Raging Duff

The Pan-Canadian investors committee spent the past six months worrying about the well-being of 14 institutional holders of the Asset-backed commercial paper we’ve heard so much about. We heard nothing about the 1735 so-called retail investors who held this dodgy investment vehicle foisted off on them by financial advisors and others looking to move the high-commission product. But suddenly, those 1700 small investors are swinging a big, big stick, because it’s up to them whether Purdy Crawford, JP Morgan and Goodmans LLP will be able to get their deal approved. Liberal finance critic John McCallum has said even if the deal is approved, the country needs to find out why the regulatory bodies allowed this paper to be sold to unsuspecting investors. He wants Finance Committee hearings into what went wrong.
McCallum’s right. This was another of the long string of disgusting scams visited on unsuspecting Canadian investors. If Bre-X and John Felderhof, Nortel and Frank Dunn, Norbourg and Vinnie Lacroix and all the other ripoffs that managed to evade regulators are the new norm, then why don’t we have a single SEC? Answer: Too many people are making too much money fleecing small investors. In a nation where we’re bombarded with advertising for every conceivable investment vehicle, surely it’s somebody’s job to ensure it’s what’s being claimed?
Nope. My RCMP sources tell me there’s nobody minding the store. It’s the wild west.

Posted by Jim Duff at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I spent the afternoon speaking with dentists I know about their struggle with the Quebec government over the fees they’re paid for looking after kids’ teeth.
As matters now stand, Quebec pays most of the real cost of pulling a diseased tooth, less than half of what it costs dentists to put a filling into a child’s tooth and nothing for preventative dentistry, such as fluoridation and cleaning. In other words, Quebec doesn’t invest in dental hygiene, only in remedial dentistry. Does that makes sense to you? Not to me.
There’s a list on the RAMQ website of the 2300 dentists who have not opted out. The impression we’re given is that these are the good guys. But oncew you pick up the phone and start calling dentists who HAVE opted out, you’ll quickly realize most are continuing to see kids 10 and under and welfare patients. They’re just absorbing the cost themselves, rather than passing it on to the denticare system.
I’m not going to get into the morality of a system that looks after the teeth of those who choose not to work while ignoring the dental health of those who struggle to pay dental bills for their kids and themselves. Quebec is full of people too poor to pay for good teeth and too proud to collect welfare. The fairest approach would be to create a sliding-scale universal dental insurance plan that would benefit the working poor. It would give dentists and patients options they don’t currently enjoy.
But that would take political courage, something in very short measure among Quebec politicians of all stripes. So dentists get resigned to being lied to by a succession of goivernments who have promised reform for the past six years, and reneged every time. And Quebeckers continue to have some of North America’s worst teeth.

Posted by Jim Duff at 3:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Go figure. Sir Wilfrid Laurier School Board placed ads in local French-language weeklies urging people interested in getting their kids educated in English to check whether they’re eligible to send their kids to the English public school system.
Nothing illegal. In fact, the board, which serves Laval and the north shore all the way out to Lachute and into the Laurentians, checked first with the Oriface quebecois de la langue français and got their stamp of approval.
For that, the Wilf Laurier board is accused of whoring for students by Le Devoir.
As far as the linguocultural mullahs at Le Devoir are concerned, the anglos should do the right thing and have a Kool-Aid party a la Jim Jones. Le Devoir is part of the collectivity that believes quebecois values are threatened because the people speaking French are from Africa instead of off the boat in 1642.
Well, bad news. The average québecois family is desperate to see their kids fluent in English, flawlessly bilingual and capable of working anywhere the new world economy sends him or her. Wilf Laurier’s ad campaign is just responding to that need.
I go back to three numbers:
25%: the percentage of new marriages producing kids eligible for English schooling under Bill 101;
4.3 million: the number of Quebeckers who claimed in the 2006 census to be unilingual francophones;
330,000: the number of Quebeckers who claimed to be unilingual anglophones.
No wonder Le Devoir is alarmed at a campaign to send more francos to English public schools. With attitudes like that, their captive readership can only erode.

Posted by Jim Duff at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here’s a conundrum to ponder: Why is it that Quebec can’t build a road that stands up to a Quebec winter?
Last week, I had to go by Rockland/L’Acadie. The two-year-old Rockland interchange looked as if it had been subjected to a mortar shelling. In conditions like that, you don’t dare drive too fast or too close to the vehicle in front of you and it’s best to stay in the middle lane. You need avoidance room.
At the merge with the Met, a new white Honda Civic was blocking a lane, its right front tire and rim a twisted, mangled ruin. A hundred feet further along, we pulled around another victim of a crevasse at least a foot wide, six inches deep and maybe three feet long. It wasn’t a pothole, but a gaping, jagged hole in the road. Like the concrete had rotted out and crumbled away, most likely to cover the road below with tire-blasting, rim-destroying chunks.
On the way up to Gatineau Park for a few days ski camping, my son and I took the 417, then cut through downtown Ottawa to the 5 toward Maniwaki. We could have crossed at Lachute and taken the 50, but a a tiny inner voice shouted ‘stay off Quebec highways!’
Good thing I listened. The trip to Ottawa was fast and uneventful. We got turned around at one point in Gatineau and found ourselves on the eastbound 50 on the Quebec side. I kid you not; at one point, we spotted five vehicles with ruptured tires and dented rims.
Now, I’ll grant you the Ontario side isn’t the smoothest ride I’ve ever had, but it’s at least passable without weaving like a drunken stunter. There is rough pavement, but none of those craters and crevasses. Last time I was in wintertime Vermont or New York, I noticed much same thing. Bumps and frost heaves, but no broken pavement — and it’s not as if they don’t get the same weather.
Some springs back, I had the opportunity to interview representatives from the State of Vermont, Ontario’s roads department and Quebec transport minister Sam Elkas on why Quebec’s roads are so bad compared to its neighbours. It turns out that Vermont and Ontario have both long held road contractors responsible for the durability of their work, whereas Quebec was only just beginning to demand similar longevity guarantees.
Try if you can to find a record of a single contractor forced to rebuild a poorly constructed stretch of roadwork anywhere in Quebec since that accountability policy was supposedly introduced. I can’t.
Another thing: highway department functionaries in Ontario and Vermont are held responsible for ensuring tenders include adequate drainage, a stable roadbed and sufficient quantities of quality materials. Again some time back, it was announced that Transports Quebec had raised the tendering and supervisory processes to that level, but from what contractors tell me, those guidelines were designed to dupe the voting public, not to build better roads.
It’s no wonder Quebec’s roads and highways don’t drain the water that ends up destroying the surface and can’t support the overweight transports we routinely allow to use them.
I also hear many highway contracts are awarded according to round-robin bidding, in which contractors take turns low-bidding on highway jobs as they’re tendered. Everybody gets work and the contracts are long enough that the contractors’ club can spread itself thin without risking penalty clauses. Hence our summer-long road closures around jobsites featuring work crews standing around watching a few people actually working.
As for Transports Quebec engineering supervision, anyone who’s read the Johnson Commission report on the de la Concorde overpass collapse knows the real villain was the bureaucrat who told a highway engineer it wasn’t worth the $250,000 to raise the span and see what was going on at both ends. In 1992.
Here in Quebec, we seem to take ruptured tires, dented rims and twisted front ends as one of those inevitable rites of spring. We pay the towing, we pay the deductible or more usually, the bill without more than a passing thought at the usurious gas tax and registration surtax we pay, supposedly for better roads. We even make jokes about it or turn it into a biggest-pothole contest.
Here’s my version of the Spring Pothole Contest: Name a third-world country with better roads than Quebec for a chance to win an all-expenses-paid vacation there for as long as it takes to fill this year’s crevasse crop. All proceeds will go toward anything but the improvement of Quebec’s roads.

Posted by Jim Duff at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, glory be. The Charest government has found the couilles to do something to force the 183,000 able-bodied Quebeckers collecting welfare to return to work.
Well, not exactly force. In fact, the Libs are preparing to put half a billion bucks into coaxing, wooing and otherwise seducing MAYBE 50,000 of those 183,000 able-bodied adults back to work — in three years.
Unbelievable. Quebec is experiencing one of the worst manpower shortages in its history and 183,000 work-eligible layabouts are arsing the poodle and selling the pups on pogey, 20,000 of them under 25.
Show me an able-bodied 20-year-old who can’t find a job and I’ll show you a shiftless, lying bum.
You can bet most of these these layabouts are working under the table. The new Quebec Pension Plan is a foil-lined closet with a grow light, automatic waterer and a couple of high-grade marijuana bushes pumping out a weekly crop of bud.
Quebec and private-sector employers — who are coughing up the other half of the billion dollars this dole buyout scheme is costing — will pay anyone who’s been on welfare for three years or more — the chronics — from $500 to $2900 a year, split over 12 months.
The government pays YOU to stay at work. Over and above your salary. Lovely.
No wonder Quebec pays the highest taxes in the known universe, and don’t buy the crap that we aren’t. We’re paying for all these entitlists who think the world owes them a living. Now who do you suppose gave them that impression? Their parents and grandparents, maybe?

Posted by Jim Duff at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Back in the spring of ‘98, when the provincial Liberals were desperate to replace Daniel Johnson, they cobbled together a financial package to woo Jean Charest from Ottawa to Quebec.
The wooing was complicated by the fact that the Conservative leader had no financial wherewithal to make the move, especially when he and his wife were sitting with a house in the Glebe in what was then a depressed Ottawa housing market.
Someone proposed the creation of a trust fund that would pay the new Liberal leader a stipend over and above his salary as leader of the official Opposition in the NatAss. According to the version I’ve heard, five people placed a million bucks each in this trust, which then paid the interest to Charest so he and his wife could buy their home in Westmount and live in a style befitting the future premier of Quebec.
According to the version outed this morning by the TVA network, Charest gets $75,000 a year from the party over and above the $182,717 he collects as premier. I don’t know if they’re talking about the same thing, but the interest on $5 million is a helluva lot more than $75,000 even when you’re invested in blue chips.
Charest has no comment on this revelation other than to say he always thought it came from the private sector. He denied receiving or having received any other amount.
Outgoing Liberal Party president Marc-André Blanchard said the stipend was the best way to protect the boss against overtures from those seeking to buy influence.
As long as he pays taxes on the money, Charest can claim to be above reproach.
Here’s the problem: Who placed the cash in that trust fund? I’ve heard five names. I can’t prove it, so I won’t repeat them. I’ve been assured that this is a blind trust, that Charest doesn’t know who put up the cash, but if I’ve heard the names, I’m sure he has.
Does any of this matter? I know that several reporters have been sitting on this story for at least as long as Charest has been the Liberal leader. It’s pretty obvious this story was leaked for partisan political reasons. Again, I’m guessing, but it has the PQ’s fingerprints all over it and it’s likely because the PQ is frustrated at the likelihood the ADQ will support the Charest budget.
Then again, it might be payback for the leak to the Montreal Gazette’s William Marsden that had Pauline Marois scrambling to defend her use of rezoned farmland and a highway right-of-way to build her Ile Bizard chateau.
It’s said that in Quebec City, everybody knows everything about everyone. If there’s more to this income trust, Jean Charest’s backers had best speak up. Their silence will definitely be used against him by his enemies.

Posted by Jim Duff at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the past 35 years, the imperative of having a secession referendum as soon as possible in the first mandate has been Job #1 in the PQ platform.
Pauline Marois proposes to scrap that imperative after denouncing former leader André Boisclair and Parti Quebecois stalwarts like Joseph Facal and Jean-Francois Lisee for proposing exactly that.
Instead, Marois is proposing to give us a Sovereignist Manifesto and a National Conversation that will allow people to talk about independence without having to risk voting for it when they vote PQ.
The proposed replacement for Article 1 will be presented at the Conseil Nationale later this month. Along with it, 11 acts of national governance, all of which can be achieved without violating the Canadian Constitution, or so Marois claims. More on that in a moment.
On language: The PQ leadership would require teachers to pass an oral and written French test similar to that now required of nurses and other professionals. Businesses with fewer than 50 employees would be required to produce francization plans and progresss reports. English as a second language would be taught as expediently as possible, whatever that means, but there’s no more on Marois’ proposal to teach other subjects in English, a suggestion that drew a collective gasp from the Quebecois cultural brain trust.
The Sovereignist manifesto would explain what would change if Quebec was an independent state. There would be a ‘National Consensus-building” between the PQ and the Bloc, the SSJB and other secessionist parties and organizations.
Back to those 11 acts of national governance. Marois claims they could be adopted without violating the Canadian Constitution, but I note that among the 11 are the Quebec constitution and the Quebec Citizenship Act, those two racist documents Marois tabled late last year. The Citizenship Act would no longer require anyone running for public office to demonstrate an adequate ability in French, a proposal that received universal condemnation when PQ citizenship critic Pierre Curzi first suggested it.

Posted by Jim Duff at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Consider this dilemma facing the Charest government:
The ERs in our acute-care hospitals are jammed with seniors who, because of a lack of adequate homecare, fall ill or injure themselves.
The hospitals have maybe three or four convalescent beds for those who, having received care, can’t go home because they have no one to care for them and arrangements have yet to be made with the local CLSC for a homecare worker.
The provincial CHLSDs, the public long-term healthcare institutions administered by the regional health and social services agencies, are full, with long waiting lists.
The CLSCs have had a decade to figure out how to administer a comprehensive homecare system since when we were hit with the virage ambulatoire. As we heard from
As Status of Seniors Minister Marguerite Blais admitted today, they still can’t.
So the provincial government has been reserving blocks of rooms in private healthcare institutions for convalescing refugees from the public sector.
Now here’s what’s happening: These patients are not getting the same level of care as those who pay for private service.
You can have two elderly persons living next door to one another in a private assisted-care institution. The resident who has paid for the services offered, gets the full treatment. The transferee from the public system gets a daily visit from whoever is assigned to follow his or her file.
I’m told the operators of these private seniors’ residences are up in arms. They can’t use those reserved rooms even if they’re empty, because the regional health agencies have them booked. Operators are upset because of the perception that they’re party to two-tier eldercare.
No wonder Condition of Seniors Minister Marguerite Blais is labouring over a new homecare policy. She’s battling the entire healtcare system and a decade of deliberate neglect.

Posted by Jim Duff at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Aphrodite and I had one of our more heated exchanges today. At issue was a woman in Ontario, clinically depressed, whose doctor fired her for missing too many appointments. Aphrodite found that to be grossly cruel and unacceptable on the part of the doctor. I disagreed. She suggested that I was a heartless monster who deserved to fall into a deep depression to serve me right.
It’s true I’m not what my mother used to call a nice person. I don’t have much patience for happy talk. I think the biggest problem on this planet is people who hide their true nature behind being nice.
I used to be quite the squishy liberal lefty, but that got rendered out of me through the simple expedient of managing people and running a business. Four levels of government and their various agencies and Crown corporations on one side. Shiftless, unmotivated employees on the other who think it’s the employer’s job to make their lives easier.
Oh, and have I mentioned all the entitlements and their agencies of enforcement? Employment insurance. Maternity and paternity leaves. Workman’s health and safety. Commission des normes du travail. The various human rights tribunals and their various fatwas, such as pay equity, statutory holidays and the right to gender-segregated bathrooms, personal e-mails and telephone calls, endless chitchat and limitless smoking breaks.
This morning’s National Post contained a disturbing opinion piece by Nouriel Roubini, a professor of economics at NYU’s Stern School of Business. Roubini’s take is that the approaching U.S. recession will drag most of the planet with it. Many businesses will shut down and those that survive will be those who bunker down.
What’s that mean? It means a world in which compassion will become a far rarer commodity, where ‘burnout’ is no longer a holiday from a lousy job. You don’t like it here, you quit. No law says you have to stay anywhere you’re not happy, but there’s no law that says I have to hire you.
Yes, Aphrodite, I lack compassion. Not for those who truly deserve it, but for all the whiners, fakers, malingerers and burnout artists the the political correctness of the times forces me to endure. For those ready to work as hard as I do, you’ll have a job with me for life.

Posted by Jim Duff at 2:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last week, the Harper Tories handed the Quebec Community Groups Network a cheque for $558,250 to Build Sustainable Research Capacity in Quebec's English-speaking Communities and to Identify and Develop Leadership among Young People in the English-speaking Communities of Quebec. Yes, in capital letters.
You may have heard tell of the QCGN. It replaces the late Alliance Quebec, which was torpedoed by the feds after it had been hijacked by a crew of angryphones, led by William Johnson and Brent Tyler and championed by the dastardly Howard Galganov.
The QCGN is the funding conduit for a motley crew of professional grant applicants and memberless organizations which includes the Quebec Community Newspaper Association. I was a founding president of the QCNA’s predecessor and the Hudson/St. Lazare Gazette, the newspaper I now edit, was a founding member. We quit when we realized the sum of the QCNA’s efforts lay in forcing its members to accept spurious, even criminal national classified advertising for a pittance and foisting a bogus readership-measurement system off on its members at enormous cost and negligible value. These poseurs couldn’t get a buck’s worth of federal advertising. Their leadership was so gutless, they couldn’t even bring themselves to confront Canada Post over its extortionist practices. Their sole raison d’etre is to give each other good-journalism ribbons at boozy annual awards banquets.
The QCGN’s latest initiative? “The Hub, a new Internet-based interregional, intersectoral, and multidisciplinary directory for the English-speaking communities in Quebec.” It’s possible these folks have found a way to make the Internet pay, but it’s more likely their hapless members will end up paying for something nobody uses. I smell another scam.
In fact this whole crowd reeks to high heaven. Take Industry Canada’s Community Tables. A few years back, I agreed to be on a Community Table committee so I could figure out what they did. They came to Hudson and held a four-hour workshop. I still don’t know what they do, but I’ve still got the fancy pen.
The same thing goes for the QCGN. By God, these people talk! They fly and drive themselves all over the province to talk endlessly about what must be done to save the English-speaking community, but heaven forbid that you ask them for tangible results. because talk doesn’t produce tangible results. Talk is for its own sake. Seminars, conferences, symposia and consultations are all variations on the yammerfest ethos that permeates the QCGN.
There are no action verbs in the QCGN vocabulary. Build, identify and develop are not action verbs. Hire, subsidize, advertise and train are action verbs, as in advertising for minority mother-tongue employees, hiring them and subsidizing their training in the other official language. That should be a priority here in Quebec. It isn’t.
Where are the English school boards in this QCGN Youth Project? Nowhere to be seen, yet the English school boards have almost limitless power in their communities to decide who’s hired as a teacher, who gets buses and who gets the money.
There’s nothing on this planet quite as full of hyperbolic, self-important rhetoric as a Canadian Heritage press release. I know because I used to write them for the Secretary of State’s office. Is there an anglo in Quebec who buys the following line of bull?
“The Government of Canada's mission with regard to official languages is clear: to promote and strengthen linguistic duality, which is at the heart of our identity. Our young people, the builders of tomorrow, will benefit from the advantages that the legacy of this identity provides, enabling them to live and flourish in their own language.”
Or how about:
“Our government wants to reiterate its willingness to work together with key partners to support the development of the English-speaking communities of Quebec and advance linguistic duality, which is a genuine economic, social, and cultural asset for all Canadians.”
Every week, my colleagues and I deal — almost entirely in French, s’il vous plaît — with indifferent, hostile, racist attitudes among the French-speaking majority and their bosses in Toronto and Calgary, smug in the knowledge that nobody will ever take them to task or call them to account for their apartheid, exclusionist policies.
It’s bad enough to be treated like a second-class citizen. When I hear the QCGN stooges blaming me for not trying hard enough to be a good little member of la collectivité, I feel the partitionist urge surge through me.

Posted by Jim Duff at 9:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)