Raging Duff

The RCMP are still trying to decide what charges to lay against Christopher Pauchay. He’s the 24-year-old from Saskatchewan’s Yellow Quill Reserve who drank the better part of two bottles of whiskey and a case of beer with his partner and the mother of their children, Tracey Jimmy. They fought, she left. He staggered out into a howling blizzard with his two little girls in his arms, both wearing just tee-shirts and diapers. He was bound for his sister’s house just 400 metres away, but it’s easy to get turned around in a whiteout, especially when you’re blind drunk and falling all over the place. At some point, he dropped his little girls, 15-month-old Santana and three-year-old Kaydence. More than an hour later, the frozen Pauchey banged on the door of a neighbour, but it wasn’t until he started sobering up that the horror of what was to come was revealed. The little girls were found frozen to death.
Of course there will be a rush to judgment. Pauchey was drunk, he’ll pay. But he already has. He was the primary caregiver in the lives of his little ones. There will be a hue and cry about the need to ban alcohol from settlements like Yellow Quill, but those bans never hold, because there’s far too much money to be made bootlegging booze into dry communities. If the booze can’t come in, the drugs do. If the drugs can’t come in, people find anything to ease the terrible boredom of winter’s days. Solvents. Junk food. Satellite TV. Because we’ve made it possible for the aboriginal cultures to live without the survival skills that kept them alive. They don’t have to hunt bush food. They don’t have to cook. They have heated homes and community centres and everything we consider part of the Canadian way of life. The only thing they don’t have is a vision of their future.
The non-native Canadian political structure has tried to dictate that vision. In my lifetime, I remember the residential schools, where Canada’s first nations would learn English,. drop their old languages and cultures, and move with the rest of us into the 20th century. We know what happened and how much it cost, because you can’t reprogram peoples’ cultural genetics.
Once, I thought the answer lay in the brave new policy that Jean Chretien and his Indian Affairs Minister Robert Nault worked out. It would have put an end to the pork-barrelling and privilege of the First Nations Elders and the intricate power structure that controls how the $10 billion in annual federal aid is spent. But ypou can’t take away power and privilege without the recipients fighting back with every political weapon they have. Nault was hounded out of office.
Former Prime Minister Paul Martin had another idea — buy off the First Nations. His Kelowna Accord died with his administration. The Harper Conservatives have no clue what to do, given that their natural constituency is a region that fears First Nations land claims like the plague.
So back to my question: what do we do with Christopher Pauchay?

Posted by Jim Duff at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

A Journal de Montreal reporter visited 12 bars and noticed people at six of them playing more than one machine at a time. In at least one case, a bank machine was located within metres of a VLT, aclear violation of the province's laughably lenient gambling-control laws. This is supposedly policed by Lotto-Quebec, but they claim there’s a problem getting the inspection program on the road.
If you believe that, you're either in the employ of the state gambling/booze monopoly, or delusional.
Quebec loves its booze pushers and VLTs are the barkeep’s friend. Don’t believe me? Saunter over to the nearest local watering hole and head for the back room where the VLT junkies spend their days. I’ve got one of those places in my town. A well-know local artist pissed away his entire inheritance and destroyed his marriage in that room. But of course it’s not the fault of the prime enabler, Lotto Quebec.
You know what should happen to VLTs? Outraged mobs should be breaking into the places where they are and smashing them to pieces. Vigilante squads of modern-day Carrie Nation abstinance zealots should be pouring Crazy Glue into their inner workings. They should be set on fire, stomped into junk, blown apart with shotguns and pounded with iron bars. I remember the late Steve Olynyk, head of the Montreal Police Morality Squad, doing just that when he’d find a bank of one-armed bandits in a local tavern. But that was before the state controlled the gambling industry.
No of course Lotto Quebec isn’t going to police VLTs. Why should they? They make a better profit than any other Lotto Quebec product, especially when married with booze and ATMs. Gotta keep those revenues pouring in.

Posted by Jim Duff at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So. Another language crisis, this one over the erosion of the pur laine population on Montreal Island. Those of us who have weathered Quebec’s cyclical linguistic tempests know that they usually erupt whenever a Liberal government moves ahead of the PQ opposition in the polls, as we’ve been seeing for the past month.
The latest outrage is over the fact that the Charest Grits are sitting on the latest of the mandated quinquennial State of The French Language studies. This study purportedly shows French mother tonguers will some day become a minority on the island. Well, no shit, Sherlock, we knew that. In fact, political scientist turned Gazette columnist Josée Legault, commissioned to produce one of these five-year updates, came to precisely the same conclusion 10 years back.
The survey the Charest Libs are being accused of hiding shows the anglicization of the neithers — those whose mother tongue is neither English nor French — has shot up with the increase in immigration to Quebec. We’re now taking 55,000 immigrants a year. Most start out in Montreal because this is where the jobs are. Their kids have to go to French schools, courtesy of Bill 101. The Commission scolaire de Montreal found their students represent more than 100 mother tongues. Teachers struggle to cope with overfilled classes and lowest-denominator students who don’t have a clue what’s happening, so you can guess what happens — old-stock francos flee to the ‘burbs, where their kids have the teacher’s attention and there’s a homogeneity of colour, a sharing of ‘quebecois values’ and, as I’ll explain, a greater chance of learning English.
On the island, a handful of controlled-access public schools and private schools are the only alternative, which is why they’re so popular with vieille-souche francophone families.
This can be very easily demonstrated in the StatsCan 2006 Census language and migration numbers published last Dec. 5, but none of that comes out in this or past surveys, because that’s not what the purveyors want to prove. The Education Ministry bureaucracy has been a battleground since the Quiet Revolution. The teachers’ unions are still controlled by doctrinaire socialists who resist any move toward a smarter, more mobile Quebec workforce, because they know it would be the end of their ‘project sociale’ — a French-speaking socialist workers’ paradise where the anglos and the neithers would be relegated to second-class citizenship.
Don’t buy that? Try this factoid on for size. The 2006 census found 4.3 million Quebeckers who considered themselves unilingual French-speaking. That same census discovered 330,000 unilingual English speakers. If the chattering class concludes from this that the French language is dying, it’s because its speakers are too stupid to survive in the polyglot 21st century.
Nah, this is all politics and only politics. It began with the reasonable-accommodation debate, in and of itself a state-sanctioned soapbox for racists, bigots and zealots. Check out the trial balloons that PQ leader Pauline Marois and her language and culture pitbull Pierre Curzi have floated over the past three months: Bill 195 and 196, a Quebec citizenship act and constitution. The proposed citizenship act would require anyone running for any public office to demonstrate French proficiency, not unlike the mean-spirited tests the Bourassa Liberals imposed on youngsters with Bill 22 back in ‘73. If the inspector was having a bad day, you were off to French school.
The proposed constitution, another one of Marois’ ‘sovereignist acts,’ would clear the decks for such totalitarian policies as determining who should be allowed to send their kids to an English-speaking daycare. As a minister in Jacques Parizeau’s government, Pauline Marois gave birth to the original $5-a-day daycare system in part to ensure that working moms wouldn’t be lost to the labour force, but also to indoctrinate impressionable young minds in those same ‘Quebec values’ we heard so much about during the Bouchard-Taylor accommodation hearings. Get ‘em young, keep ‘em stupid and they’ll breed true, to borrow from the livestock industry.
Belgian-born demographer Marc Termote, the auteur of this latest exercise in fundamentalist consensus-building, claims there’s an ‘obvious paranoia’ within the Office quebecois de la langue française at having to explain the long-term implications and causes.
What are they, apart from the flight of old-stock francos from Montreal Island?
Begin with the birthrate. Quebeckers, having dispensed with the Catholic Church and the strictures of family and marriage, lead Canada in divorce, common-law relationships, swinging, abortion and the other trappings of post-catechism liberation. Termote notes that the franco birthrate trails that of the neithers, even the anglpos. He doesn’t specify which group the Quebec’s aboriginal peoples are lumped under, but we know from other, less politically weighted studies, that their soaring birthrate is a cross-Canada phenomenon.
English is spoken in more off-island households: Back to the off-island exodus. Francophones, blocked by Quebec’s restrictive language laws from sending their kids to English public schools, well know the French-supremacy ayatollahs in the education ministry are blocking the Charest government’s earnest desire to see English language instruction beginning in the first grade. So they move to officially bilingual off-island municipalities such as Hudson and Rosemere, where their kids mingle with little anglos being sent to French schools so they’ll be bilingual. Result: Some nominally French elementary schools have more anglos than francos in their classrooms.
Another factoid Termote doesn’t share with us: a 1998 Education Ministry study predicted that by 2008, one in four marriages contracted in Quebec would produce offspring eligible for English schooling. That study was the basis for the PQ’s last major trial balloon — to make English CEGEPs ineligible for francophones. The rationale: Francophones and neithers of marriageable age would meet members of the opposite sex and nature would take its linguistically unacceptable course.
In fact, Termote’s dire prediction that French speakers will be in a minority on Montreal island has yet to come to pass. The 2006 census found French to be the language of usage of 52.6 percent of the island’s roughly three million residents. Termote says he’s not concerned about when francos slide into minority, just the tendency.
This latest outcry in the French mainstream media is just the latest evidence of how quickly Quebec’s self-appointed cultural watchdogs drool to the sound of Pauline’s bell. The French-language dailies surrender any pretense to impartiality and balance when covering a language story and let’s not even begin on radio or television.
Consider the flimsiness of the case for the erosion of the French language. The Journal de Montreal’s alarmist six-page spread about how an attractive female reporter could be hired by 15 percent of the businesses she applied to during the pre-Christmas retailing rush even though she pretended to speak no French was what old-school editors used to call vertical-pronoun journalism. All about whoever’s writing it, rather than the facts, or in this case, spin over substance with the goal of pandering to the nascent racism and xenophobia that reside in most people.
What happens when a society underwrites the opening of that Pandora’s box, under whatever pretense? The Holocaust, Darfour, the Ukrainian Famine. Rwanda, the Congo, Zimbabwe, Kenya, apartheid, segregation.
I go back to what La Presse editorialist André Pratte said in his video blog. About how the call for zero tolerance for language law violations says a lot more about the people demanding it than the people supposedly committing the violations.

Posted by Jim Duff at 7:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I say to hell with la republique de Quebec. I say Pierre Foglia for philosopher-king.
My favourite columnist in all of Canada has written a wonderful little rant about the latest chapter in the French-under-threat saga.
He responds in this morning’s La Presse to someone who couldn’t be bothered with a certain fine little Indian restaurant because the waiters don’t speak French. Foglia writes: I can’t be bothered whether people speak more or less French in the businesses in Park Ex and in the laneways of the Chinese Quarter. Don’t get me wrong, he continues — I CAN be bothered about the French language. I’m a huge fan. It made me who I am.
There’s no contradiction, Foglia continues. It’s just that I don’t see the threat to French the same way as others. For me, the French language is rendered a hundred times more fragile by the blabla spoken and written by the people coming out of our teaching schools. Language is an apple. The worm is either inside or isn’t inside. Languages die from the rot within. Languages never die because of too many Bulgarians, Arabs, Pakis or little assholes from Flin Flon, Manitoba who don’t speak it.
Languages die primarily because they’re badly taught in school, at home, in literature, in trashy music or because of your great-great-great grandfather.Languages die because they’re not being used to read, write, think, debate or philosophise, create, breathe or live.
To the reader who couldn’t be bothered with a certain fine little Indian restaurant because they didn’t speak French, Foglia offers this typical Fogli-ism — The language of the owners isn’t hindi, but urdu. When your mother tongue is urdu, it’s harder to learn French than a Finnish hockey player. I should have begun this rant with the fact that the urdu-speaking owners have two children who happen to speak very good French. They serve tables on the weekends and they even speak French between themselves.
Foglia concludes: Feel better now?

Posted by Jim Duff at 7:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m going to go to liberal hell for this, but why is the Ville-Marie borough spending $140,000 to host a forum on homelessness? Yes, the professional social activist cadre will be mightily pleased, because they, like me and Bill Clinton, love the sound of their own voices as they’re paid to talk. They’re the same folks that don’t want development on Peel Basin or
I just love the statistic that there are 230 homeless groups in Ville Marie Borough alone. Are there 230 real homeless in the borough? I’m guessing there’s a hard core of people who have no fixed address, lost souls so far gone in drink and drugs, they can’t live without sucking a steady stream of small change out of the pockets of gullible Montrealers.
Then there are the mentally ill we’ve ‘deinstitutionalized’. Then we closed the outpatient clinics that ensured they took their meds by prmising them a hot meal and somewhere warm. I know someone like that. He’s mentally ill. He belongs in a group home, closely supervised, both to protect him from society and to prtect society from him.
Then there are the kids who come to any big city to squat and live on the street. Middle-class kids, runaways. I once lived in a condemned building in St. Henri, on Richmond Square, because it was cool and I had enough of parental control. Did that make me homeless? There are plenty of jobs going begging — even for unilingual anglos. These people could work. They choose not to, because work’s not cool. So they panhandle. They and their dogs clog our sidewalks.
So enough of this homeless myth. Fix the mentail illness support system and enforce the panhandling bylaws.

Posted by Jim Duff at 9:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday, I said Transport Canada had banned the use of 15-seater vans like the one implicated in that horrific accident in Bathurst, New Brunswick last week. Turns out there is no such ban. Transport Canada has been studying the file since last summer, when the Canadian Standards Association and the Nova Scotia department of Transport brought the danger of these things to their attention. Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon is still pondering a ban. Funny, isn’t it? Transport Canada took no time to halt the import of new cars from the U.S. into Canada on trumped-up safety issues but it’s still 'considering' a ban on these killer vans. What a stinking pile of bureaucrap.
If they kill, extended passenger vans should be banned outright. Not just for the transport of kids. Why should these things be safe for adults if they’re unsafe for students? What’s that mean? That a Ford Club Van can transport those kids to a Scout outing, but not to school? That they’re safe for Canadian Forces band members, but not for army cadets?
Multiply the federal hypocrisy by the buck-passing that 940 Montreal’s reporters have uncovered here in Quebec. There’s a law on the books making these 15-seater vans illegal for the transport of students in Quebec. But Transport Quebec says enforcement is the Quebec Automobile Insurance Board’s job. The SAAQ says it’s the Transport Ministry’s responsibility.
Does it matter a hoot whose responsibility it is to ban these vans? And let’s not get sucked down that silly detour of their being okay for adults, but not for students. If they’re dangerous, they’re dangerous for everyone — not just for those inside.

Posted by Jim Duff at 7:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As André Pratte puts it so succinctly in today's Cyberpresse blog, the Journal de Montréal 'exposé' on the on how unilingual anglos can get a job, this isn't evidence of the erosion of Quebec's French language charter.
Pratte, chief editorialist for La Presse, say it leads to the following conclusions:
• Montreal's employers are so desperate for pre-Christmas help, they'll hire anyone who looks and sounds like he or she can do the job;
• There's an eager market for any media outlet ready to pander to the most regressive elements of Quebec society.
Pratte correctly points out that this is really about politics. The ADQ had Herouxville driving its rise to power. Pauline Marois doesn't want to be passed on the right by Mario Dumont, so she's added a dash of French-is-dying rhetoric to the racist citizenship act she ran up the flagpole last fall.
The PQ's zero tolerance for linguistic lapses may not drive progressive péquistes out of the party, because I think they've already left for the ADQ and the Liberal folds. But to paraphrase, nobody ever lost an election by underestimating the worst tendencies of the voting public.
Marois' message is simple: those conniving anglos have joined those accommodationist immigrants in a conspiracy to destroy Quebecois language and culture. Only I can stop them, and only by unilaterally making Quebec a pure, French-speaking post-Catholic pseudo-socialist society.
As Pratte points out, the zero-tolerance line merely shows these people for who and what they are.
As for the Journal de Montreal, remember the utterance of that immortal 19th-century Fleet Street tabloid baron to his underlings:
"Your job, gentlemen, is to shock, to entertain and to inform. In that order."
The game is to sell papers. The late Pierre Péladeau would be a proud man this week.

Posted by Jim Duff at 7:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

PQ leader Pauline Marois has done it again. In an interview with Tommy Chouinard in today’s La Presse, she advances the notion that Quebec should not have to wait for a referendum to begin the secession process. She’d put her cockamamie Quebecois citizenship act and her linguistic apartheid agenda that would force neo-Quebecois to take a language test before being allowed to run for dog catcher. As Choinard explains, there’s a major battle going on within the Puke ranks over two schools of thought. One, put forward by politicologue Denis Moniere just before Christmas, says a PQ government shouldn’t even bother using the S word unless it scores at least 45 percent of the popular vote. Marois wants to dispense with the mess, fuss and bother of the democratic process by beginning the process without a vote. There’d be the language tests, the loyalty oath and a wave of anti-democratic claptrap that might fool some into thinking she’s Quebec’s Messiah.
Of course the Liberals aren’t silent on this. Benoit Pelletier, who we spoke to yesterday, is accusing Marois of trampling on democratic process with her referendum-free secession. Some of the Pequiste intelligentsia are outraged that she persists in pandering to the most reactionary, regressive, narrow-minded elements of uebec society.
But Pauline’s onto something. As we saw from the response to yesterday’s Journal de Montreal special, Quebecois de souche don’t really care about reality as long as the sacred cows of language and culture are protected from the Barbarian hordes invading Godless Montreal. After all, she’s the only one of three Quebec party leaders and three federal leaders pandering to exactly those same lements. To hell with multiculturalism, test the bastards and if they have an accent, they don’t get the basic rights offered to le vrais Quebecois.
If that isn’t institutionalized racism, I don’t know what is.

Posted by Jim Duff at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Quebec Superior Court Judge Joel Silcoff has derailed the sweetheart deal between the Montreal Transit Corp and Bombardier. In a 46-page decision handed down yesterday, the judge said the MTC could not cut a deal with Bombardier to replace 336 outdated Metro cars without proceeding to tender.
It’s huge news for Alstom Canada, but MTC chairman Claude Trudel says the decision means Metro users won’t see new cars for another year. The MTC isn’t ready to say whether it’ll appeal the decision. Bombardier said it was a disappointing decision. The provincial government, which would end up financing 75 percent of the $1.2 billion deal, wasn’t talking yesterday, but said it might have something to say today.
Resources Minister Claude Bechard should be wearing this egg on his face, because he’s the man who in July, 2005 said the Quebec govermnet was looking at giving an untendered contract to Bombardier, whose railcar division just so happens to be in La Pocatiere, in Bechard’s own riding of Kamouraska-Témiscouata.
Now, the untendered deal with Bombardier was based on the argument that nobody else in Canada could fill the contract, but Bombardier’s competitor Alstom took the deal to court, arguing that they should have been given the chance to tender a bid once they saw the specifications.
My take on this: The Charest Liberals used to rip into the PQ while they were in power, for cutting exactly this kind of sweetheart deal with Quebec Inc. State capitalism was an evil that had to be exorcized, Charest used to say. Now that the shoe’s on the other foot, what do we see?

Posted by Jim Duff at 9:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I overheard one of the women at work talking about how she’s just been hit with a $200 daycare bill. Her youngest is at a private $25-a-day daycare. The daycare closed for two weeks over the holidays, between Dec. 21 and Jan. 3, but they told her she had to pay them for those two weeks “to keep her child’s place. This was after they tried to give her a tax receipt for $400, instead of $700, for the last couple of months. In other words, they extorted $200 out of her for not playing their tax-evasion game.
It’s not just the private for-profit daycares, either. These moms all agree it’s important to check your bill for after-school programs at various public schools. One mom found an extra charge on her $20 a day bill — for two days her son wasn’t even there.
Quebec is touted across Canada and as the model for affordable, universal daycare. It’s a lie, because Quebec’s daycare is neither universal nor, in many cases, affordable. The Charest government can’t deliver on its promise of more daycare spaces, even after it passed a bill allowing the private for-profit daycares to set up shop. What happened is that it promptly outlawed all supplementary fees.
So what we’ve got now is the worst possible combo of gouging by desperate private for-profit operators and rampant abuse of the public system by parents who could afford to pay for private, but instead deny single-parent working moms a slot so they can attend exercise class, shop and have boozy lunches with their girlfriends. As far as I’m concerned, there should be a means test. Those who can pay, should be directed to the private for-profits, who should have the right to levy whatever fees the market can bear. The public and private non-profits should serve those who need their services most, first.
The Charest Liberals have managed to marry the worst of both the public and private systems to create a single model, flawed to its very core.

Posted by Jim Duff at 8:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ten years ago, I published a story suggesting negligence was a contributing cause to the hydro blackout that resulted from the ice storm. It quoted consulting engineer Brian White, then as now one of the foremost experts in the electrical transmission field. The report put the lie to Hydro Quebec's fatuous fiction, widely parroted by a credulous media, that this was a simple 'act of God' due to a once-in-10,000-years ice storm.
Today on my Raging Duff blog, I'm publishing Mr. White’s latest thoughts on what really happened 10 years ago, and why.
It’s a scathing indictment of the collective mindset which places cost-saving ahead of human lives and suffering, a mindset described so well in the Johnson Commission report on the collapse of the de la Concorde overpass last Sept. 30.
This is also the first time that anyone has linked the root causes of Quebec’s failing infrastructure with the great blackout of 1998. Hydro Quebec can remain silent, but the truth is out, thanks to Brian White’s fixation with failure’s causes.
One last thing: There have been far bigger ice storms, both prior to and after the January, 1998 Quebec Ice Storm, including the January, 1983 freeze that blacked out parts of nine U.S. states and last month’s massive ice storm that blanketed most of the U.S. midwest. The ice loadings on their hydro installations were every bit as bad as what hit us. The difference is that their public utilities aren’t treated like the Voice of God by a gullible, fawning, feckless media.
•••••
The hyperbole surrounding the 10th anniversary of the 1998 Ice Storm has Brian White shaking his head.
“So little is known about what really happened,” says White, who over the past 61 years has built a worldwide reputation as a electrical transmission engineer with a fascination in why things fail.
“There’s an amazing parallel between the Challenger disaster and the ice storm,” says White, now in his eighties and still consulting. “Both were predictable disasters. One was even predicted.”
He goes on to describe how the Challenger disaster occurred on the coldest morning in Florida’s history, so cold the launch crews had to chop ice off the walkway so the astronauts could access the shuttle.
“They knew from the burn marks on rocket boosters they had recovered from previous launches that the O-rings shrank in the cold, breaking the seals.” When one engineer spoke up, he was told to take off his engineer’s cap and put on his NASA cap. “Sixty-four seconds after liftoff, Challenger exploded and one second after that, everyone in Launch Control knew why.”
Like NASA’s hubris, White says the failure of Hydro Quebec’s transmission network which began Jan. 5, 1998 and left some 1.4 million customers in the dark for as long as two months was rooted in Hydro Quebec’s culture long before the towers fell.
He knows, because he wrote Hydro’s ice-loading specifications.
•••
To get a sense of the vendetta between White and Quebec’s public utility, we have to go back to 1954, when White came east from British Columbia to build Alcan’s 345-Kv line north of Lac St. Jean to power the aluminum giant’s massive new smelters.
White was Alcan’s golden-haired boy after solving an transmission-line nightmare in B.C.’s Coastal Range with an elegantly simple, inexpensive solution – a catenary ‘skyhook’ suspended from the walls of a steep valley still in use 50 years after he risked his career by pitching it to the company’s top brass.
Here in Quebec, White became a consultant to Hydro Quebec while still working for Alcan. In ‘56 and ‘57, he helped engineer the Bersimis transmission grids for Hydro. In 1957, while working for Alcan, White invented the guyed tower, the V-shaped structure still preferred in rough terrain over the ubiquitous latticed tower.
By 1960, Alcan was selling White’s aluminum guyed towers to Ontario Hydro, B.C. Hydro and to utilities around the world interested in a cheaper, more quickly built alternative to traditional steel lattice towers.
“Except in Quebec,” White notes. “Hydro’s chief engineer at the time said it was stupid.”
The result of Hydro’s pig-headedness can be seen even today on the line from Churchill Falls – guyed vees to the Quebec border, then rigid lattice towers. The only time White exhibits any rancour toward his former client is when he notes that Hydro now claims it invented both the guyed-V towers and White’s innovative suspension system using two guyed masts and a wire-rope crossarm. But he does it with restraint, showing me first the self-aggrandizing piece by Hydro transmission engineer Elias Ghannoum, then the cover story in the journal of the Canadian Engineering Society crediting White. They have photos to prove he was first.
•••
Jump to 1974, when Hydro’s engineers and consultants were drawing up specs for the massive transmission network from James Bay. By now, the largest transmission lines were carrying 735 Kv and stress loads on vital components were being measured in tonnes.
“Hydro Quebec decided that the maximum loading would be a 45-millimetre radial of ice, or one and three-quarters inches, for a total of 10 inches per foot. So based on that, I wrote the specifications.”
Even back then, says White, the new specs were a betrayal of Hydro’s vows of reliability. Most of the low-voltage transmission system then in use was designed for an inch of ice.
“The whole secondary system was hung out to dry,” White says. “It was doomed to collapse if it got even close to 1 3/4 inches of ice...Farmers had electrified their operations on the basis of Hydro’s promise of reliability. No more woodstoves and two cows milked by hand, but electric heat and 200 head milked by electricity.”
The low-voltage double wood pole transmission lines that still crisscross the agricultural regions of southern Quebec were the first to fall in the five days between Monday and Friday, Jan 5-9 – including the line supplying Vermont’s public utilities.
Hydro’s dereliction wasn’t confined to the low-voltage lines. “They knew they had bad insulators back in 1974,” White says. Like any chain, electrical transmission systems are only as dependable as their weakest link. The transmission lines are suspended, and insulated, from the towers by strings of porcelain disks the size of dinner plates. Each has a slotted steel cap at one end and a pin at the other, both glued into the porcelain with Portland cement. The discs are strung together, pin to cap.
“We determined that if one string breaks, the shock load on the system is equivalent to a 2,800-pound automobile dropped 30 feet,” White recalls.
The effect of an insulator-string failure is immediate and catastrophic, especially when the transmission lines are loaded with ice. All it takes is the failure of one string to trigger a ‘cascade’ – a chain reaction that can pull down tower after tower, like falling dominoes – exactly what he and his fellow engineers found when they surveyed downed towers throughout southern Quebec in the aftermath of the 1998 ice storm.
White describes how his group found the remains of the broken insulator that caused the collapse of 60 to 70 towers on a 735 Kv transmission line where it crosses the Richelieu River — and how they ran into a Hydro Quebec engineer who had found it earlier that day.
White and his fellow transmission engineers knew as far back as 1974 that something was causing the insulators to fail, but it took several years before everyone grasped that the problem lay in the cement used to glue the insulators together. It was the same quick-setting ‘ciment fondu’ now suspected in dozens of high-profile structural failures, including the Sept. 30 de la Concorde overpass in Laval and the interstate highway bridge disaster in Minneapolis. In the case of the insulators, the aluminum oxide additive allowed the manufacturer to ship product faster, but as White discovered, the insulators began losing strength even sitting in storage.
“It’s not Hydro Quebec’s fault that ciment fondu was used,” he says. “As soon as they knew there was a problem, they began a program of changing out the strings of bad insulators, costing them millions.”
But the retrofit would be expensive – at $25 apiece, the bill could hit $25,000 per tower, not including labour and other costs. Sometime around 1994, White says a decision was made to stop spending money changing out insulators that looked okay to the untrained eye. “They had already spent $3 million, which someone decided was too much.”
He wouldn’t hazard a guess as to who made that decision. “Hydro Quebec is totally owned by the government...I suppose it was just passed down the line.”
The Nicolet Commission’s probe of the massive power outage took upwards of a year and cost millions, but the final report didn’t contain a single mention of failed insulators, White notes.
“In other words, the power failure was an act of the devil,” he added with just a hint of sarcasm. “Exactly like Challenger, just like the bridges. They closed their eyes to what could happen.”

Posted by Jim Duff at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Barely 48 hours after its official kickoff, the Quebec City 400th Anniversary Corporation announced the departure of director Pierre Boulanger. He’ll be relieved by summer festival director Daniel Gélinas, who becomes the fourth PDG of the 400th anniversary festivities. It was mutual, says chairman Jean Leclerc, who hastened to add that Boulanger’s departure had nothing to do either with the lousy press the event has been getting or the conflict-of-interest allegations dogging those flogging it.
Meanwhile, the federal Conservative government of Stephen Harper continues to spin the story toward the positive. Canadian Heritage Minister Josee Verner, who has been taking the heat for the mismanagement of the event, wished Boulanger the best of luck in his new challenges.
Verner, whose hubby has a piece of the advertising pie for the big hoopla, also said she welcomed the transparency measures also announced yesterday.
As Official Language Minister, Verner also got in a plug for her government’s Quebecois Nation agenda. “The 400th anniversary of Quebec City, which we will celebrate throughout 2008, reminds us that French is the founding language of Canada. The first event of the year, The 400-Year Journey, which will take place in the heart of Old Quebec City on January 5 and 6, 2008, will set the tone for a year filled with monumental productions.”
Yada, yada, blada woof. I’ll bet Good Queen Liz is thanking her lucky stars she won’t have to put up with the pretense she’s welcome — but let’s make it clear it’s not the Quebec people snubbing her. This is pure politix of opportunism a la Stephen Harper.
What a boondoggle. And to think the Tories could win 30 Quebec seats playing to this peanut gallery.

Posted by Jim Duff at 8:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)