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Did you catch that stupid story in all this morning’s papers about students blowtorching one another with lighters and cans of Axe deodorant spray? Well, finally, I can come clean on something that has been haunting me for years. When I was a teenager, I kept a can of Right Guard deodorant spray in my locker at school and a Zippo lighter in my pocket. So did many of my classmates. They were so we could play a game called Burn Off the Other Guy’s Eyebrows. To play the game, you’d whip out your can of Right Guard and draw your Zippo, flipping it open and igniting it in one smooth motion. You’d fire the can of Right Guard at the flame, producing a blowtorch effect. Then you’d try to burn the other guy’s eyebrows off. I can’t remember anyone getting hurt playing that stupid game, but I do recall Billy O’Brien setting his pants on fire lighting his flatulence.
I don’t know this, but I’m guessing girls don’t play games with lighters and spray cans of deodorant. Get a bunch of girls together and they try to achieve the level of the smartest one. Bring boys together and they’ll dumb down to the level of the dumbest kid.
The Harper Conservatives today revealed the 2006-2007 surplus: $13.8 billion. That’s $4.6 billion higher than forecast in the March 2007 budget, due largely to soaring natural resources prices. The good news, if we can call it that, is a $14.2 billion reduction in the federal debt. Under the Tory tax-back guarantee which decrees how surpluses must be split, that means $725 million in personal tax cuts, $1.5 billion since the Harper government was elected in January '06.
Over the past two years, the federal debt has been reduced by an amount equivalent to $1,142 for each Canadian. Federal debt as a percentage of the economy is down to its lowest level in 25 years. Canada was the only G-7 country to post a surplus in 2006. All good.
But what the Tories or the Liberals before them don't say is that debt reduction has been on the backs of the provinces and the municipalities. As Laval Mayor Gilles Vaillancourt pointed out in an interview marking the first anniversary of the collapse of the de la Concorde overpass a year ago Sunday, Canada is is running a multibillion-dollar annual deficit in not seeing to its crumbling public infrastructures — roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, sewers, aqueducts and whatever else keeps civilization civil. We're aware of that hidden deficit only when things like de la Concorde happen.
Vaillancourt supports the idea of paying down the debt. But he wonders why, instead of dropping the GST a point, the Tories didn't keep it there and pledge the money for infrastructure repairs.
As Vaillancourt says, the best memorial to those who died in that collapse would be to ensure the cash is there to fix what's so obviously in need of fixing.
NDP leader Jack Layton's right. Spend more to fix what's broken. If the Harper Tories want a majority, they'll have to do better in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver — where Canada's infrastructure problems are at their worst.
Bad, bad news for Jean Charest in the latest CROP poll in La Presse — more than half those polled figure he won’t be around to lead his party into the next provincial election, which would see a Charest-led Liberal party finish third.
Prior to this spring’s provincial election, the Charest government thought it was being clever to push the whole reasonable accommodation uproar back to this fall’s hearings. But the latest CROP poll tells us Charest’s move backfired. If an election took place this week, it would be between Mario Dumont’s ADQ and Pauline Marois’ PQ, 34 to 32 percent. Charest and the Liberals would finish a poor third, with 24 percent.
CROP’s Claude Gauthier says that with a three-point margin of error, the outcome of another provincial election would be too close to call — except that the Liberals are in trouble.
In Greater Montreal, the three parties are tied at 28 percent, but the Liberals lead only on the island. The ADQ rules both off Montreal island and throughout the Quebec City region.
The poll also found that barely a third of francophones are plugging for Charest and barely 15 percent would vote Liberal.
It’s the first time since last March’s election that Dumont’s troops in the lead. For the Grits, this is a three-point drop since August and a nine-point plunge since the election.
The accession and election of Pauline Marois doesn’;t seem to have done the PQ much good. The pequistes have gained two points since March’s disastrous third-place finish, but they’ve dropped three points since August. Worse, Pauline has lost half the 12 point lead she had in August over Mario Dumont as who people think would make the best premier....she’s at 35, Mario at 29 and Jean at 19, a drop of three points.
CROP also asked its monthly question measuring support for an independent Quebec. 41% said yes, 59% said no.
Car-free day: An exercise in media hype that we should be ashamed of. Here's my question: how many of the city's 28,000 employees, elected or otherwise, took public transit? How many companies encouraged their people to ride the straps? The test on whether all this bloviation accomplished anything? Ridership numbers from the STM and the AMT.
While I’m at it, you gotta love the news — on car-free day, yet — that the feds don’t want to pump any more cash into the 50-year-old Champlain Bridge. Ottawa would like to replace it with a new eight or 10-lane span that’ll cost then a billion bucks. The feds don’t see any point in replacing the deck in 15 years. The deck was replaced in 1992, but the bridge is carrying 56 million cars and 5 million trucks a year, so they figure a new span is cheaper. And we can forget about the commuter train on the ice bridge. It’ll cost a billion by itself, so it’s dead. Instead the new bridge will have two dedicated mass transit lanes.
Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon has ordered a detailed study. What’s that tell us? Public transit isn’t a high priority. The stupidest thing I heard in a day of stupid comments? That the city would be ploughing the bike lanes for people who ride all winter. It’d be cheaper to buy those 1,000 die-hards transit passes...hell, it’d be cheaper to buy them cars.
Concordia president Claude Lajeunesse stepped down yesterday, barely two years into a five-year term. The announcement was made at a Board of Governors meeting Monday, and made public yesterday, but if anyone knows why he’s really leaving, they’re not saying so publicly. Part of it could be their deficit, which is expected to fall anywhere between $7.5 and $10 million. The annual audit is complete as far as my sources at the Link know, but it has yet to go public. Some of the staff are reportedly quite happy to see him go; including some of the unions without contract.
There’s also a rumour that Lajeunesse is leaving with a massive golden handshake — a million bucks. This is all Lajeunesse has said on that: I have reached an agreement with our Board of Governors to leave my position as President of Concordia University on October 31.
Was this the same Claude Lajeunesse crying about Quebec's tuition freeze earlier this year? The same man who said universities were foundering for lack of funding?
ANGLO SURVIVAL IN PERIL!
OTTAWA HAD BETTER SEND US $500,000 OR YOU’LL NEVER SEE US AGAIN AND WE’LL DIE AND IT WILL BE YOUR FAULT!
That, in essence, was the hyperbolic shout on the front page of our English Language Daily this morning, emanating from a group called the Quebec Community Groups Network.
You can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of the QCGN. It is a useless little organization, the last remaining vestige of the once-mighty Anglo Lobby Industry begun by the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1978. Surely you remember — Quebec will be as English as the rest of Canada is French.
The Quebec Community Groups Network purports to represent 23 English community organizations. In fact, most of those community groups have next to no members and a bogus mandate. Example: the Quebec Community Newspaper Association, which claims to represent the English weeklies in Quebec. It can’t even bring itself to address the critical problems its members are having with Canada Post. Its major function seems to be to organize an annual piss-up and to force the member papers to take classified ads for online scams.
For those who forget, we once had a group called Alliance Quebec. It got as much a $1.5 million a year to “build bridges” with Quebec’s French-speaking majority. The only bridges it built were to political careers. Tom Mulcair. Russ Williams. Russ Copeman. Then in 1998, Alliance Quebec got hijacked by Pit Bill Johnson and angryphones who considered Howard Galganov their patron saint. Then what happened? The lamb lobby went whining to the federal Liberals and got them to slash AQ’s funding again and again. It died.
Now we have the Quebec Community Groups Network going whining to the same federal Canadian Heritage teat. They want 500 grand to host meetings and lobby.
Meet to discuss what? The Anglo future? Most of us are getting on with just that. We deal daily with racist, bigoted francophones who never let us forget who’s in the driver’s seat. Every day’s a fight — for service in English from institutions we pay our taxes to, for the right to be considered for employment even if we have a non-Quebecois name.
Lobby for what? More civil-service jobs? Don’t make me laugh. Last I looked, non-francos made up less than five percent of the provincial bureaucracy. Francos make up 37 percent of the federal bureaucracy, and that doesn’t include Crown Corporations. Where’s the symmetry there?
So spare us the hysterics. All the forums and lobbying in the world won’t change the bleak truth — that all seven federal and provincial parties are busily fuelling nationalist fervour here in Quebec and if you’re a non-franco, you either weather the heat or get out of the kitchen. What we need is less of the QCGN’s mewling and more plain talk about how our own institutions are letting us down.
But don’t for one moment confuse the survival of the QCGN with the survival of the English-speaking community. They’re no more representative of the anglos than Jean Charest’s Liberals.
Last week, I predicted that Stephane Dion and Gilles Duceppe would be the big losers in this past Monday’s three byelections.
Now I’m not so sure.
Yes, former Quebec Environement Minister Tom Mulcair won big in Outremont, a Liberal bastion since 1935. It’s the NDP’s first Quebec seat since Phil ‘Lemon Aid’ Edmonston took Chambly in 1989. But Mulcair won on the strength of his principled stand against the sleazy Orford payoff and the sheer force of his presence in the riding. I’d bet dollars to donuts he can’t repeat in a general election.
Yes, the Tories could beat the Bloc in the separatist cradle of Roberval-Lac-St-Jean. But Denis Lebel, the former mayor of Roberval, could win for the Marxist-Leninist party. No surprise there.
The Bloc had St. Hyacinthe Bagot in the bag.
The pundits are all predicting Liberal Leader Stephane Dion’s in big trouble after having lost Outremont. I can’t see that. The Liberals have an unwritten rule: Every leader gets to carry the ball into one general election. If he/she screws up, all bets are off. The party brass can quote that tradition as they’re pressured to dump an unpopular leader.
After all, who would they hand the ball to? Michael Ignatieff? Justin Trudeau? Bob Rae? One of the other also-rans at this year’s leadership convention? The way I see it, the voters are so mercurial right now, there’s no predicting what they’ll do in a month, let alone a year.
Gilles Duceppe is another story. The caucus is fed up with his micromanaging, his ruthlessness and his insistance on caucus solidarity. I understand that a number of MPs are on the verge of retirement. They’ll pull the ripcords as we get closer to Canada’s new fixed election date, Monday, October 19, 2009.
Voters in three federal ridings in Quebec are preparing to deliver a claque a tete to Stephane Dion and Gilles Duceppe Monday...This according to this morning’s La Presse/Unimarketing poll, which points to former Quebec Environement Minister Tom Mulcair easily winning Outremont, the NDP’s first Quebec seat since 1989. The Tories could beat the Bloc in the separatist cradle of Roberval-Lac-St-Jean. The Bloc has St. Hyacinthe Bagot in the bag, and the Liberals are nowhere on the radar.
But here’s what’s even more interesting: Monday’s three federal byelection are turning into referendums on Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan and Bill C-31, the veiled-voter amendment to the Elections Act.
In Roberval Lac St. Jean, where the Tories Denis Lebel has a six-point lead over the Bloc’s Celine Houde, half the voters surveyed and a third of those who say they’ll vote Tory want the tropps out immediately. More Liberals want the mission to contginue past February 2009 than do Tories.
In Ste Hyacinthe, 69 percent of all voters want the troops out immediately — and 73 percent of those who say they’re voting Tory.
In Outremont, two-thirds of those surveyed want the troops out ASAP, three-quarters of the NDP vote and 60 percent of the Conservative vote.
In all three ridings, an overwhelming majority of Conservative voters want the troops out of Afghanistan either iimmediately or by February, 2009.
What’s this tell us? Harper is way out of step with his Quebec vote when it comes to ending this mission. Mind you, that’s just one poll — but Monday’s results will hammer home the message in a way no politician can ignore.
A frind and colleague sent me this via e-mail:
I was born here, but being a child of immigrants who never felt 100% accepted here even after 50 years, and
because of comments I have heard all my life from them like: If our name was Tremblay, the govt wouldn't have
audited us, you would have gotten that great job, they wouldn't have fired you, etc. and despite being bilingual,
(my mother is from Belgium) I still feel that the Quebecois see me as part of "eux" and not as the Anglais, but
as the "ethniques".
Also even though I speak French to people, they most always switch to English even though I speak well, but
with a belgian/english accent I guess it is.
So there.
The anglos like me just fine. Me, I feel Canadian more than anything else, Polish not al all, and a Quebecker on
rare occasions like on St. Jean if I'm at a party....and listening to Harmonium.
I have a friend, Pascal Gisenya, who’s a pharmacist. Or he was, back in the Congo. He owned a chain of pharmacies. He’s a Tutsi, so during the tribal troubles, he fled to Kenya, where he was a regional rep for GlaxoSmithKline. But he had visa problems, so he had to move his family back to Rwanda, where his wife and children live now. He’s working as a pharmacist’s assistant in a small pharmacy and waiting to hear whether he’ll ever be able to practice his profession in Quebec, Pascal speaks 10 languages, including fluent English and French. He’s fully qualified to do what any pharmacist does here in Quebec. But the Ordre des pharmaciens wants him to go back to pharmacy school before they’ll even let him take the test. The other provinces will let him write the test, but he wants to stay in Quebec.
The truth? Quebec’s Ordre des professions doesn’t want Pascal to become a pharmacist, because to let Pascal become a pharmacist would open the floodgates to the other 39 self-regulating professions in Quebec — medicine, dentistry, engineering, to name just a few. The Order of pharmacists doesn’t want Pascal to become a pharmacist even though there’s a pharmacist shortage because it’s a goldmine for the chains.
The reasonable accommodation hearings are nothing more than a political sop to keep the lid on Quebec’s hypocritical stance on immigration. We want new Quebeckers, they say — as long as they’re ready to do the jobs we don’t want.
Stephen Harper has repeated his les-Quebecois-form-a-nation rant on an international stage.
The PM ended his Australian sojourn with a speech to the Aussie parliament by declaring that les Quebecois — not Quebeckers — form a nation within Canada.
The franco journalists were ecstatic. The first head of a Canadian government to recognize the Quebecois nation on an international stage, writes Joel-Denis Bellevance in La Presse, while at the same time predicting backlash. “:The recognition of the Quebecois specificity, especially outside Canada, does not have the country’s unanimous support.
Well, no shit, Sherlock.
It was one thing last year, when the Harper Tories adopted that motion in the House declaring that “les Québécois form a nation within a united Canada.”
There was some question back then about what Harper meant when he said les Quebecois. Not Quebecker, but les Quebecois. This time around, there was no abiguity, because Harper said it first in french, then repeated it in English. He said: Australia was born in English. Canada was born in French, in Quebec 400 years ago next year, and that is reflected to this day by the French-speaking presence by the Quebecois nation within our united country. In English, the PM used the expression “Quebecois nation.” That must have had the Aussies shaking their heads.
According to Bellevance in La Presse, Harper didn’t consult with anyone before making the speech. In fact, his own handlers knew ony 24 hours before.
“For the first time ever, a prime minister has recognized the Quebecois nation on the international stage, and it didn’t stop there. He recognized that Canada was founded in French,” said a senior member of the Canadian delegation. Another said Harper’s recognition of Canada’s French founding fathers was a major step in acknowledging Quebec’s role in Canada.
My Uncle Larry, an 83-year-old Alberta farmer who believes in a moat between Manitoba and Ontario, says I’m missing the point. He says I should catch what Harper’s NOT saying — that anybody can be a nation within Canada — Iroquois, Cree, Newfie, Winnipegger.
My son agrees. If the separatists want to spin straw into gold, that’s their problem, he adds.
Perhaps. But I fail to see how this does anything but encourage the nationalists.
Trudeau was a fascist, says Mulroney.
Here we go again, with another replay of that tiring Canadian game of trying to quantify was the greatest Canadian prime minister, Brian Mulroney or Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Frankly, who cares, apart from the fact that we’re still living with the legacies of both men?
I’m reminded of Trudeau every time there’s another outbreak of lingistic/ethnic intolerance in Quebec. Trudeau was the father of the Official Languages Act which ensured that francophones would have an affirmative-action floor in the federal bureaucracy, but the OLA’s bureaucratic structure — and Trudeau’s Supreme Court appointees — guarantee the asymmetry of lingustic rights in Quebec versus the rest of Canada. And let’s not forget that Trudeau started the ball rolling on trade with China. Inevitable, maybe, but I’m sure we’ll end up regretting it.
I’m reminded of Mulroney every time I factor in the 15.56 percent (now 12.24 percent) GST/PS on almost all goods and services. Tax on tax hits the working poor and middle class the hardest.
So what if Trudeau was an anti-Semitic draft dodger who admired Hitler and Mussolini and once supported Quebec independence? As Max and Monique Nemni tell us, he was influenced by the tenor of the times. Adrien Arcand’s Nazi brownshirts were beating up Jewish teenagers with the tacit approval of the Catholic Church. Most of Trudeau’s profs read Le Goglu, Le Devoir or the collected works of Lionel Groulx. Ever hear of Laurentia? That was the vision, widely supported by the quebecois intellectual elite, of an independent French-speaking Catholic state of pureblooded descendents of New France’s original settlers. Frankly, it's a credit to Trudeau that he was able to break free of those cultural chains.
As for Mulroney, Stevie Cameron and Rod Macdonnell did a far better job that I ever could, asking the hard questions in On the Take, the seminal volume of the Mulroney era. If you read that in conjunction with Peter C. Newman’s contentious Mulroney Memoirs, you’ll be able to form your own conclusion about the man.
I covered both men. I knew Trudeau personally. I didn’t much like him as a person because I knew too much about his personal life, but I admired his intellectual rigor and the will that gave him the power to take — and hold — unpopular positions.
I liked Brian Mulroney. He’s a warm, gregarious individual who brings out the best in people. His legacy includes the end of South African apartheid, NAFTA and an enduring economic boom. But he danced too close to the unsavory gang that brung him and I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of the scandals that surrounded those years.
Mulroney’s posthumous slagging of Trudeau for being a fascist was just plain small. I’m sure it’s driven by his memories of how Trudeau sank the Meech Lake deal by accusing Mulroney of being a nationalist dupe, but at least Trudeau did it in the heat of battle. Sure, it’ll sell books, but this was not Brian Mulroney the statesman. Take it all with a grain of salt and realize it is what it is — a ratings driver for CTV.
When are people going to wise up to the inherent corruption and stupidity of the rush to build windfarms? A good example is the proposal to put up 31 of these oversized eggbeaters on an 80-hectare site near Stanbridge Station, southeast of here. This is just one of dozens of partnerships being proposed by a bunch of carpetbaggers rushing to cash in on the Charest government’s plan to add 2,000 megawatts of windpower to Quebec’s electrical grid.
Let’s put this into perspective. Hydro Quebec currently produces more that 35,000 Mw, almost all of it as hydroelectricity. In Europe and Australia/New Zealand, windfarm electricity produces roughly five percent of their respective energy needs.
It’s not hard to figure out why the farmers are suckers for these windfarm proposals. They’re paid up to $10 grand per year for these things on their land, not including access roads. Instead of worrying about getting crops in and out of the ground, they can sit there watching the windmills make them money.
Not everyone’s excited about this. This weekend, I was hearing the story of a property owner called John Weatherall, who owns most of the shoreline at the western end of Wolfe Island, near Kingston, Ont. An Alberta windfarm promoter is proposing to put up 85 of these wind generator units. Weatherall doesn’t want them, but he has no choice, because the other farmers want the deal so bad, the regional government will expropriate his land.
Why is Charest backing this? Politics. It’s part of the Kyoto clean energy buzz and it creates jobs in depressed areas. That’s why Quebec lobbyists have joined forces with the major wind turbine manufacturers — GE Energy, Enercon, Nordex, Enron Wind, Vestas, NEG Micon, Bonus — all American or European.
It’s one big scam, which is why some regional governments have declared a moratorium on windfarms. They’re asking tough questions — like who pays to dismantle these windfarms when their promoters go bust or when they’ve reached the end of their design life. Who restores the farmland?
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