto with Robin Philpot in St. Henri-Ste. Anne, or Nino Colaveccchio in east-end Montreal.
The questions that those who support Quebec’s nationhood must ask themselves is are the following:
What is the purpose in doing this? Is it merely symbolic, as Mr. Ignatieff and Marc Garneau pretend? If so, the only conceivable political rationale is to convince soft nationalists you’re Quebec-friendly, which to my way of thinking isn’t much above buying votes with sponsorship cash.
Otherwise, a nod to nationhood is another concession to the zealots who will use it as a bye to a geography-based, United-Nations-bound application for nationhood. Those who argue for symbolism forget what Jacques Parizeau said about the one-way nature of lobster traps.
Those prosyletizing for Quebec’s nationhood would do well to ask Quebec’s non-francophone 20 percent how they feel. We all remember Parizeau’s money and ethnics speech following the 1995 referendum defeat and subsequent comments from the likes of Yves Michaud and Bernard Landry. The secessionist movement’s history of leadership has shown itself wanting at every opportunity to show openness to les autres. Why would anyone go there , other than to suck up a few hundred thousand votes? For shame.
If there's anything people don't like, it's someone who refuses to 'fess up to a wrong.
International affairs Minister Peter MacKay came out with an injudicious blurt during last Thursday's Question Period. In returning a shot from Liberal ratpacker David McGuinty, MacKay inferred that his old flame, Tory turncoat Belinda Stronach, was a dog.
Of course the media and the opposition won't let it go. It's far too much fun for the hacks, in what is a slow news period, to keep up the dog references....the Liberals 'hounding' the Tories, MacKay 'dogged' by his reference to his ex...the puns and wordplay are what's needed to perk up the jaded talk-show crowd.
Why should the Liberals stop worrying at the Petey bone? It's a break from kneecapping each other over Afghanistan, Israel, Quebec, missile defence and all those other lose-lose issues that make them look like a party that's going to spend at least one more election in the penalty box.
Here's what the dog business says about the Tories:
Peter MacKay said a stupid thing. All he had to do was stand in the House the next day and apologize to Belinda in front of their peers and the entire nation and he would have rendered all that manufactured outrage powerless.
"Sorry, Ms. Stronach, I guess I was carried away by my own emotions. I'm really sorry and you know I don't mean what I supposedly said."
Women love a man who apologizes, even if they know he doesn't mean it.
But Petey didn't do the intelligent, manly thing. From that day on, he began building what has become a ludicrously elaborate edifice of denial by insisting he didn't say it, parrying reporters' questions with bluff and stonewall that everyone knew smelt like a pile. Because his blurt wasn't in Hansard, I guess he figured he couldn't be called a liar.
MacKay showed the same bad judgment this time around that he exibited when he claimed he never had a deal with Tory pretender David Orchard to oppose unification of the Canadian Alliance and the Progresssive Conservatives. It's conduct unbecoming the office and the man.
MacKay's bad-dog behavior taints the Tory pedigree. Worse, his boss's pitbull defence turned what should have been a stint in the doghouse into a dogfight.
Just as the ayatollahs prove the core argument against Islamofascism by threatening to kill those who question, the reaction to ex-premier Lucien Bouchard's latest comments about Quebec's productivity illustrates both the seriousness of the problem and the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of his critics.
What the jabberers and hacks don't explain is that Bouchard is just the messenger, just one one of the 12 co-authors of the Clear-Eyed Manifesto, published exactly one year ago today. The manifesto is just 10 pages long and is available on the web, which is why I find it ludicrous that much of the jabbering and spewing we're hearing on the topic is from commentators whose total reading appears to have been the Journal de Montreal's rehash of an interview Bouchard did on TVA.
To read the manifesto is to fiund oneself nodding in agreement. Its key points:
Quebec has come a long way in half a century, but Quebec Inc. has stalled. The combined personal, municipal and corporate tax load is easily the highest in North America, yet Quebec's nearly seven million citizens carry one of the hiighest per-capital debt loads in the western world. Productivity and per-capita income are trailing those of Quebec's major competitors in Canada and the U.S.
Quebec is managing over the short and medium term, but the long-term outlook is bleak. The retirement of the baby boom generation is going to place an enormous load on Quebec's socioeconomic structure. There won't be enough money to pay for everyone's retirement, let alone the additional health-care costs.
Notably, sovereignty is't being perceived as a solution even though the manifesto's 12 co-authors are split between federalists and secessionists. All agree the core problems won't go away, no matter which option Quebeckers choose.
There are no clear solutions in the manifesto. Instead, there are suggestions of how we should go about building a consensus within Quebec society and examples of the sacred cattle that should be on the chopping block. For instance, the manifesto says we should look at the whole issue of low-cost university education for all, not just because cheap tuition deprives post-secondary institutions of needed revenues, but because it creates false illusions among students better suited for trade schools — especially since Quebec is facing an acute shortage of skilled tradespeople.
What I find particularly striking about the manifesto is that it predicts precisely the kind of outcry we see whenever any Quebec government — Liberal or PQ — dares suggest slaughtering one of these sacred cattle. Raise tuition fees? Limit university enrolment to those most qualified? Outrage! Take to the streets!
But all those other challenges pale in comparison to remaking the civil service. As we saw earlier this month, the snivel servants overseeing provincial employment and manpower training average more than 18 sick days a year. That's sheer, unadulterated waste — especially when one considers that these are the people who administer the Employment Insurance program. EI is a dead weight on Quebec's private sector, sucking contributions from the pockets of employers and giving incentives to disloyal, unmotivated employees looking for something to tide them over as they leap from job to job.
And all we hear from the union leaders is the whine about quality of life and the usual entitlist crapola about the right to a well-paid job with plenty of time off and all the usual perks.
There isn't a political leader in Quebec with the balls to remind the bleating sheep that there is no EI in China or India. No pregnancy leave, no manpower retraining, no CSST, no safety net, no nothing. If you don't work, you die.
The cutest trick in the Quebec social-democratic bag of them is to demonize the mouthpiece and dumb down the message to a simplistic level. You could blow holes in the Ten Commandments with that formula. We ignore the manifesto at our peril.
Steel-reinforced concrete is a partnership. There’s a a steel skeleton for shear strength and concrete for rigidity. When one fails or is missing, the other can’t do the job alone.
When the concrete bridge decks of the de la Concorde overpass were poured in the factory 36 years ago, the steel reinforcements that were supposed to extend all the way to the flanges cast into both ends were too short. But whoever oversaw that job allowed the concrete to be poured anyway. The result was a 100-foot span with weak, crumbly ends.
The deck section — along with all the others that went into the de la Concorde and de Blois overpasses — were trucked to the site and installed without any quality control tests to assure they were up to the specifications written by the engineering firm Dessau.
In other words, the commission of inquiry into the Sept.30 overpass collapse that killed five people is now investigating a 36-year-old case of criminal negligence.
Because Pierre-Marc Johnson, Armand Couture and Roger Nicolet don’t need to waste their time or our money trying to find the root cause — and the fact that they’re preparing to demolish the de Blois overpass in coming weeks is proof they’ve already reached their conclusion.
We were prepared for far less conclusive results. Salt-spray corrosion, maybe, or the cumulative effects of years of heavy traffic or other vibration sources.
But not gross incompetence on the part of the firm that cast those concrete bridge decks.
Or the failure of the Transport Ministry to ensure quality control on the deck sections prior to their delivery and installation.
Even under the cover of anonymity, the experts are mincing their words in today’s Denis Lessard story in La Presse. Their strongest condemnation: the placement of the flanges wasn’t carried out according to the state of the art, which according to one expert, hasn’t evolved significantly in 30 years.
Who goofed? What Homer Simpsonesque character decided that the deck sections “looked good enough to ship?” Was there a requirement that a Transport Ministry flunkey inspect the steel skeleton before the concrete was poured? If not, why not? After all, these things were built by the low bidder.
What company built these things? What was Dessau’s responsibility in ensuring the integrity of these deck sections? Like it or not, this inquiry has the job of exploring how the tendering and quality-control aspects of Quebec’s public infrastructure construction industry.
There’s no daylight between that industry and provincial politics, and hasn’t been for as long as I can remember. Anyone with more than passing knowledge of Quebec politics now sees precisely where the Johnson probe should be headed. Whether it goes there or not is a test of the Charest government’s election vow to see that government is performed differently.
The daily media likes to crap on weeklies, but they do so at their peril. Sure, there are too many grip'n'grin pix of people getting awards and bits about what the local Legion branch is having at their next social, but hey, that's all the news some people want in this world of dead babies, nuke crazies and home invasions.
Good weeklies give you a lot more. They cover local council meetings. They ask questions about conflicts of interest. They amplify the question-period queries that would otherwise be sloughed off by elected officials who think democracy was a mistake the day after they got themselves elected.
Good weeklies have the guts to challenge arrogant municipal civil servants who see the taxpayers as a bottomless purse and complaints as an affront to their integrity.
In Europe and in North America, dailies are hurting. The New York Times is cutting its page size by 11 percent. Layoffs are ahead.
Daily ad lineage is down as costs rise. Consider this: the North American newsprint industry is closing plants as fast as it can, a repeat of what's happening with the OPEC oil cartel cycle — prices skyrocket, profits soar, consumption drops, so to keep prices high, the producers conspire to limit supply and buoy profits.
That's fiscal suicide over the long term. Everybody gets used to smaller and more expensive. Layoffs are inevitable.
Want an example closer to home?
The Sun newspaper chain is imploding. My Sun buddies say the six-paper group is in complete disarray. The chain of command is totally dysfunctional. The entire chain is being jerked around by Montreal, read my old friend and boss Pierre-Karl Peladeau and the Quebecor Media brain trust. The publisher of the Toronto Sun supposedly quit last week, but insiders say he was fired because he wasn’t doing head office’s bidding. Calls being made in in Montreal make no sense. The Sun chain is all about columnists. Columns out of Toronto aren’t being allowed to run in the rest of the country. Total censorship, says my Toronto source. Understaffed newsrooms are hearing rumours there are further cuts coming. You can fire a howitzer in the newsrooms in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto and Ottawa and not hit anyone.
All the decisions, all the editorial filters are in Montreal.
What everybody at the Sun chain seems to forget is that it was founded as a weekly community newspaper — during a La Presse strike, no less — by the late Pierre Peladeau. That's why dailies will die and weeklies will live. Remember the dinosaurs and the tiny, furry mammals that survived them.
So the J de M discovered that Quebec leads the civilized world in civil-service sickouts.
Let me put it this way: It's not exactly a surprise.
I know it's not p.c. to mock fat people, but the ideological lard hanging around the waist of the Quebec civil service is obscene. Who doesn't know someone from the public or parapublic sector who isn't epuisé, en burnout? Funny. I don't know one person en burnout in the private sector. They may hold down two jobs and be undergoing chemo in the middle of a divorce while their kids are in Youth Court, but they somehow manage to keep on keeping on.
Why do civil servants book off sick? Because they can. Their unions have negotiated fat contracts with more outs than the Minnesota Twins. There's a sickout culture in the snivel service that makes it okay to pretend to go bughouse, or develop a sudden allergy to a colleague's perfume.
And they're not shy about talking about it. I have a sailing pal who worked for the feds in Ottawa. He took early retirement because he was épuisée. Now he's back doing the same work for the same department, but this time he's under contract. Suddenly he's got all the energy and drive in the world. I call it a miracle cure.
Last week we heard that a third of the entire teaching force was on stress leave. THIRTY PERCENT! The head of the local teachers' union, the only living soul to be doing any talking, said it was because classes are too big and there's no support. Hey, most of the private-sector businesspeople I know can't find any help, work six and seven days a week and haven't had a summer, Easter or Christmas vacation in years. Are they stressed? You bet. Would they like to book off sick? Damn right! But they can't because there's no disability insurance, no big, fat union contract saying it's okay and nobody to pick up the slack if they go down.
So they push on, no matter how bad they're hurting.
I'm sure there are dedicated civil servants who haven't lost a day in their entire careers. But they're the exceptions. There's a sense of entitlement in the civil service that sick leave is another of those fringe benefits, like drug insurance and EI. Too bad the majority of Quebec's workforce isn't able to share that same sense of entitlement. I say fire the entire bunch and hire the productive people back on contracts. Pay them more to compensate and we're still ahead.
So North Korea, that rogue nation that worships Donald Duck as a deity, has a nuke. Does that mean we should all go back to worrying about nuclear proliferation? When I was a kid, it was all about surviving The Big One. Instead of pools and cottages, some people invested in bomb shelters.
Back then, the Russians were the bad guys. America was the only nation with the moral authority to be able to own and manage nukes. They let the Brits in on it because they had to park their nukes as close to those perfidious Soviets as they could. We were so upset when the Russkies got them that we deported a Canadian politician.
Then France got nukes and we were all atwitter about them testing them in the Pacific, but the Americans couldn't very well say anything because they had lit up Bikini Atoll, right?
Then the Chinese got them and we worried for a while, because everybody figured Mao would take out Taiwan. But that went away as we "opened up Chinese markets to North American products." Har.
When Israel got them, the sales pitch was that it would stabilize the entire Middle East. Wrong.
After that came India and Pakistan, each daring the other. The Americans had a big problem with India having them (those anti-U.S. multinational trade laws, doncha see?) until they found out that the head of the Pakistani nuke program was giving his Islamic co-religionists all the help they needed. Suddenly the Indians needed all the help we could give them.
Did I leave anyone out? Oh, yes, South Africa and Brazil. They were both working on nukes until the rest of the world got excited and convinced them not to go there. So they dropped them, and why? Because the Americans and the Brits pledged to give them a nuke hand if either of them got threatened.
So that's why I can't get overly excited about North Korea with nukes. What are they going to do — sell them to the Syrians so Assad can forward them to Hezbollah? Flog them on the open market? The way I see it, there are so many nukes out there now, it's a miracle none of them have gone off.
It's all about nuke envy. The west has four members in its nuke clubhouse, now that India is wearing a white hat. Russia and France have their own little non-aligned club. Pakistan is the standardbearer for the Islamic world until Iran tests its boomer. And it will.
China was all alone in the Asian rim until Duckburg's whackjobs banged theirs off this week. I don't believe for one second that drivel from China about not tolerating their little nuke buddy's big new toy. Balance of power, be damned. It's all about having as many nuke buddies in your clubhouse as possible. No wonder Japan is talking about building a bunch. Alone of the world's nations, they have a pretty good idea of what these babies can do. Can't say as I blame them.
Trooper Jeffrey Hunter was guarding a road construction crew working on the Panjuaii highway when a Taliban missile smuggled in from Pakistan tore his legs apart earlier this week.
He was lying in his hospital bed when a superior officer arrived to inform him that his danger pay was being cut off. Because he's no longer fighting, Trooper Hunter won't be getting the $2,111 a month tax-free for risking his life.
Gee, thanks, Canada. Thanks, Stephen Harper. So much for those flowery words our government uses to describe the sacrifice of our men and women and our sacred mission to protect the fragile flower of Afghani democracy. When you're lying in your hospital bed, contemplating life as a cripple and someone tells you you're not being paid because you're injured, what does that say about the value the Canadian government really places on the sacrifices of our fighting men and women?
I used to support the NATO mission in Afghanistan.
I used to believe we were there to ensure peaceful, democratic elections. To guarantee that little girls could go to school. To allow Afghani women to throw off their bhurkas without fearing a beating or a raping at the hands of the religious authorities. To create a new nation safe from the opium warlords on one side and the Islamofascist zealots on the other.
I stopped believing in the Afghanistan mission this past January with the death of Glyn Berry, the Canadian diplomat. Since then, 39 others have died and well over 100 others suffering life-changing wounds, like the loss of arms, legs, eyes, ears and senses. We're no longer there to win hearts and minds and rebuild a nation. We're there as a human barrier to staunch the flood of Taliban jihadists from Pakistan.
Pakistan? Our supposed ally? We've seen that despicable weasel Pervez Musharraf's true colours when he ridiculed Canadian dead. Karzai knows what a perfidious piece of scum the Pakistani dictator truly is, but he can't say a word because George W. wants to pretend they're allies. Another stinking lie in a vast volume of lies the U.S. war lobby has spun and continues to spin. Meanwhile Pakistan's secret police actively aids and abets the jihadists attacking, killing and injuring our troops.
Shame on Stephen Harper. Shame on the military brass that dock pay from our wounded soldiers.
Shame on the Canadian International Development Agency for failing to ensure our tax dollars are spent where they're needed, not where some bloated UN bureaucrat in Kabul thinks they should be spent. This is a mission doomed to fail because it is built on lies. Never mind the polls that say 587 percent of Canadians support this ridiculous charade. Harper must challenge our NATO allies to redefine the mission. If he doesn't Canadian sacrifices are meaningless, because they'll do nothing to bring peace. Isn't that why we were there?
It makes me nuts, this story about Canada Post refusing to deliver to a Verdun neighbourhood where the sidewalk on one side of the street was being rebuilt.
Especially the part where the flak for Canada Post said "our employees are our number one concern."
Golly, I said to myself, since when did one of the worst employers in the country begin putting the concerns of its unionized workforce before those of its clients?
Is this the same Canada Post that hired secret spies, installed hidden cameras to stop mail theft and ran a stopwatch on employees on their pee breaks?
I can hear Canada Post's mouthpiece claiming that happened in the bad old days, when Canada Post was a Crown corporation.
I can't tell the difference. Canada Post is still the same big, fat, disagreeable monopoly where the complaints procedure places the entire burden of proof on the complainant. If you want to know the true definition of existential futility and despair, try bringing a complaint to the Canada Post Ombudsperson. Your time and energy will be efficiently, ruthlessly sucked into the official Canada Post Bureaucratic Black Hole. There is no way the consumer can possibly win, because the whole process is fixed.
I'm the editor of a weekly newspaper. We depend on Canada Post to get our papers out on time, and to the people we say we deliver to. Scarcely a week goes by that we don't get a beef from someone who didn't get their paper.
And guess whose fault it is?
Surely not Canada Post's employees. There's one particularly incompetent fool who makes it her life's work to bitch and moan about having to lug big bags of mail around, and the papers that aren't delivered are on her route. Maybe if she smoked half a pack a day less and pushed herself away from the table a few minutes sooner every mealtime she’d be able to get the job done.
When we complain, what does her boss do about it?
She tells us we have to take every paper apart to insert fliers in a method unheard of in the printing industry.
We say show us where it says we have to do that in the Canada Post book of rules.
She can't. Nowhere is it written. It's typical of the bureaucratic bafflegab Canadians are fed daily by the biggest, ugliest monopoly in this nation full of them.
If we had an alternative, we'd be using it. But Canada Post sees to that. Nobody gets to attack its hegemony, because it enjoys the exclusive protection of the federal government. If that isn't a state monopoly, I don't know what is.
I recall when the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau told a mob of striking truckers working for a Canada Post subcontractor to mange la merde. He was speaking for all of us.
Someone I know was standing in a weekend lineup at the local ATM. You know, the space so tiny it's impossible NOT to hear the conversations of everyone jammed in there.
A guy comes in and sees his buddy in the lineup. He says "Hey, I hear you shot yourself a REAL big buck!"
The friend says yes.
"I hear you got it in Hudson," persists Mr. Bigmouth.
"Depends on who I'm telling the story to," says Nimrod the Mighty Hunter.
Hunting anything in Hudson is illegal, but there's a big deer herd in the valley near Whitlock Golf Club and they roam all over the community, so the hunters come from all over to jack deer at night. They use million-candlepower spotlights, which cause the deer to freeze. They they blast 'em, chop off the hindquarters with axes and take off with the meat before the wardens arrive.
There's a telephone number, SOS Braconnage, where people can call and report illegal hunting anonymously.
My pal wrote down the licence number of the pickup truck the hunter was driving, but hasn't picked up the phone. Why?
Because something says not to.
That's Quebec, 2006. Distrust of the government has reached such a level that people think twice before reporting illegal acts on anonymous snitch lines.
Either we're afraid that our identity will be leaked or we're cynical enough to believe we're wasting our time, but the net result is that the concept of citizenship no longer carries the same sense of social responsibility that it once did.
How about that guy David Ferrara, the guy who first called 911 to report chunks of concrete on Highway 19 an hour before the de la Concorde overpass fell and lkilled five people? Do you think he'll be as quick to call 911 next time — if there is a next time?
If the government doesn't give a damn and says so with its failure to act, why should any of us give a damn?
So what if a hunter jacks a deer off Highway 342? Why should I bother giving his licence number to the game wardens?
What goes around, comes around. And what's emerging isn't pretty.
What blows me away is that when it comes time for accountability in government, nobody ever gets fired.
Remember the SARS epidemic in China? The health minister fired himself. It's the Asian way. You screw up, you commit career suicide. I like it.
It's that way in business. Airbus tossed its CEO after the 555-seat A-380 missed its production targets. Hewlett-Packard cleaned house over a boardroom dirty-tricks scandal that had nothing to do with share prices. Come to think of it, the Americans have taken a different route than we have when it comes to punishing corporate crooks. Adelphia's Riga family, WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers and Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski are all off doing time. It may be country club time, but it's still time. Even Martha Stewart went to prison.
Who goes to prison in Canada? Nobody I know. Frank Dunn and John Roth both had a hand in ripping off Nortel shareholders. As far as I know, they're living the life of Reilly, along with all the other corporate thugs this nation seems to excel at producing.
Like I said, maybe it's the Canadian way to make nobody accountable. How many people went to jail over Gomery? Don't tell me Chuck Guite and his co-accused were the only ciulprits.
Yeah, right. They're the ones who got fingered.
That's Canada for you. After thed taxpayer is subjected to a particularly egregious screwing, the government in power calls an inquiry. It is carefully scripted to ensure that embarrassing truths are never revealed. At the end, someone gets his knuckles rapped.
That's what'll happen with the Concorde overpass collapse. Maybe they'll even tell us it's an act of God.
I say fire somebody. The Transport Minister would be a good start. Let the terror work its way down the chain of command, rather than up from the poor bugger who makes $16.40 an hour to pick dead skunks and blown tires off the highways.
But they won't, because in Canada, and especially in Quebec, hardly anybody in government or bureaucracy EVER gets fired for killing people. The only firing offence is embarrassing the government.
Trust Jean Charest, with his unerring campaigner’s instincts, to home in on the other guy’s vulnerabilities. The Parizeau and Landry governments short-changed highway maintenance for nearly a decade as they pretended to keep their promises to balance Quebec’s budget, but instead of hammering away at that as the root cause of Saturday’s overpass collapse that killed five in Laval, he’s named former PQ premier Pierre-Marc Johnson to head up the inquiry.
Was the 35-year-old overpass poorly constructed? Was it inadequately maintained? Do we really know what 35 years of road salt can do to rebar and reinforcing cable? We can speculate all we want, but until the forensic engineers can get a good look at what was going on at the ends of that span, the speculation will continue.
To those demanding the head of the Transport Quebec inspector who checked off on the overpass an hour before it fell, it’s true that Quebec’s 4500 bridges, viaducts and overpasses shed chunks of concrete all the time. There’s a net under the Jacques Cartier bridge to catch the rain of cement. The underside of the Ile aux Tourtes Bridge carrying the Trans-Canada from Montreal Island toward Ottawa and Toronto, looks like Frankenstein’s monster, with bolts and bars and other bits cobbling the thing together.
The entire span shakes like a leaf under the weight of twice the truck traffic it was designed to carry, but Transport Quebec insists it’s safe.
The Galipeau Bridge, which carries the 20 between Ste. Anne de Bellevue and Ile Perrot, is barely 20 years old, but it’s in desperate need of reconstruction because of the relentless jackhammering of truck traffic. The only reason it’s not being rebuilt this year is that the Roads traffic experts are trying to figure out how to keep traffic flowing. If the Ile aux Torture Bridge clogs, where’s all that traffic to go?
Try back to Montreal and the Mercier, Champlain or up to the 640 via the 13.
This tragedy does two things.
It sounds the alarm on what may well be accelerated wear and tear on our entire highway infrastructure due to the excessive use of road salt.
It reveals the failure of the self-regulation system by which Quebec's professional bodies are permitted to discipline members who are derelict or negligent in the performance of their responsibilities, as we now see from the wrist-slapping meted out after a similar collapse in 1990. Why exercise due diligence when the failure to do so exacts so little in the way of punishment?
It also exposes the systemic weakness of Montreal’s road network, overburdened as it is with heavy truck traffic and too few choices for rush-hour users.
Would traffic to and from Laval be as clogged for the next six months if the Highway 25 link had been built without the endless yammering of the mindless Luddites who call themselves environmentalists?
Would Transport Quebec be as slow to close suspect bridges and overpasses if Highway 30 gave through truck traffic a way around the city?
It’s all very well to bleat on about getting traffic out of the city centre, but to do that, one needs better public transport. Laval’s bus network is far too slow for most users and the $5 billion Laval metro link isn’t open for another year.
Charest will be able to use this tragedy to make political hay without seeming to. That’s the quintessence of good politics.
Too bad innocent people had to die first.
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