Raging Duff

What have I been saying about Quebec being a pisstank nation?

This past week, the director-general of the Quebec Police Force, Normand Proulx, ordered the immediate closure of eight after-hours drinking clubs within QPF buildings. Two of these licenced establishments are located within the massive headquarters building on Parthenais, in Montreal’s east end, and one in the Quebec City headquarters. This is not new; most have been serving booze for the better part of 20 years.

Did the top cop act because of the malodorous message being sent by the existence of these officers-only beerhalls and cocktail lounges?

Nope. Proulx acted only when news broke that a retired senior officer on a consulting contract poured himself into a police vehicle upon leaving one of these blind pigs and riccocheted off three parked vehicles before being busted by the Montreal cops. He flunked the breathalyzer.

Of course, the police union isn’t happy with this removal of acquired rights. Association president Jean-Guy Dagenais lamented the decision based on what he called an isolated case. It’s the fault of the drinker, not the booze, he said.

Dagenais’ point is that cops need a place to let off steam without risking a fight with a civilian trying to start something in a local bar.

But he misses the bigger issue. Quebec’s drunk-driving record is far and away the worst in Canada and shows no sign of improvement, thanks to the squishy soft judges who permeate our legal system. If the provincial police see nothing wrong with getting behind the wheel after a few wets, why should anyone else?

Proulx was right to order the private clubs closed until a full probe has been conducted, but the ban on these clubs shouldn't stop there. Public Security Minister Jacques Dupuis should stem in and order them closed, period. The optics are all wrong in this losing war against drunk driving.

Posted by Jim Duff at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Who reading this recalls the bad old post-referendum days here in Montreal when Raymond Villeneuve and his Front de libération nationale du Québec thugs would be on one side of Ste. Catherine and Howard Galganov, Pit Bill Johnson, Brent Tyler and the angryphones on the other, shouting invective at one another in both official languages?
Ottawa and Quebec sure did, which is why funding was slashed to Alliance Quebec and Galganov was hounded off the air while Pierre Falardeau and Victor-Levy Beaulieu continued to spew their viciously anti-Canadian racist propaganda with funding from Telefilm Canada and the Canada Council.
So very Canadian. If you don’t like the tenor of a debate, shoot the side that embarrasses you by reminding folks of your hypocrisy.
If you like that kind of nostalgia, you’ll feel right at home this Sunday, and this time, the angryphones don’t need fed funding. Allen Nutik and his Affiliation Quebec Party are hosting a rally this Sunday at Ruby Foo’s on Decarie. They’ll all be there — rights lawyer and former Alliance Quebec president Brent Tyler and the independantistes’ arch-nemesis Howard Galganov.
Outside Ruby Foo’s will be none other than the FLNQ’s spiritual successors, the Jeunes Patriotes du Quebec. You gotta love the way the JPQ builds up Galganov’s appearance on Quebec soil, like something out of the WWF. They call him an odious and crapulent personality. They reel off highlights of Galganov’s radio and political career, like the time he went to the States with Billy Two Rivers and urged Americans not to invest in Quebec, or the horrid things he said about the late sainted Dr. Camil Laurin, father of the French Language Charter, or his comparison of the Office de la langue francaise with the KKK.
Of course Nutik couldn’t buy publicity like this and it’s mother’s milk to Howard. Galganov is running federally in his eastern Ontario riding, as an independent. There’s growing backlash next door to the speak-French rights campaign in the counties from Ottawa to Cornwall and Galganov’s brand of screw-you defiance is gaining traction among disenfranchised Loyalist descendents who watch with dismay as Dalton and the McGuilties give away the farm to everyone from First Nations gangsters to French supremacists.
Given the help he’s gotten from the Mohawks, Galganov will stay well away from the warriors. But he’s right at home with his old enemy. I’ll bet he’s thanking the JPQ for turning him into this weekend’s headliner.

Posted by Jim Duff at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let me begin by saying I don’t think anyone should be allowed to comment on the Castonguay report without having read it. Most of the negative kneejerk reaction to the report parrots the clapped-out neosocialist warhorses whose hair-clogged ears still ring with Tommy Douglas’ call to arms. Tommy’s dead, and so is the Canada Health Care Act.
Let’s begin with what former Quebec Health Minister Claude Castonguay and his working group said in the 37-recommendation, 317-page report (which I’ve read, by the way.) The report doesn’t propose a user fee. What it says is that the government should consider a credit/taxback mechanism. There’s also a recommendation to raise drug-insurance premiums, but the only true user’s fee being proposed is a $100 annual fee to assure 24/7 access to a family medicine clinic, with the money going to encourage doctors to set up these clinics. Wouldn’t you pay for guaranteed access to a family doctor?
I think the report projects a worst-case scenario, substantially similar to that outlined by B.C.'s health minister this week. I’m an acolyte of David Foot (Boom, Bust and Echo) and his observation that demographics explain almost everything in society, so I begin with the premise the current system cannot begin to cope with the boomers, their age-related afflictions and the rising costs of treatments and drugs. The right to insure oneself for medicare-insured treatments seems to me to be bedrock common sense.
Here's my synopsis of what the report says (and by the way, it's not on the case for public healthcare, but on how Quebeckers should be allowed to consume and pay for those services):
• First, the report is unabashedly pro-medicare, What the Castonguay working group says is the universality of private insurance is not incompatible with a universal public system. The report — which is unabashedly pro-public-health — concludes the Charest government has to open the door to private health insurance to cover medical treatments currently covered by medicare if the public system is to survive.
Castonguay is critical of the Charest government's new Bill 33, which permits private insurance to cover just three types of surgery — hip and knee replacement and cataract surgery. We know why Quebec opened that door — the Supreme Court’s Chaoulli decision.(You can look it up). But Castonguay says the door should be opened wide, to allow private insurers to cover all types of surgical procedure — no limit, no list.
• Bill 33 says these privately insured surgical procedures can take place only in private clinics, and performed only by the one percent of Quebec doctors who have opted out of medicare. That’s 158 of 16,000 doctors. Big friggin' deal. Instead, says Castonguay, we should adopt the British NHS model, wherein doctors should be allowed to see private patients after putting in a certain number of hours in the public system.
• Castonguay says it makes no sense for people to be forced to wait unreasonably for procedures when they’re willing to pay. The Castonguay working group doesn’t buy the theory that only the wealthy will subscribe to medical insurance to avoid having to wait. The report cites the case of the truck driver who paid out of his own pocket so that he would not have to wait weeks for an operation in the public system. “What principle allows us to refuse him the right to insure himself against such a risk, when the public system can’t meet his needs,” the working group asks.
• The insurance premiums of the 1.7 million Quebeckers who subscribe to the public drug insurance plan should be increased by 34% to end the ineqities between the public and private drug insurance schemes. Quebec now pays 25 percent, or $211 million, while the 1.7 million public drug insurance subscribers pay $621.5 million. Castonguay says the users should pay the whole shot in their categories, which would mean that the maximum annual contribution would rise from $904 to 1184$, a $280 jump. Welfare cases and the elderly on full income supplement would continue to receive free drugs.
• Hospital funding should be shifted to results-based. Right now, hospitals, CLSCs and CHLSDs get a funding envelope at the start of every budget year. Believe it or not, we pay bureaucrats bonuses for operations not performed, or patients not seen — much like the American HMOs we pretend to loathe. Castonguay would change that to pay hospitals on the basis of their patient load.
• The Douglas warhorses are especially incensed at the proposed $100 annual fee family medicine clinics would be allowed to charge to guarantee access to a family doctor 24/7. Castonguay thinks the fee would encourage family medical clinics. I agree.
I don’t agree with some recommendations, such as a means test for tax credits to ‘natural caregivers’ which would result in homecare allowances being cut by three percent for every dollar of family revenue in excess of $29,645. To my way of thinking, Quebec should be heading in the other direction.
I can understand the politics of why Premier Jean Charest and Health Minister Philippe Couillard are both backing away. In a democracy, re-election is Job #1, not principled policy decisions. But I can’t for the life of me understand why the media is piling on as if they understood what’s at stake. As for the snide shots at the fact Claude Castonguay is an insurance company executive, let’s also remember he established medicare in Quebec. Don’t we at least owe him the respect of reading his work before we shout him down with bananas in our ears?

Posted by Jim Duff at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Another beach bullying incident in Ottawa today, with Stephen Harper kicking more sand in Stephane Dion’s face in the form of a rewritten motion extending the Afghan mission by almost three years.
Why? As I said two weeks ago, the Tories think they can whip the Liberals in an election, but they don’t want to be seen starting the fire, to borrow from Billy Joel. The latest Strategic Counsel/Globe/CTV poll suggests it's sound strategy to goad the Liberal leader to fight back with a non-confidence motion and force an election the Tories think they can win.
The Liberal-dominated Senate has already caved on the crime bill, with mandatory minimums for repeat drunk drivers, gun crimes and grow ops. The Bloc’s been trash-talking the budget, but that’s the noise the Bloc usually makes before it turtles.
That leaves Afghanistan. The motion announced today sets out July 2011 as the end date for the mission in Kandahar, with all troops out of the region by December. Dion asked for the mission to end in February, with a pullout in July.
The motion refers to the need for 1,000 more troops from NATO allies, a key recommendation of the Manley report. The Conservatives have said that they will only extend the mission if NATO provides 1,000 troops as reinforcements, and help in obtaining helicopters and aerial drones.
If Dion had been on the ball, he’d have recalled that Canada has no more desperately needed heavy-lift choppers because the Mulroney government sold ours to the Netherlands. How ironic, that Canada is now in the position of begging rides on our own ex-Chinooks.
According to a blog on the Canadian American Strategic Review website, our former helicopters are tailor-made for this mission. The  Chinook can carry up  to 44 fully-armed troops, plus cargo slung from up to three belly hooks. The blog reads:
"In the mountains along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, the air is thin, and  summer temperatures can reach 50 Celsius. In such ‘hot - and - high’ conditions, turbine engines lose power and rotor blades claw for lift. Most helicopters begin to lose the stabilizing effect of their tail rotors.
But, of course, the counter-rotating Chinook has no tail rotor. This twin-rotored configuration bestows other operational advantages on the Chinook. When troops use the aft loading ramp, the spinning blades of the rear rotor are safely high above them  (unlike a conventional  helicopter’s  vertical  stabilizing  rotor). The twin rotors also give the Chinook great stability. Skilled pilots hover with only the rear landing wheels touching the ground to facilitate unloading. Chinook pilots in Afghanistan routinely use this technique to offload on uneven ground or even on rooftops."
But we don’t have Chinooks. Instead, we’re having to replenish our Forward Observation Bases, or FOBs, by truck. By road. Our troops are sitting ducks for IEDs — roadside bombs.
Whoever made the treasonous decision to sell the Chinooks should be court-martialled or fired. It also has me wondering about the EH 101 helicopter acquisition politics that dogged the Mulroney government’s last term. Anyone remember Paramount?

Posted by Jim Duff at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Has the Quebec Liberal caucus revolt against Stephane Dion begun? Here’s why I think so.
Sources say Pablo Rodriguez, the east-end Liberal MP who used to head the Quebec wing, threw a hissy fit in the Liberal caucus this morning over how the Harper Tories are spinning the PM’s discussions with Stephane Dion.
Essentially, Harper said he and Dion are close to agreement on how the Canadian mission to Afghanistan can be extended to February, 2011 without exposing Canadian troops to the dangers they currently run in Kandahar.
Pablo says that’s not true. He says there’s an enormous difference between the Liberal and Conservative positions. He says Harper is mining the rift in Liberal ranks over the mission and says it’s his own party leader’s fault because Dion doesn’t speak clearly.
The deal reached between Harper and Dion is simple: The mission continues as is until next February, and for two years after that, but only on the condition that the Canadians are rotated out of the Kandahar meatgrinder.
Harper wants things to remain as they are until 2011, but he knows Dion is so desperate to avoid forcing a confidence motion on the mission, the Liberal leader will agree to almost anything that will let him save face.
Rodriguez wants Dion to retract, and said so after the caucus meeting, so I’d have to say this is the first open revolt against Dion’s leadership. The Quebec wing hates him, but they’re so afraid of Senator Celine and her absolute power to refuse to sign their nomination papers, they’ve been toeing the line. The fact that Rodriguez basically broke caucus solidarity by going public with this, says to me the Quebec rump wants to force an election at any cost.
Why? Because the Quebec wing wants Dion out at any cost. The Quebec wing wants Bob Rae or Michael Ignatiff as leader. This outburst from someone that close to the same old

Posted by Jim Duff at 7:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bernard Landry just won’t shut up and this time, I agree with him. Yesterday, PQ leader Pauline Marois pleaded with the former premier to please refrain from making inopportune comments about the latest twists and turns in PQ policy, but Landry said today he has no intention of doing so.
I may still be a card-carrying member of the party, but I’m a university professor and I speak on a variety of topics, this being one, Landry said today. Mme Marois is right in calling for party unity, but people like Joseph Facal, Jean Francois Lisee and myself to remain silent on important issues, Landry told Le Soleil.
Landry doesn’t see how his comments are out of line, given that the PQ is a party of ideas and debate, he said. He defended his comments by saying he’s never called a reporter since he left politics, but that doesn’t mean he won’t speak when they call him.
This was all triggered by Landry’s position against educational reform. First launched by Marois as education minister, the reforms have come under fire from Lisée, Facal and Landry himself, speaking as a grandfather. The reforms have already seen the return of percentage grades over the objection of the teachers unions. Quebeckers don’t like these reforms. They’re the product of pedagoges and functionaries, not real-world teachers. Rant on, Bernie.

Posted by Jim Duff at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)