Raging Duff

Robert Goulet, the big-voiced star of Broadway and the silver screen, died yesterday at Cedars Sinai in Hollywood after a long battle with pulmonary fibrosis, a debilitating lung disease. He was 74.
Today, I received this e-mail from Don Chapman, the Canadian-born United Airlines pilot who has been leading the fight for Canadian citizenship for a quarter-million born Canadians stripped of their citizenship by a 30-year-hole in the Canada Citizenship Act.
Dear Jim, I thought you'd like to hear "the rest of the story."
Yesterday another one of us caught up in the Lost Canadian minefield died — his name was Robert Goulet. I first became acquainted with Mr. Goulet a couple of summers ago when he was receiving a Star on the sidewalk in Toronto. CTV was filming the event, and just after the unveiling Robert Goulet turned to the person accompanying him, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and said, "but what I really want is my Canadian citizenship." The problem? Robert Goulet was born in the United States to a French Canadian father, and a mother with huge ties to Quebec. On his father's death, the family moved to Edmonton where he attended school and sang. Like many other Lost Canadians, Robert got caught up in the age 24 retention rule. Canada was questioning whether he had been out of the country on his 24th birthday, so therefore his citizenship came into question. It now appears as though Robert was in Edmonton on his birthday, as the family eventually found an old picture of a local nightclub marquee, highlighting the entertainer performing as being "Robert Goulet!" How sad that ones identity and citizenship could hinge on finding an old family photograph as proof that you happened to be in Canada half a century earlier on one particular day of your life.

Posted by Jim Duff at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More than 40,000 Quebecers have left the province in the past year — 12,577 between April and June of this year. That tops the 1996-97 post-referendum peak and compares with the outflow we saw following the 1976 PQ victory.
Who’s leaving? We don’t know. We won’t know until the StatsCan 2006 census migration demographics numbers are out in early December. Is it Quebec’s growing xenophobia? I can tell you my neighbour Mahmoud Osseyrene is moving his family to Alberta, because of an excellent job opportunity, but I also know my nationalist pal Pierre Ostiguy transferred to B.C. because he was disgusted with Quebec’s never-ending war of words. So I’d have to say there’s no proof people are leaving because they don’t feel welcome in Quebec. People leave Quebec because they can’t make as much money here. Robbie Ritchie, the former president of CP Rail, is as close to a Hudson homeboy as anyone I know, but he’s not going to come back to live now that he’s retired, because he pays 39 percent personal taxes in Alberta. At his level, you can hire a private jet and rent an entire B and B with a fraction of the money you save.
Quebec’s a great place to be poor. There’s cheap daycare for those whose trade is pumping out kids. Welfare gives you free dentistry, free drugs, free everything. Rents are controlled., there’s plenty of illegal drugs, illicit tobacco...public transit is cheap and the cyclist is king.
I predict the numbers will show the latest exodus includes equal numbers of anglos, allos and francos looking for an escape from more than 30 years of ideological civil warfare. Anybody with a work ethic and a desire to succceed eventually comes to the conclusion that Quebec costs them too much to live here, much as they love this place.
My dream? I’d love to see Montreal become a city-state. A tax-free zone where business could thrive again and language was a tool in the business of making money. In a successful economy, everyone’s ship floats. In a moribund, bureaucratized wasteland like Quebec, most of us have forgotten what boom times feel like.
In our business, there are fewer listeners, readers and watchers every year. The Gazette’s paid circulation has been in a slow, steady decline for a decade, notwithstanding its monopoly. English-speaking Quebeckers who whine about their dying community should look around them and see what’s happening to everyone else in Quebec.

Posted by Jim Duff at 8:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Here’s the question at the heart of the debate raging over the PQ's proposed Quebec Identity Act:
Should one’s ability to speak French be a prerequisite for the right to vote, run for office or otherwise take part in Quebec society?
The author of Bills 195 and 196, a proposed Quebec constitution, is former Bloquiste MP, now PQ constitutional affairs critic Daniel Turp. He's easily the smartest guy in the PQ room. I don’t buy for a millisecond his claim of wanting to put an end to the ghettoization and marginalization of new immigrants, but it's a brilliant tactic.
This is all about political strategy. The PQ needs to stop Mario Dumont and the ADQ. This uproar over Bill 195 has the net effect of throwing Mario Dumont off message. Dumont was the one who pushed hardest for the reasonable accommodation debate. Dumont’s the one who has said the immigrants have to be pulled out of their ghettos and mainstreamed into Quebec society. Bill 195 forces Dumont to take a position he doesn’t want to take. If he does and the law gets tabled and passed, it will eventually end up in the Supreme Court, where it will be knocked down for being in violation of both the federal and Quebec charters and then the secessionists will be able to campaign on the need to break away from a country that doesn’t really recognize Quebec’s specificity.
Bugt I’m getting ahead of myself . The trouble with Turp’s strategy is that he needs to ensure his players keep quiet on some aspects. PQ language critic Pierre Curzi obviously wasn’t when he blurted some nonsense about how, after Quebec seceded, west island anglos would be stripped of their right to vote. A brainfart, he claimed as he backpedalled. I don’t think so. I think Curzi was just being honest.
The Turp/Marois party line is a triumph of treacherous doublespeak. I received an open letter just this morning from a coalition of secessionists and French-language supremacists accusing anyone who opposes the law to be against Quebec’s values of secularism and gender equality.
The open letter (my translation) reads: We don’t oppose individual rights or religious freedom, but nobody should be allowed to use this right to oppose Quebec law, because this risks shattering social cohesion. There are no exceptions to the law, no special dispensations for specific groups or individuals; it applies to all.
Next, it attacks multiculturalism. “When we fight discrimination, we also fight the “communautarisme à la Trudeau” which serves to isolate immigrants from the public debate and places them in social ghettos. The most perfidious form of racism is to withhold from new immigrants the tools they need to fully integrate into Quebec society. This in effect is what has plunged us into the situation facing us for the past several months. To say to a citizen that he or she must have a correct mastery of French is not only not racism, but an acknowledgement of the effects of the cuts in francization programs. It’s no coincidence that the federal government demands a mastery of French or English of new immigrants.
The writers display a profound ignorance of immigration dynamics when they refer to “what’s happening in Parc-Extension in Montréal. This neighbourhood is the poorest in Canada and contains one of the highest number of immigrants...to allow this situation to endure is contrary to the state’s principles of democratic rights.
That, says the coalition, is why the state must adopt a constitution and an act regarding Quebec’s cultural identity. There’s nothing racist in this. The French language remains to this day the best way of integrating new arrivals. Better that, says the group, than doing as the feds are doing on Rosemont Blvd, ghettoizing our immigrants by building housing reserved exclusively for new immigrants from Southeast Asia.
The signatories are Paolo Zambito, a former political attache and treasurer of the Mouvement Montréal français, Farid Salem, president of Solidarité Québec-Algérie, Juan José Hernandez, former president of the Bloc québécois Outremont riding association and Pierre Biacchi, a self-described Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste militant and PQ member.
Huntingdon mayor Stéphane Gendron has it right when he attacked the draft bill in a council resolution, but unlike the Herouxville resolution, his didn't get any ink in Quebec's heavily self-censored nationalist media.
What Gendron said in essence was that this is a racist law, a fascist law, a totalitarian law that will margvinalize Quebec in the community of nations and kill any economic recovery. He's right. So why haven't we heard that from every municipal leader in Quebec?

Posted by Jim Duff at 8:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Unprecedented. That’s the best way to describe the out-of-court settlement between the Quebec Automobile Inurance Board and the victims and orphans of those injured and killed in last year’s de la Concorde collapse.
It’s not the money. $1.6 million divvied up that small gives little Gabriel Hamel $300,000 for the loss of both his parents.
It’s the fact that the SAAQ decided to settle rather than duke it out in court. Only one case, that of the driver of that blue van, who suffered crippling back injuries, has yet to be resolved. All the others signed away their right to sue by settling with the SAAQ.
If they’d opted to continue litigating, the victims would have had to prove these were not automobile accidents. The SAAQ would have tried to prove that they were. Depending on the outcome, the victims could have won the right to sue everyone named in the Johnson report, beginning with the ministry of transport.
SAAQ boss John Harbour says the settlement is the best solution, seeing as how the lawyers would have gobbled up the lion’s share of any settlement.
The SAAQ has only one precent to go on — a motorist injured when a light plane made a forced landing on a south-shore highway.
It’s understandable why they don’t want to, given the cost of litigation, but it’s still a pity nobody decided to fight. This would have been the only way Quebec’s grossly unfair no-fault insurance scheme would have been forced to allow people like the Jolicoeurs to sue the kid who put their daughter Patricia in hospital for life.
Only a truly ridiculous law could conclude that any car crushed by last Sept. 30’s collapse was the cause of the occupants’ death or injury. Yet that’s what the SAAQ pretends. When an overpass falls on you because of the criminal negligence of those who built it, inspected it and maintained it, surely that’s no accident.

Posted by Jim Duff at 8:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So. Nobody gets fired, nobody gets sued and the only guilty parties named and shamed in the Johnson Commission’s report are the Transport Ministry engineers.
What about the suppliers of the substandard concrete? What about the incompetents who were hired to oversee the work?
Golly, we don’t know who was on site. Very convenient.
What about the culture of hiring former transport ministry employees as consulting engineers on major projects? Why is there nothing about the bid-rigging process?
Why has Johnson not recommended changes to the performance bonding that would require contractors to insure their work for the entire working life of a structure?
The only pipi-whacking was Pierre-Marc Johnson’s harsh indictment of the culture of sloth, incompetence and buck-passing within the MTQ.
Johnson referred to the June, 2004 report from MTQ engineer Gilbert Bossé to Claude Leclerc, head of the maintenance service in the Laval/Mille-Iles MTQ office.
I have a copy of that report here, along with the followups from Leclerc to his boss, Christian Mercier, head of MTQ Maintenance division in Quebec City:
Bossé’s original report, dated June 17, 2004, reads as follows:
“The de la Concorde Blvd. overpass over Highway 19, exhibits seating problems. During the last general inspections, damages have been observed and merit particular attention. The sate of the seatings can’t be precisely established because thier configuration does not allow a visiual inspection. However the damage observed on the exterior sides leads to the suspicion of a major disaggregation problem in the seating. The presence of wide scissors fissures on the edges of the structure are equally disquieting.
At this stage, the assistance and the co-operation of your office would permit us to identify the best direction to proceed with this file. The options we’re facing range from closer monitoring to a thorough inspection necessitating the lifting of the entire bridge deck.
In the eventuality the latter option is judged necessary, the contract will need to include immediate repairs to the seatings and the tongues which sit on them, given the complexity of having to lift the bridge deck and manage traffic flow on both the boulevard and the highway below.”
Bossé’s letter included drawings and photographs of the damage.
•••
Mercier writes to his superior, Claude Leclerc, on March 1, 2005. He agrees with Bossé on the extent of the damage, but concludes: “A more detailed inspection isn’t necessary. The problem is in the lack of weatherproofing on the expansion joints. Let’s continue monitoring the situation to see whether the seatings continue to deteriorate, or whether they stabilize before we proceed to repairs.
Mercier goes on to describe what the repairs would consist of. They would take four weeks, beginning with installing temporary supports at each end of the bridge deck. Then thy’d hammer away the seatings at each end and replace them with elastomeric structures. Mercier’s total cost: $384,600.
•••
The last letter is from Leclerc back to his report, Gilbert Bossé, dated March 3, 2005.
“As a result of your request, Christian Mercier accompanied you to the site on July 15, 2004. While noting the same things as Bossé, he and I have concluded that no immediate intervention is required. However, we’re asking you to keep a close eye on what needs to be done if more serious degradation does occur.
•••
These three documents at the heart of Daniel Johnson’s harsh criticism of the Transport Ministry’s culture of coverup, obfuscation and buck-passing also happen to be the three documents ADQ leader Mario Dumont pulled out of his jacket pocket during the March 17 Quebec leaders debate. It’s clear why Pierre-Marc Johnson felt obliged to address them specifically in his report.
Here are my questions:
What happened to Gilbert Bossé? Was he transferred? Fired? Was he the source of the docs leaked to Mario Dumont?
What about Leclerc and Mercier? Will there be a letter in their file?
Nobody gets fired, nobody gets sued and only the union gets whacked. This, folks, was the ultimate political document.

Posted by Jim Duff at 8:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Here’s a question for you:
Should the City of Montreal try to cut a deal with Bell Centre owner George Gillett for his $32 million property tax bill? Gillett, who owns the Montreal Canadiens, is taking the city to Quebec’s Administrative Tribunal to try to recover $12 million he claims he was overcharged in the last valuation roll, from 2004 to 2006. Gillett claims the Bell Centre isn’t worth more than $60 million, while the city’s evaluators place the dollar value at $150 million.
While he’s in front of the TAQ, Gillett will challenge the $225 million the city now claims the Bell centre is worth in the latest four-year valuation roll. Gillett’s experts place the value at $75 million. If he wins, he’ll save $5 million per year. Add it all up, and it comes to $32 million over seven years.
A Gillett victory would hammer the city’s $100 million annual tax reimbursement contingency fund. It would also place a greater load on other taxpayers and embolden other big players to contest their tax valuations.
But they should have seen this coming. Let’s not forget that former Habs GM Ron Corey got hiself into trouble precisely because of this./ Corey built the Bell Centre without getting a tax ruling from the city. The Bell Centre has been hammered for taxes ever since.
Given what the Habs and the Bell Centre do for Montreal, I’d have to say the city should cut Gillett some slack. But $5 million a year? That’s a lot of slack — especially since Gillett knew the score when he bought the club and the Bell Centre in 2001. Didn’t he pay just $181 million back then? Isn’t the franchise now worth $300 million, according to Forbes Magazine?

Posted by Jim Duff at 8:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A major infrastructure funding and maintenance announcement by the Charest government today...this is a followup to the last provincial budget, which already earmarked the cash, but there’s a twist — a new law that requires future governments to maintain and invest in new infrastructure.
Quebec’s public infrastructure now gets $14.9 billion, or about $3.6 billion annually. That rises to $5.9 billion between now and 2012, for a total of $29.7 billion over the next five years.
Today’s announcement by the premier and Treasury Board President Monique Jerome Forget made it clear the money isn’t just for Quebec’s crumbling highways, bridges and tunnels. It’s for public transit, schools, hospitals, culture, public housing, public security and research — and that $30 billion also includes previously announced projects, such as the MUHC and CHUM superhospitals.
You gotta like the law forcing future governments to invest in maintaining and renewing infrastructure, but what’s it really worth? Let’s not forget the province has had a zero-deficit law since Lucien Bouchard was premier. In that period, we’ve seen the Quebec provincial debt rise from $115 billion to $125 billion — and it’s rising at around $3 billion a year.
To steal a great advertising line, where’s the beef? How much of this is new money? How much of this is recycled promises? How much of this is for Montreal and how much for Ste. Cawliss de Tabernak? So many questions, so few answers.

Posted by Jim Duff at 8:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So what did I tell ya? Didn’t I say the Harper gang’s les-Québecois-form-a-nation-within-Canada resolution would backfire? Oh, it’s just symbolic, some people said. A pious platitude for the masses. Conservative Public Works Minister Michael Fortier said on these very airwaves he was surprised I was surprised at a political gambit designed to pre-empt a similar move by the Bloc.
So what are they saying now that Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe is challenging the Harper Tories to amend the Charter to make French Quebec’s official language?
What’s the Bloc demand mean to you and I?
Nobody needs to serve you in English at Canada Post, VIA Rail or any other Crown Corp. Unilingual francophones have the right to refuse to work in English.
Federally regulated industries such as banks, communications, transportation would be forced to institute those stupid francization programs. Service in English? Where numbers warrant.
Look — anyone doing business in Quebec already knows damn well they’d better have a French-speaking workplace. Anybody in Quebec doing business with the rest of the planet already knows they’d better have fluent English-speakers on staff.
The Supreme Court of Canada has already upheld the right of the Quebec government to create two classes of citizens — those who have the right to educate their kinds in the language of their choice and those who don’t.
Frankly, I’ve never understood why French-speaking Quebec allows demagogues to railroad them into thinking their language and cuture are in peril because their kids are fluent in English.
It’s the same crap we hear from old-stock Quebeckers whining about how the sight of a hijab is destroying their Quebec. What was it, 30 years ago, they were whining about how the sight and sound of English was destroying their Quebec.
Who the hell made it their Quebec? Anyone who lives here, works, pays taxes and contributes to the economy is building Quebec. Well, maybe not the 40 percent of old-stock francophones who are sucking off the welfare state with EI, CSST and welfare. But they’re de chez nous, so that’s okay, right?
Stephen Harper doesn’t care about minority language rights. He made that clear when he axed the Court Challenges program — a decision I supported at the time. But now we’re seeing the crows coming home to roost and the fallout ain’t pretty.

Posted by Jim Duff at 7:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ever hear of the chain of survival? It’s the system that begins with a 911 call and ends when the hospital moves you out of intensive care — or to the morgue. Which it is, depends to a large extent on luck in Quebec. Will the first responders get there within the seven-minute golden mean to begin CPR, defib, anaphalaxis? Once they’ve stabilized you, is there an ambulance to get you to the hospital before you start to sink again?
In Greater Montreal, the first link in the chain of survival used to be the arrival of the Urgences Sante ambulance, or if you were lucky, one of the first-responder or EMS teams that existed prior to the forced mergers. But the ambulance response times — as much as 30 minutes in some parts of the West Island on bad days — began the push for better services. Now, the first link is supposed to be Montreal’s 2300 firefighters. But Quebec, the doctors and then the Tremblay administration all stalled their implementation — so the chain of survival is full of weak or untested links.
The firefighters get $1.50 an hour, plus a taxable $1500 training bonus, to become first responders. They’re working without a new contract as the city paints them as greedy and incompetent. Urgence Sante paramedics — now the second link in that chain of survival — are bleeding to death from low pay, long hours and mandatory overtime. They’re now in a legal strike position.
Yesterday, I spoke with Stephane Gascon, spokesman for the Urgences-Sante Paramedics union. I asked him how long it would take before the chain of survival here in Quebec would be assured. Decades, he said.

Posted by Jim Duff at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Montreal’s 2300 firefighters aren’t very smart when it comes to manipulating public opinion. Talks between the brotherhood and the city are back on, so the firefighters prepared a shopping list of demands ranging from 500 more firefighters and seven more stations, to a better deal than the buck fifty an hour bonus for first responders. Cost of living went up three and a half percent last year, but the city wants to give them zero, two, two and two over the life of a four-year contract. So the firefighters had another suggestion that would in effect give them the cost of living — 24-hour shifts, the norm in many major North American cities. The city’s response: Feed the demand to the media, which knows about as much in the life of a firefighter as we know about the salaries of the 5,000 top-paid bureaucrats at City Hall. So of course the debate’s now about whether we should be paying firefighters to eat and sleep in their firehalls — which they already do, and have been doing for as long as I can remember. Yes, we already have 24-hour shifts. Isn’t the city fantastic at demagogery?

Posted by Jim Duff at 7:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Tories announced today they’re spending a munificent $1.5 million to, and I quote: “enhance health care services for English-speaking minority communities in Quebec.” And how will they enhance English-language healthcare services? By giving $1.1 million to the Quebec Community Groups Network, my favourite gang of bridge-building equivocators. What was it, two weeks ago, we had the QCGN president on to explain about the need to get anglos together to yammer on about the need to build more bridges with the franco majority here in Quebec...at the time, they were looking for $500,000 to host more yakfests and develop more programs to study the need for more programs.
So the bridgebuilders got their slush funding.
From the same government that recognizes the Quebecois nation — within Canada, of course. Part of the same federal system that turns its back on Quebec’s million English speakers because, as we all know, les Quebecois form a French-speaking nation within Canada — not Quebeckers.
In Quebec, there are three circles, to borrow from Solhenitzyn and Pauline Marois — nous, eux and les autres. When Jacques Parizeau blamed money and ethnics for the 1995 referendum loss, he was referring to eux and les autres. Since then, racism has adopted a more modest garb.
Nous, les quebecois et les quebecoises, are French-speaking Caucasians. Those folks blurting out politically incorrect things at the reasonable accommodation hearings are all nous. Once they would have been Catholic, but we’ve seen Catholicism replaced by Quebec nationalism as the official state religion.
Eux, them, are the remnants of a once-mighty community that included the Scots, Irish, German and all the other post-Conquest European settlers who helped build Quebec into Canada’s economic powerhouse for a century. The loathing the nous hold for eux is of long standing, because once, eux were in the driver's seat. There's a heavy revanchist streak to the way nous lose no opportunity to put eux down.
But it's nothing compared to the loathing and fear the nous feel for les autres. They're what used to be called allophones — neither French nor English mother tongue.
In most of Quebec, unilingual anglos know better than to ask for service in their language from the healthcare system. If they get it, great. But if they don't — and most don't — it's because the right to work in French trumps the right to die in English.
But that's nothing compared to the venomous hatred nous feel for demands from les autres. The reasonable-accommodation debate is precisely about the fear that the right to be unilingual could be trumped by the rights of others to services in their language. As Marois herself said yesterday, it's really about language.
Anyway, to get back to the Tory pretence at addressing the health-care access issue, $3 million will go to the Societe Sante en francais. Got it? The French outside Quebec have a group that does nothing but militate for healthcare service en francais. In Quebec, we have a bridge-building club.
Who are these people? School administrators, mostly. They’re the folks who do a superb job looking after their interests, but roll over and play dead whenever it comes to fighting for access to English schooling. French-speaking Quebec is crying for better English in the French public system, but they’re at the mercy of the doctrinaire racists and French-language zealots in the unions and the Education ministry.
If there’s anything more ignorant and pitiful than the sight of politicians sucking up to racists and nationalists, it’s anglo Judenrat scrambling for funding to justify their failure to deliver. As we say in the newspaper business, where’s the action verb?

Posted by Jim Duff at 6:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the 940 Montreal Raging Duff weblog for January 10, 2007, I began with this question:
Does the fact that the oil companies decided to add a 1.3 cent a litre surtax to the price at the pump in anticipation of a green tax that the Charest government had not even decided on, constitute a conspiracy to fix prices?
I wrote that three days after an oil-industry executive blurted to LaPresse that the industry had decided together to begin collecting the 1.3 cent per litre surtax if Quebec decided to make it retroactive.
This conspiracy to fix prices began on or about January 1, 2007, two weeks after the Charest government adopted its energy-strategy legislation, one of four bills rammed through by closure prior to the end of the last National Assembly session.
Lawyers immediately sought permission to proceed with a class-action lawsuit against Petro-Canada, Shell Canada, Ultramar and Imperial Oil.
The motion alleged that the Big Four conspired illegally to raise the price of their product under the pretext that they needed to prepare themselves for the eventuality that Quebec would impose its 1.3-cent-a-litre Green Tax.
The lawsuit pointed out that the government has not yet adopted the regulations necessary to administer, calculate and collect the tax from the oil companies, yet they went ahead and began collecting the surtax anyway.
“The oil companies acted in a concerted fashion to ensure that the surtax would be passed uniformly onto their clients,” the motion noted. The alleged collusion permitted the four firms to collect an additional $5 million a week, according to estimates by lawyer Philippe Trudel.
If what the lawsuit alleges is true — and it’s up to a Superior Court judge to assess the veracity of the claim — it tells us several things.
— There is a communications structure at the seniormost levels of the oil industry’s biggest players that allows them to discuss issues of common concern and make decisions at what, in the corporate world, is lightnig speed. We’re talking less than two weeks here — at Christmas.
— That the Charest government may even have been aware of what the oil industry was planning when it rammed that bill through closure.

Posted by Jim Duff at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)