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This past year saw the Ste Anne de Bellevue Veteran’s Hospital open its new Alzheimer wing to make room for a rotation of Armed Forces combatants — most of them from Kandahar — being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, what we used to term shell shock. These men and women don’t spend long in Ste. Anne’s — just long enough to be assessed. But it’s a sobering reminder that Canada’s veterans aren’t just of two world wars and the Korean conflict. Add Kosovo, Kandahar, Mogadishu, Srebenica, Lebanon and half a dozen other theatres to that list.
What, we wondered, does Canada do for our troops at Christmas?
It turns out that there is an official Canadian Armed Forces gift-giving program. Operation Santa Claus is conducted by the Department of National Defence (DND). Its mission is to send deployed every Canadian Forces member serving in remote Canadian locations or overseas a Christmas gift package filled with items donated by Canadian corporations. Although packages also include letters and Christmas cards from schoolchildren, one gets the impression that our troops are getting mainly junk food and letter-writing materials — hardly the kind of Christmas gift that makes one feel a connection with the folks back home.
Clearly, Canada’s lack of long-range, heavy-lift aircraft (our Hercules transports are old, slow and tired and the military and the government are still dickering over their replacements) is a major problem. The DND Operation Santa Claus web page notes:
“The mission re-supply system is designed to move operational and operational support equipment. Donated goods do not qualify as such, and can only be moved when space is available. Such space is extremely limited and its use requires extensive coordination in order to keep it under control. Therefore, in order to avoid disappointment and to ensure that the CF logistics system is not overburdened, individuals wanting to conduct donation campaigns are encouraged to do so in accordance with the following programs:
“...Christmas gift packages filled with items donated by Canadian corporations are sent to every deployed CF member stationed throughout the world. Donating organizations must meet specific criteria, including requirement for a quantity of 3,500 of a single item.”
To be blunt, Christmas in Afghanistan (or anywhere else Canadian Forces troops are deployed) doesn’t sound too appealing.
It’s too late for this year to charter a heavy-lift cargo plane, fill it with the kind of gifts that we would all like to get, and fill out the paperwork needed to fly it to the closest airstrip and truck them to our bases. But it strikes us that if the Department of National Defence wanted to make it a priority, it would.
I know Canadians would get behind such a campaign, given a ghost of a chance. Whatever we may think and feel about the Afghanistan mission and Canada's role and the tip of the spear, we canot help but feel for those facing Christmas there.
Everything and nothing. All things to all people, but nothing to anybody. Euphemisms couched in platitudes, with different meanings in French and in English, cloaked in nuances that depend on where in Canada you live.
No wonder there's such a debate raging over the Conservative Quebeckers-form-a-nation-within-Canada resolution presented in the House of Commons this week.
Harper’s dead wrong when he says Quebeckers form a nation, either in or outside Canada. Canadian Press and most English media outlets use Quebecker (with or without the ‘k’) as a generic term for the roughly seven million inhabitants of La Belle Province. If Quebec is your legal residence, you have a Quebec driver’s licence and a Quebec healthcare card and you pay taxes to both the federal and the Quebec provincial governments, you’re a Quebecker. With that as the test, Quebeckers no more form a nation than do Ontarians.
In French, Harper uses the constitutionally explosive québécois. Here in what was once known as La Belle Province, that's how the genetic/linguistic descendents of those who came to New France between 1608 and 1763 describe themselves.
Obviously, it’s not a civic description, but an ethnocultural appellation; the descendents of the French-speaking settlers of ‘’la nouvelle France’ have spread throughout Canada and across North America. A fraction comprises the 80 percent of Quebec’s citizenry considered French mother tongue for the purposes of Quebec’s language laws. This majority lives in French, protected by a succession of federal initiatives such as the Official Languages Act and a series of Supreme Court rulings which has consistently placed the rights of the French-speaking ‘collectivity’ ahead of both the federal and provincial human rights charters. If ever it comes time to dole out credit for the creation of the quebecois nation myth, I’d say Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the Liberals played a bigger role than Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc.
By using québécois, Harper has endorsed the claim to civic nationhood by 5.5 million French-speaking Quebeckers, a terrible mistake in my view.
Those who claim it carries only symbolic meaning don’t read history. A succession of Quebec governments moved to recognize the Mohawk, Montagnais, Huron, Innu and Inuit nations and granted them various degrees of autonomy and civic status in the belief that granting such status would serve to strengthen Quebec's own claim to nationhood, only to regret it when these national entities threaten to partition themselves from Quebec whenever the province threatens to secede from the Confederation.
To steal a buzzphrase, words matter. As a journalist and editor, I have long had a problem with nationalist nomenclature. For years, I refused to use the term National Assembly to describe the Quebec legislature, even though a Liberal government so declared it nearly 50 years ago. My view is that the ongoing campaign to label things ‘nationale’ is a soft-core, back-door Parizeauist lobster-trap approach, a subtle form of mental conditioning to ease the sticker shock of full-on secessionism.
But there’s an even better reason why Harper erred in pandering to this particularly insidious conceit.
As a Quebecker, I know there is a spiritual entity you could call the Québecois nation, because I can’t be a member, and mother tongue is only a small part of it. It’s the television we watch, the radio we listen to, the books, magazines and newspapers we read, where we live, the friends we keep. It’s the collective history — of humiliation, many québécois would say — and its concomitant prejudices that I can’t share.
The Tory motion may have been smart tactics, but it was dumb strategy, because it’s yet another stamp of approval for the language and education laws that have stifled Quebec’s prosperity for so many years and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future. Worse, it’s recognized exclusionary ethnicity as a political fact. Conservatives will argue that the Liberal initiative and the Bloc motion gave them no choice, but is moving the secessionist ball another first down towards the independantiste goalposts worth a dozen more seats in Quebec?
Strikes me that Stephen Harper was putting on a show for the crowd back home when he started talking tough at Chinese President Hu Jintao about human rights this past Sunday. Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s great that a Canadian PM finally starts calling a spade a spade, or in this case, a Falun Gong adherent an organ donor for transplant tourists.
But what’s the point of yattering about rights and entertaining the Dalai Lama when we’re not prepared to put our money where Harper’s mouth has taken us?
Begin with our balance of trade with the People’s Republic. Last year, Canada bought $30 billion worth of goods from China and sold them $7 billion. That’s four to one, near as dammit. Yet we also continue to send China another billion dollars in subsidies for various vaguely worded programs which seem to translate into more money for Canadian universities to teach Chinese nationals our manufacturing, marketing and medical technologies.
If we were truly upset about Chinese human rights abuses (and they are both manifold and egregious) we would refuse to do business with them. We would ban their imports. We would purge our big-box stores of their products the way our American neighbours purge anything from Cuba. We would ban their nationals from studying at our institutions of higher learning.
As I said on my show Monday, Harper would have done well to have spent time with Margaret MacMillan’s new book on Richard Nixon’s world-shaking 1972 trip to China that effectively changed the world by remaking the geopolitical map. More than anything else, it explains how much work and how many details went into that moment when President Nixon and Chairman Mao shook hands.
Stephen Harper is going to have to get his head around the reality that whatever he says and his government does is measured against past triumphs and humiliations of one of this planet’s oldest and most evolved civilizations, now fronted by a bureaucracy which has thrown itself into savage capitalism with the same fervour that Red Guards once persecuted venerable Confucians because Mao said so.
Stephen Harper is a smart man, but he’s caught in a vicious trap called “not being like the Liberals.” It hamstrings him in the same way that his Tory predecessor Brian Mulroney was hamstrung by his vow to see Quebec sign the constitution.
If Canada is about to hold China to account, Stephen Harper is going to have to do better than the past six months of kiddie snits we’ve seen from the likes of Jason Kenney and Peter MacKay. After 5,000 years, China has learned that what goes around, comes around. I’d suggest to this gang that they start learning the basics of statecraft before they take on the big fish.
An alleged judge of Manitoba's Court of Queen's Bench, Mr. Justice Gerald Jewers, saw fit to release a Karla Homolka clone by the name of Lynette Traverse after two years of 'time served.' Time served is one of those scams beloved of Canadian jailbirds, in which they stall sentencing as long as possible. They fire their lawyers, they fake illness, they allege mistreatment — all so that they can maximize the time they spend incarcerated prior to sentencing. Why? It counts as double time.
The original intent of the time-served clause was laudable. It forced the Crown to get to trial as quickly as possible. But it's used by scum like Traverse and her partner in the kidnap/rape/sodomy of two young girls to minimize, and in Traverse's case, to avoid time spent in prison.
Jewers gave Ladouceur 10 years, minus only three years for time spent, because evidence showed the two plotted to obstruct justice.
If ever the Harper Tories needed a poster couple for changing the way judges are appointed, these two are it. They're unrepentant users of the system, despicable perverts both of them, and I have little doubt we'll be hearing their names again, preferably when vigilante justice deals with them in a way the Canadian judicial system prefers not to.
Justice Minister Vic Toews last week floated a trial balloon for a system that would see the secretive Judicial Review Council replaced with a board that would include law-enforcement and corrective-system professionals, as well as others in the long chain of justice. Of course, there has been a terrible hue and cry from academics and the rights lobby, because that's how these people make a living. But the truth is that Canadians from coast to coast are sick of perverts like Traverse and Ladouceur smirking their way through the system. In an ideal world, this pernicious filth would be subjected to the lash and hard labour for the rest of their lives — as long as their victims will carry the pain of what they were subjected to. But we don't do that in Canada. A pity.
In the meantime, let's change the way judges are appointed. Ideally, they'd be elected, but that's a non-starter in this parliamentary dictatorship. So at least take the choice of who gets the job away from a gang of ex-lawyers.
Ho hum. A $5.3 million deficit for this past summer's World Outgames.
And who picks up the tab?
You do. I do. Why? Because We Weren't There. We didn't go. We didn't buy tickets. We betrayed our gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered brothers and sisters by not laying out bucks and planting our butts in seats at their events. It's our fault that we didn't recognize this glorious celebration of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered culture with our wallets and our presence.
So we must pay.
The fact that we've already paid once — the provincial government gave the Outgames more than $3 million and the City of Montreal another couple of million — is of no consequence. We must pay.
And pay.
And we won't raise our voices in anger, because that would be a homophobic renunciation of Quebec's status as an open, tolerant, accepting society.
When will we learn to say no?
Gaz columnist Don MacPherson says Stephen Harper made an error in judgment when he welcomed Don Cherry to his office. Grapes, said MacP, is best known in franco Quebec for his regular anti-French tirades. As proof of Cherry's rep, Don cites the boos and catcalls from Grit and Bloquiste benches when Cherry's presence in the House visitors' gallery was announced this week.
Frankly, I don't think the average Quebecker gives a bleep about Cherry one way or the other. The man's an entertainer now, a buffoon, a parody of himself. The fact that the CBC puts him on the air is a matter of continuing wonder to me, given the relentlessly correct, carefully skewed and infinitely readjusted spin the Corp exerts on everything that passes through its various broadcast portals, but I guess the CBC will do almost anything to preserve the fiction that it serves as the voice or real Canadians.
Another reason why I think Cherry doesn't matter: his blunt-instrument isms — racism, sexism and jingoism — pale in comparison to the honed barbs you'll hear on any of the most popular French-language talk-radio and television shows in Quebec. Even for anglo Quebecers, Cherry's in the same league as Red Green and the Air Farce. Not sharp, not smart and really, really not funny.
Getting back to MacPherson's suggestion that Quebec will punish the Tories because of Grapes Afghanistan, Kyoto, same-sex marriage or whatnot, here's what I think:
There’s an old expression in French: Faut voter à bon bord. Gotta vote for the right team. It expresses the essential pragmatism of Quebec voters in electing governments that best represent their interests, or bluntly, gives them money and pays lip service to their we're-a-nation pretenses without stirring the humiliation pot and getting the scribble-and-spew crowd a pretext to argue for another referendum.
Right now, everything's frozen. According to the last CROP poll, the Charest Liberals, the Harper Conservatives, Gilles Duceppe’s Bloc and the Parti Québécois under André Boisclair are all stalled in the popularity ratings. The secession option stagnates at 45 percent.
This past weekend, Harper and Charest gave Quebeckers a foretaste of their joint strategy for the next federal/provincial election/referendum cycle with their co-hosted announcement for the completion of Highway 30.
Conservative Public Works Minister (and Senator) Michael Fortier was front and centre, as he was for several high-profile announcements in Vaudreuil-Soulanges riding over the past six months. Maybe we’re reading too much into the unelected minister’s presence, but it strikes us that the Tories will bribe Quebeckers with almost anything to hang onto their 10 seats in Quebec and add to them if possible. Fortier needs a seat and it's one riding that everyone knows could swing Grit, Tory or Bloc, because it has.
As the bard Bob Dylan noted, you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Or as we say in Quebec, il faut voter à bon bord. Megaprojects and plenty of cash for municipal projects tend to neutralize a mountain of humiliation from the likes of Don Cherry.
The Charest Liberals are hinting at a one-year, one-percent PST hike, a one-year hike in public daycare fees from $7-a-day to $31, or even the temporary layoffs of more than 17,000 to pay off their salary-equity promise to the female half of the Quebec workforce.
Equal pay for equal work will cost taxpayers $825 million more a year. The Wage Equity Commission recommended that the gap be made up with five payments over four years. Quebec wants to spread that over seven years, in eight payments of $184 million.
Finance Minister Michel Audet says that if the government is forced to follow the faster payback scheme, the money has to come from somewhere, because by law, the province has to balance its budget. Do they up daycare fees? Do they raise the PST? Do they lay people off? Do they cut $600 million in grants to community organizations? Do they whack drug-insurance payouts by 30 percent? Employment Insurance payouts by half?
Quebec’s wage-equity law was adopted in November, 1997. It requires that all businesses with more than 10 employees pay male and female employees equally for equal work by this year. Employers who feel the policy threatens their financial survival can turn to the Wage Equity Commission for a delay. So far, the Commission has received five such demands and approved one such delay.
This really roasts my chestnuts. How can the Liberals expect the private sector to toe the
It’s a good thing in retrospect that Charest didn’t call a fall election: 41 percent of Quebeckers approve of the job Charest is doing, same as last month and one point up from August, when we saw that big bump for the Liberals.
This according to the monthly CROP omnibus poll in La Presse, where they survey 1000 people to gauge federal and provincial political trends. This one was from Oct 19 to 29, after the NatAss resumed sitting and we were getting all those sawmill closings.
Other highlights: the provincial Liberals and péquistes are both sitting at 37 percent, which means Boisclair and the PQ would have won an election this week because of the heavy concentration of Liberal votes in and around Montreal. But according to CROP, the PQ isn’t going anywhere either — and if a referendum on sovereignty-association had been held this week, the No would have won 55-45. As for Mario Dumont’s ADQ, they’re up a point to 13 percent. Not much life in that political body and it’s too bad, because they’re the middle ground Quebec needs to move on.
An interesting footnote: Andre Boisclair’s arrival in the NatAss didn’t do a damned thing.
The Harper government is also sitting at 41 percent, making the Tories just as unpopular as the Charest Liberals — the Tory dissatisfaction rating with Quebeckers jumped from 50 percent in September to 56 percent last month. But look at this as proof of the link between Quebec Liberals and federal Conservatives — 61% of the provincial Liberal vote are satisfied with the Harper Tories, compared to 20 percent of Quebecers as a whole.
So if a federal election had been held this week, the results would have been almost the same as this past January. The Tories would have gotten 24 percent, a point less than last time. The federal Liberals, even without a leader, would have gottenthe same 21 percent they got 10 months ago.
The big kicker: Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc would have finished with 36 percent, compared to the 42 percent they got in January. Golly, gee, Gilles, do you think that maybe Quebeckers have glommed on to the Bloquiste personal income trust?
Something else to hearten the Tories: In the Quebec City region, they would have scored 38 percent, even better than last time, when they won 10 seats mainly in the Quebec City and Beauce ridings. Could it be that Harper and the Conservatives can pull their fat out of the fire here in Quebec?
I got quite the kick out of listening to Liberal Finance critic John McCallum whining on the DWD last night about those perfidious Tories and how they broke their campiagn promise.
"Maybe you could say the Tories did what the Liberals didn't have the courage to do," I suggested.
McCallum had a problem with that. The entire Liberal caucus has a problem with it.
Because Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty did what had to be done.
Income trusts are a great stock saving vehicle. Every penny that went into income trusts would be paid out to the shareholder, who would then be taxed according to his or her personal income. Such a neat, tidy way for retirees to ensure that they'd have the cash for a comfortable dotage.
The problem for Flaherty is that once the corporate world saw the Liberals rolling over and playing dead on income trusts.
Nobody should ever forget the editorial that appeared last November in the National Post: Ralph Goodale, explain this graph. The accompanying blip in the Standard and Poors/TSX capped trust index graph proved beyond a shadow of doubt that the market knew that Martin's Grits were going to do something nice for income trusts in last fall's minibudget by doing nothing to tax them. That was backed by Scott Brison's e-mail to a Bay Street crony prior to the announcement, that the fix was in.
The Liberals acted exactly as they have throughout their tenure — pandering to their special-interest friends while keeping up the pious drone about their integrity. They have learned nothing from their Gomery gauntlet and their protestations this time ring just as hollow as their sponsorship mouthings.
The Harper government was looking at having to cancel its 1 percent GST cut because of revenues lost to what was, after all, a tax loophole for the well-to-do.
Just think what would have happened if the banks had followed Telus and BCE into the income-trust wonderland. The Tories just won themselves a slew of votes among middle-class Canadians. Let the whiny Liberals make their pitch to the whiny we-were-betrayed crowd. But I'll bet $100 to a charity of the taker's choice that even if they win a landslide in the next election or the one after that, they won't repeal the Tory tax change. Because then they'd have to show leadership, something they haven't exhibited in the slightest measure on the income-trust file.
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