Tag Archives: activism

| Media, Video

It’s just cruel to not provide the video (UPDATED)

Local news is abuzz (well, kinda, when they’re not blowing Harry Potter) about Global Action Network volunteers infiltrating a Quebec foie gras producer and gathering some awful footage of what they call animal cruelty.

Today they supposedly released video of their findings. So you’d think that the news websites would at least provide a link.

So once again Fagstein steps in where others have failed. Check out the four-minute video on YouTube.

UPDATE: The above video was for some reason taken down. Here’s another link to another video with the same scenes.

| TV

Music music everywhere!

Live Earth is all over cable TV today. With concerts happening all over the world, there’s too many feeds to be handled by one station, so they’ve split it up:

  • CTV is roving around, picking up from the different concerts as they become interesting
  • MuchMusic is showing pretentious alt-rock from New York
  • MuchMoreMusic has all the cool bands in London
  • MuchVibe, because they’re black I guess, is showing Johannesburg
  • Bravo has some cool stuff in Hamburg (this relieves me – I thought they were speaking French for a minute and was wondering why I couldn’t understand anything)
  • Star TV is showing the Brazilian hunks in Rio de Janeiro (I assume — it’s a cold day in hell when I add Star TV to my television lineup)
  • UPDATE: NBC has joined the fray as of 8pm with some highlights from the day (read: more Foo Fighters) — CTV is picking up the NBC telecast, throwing in their own commercials, and sending that feed to cable companies to put back on the NBC channels. Don’t you just love Canadian television broadcasting?

And while I have the floor, memo to the performers (Dave Grohl, listen up): It’s bad enough when other people usurp your music’s lyrics to suit their message (an entirely inappropriate repurposing of words based on a three-year-old’s understanding of what the chorus alone may be referring to), please don’t make me cringe by doing it yourself. That song is about how your ex-girlfriend dumped you, not about the need to conserve electricity by using fluorescent bulbs.

Thank you.

| Montreal

Day of action, followed by many days of inaction

A march is being planned for Friday at noon at the corner of Parc and Sherbrooke to protest for aboriginal rights.

It’s part of a nationwide “day of action” (I see that phrase used a lot, but I’m unclear on what it’s supposed to mean) for aboriginal rights in this country. At issue (not to imply that these aren’t perennial issues) are aboriginal poverty and land claims, among other things.

See the Facebook page for the event.

Other events are happening in Kahnawake, on the other side of the Mercier Bridge.

| Uncategorized

Mr. Prime Minister! OMG! The Quebec unions don’t like how we’re treating the Palestinians!

I’m not one of those people who thinks musicians should just shut up about world hunger. I believe everyone’s entitled to their opinions.

But there’s a difference between a single person expressing an opinion on a subject they’re not well-known for, and a group expressing an opinion on behalf of its members, on a topic that’s completely irrelevant to the group’s function.

So why are Quebec’s unions taking a hard-line stance against Israel in the Mideast debate? Surely there are people in unions here who disagree with this position, and yet have had it thrust upon them.

It’s things like this that give unions (and union management) a bad name here.

| Fun, Media, Montreal

So there were these naked cyclists

Coolopolis has the photo goodness. Flickr has some from the rest of the world.

So did the local media cover it? Naked people biking to protest against global warming on F1 weekend? You better believe they’re on it.

The bike ride came hours after yet another cyclist collided with an automobile in the city. Not that the city is dangerous for bike riders or anything.

And a note to CTV’s Cindy Sherwin: Try not to say “cyclists were wearing helmets” over B-roll showing a bunch of helmet-less cyclists.

| Montreal

Ben’s is dead. Long live Ben’s?

Taking “a day late and a dollar short” to its extreme, there’s plans for a protest next week to keep the Ben’s deli building out of the hands of developers.

Now, you might say “but the building isn’t architecturally interesting at all”, and you would be right. It was only built 50 years ago. You also might note the minor details that the restaurant closed months ago, the building has already been sold, and nobody cared about it when it was in business.

I went to Ben’s once in my life. I went in with a friend, looking to get some breakfast. We left 20 minutes later, still hungry, because nobody came to take our order.

Good riddance.

| Montreal

Save the park! Keep the rubber off! Let it go bareback!

The Save Westmount Park group got an opinion in the Gazette today. Their cause is keeping artificial turf out of the park, due to the artificial surfaces’ perceived risks to health and the environment.

Wikipedia has a good roundup of the pros and cons of artificial versus natural grass:

  • PRO: It’s easier to maintain
  • CON: It’s made of old tires and heavy metals which are poisonous

The things we do just to make our lives a bit easier and our grasses a bit greener…

| Montreal, Public transit

Revolutions are so disorganized

With today’s anti-STM-strike protest still 45 minutes away (wish I could go see it, but the buses won’t get me there fast enough), there are already rumours circulating of similar protests planned for Friday and Tuesday.

The media picked up on today’s protest (4pm, Berri-UQAM metro), so it may get some decent activity despite the last-minute planning.

UPDATE: Since there’s been no news following the protest, I’ll assume that it either didn’t happen or didn’t make much of an impact.

UPDATE (Fri. 4pm): Apparently nobody showed up but the media and a single organizer. I don’t know if I’d agree that it was “heavily hyped”. In fact, other than a La Presse brief, a vague Facebook post and some mentions on the morning all-news channels (which only the media watch anyway), nobody even knew about the protest.

| Uncategorized

CSU: The 12-step program

If you’ve never experienced student politics at Concordia University, you’ll never understand it. It’s cold, calculating, ruthless, predictable, and it consumes would-be student politicians, infusing them with the worst that partisan politics have to offer.

The Concordia Student Union obsession began six years ago, when two nerds ran against each other. Not content to simply win or lose, both amassed an army of blind followers who would suspend their own moral compass in order to achieve the greater good. People refused to talk to each other, convinced that every minor misunderstanding was a huge conspiracy against them. Yearly elections were planned months in advance, with every underhanded trick under the book considered fair game.

Now, with those early nerds gone and the radical extreme sides of half a decade ago replaced with moderate parties whose politics aren’t all that different, some of those minions are finally coming to realize this, and they’ve created a Facebook support group (64 members and growing):

Concordia politics made me a worse person

| Uncategorized

What’s a student to do?

Now that the minority Quebec government has put power in the hands of whatever two of three parties can agree on, it looks like tuition in this province is finally going to (formally) increase. The Liberals promised a small hike, and the ADQ’s platform is in favour of tuition hikes. Only the PQ is in favour of keeping the freeze intact.

This is, of course, horrible news for student groups, to whom students pay huge amounts of money to represent their interests – chief among them being tuition. ASSÉ, the more militant student group, has already called for yet another unlimited student strike this fall. (I’d link to the English version, but their English site hasn’t been updated in two years.)

Some people are pointing out that the tuition hikes were open platform points for both parties, and the issue was heavily debated before the election. People want to raise tuition (in as much as voters can “want” any single issue in this electoral system).

The problem is that these groups are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can’t do nothing, or else their power to put fear into politicians’ hearts will fade (pressure from these groups is what has kept tuition this low for so long). On the other hand, cry wolf too often and nobody takes you seriously any more. ASSÉ especially has been very quick on the “strike” trigger (which is made worse by the fact that student “strikes” don’t actually cause financial or labour problems for the government), and this has led to many groups (including the Concordia Student Union) dropping ASSÉ in favour of the less militant and more negotiating FEUQ.

So even though ASSÉ is silly to call this strike, they must do so in order to save face.

| In the news

Election roundup

I’ll spare you the he-said- he-said- his-party-issued-a-press-release- his-party-issued-one-too-so-he-wouldn’t-be-left-out of the campaign stories today, but there are some interesting tidbits.

André Boisclair, I guess thinking that he wasn’t getting enough controversy, has decided to weigh in on the latest reasonable accomodation debate involving Muslim women that somehow has become an issue only during this election (did Muslim women not vote in 2003?). The odd thing about it is that yet again Boisclair is taking the “it’s unreasonable” side of the debate. I thought the PQ was supposed to be the left-wing party? And I thought left-wing people were pro-Muslim? They are at Concordia at least.

Then I think back to Boisclair’s major talking point: “The regions.” He’s not courting votes in Montreal, he’s going after rural communities. The poorer, Catholic, xenophobic areas like Hérouxville that could go to any of the three parties. So while his party thinks of itself as enlightened (after all, it elected an openly gay leader), he’s pushing it into Reform Party-like xenophobia.

Meanwhile, Peggy Curran is implying that activist students, who were denouncing Charest and Dumont (but didn’t seem to mention Boisclair), are taking a pro-PQ stance, despite claiming they’re not partisan. I wonder if these students agree with the PQ leader’s interpretation of what a reasonable accomodation is.

Dumont is apologizing for a candidate in Abitibi-Est whose “business” website apparently accused Jews of a worldwide financial conspiracy or something, while discussing “questions of international finance and banking in an awkward way.” Sure, if by “awkward” you mean “complete nutcase.” Oooh, let’s make all the links move back and forth and choose random colours for everything. I’ve seen 12-year-olds make better websites on MySpace. And read more coherent economic analyses from them too.

I can’t seem to find the offending text through the WayBack machine, though its latest version of the site is from a year ago.

The Gazette’s Saroj Bains has videos up of the three campaign buses: Kevin Dougherty on the Liberal bus, Hubert Bauch on the PQ bus, and Mario Dumont gives a tour of the ADQ bus. Apparently a fancy coffee machine is enough to keep the reporters in line.