Editor: Hey reporter, do a story about all these shootings, will ya?
Reporter: Sure.
(Later)
Reporter: Police say they have no evidence there’s a link between these shootings. It doesn’t look like there’s anything in common other than they all happened within 24 hours of each other.
Editor: Be sure to put that in your story somewhere near the bottom, you know, after you’ve convinced everyone that the entire city is on a shooting spree.
Reporter: Uhh… ok.
UPDATE: L’Autre St-Jean seems to have changed its mind again. See below.
As an anglophone Quebecer, it always annoys me when people confuse “Québécois” with “French-Canadian”. Not all Quebecers are francophone, and not all francophones in Canada live in Quebec.
It’s not just the Rest of Canada that does this, it’s also many of the Québécois themselves. Us anglos are really better off living in Toronto, where we belong. And French-speaking Canadians outside Quebec are ignored because they won’t be part of the new sovereign country anyway.
Thankfully, these views aren’t shared by the majority. Which is why I’m heartened at the near-universal outrage in the comments section of an article by La Presse’s Martin Croteau about two anglophone bands being banned from Fête Nationale celebrations on June 23. (The fact that hell is being raised by francophone publications (see also Voir, Bang Bang, Josée Legault) instead of just The Gazette, CJAD, CTV or The Suburban is also nice. Those outlets would be quickly dismissed for bringing up stories like this first.) There’s even a petition going around to bring them back (with requisite Facebook group).
It seems that the Autre St-Jean organizers were getting pressure from Fête Nationale directors (read: SSJB) and others to remove Bloodshot Bill and Lake of Stew from their event, even to the point where protests were threatened if they were allowed to go on. Though both are Quebec bands, their songs are in English, and that’s just not right, they argue. Fête Nationale is about celebrating a French Quebec.
This, of course, comes mere days after celebrating the fact that they were including anglophone bands and being more inclusive.
UPDATE (June 15): A short, bilingual message posted on the event’s website says they are “maintaining” their list of invitees, including the two anglo bands:
Montreal, June 15th 2009 – As the producer of L’AUTRE ST-JEAN, we, C4 productions, have been mandated by l’association Louis-Hébert to create an alternative musical event to celebrate our National Holiday. In that sens, we maintain our choices for the line up of the event with Malajube, Vincent Vallières, Les Dales Hawerchuk, Marie-Pierre Arthur, Lake of Stew et Bloodshot Bill which represents forty minutes of anglophone music on a six hour show.
We wish that the event on June 23rd at Park ‘du Pélican’, which is, in our opinion, in the image of Québec and Montreal in 2009, will be peaceful.
More info will be communicated wednesday.
Mind you, in Quebec City, it’s still French-only.
Whether or not they’ll actually get to play, I think back to the basic question: What is the Fête Nationale supposed to be about anyway? Is it about language, culture, or about the province of Quebec?
If Wikipedia is to be believed, the Fête Saint-Jean-Baptiste was about language and culture before the Quebec government got its greedy little paws on it. It was about French culture, and by that logic you might consider having only francophone bands perform at such an event.
But the Quebec government turned it into the civic Fête nationale holiday, wrapping it in the fleur de lys, blocking off non-Quebec francophones and making it to Quebec what Canada Day is to Canada.
Perhaps it’s because of their proximity on the calendar, combined with the political Quebec-vs-Canada divide that’s overwhelmed our politics over the past half century that people see an equivalence. Patrick Lagacé suggests if we turned this around – francophones being banned from Canada Day celebrations because of threats of protests from Albertans who want it to be English-only – that the outrage would be much higher.
If we accept that le 24 juin is a civic holiday about celebrating the state, then the comparison has some credence. The only catch is that Quebec wants to be unilingual while Canada does not.
But if it’s about culture, then a more apt comparison would be with St. Patrick’s Day in Quebec (indeed, the holiday has its genesis from those who wanted a celebration of the Québécois on June 24 like that of the Irish on March 17). And anyone who’s been to a St. Paddy’s parade in this town knows they’re very liberal when it comes to who can call themselves Irish. It’s not just Scottish pipe bands that slip by. Ukrainians, Israelis, Chinese are all welcome. Just put a shamrock sticker on your cheek and some green in your beer and you’re accepted into the club. So even then, anglophones (and any other language) should be welcome.
Provincial civic holiday, or francophone cultural celebration? Which is it? And which should it be?
So Lisa Raitt apologized today, bringing out the waterworks a day after she found out that acting like a robot and refusing to address the issue during question period wasn’t a working strategy.
The video is all over the place (the news media have finally figured out that when you talk about “tearful” and “emotional” apologies, it’s best to have the video). So now all Canadians (and opposition MPs) who might have branded her a heartless politician for calling cancer treatment a “sexy” political issue now feel sorry for a crying woman who lost her daddy and brother to cancer.
What gets me about this isn’t that the tears seem so scripted, as if a political analyst backstage told her to go out and cry. It’s that the people who are so naive about politicians to think that they don’t all put their political ambitions ahead of basic human decency, the ones who were so outraged about Raitt’s candid comments as if they told us something we didn’t already know, those are the same people who are going to fall for this display, who think she will have learned her lesson and that either she didn’t mean it or she’s changed.
For the rest of us, her candid comments showed a rare honesty, and her emotional apology is unnecessary.
Sadly, the rest of us are the minority.
It’s the kiss of death for a cabinet minister when the prime minister issues a statement saying he has confidence in him or her.
“The Prime Minister has confidence in his Minister of Public Works” was the word from Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s spokesperson on Jan. 9, 2002, when the minister in question was a man named Alfonso Gagliano, who was facing allegations of patronage. Six days later, he was dropped from cabinet in a shuffle.
So you can imagine how Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt feels that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has confidence in her, after her latest embarrassment.
It seems her aide had mistakenly left a tape recorder with a mistakenly-recorded private conversation in a bathroom (this was before she was fired for mistakenly leaving “secret” ministerial documents at CTV), and that tape got into the hands of the Halifax Chronicle-Herald.
After successfully fighting off an injunction to stop its publication, the Herald put the tape online last night and is going to see its hit count skyrocket over the next few days.
Opposition MPs are, of course, outraged to hear a cabinet minister think that a cancer treatment crisis is “sexy”. Except, it is sexy from a political and journalistic perspective, if not a human one. And opposition MPs were just as outraged at Raitt yesterday in question period.
Neverthless, Raitt’s days as a cabinet minister are numbered. Not because she’s incapable of handling the portfolio (though she probably is), not because she has poor choice of staff (though she does), and not because she doesn’t have a soul (she doesn’t, and neither does any other politician), but because she got caught talking about the stuff that every politician thinks but no one will admit publicly.
And so Raitt will be replaced by some other politician who’s better at lying and keeping things out of the grubby hands of the press. And our government will continue to be run by people who can manage their image instead of people who can do their jobs.
Such is politics, I guess.
Now if you’ll excuse me, question period is about to start. And it’s gonna be gooooood.
Some familiar voices from CBC Montreal read some passages from dearoldlove.com for Jonathan Goldstein’s Wiretap show last month (complete audio of the show is here). Can you pick them out?
La Presse on Saturday had a special feaure on “la webtélé”, or online video series. It also includes a piece from Hugo Dumas on a Vrak.tv series, one from Chantal Guy about how women are taking charge online (hello there, Jessica)
The piece from Nathaëlle Morrissette talks about the business model for online video, which outside of Têtes à claques doesn’t really exist. Even though it’s cheaper than television, online video series in Quebec are supported either by arts grant, television broadcaster/telecom company/internet provider or by the creator’s back pocket (usually a combination of these).
I’ve always been impressed with the state of Quebec cultural productions, especially when compared with English Canada. I wonder how much of that success is due to the heavy subsidies from provincial and federal governments, and how much is due to the fact that Quebecers crave music, television and movies in their own language and from their own culture.
Still, I wonder how much a population of six million can really support. The failure of TQS I think was due partially to this oversaturation of media. If hundreds of producers start making their own web TV series, they’re contributing to the fragmentation of what little advertising and other revenue they can hope to collect. Not all of them can get cushy deals with Radio-Canada or Télé-Québec.
But you won’t know if you don’t try, right? If they’re willing to bankroll these operations as a labour of love, who am I to tell them no?
Better pull these ads quick. There's a minor update to them.
Well, it’s official. Benoît Labonté is stepping aside as leader of Vision Montreal so that former PQ minister Louise Harel can run in his place for mayor of Montreal.
I must say I’m surprised by this move. Not only does Labonté have a lot of ambition, but he’s made his campaign for mayor all about him. The Vision Montreal website still links to his blog, which has his face plastered all over it and is now useless as a campaign website (which makes his assertion that his cause “isn’t personal” absurd to the point of late-night comedy). They’ll replace it by one from Louise Harel (who will hopefully hire Labonté’s web designers instead of sticking with her current blog).
I could criticize Harel on many points. She was the person who gave us the whole megacity disaster (fortunately for her, residents of Hampstead and Beaconsfield don’t vote for Montreal’s mayor), and she wants us to just forget all that, saying “there’s no question of rekindling the debate.” She’s an evil sovereignist who spent most of her political career in Quebec City and can barely string three words together in English. And she shares Labonté’s habit of using lots of words that say nothing, not to mention his lack of humility.
But what gets me most is how matter-of-fact this all is. Five months before an election that Labonté has been preparing for more than a year, they have a meeting and just replace the leader.
The ease by which this happened reflects something I wrote about with Labonté in April: He and his party have no platform.
You can see it in Harel’s press release, just like in Vision Montreal’s “Manifesto”. There’s lots of talk of “true political and administrative leadership and attention to priorities,” but no discussion of what those priorities actually are. The only thing that ties Labonté, Harel and Vision Montreal together seems to be the only point of the platform so far: A dislike of Gérald Tremblay.
Actually, to be fair, there’s one other platform point hidden among the empty calories of text about “visionary leadership” and “bold vision”: a desire for a radical change to the borough system and more centralized power at City Hall. It’s something Labonté has supported and something Harel instituted with municipal mergers (though her bill created the mess in the first place).
But that still leaves a lot of blank that can be filled in by almost anything (provided it can be sold as bold and audacious) before November. They could fill it with Projet Montréal’s trams and greenery if they go through with a merger, as Harel hinted at. But I’d like to think that Richard Bergeron is smart enough not to tie his reputation to this sinking ship.
In the end, this probably says more about Vision Montreal and our city’s politics than it does any individual player. The parties can’t be pigeonholed like they can on the provincial and federal levels (Conservatives/ADQ xenophobic conservatives who want to dismantle the government piece by piece, NDP/Québec solidaire crazy leftists who want to pour even more tax money into inefficient black holes, BQ/PQ left-wing separatists who talk radical to get elected and then soften up when they get into power, Greens the environment nuts, and the Liberals the centre-left lesser of many evils who have the experience to run government and the experience to exploit their offices). We don’t really know what separates Union Montreal and Vision Montreal other than who’s leading them.
Like with Labonté, I’m willing to give Harel the benefit of the doubt, and look forward to reading her platform if eventually it comes out.
But right now it’s hard not to see the party of Pierre Bourque as a blank cheque to be cashed in by naive, ambitious politicians who want to parachute in and carpetbag their way into power based solely on their personal, vastly overestimated popularity combined with a lot of empty words from rejected Obama speechwriters.
UPDATE: Le Devoir agrees with me, asking why the left-wing Harel is uniting with the pro-business Labonté.
Hugo Dumas has the details of the car accident that sent TVA host Pénélope McQuade to hospital over the weekend on Sunday.
The short version is that she was driving down the highway when she tried to connect her iPod to her car audio system, and her car drove off the road, ejecting her through the sunroof. She’ll need months to recover.
This kind of non-fatal accident happens regularly on Quebec roads. Usually it’s only the ones that result in fatalities that make it into the paper, and even then it’s only a brief.
But McQuade is on TV, and that makes her more important.
On the positive side, hopefully her experience will convince other drivers to pull over before doing something as boneheadedly dangerous as fiddling around in the glovebox.
The report is that her face, arms and neck (those things visible when you’re on TV) are all in good shape. Let’s see her on some SAAQ ads when she’s better.
TENIR LA MAIN COURANTE
On behalf of the news media, I would like to extend a thank you to Bela Kosoian and Laval police.
Our jobs can be hard sometimes, and during these spring months, as everyone goes outside and tries out their BIXIs and stuff, it’s hard to find something to be unequivocably outraged about.
But a Globe and Mail story came out on Saturday reported a woman was fined for not holding the handrail on an escalator (and not following police demands that she do so), and the need for outrage was obvious.
Reporters filed stories about her ordeal, photographers took pictures of a sad-faced woman holding a ticket in front of an escalator, columnists turned the outrage meter to 11 and bloggers just went ahead and called Laval police Nazis… repeatedly.
It even got some international attention in the “news of the weird” category, and a mention on Boing Boing, which was in turn Dugg.
For the benefit of those who haven’t gotten the story emailed or Facebooked to them a thousand times already, here’s what supposedly happened:
Kosoian, a 38-year-old student and mother, was heading down an escalator at the Montmorency metro station, and either ignored, didn’t hear or didn’t understand repeated instructions from a Laval police officer to hold the handrail. When she got to the bottom, she was handcuffed and issued two fines: One for not holding the handrail ($100) and another for obstruction ($320). Oh, and she also says there was OMGPOLICEBRUTALITY!!! because the handcuffs were too tight.
There’s no specific provision in the STM’s regulations that requires holding handrails on escalators, so a more general one was cited instead:
4. Dans ou sur un immeuble ou du matériel roulant, il est interdit à toute personne:
e) de désobéir à une directive ou un pictogramme, affiché par la Société;
Of course, the fine was excessive and the supposed infraction entirely benign (the escalator pictogram also prohibits strollers, a provision which is also routinely ignored). Even the STM said they don’t fine people for such things.
Kosoian will probably win her case in court, if it isn’t dropped outright by the prosecutor, especially after all this media coverage. Laval police, for their part, are justifying the actions of their officers, but that kind of blind loyalty is to be expected, especially where the officers were technically in the legal right to do what they did.
For next week, can we get a phone company who’s abusing a grandmother by not letting her cancel her service?
Having children running around would just ruin this image.
Nuns’ Island residents, apparently feeling that their reputation as snobs wasn’t cartoonishly cliché enough, have declared opposition to the sound of children playing in a public park. They want the park to be made less fun so that the children won’t be so tempted to make children-fun noises and disturb all the condo construction going on.
Oh, but they say, they don’t want to close the park next to their high-rise apartment building, they just want the water shut off to save the environment!
To them I’ll point out that this picture was taken on the same street as that park.
Notice the SUV parade?
Thankfully there’s no shortage of others also ready to point out the hypocrisy and stupidity of the argument, and those include Verdun mayor Claude Trudel, who rebuffed the petition.
Pauline Marois, apparently desperately looking for something to be outraged about, thought she found something in a report from the Caisse de dépôt et placement. There she discovered that the Caisse had lent money to Gesca Ltée, the company that owns La Presse.
The scandal, she figured, had to do with the fact that the former head of the Caisse, Henri-Paul Rousseau, now works for Power Corporation, the company that owns Gesca. Clearly this presented a conflict of interest.
Except, as the government pointed out, the first loan was issued before Rousseau was hired at the Caisse (by the PQ government, no less).
That revelation doesn’t entirely absolve Rousseau of the appearance of conflict (other loans were issued during his term), but one wonders if Marois would have been so critical if it involved a company that didn’t have such apparent ties to the Liberal Party of Canada.
A friend of mine asked me if this National Assembly romance qualifies as a news story. I think it does, especially because they belong to opposing parties. The opportunities for conflict of interest are simply too large to ignore. It’s not the story of the year or anything (how many of you recognize these people?), but it should be out there for the record.
We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for now, as Jean Charest is doing. But you know something’s going to happen. Either one of them (probably him) is going to switch parties, one (or both) will leave politics, or they’re going to break up.
And if they do decide that the National Assembly isn’t for them, Nathalie Normandeau and François Bonnardel could become odd-couple political commentators.
I mean, if James Carville and Mary Matalin could find a way to tolerate each other, anything’s possible with love.
The Internet is making it a lot easier to spot stock photography being used for marketing purposes. Most of the time it’s not a big issue, unless you’re pretending that it’s something it’s not. Pretending that a beach in England is actually one in Alberta is a good example.
Their explnation:
“There’s no attempt to make people think that this is Alberta,” says Tom Olsen, the premier’s director of media relations. “There’s no attempt to mislead. That picture just fit the mood and tone of what we were trying to do.”
I mean, it’s part of a tourism marketing campaign for Alberta. And it has the word “Alberta” on it. But it would be silly to suggest that this was a picture of Alberta.
Just like it would be silly to suggest that a picture on the homepage of a Montreal radio station was of a Montrealer.
So a singer, a philanthropist and a media magnate walk into a banker’s office…
Though scarier than the thought of Céline Dion being the permanent national anthem singer or the Journal de Montréal getting exclusives on everything related to the Canadiens is this:
This trio of potential buyers is said to be contemplating a dedicated pay-TV channel in Quebec that would carry Habs games and other hockey-related content as one way to increase revenues from the team.
It’s just an idea, but it’s an idea that would be devastating to RDS.
We’re in the middle of a revolution in the newspaper industry, and even though I’m caught up in the middle of it, it’s kind of fun to watch everyone try to muddle their way through.
Photographers are learning how to shoot and edit video. Reporters are learning how to blog. Editors are learning how to link. And managers are desperately trying to come up with new ideas that will help save their industry and their jobs.
At Cyberpresse, they’re pumping out videos. Newspapers are jumping on the multimedia train, creating videos, audio slideshows, photo galleries, podcasts and other things they couldn’t do on paper.
Part of me doesn’t quite understand why newspapers are trying to compete with television and radio on their own turf. TV has been producing three-minute packages much longer than newspapers have, and it shows.
On the other hand, some videos I’ve seen demonstrate that newspapers are capable of reaching a level of depth you won’t get on television outside of PBS or the occasional NFB documentary.
Cyberpresse and its producing partner Top Multimédias offer some good examples for newspaper videos, but unfortunately a lot of examples of what not to do.
Bad: Rudy Le Cours
In the latter category, you’ll find this sleeper from La Presse business columnist Rudy Le Cours. He’s standing in front of a bright window (which is one of the first things you learn in photography school not to do because it makes the subject dark) and for three minutes and 27 seconds talks into the camera about … I think it’s unemployment or something. I had to be resuscitated a few times while watching it and I don’t remember much. There are no graphics, no charts, no pictures, no numbers. Nothing to make it worth setting up the equipment to have this guy speak text into a camera.
This video from Mali Ilse Paquin in Italy is also a head-scratcher. The audio is clearly taken over the phone or a really bad voice recorder. And the video is just a series of pictures. A blog post or story with the pictures attached would have made much more sense.
Good: Marie-Christine Blais
On the other hand we have Marie-Christine Blais and her “Week-end chaud” entertainment preview. She too is talking to the camera, but it’s clear she and her camera operator are having fun (something I’ve long argued is sorely lacking in a lot of news media these days). Not only is she adorable, but she piques my interest enough that I’ll click on that play button when her face comes up. The videos also put up web addresses of bands that she mentions (although displaying show times would be useful).
Cyberpresse still has a long way to go. There’s no way to add comments to videos or embed videos on other pages. And there’s no related links on any of the videos like you can find in YouTube video descriptions. All you can do is go to this page and navigate your way through the various videos in a giant Flash application.
Here’s hoping Cyberpresse (and others) move quickly toward having more fun (if not effort) and way less talking heads standing in front of windows.