Former Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau, left, current CEO Robert Dépatie, and Groupe TVA President Pierre Dion.

In the end, it was probably the most sensible decision. Pierre Karl Péladeau, who owns a controlling stake in Quebecor Inc. and its subsidiary Quebecor Media Inc., which became a problem when he became a candidate for the Parti Québécois, has agreed to sell his entire stake in the company to the Quebec government for an undisclosed price. The news was reported in this morning’s Journal de Montréal (of course).

The sale, which will effectively nationalize Quebecor Media, owner of the Journal de Montréal, Journal de Québec, Videotron, TVA and a bunch of other companies, will keep its control in Quebec. Keeping control here was the big reason why Quebecor bought Videotron and TVA in 2001.

It’s not clear exactly how the process would go through, whether it would be the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, which already owns a significant share of Quebecor Media, buying the rest, or whether there would be some other branch of the provincial government created to run the company. Péladeau and PQ leader Pauline Marois said the deal would not affect senior executives or staff at Quebecor, and that Quebecor’s editorial independence would be assured. Marois left open the possibility that assets such as the newspapers or Videotron might be sold, but said there was no question that control of those assets would remain in Quebec.

Péladeau said the deal would go through regardless of who wins the April 7 election if he wins his seat. He didn’t say exactly what would happen if he’s not elected to the National Assembly. He also said he discussed the deal with Quebecor CEO Robert Depatie and Quebecor’s board.

Since Videotron and TVA are regulated by the CRTC, the deal would need to be approved by the regulator first. There might be other federal and provincial bodies having a say considering the unusualness of this deal.

The implications of this deal are a bit too out there to ponder right now, so I’ll let it digest before I analyze it further.

Jean-François Lisée waves to an excited but skeptical crowd at an Equality Party event on Monday morning in Westmount.

By now you’ve heard the news announced this morning that Jean-François Lisée, the Quebec minister responsible for anglophones, has pulled a reverse Richard Holden and quit his party and cushy job to join the resurrected Equality Party as its only current MNA.

While surprising to some, and certainly a gutsy move to go from being in the government to being a one-man party, the move comes as much less of a surprise to people who have followed Lisée and his actions over the past few months.

From his appearances at anglophone events to his secret meetings with important figures in the anglophone community, Lisée became fast friends with key people in the community. And though they were very skeptical of what he had to say as the official turd polisher of the Parti Québécois, the mood changed significantly in the past few weeks. Some anglo leaders started to speak of Lisée as the one good guy at the PQ.

As anglos became more comfortable with Lisée, the other side became less so. Lisée’s thinly-veiled attacks on fellow minister Diane de Courcy (responsible for language policy) certainly didn’t earn him too many friends, nor did his suggestion that the STM be bilingual. His public comments earned the minister a lemon prize from language group Impératif français.

According to people with knowledge of PQ cabinet discussions, Lisée was even more disagreeable behind closed doors, questioning language policies, pleading for the party to kill Bill 14 and even questioning some of the fundamentals of Bill 101.

His views don’t represent a complete reversal of position. Lisée was famously responsible for a speech Lucien Bouchard gave at the Centaur Theatre saying anglos are an important part of Quebec. The speech, and statements contained in it, were not universally accepted among his colleagues.

It remains to be seen just how militant Lisée will be on the other side. Will he call for the repeal of the Quebec language charter and all special protections for the French language? So far, all he’s said is that he wants both languages to be equally protected in Quebec (he said something similar at the CBC’s recent Living English event, though to the guffaws of the crowd). He also said the fight for French isn’t over, and that he will work hard to ensure language equality in other provinces as well. (I guess that means he’s a federalist now too?)

The other question is whether Premier Pauline Marois will replace Lisée. Clearly he’s no longer a minister. Will she name someone else as minister responsible for anglophones, or will she decide not to, for fear that someone else might be turned to the dark side?

The standings

With Lisée’s defection, the National Assembly is left with 53 PQ members, 50 Liberals (including speaker Jacques Chagnon), 19 CAQ members, the two Québec solidaire MNAs and Lisée’s Equality Parti/Parti Égalité. It doesn’t shift the balance of power, but it does make things tougher for the PQ.

With public opposition growing to the city of Montreal’s plans to award contracts to ethically questionable companies to fix potholes, and public demand still high for those potholes to be filled nonetheless, Montreal’s city council has finally found a third option that everyone can live with: Tear up the asphalt and just leave dirt roads everywhere.

The Applebaum administration announced the move the way it usually does, via a tweet from councillor Marvin Rotrand. He said the independents and the three city hall parties came to the unusual agreement that roads in poor state outside the downtown core would be stripped of their asphalt and left with dirt or gravel roads (most of the a mix of the two) until a more permanent solution could be devised. Those in the downtown core would still be repaved, since dust covering downtown would be more of a problem than switching to dirt roads would solve.

Highways and bridges, which are managed by the provincial (or, for some bridges, federal) government, are not affected by this measure.

While dirt and gravel roads sound like an interesting (if dirty) solution, they won’t come without a price. Even dirt roads need maintenance, and contractors will still need to be hired to tear up the roads and lay down the dirt. Fortunately for us, out-of-province construction companies can handle that job (dirt, unlike asphalt, doesn’t have to be poured immediately).

The conversion will happen in stages, with the most deteriorated roads getting the highest priority.

Rotrand said some practical elements, like how you mark lanes on a dirt road, will also need to be figured out. He hopes to get some ideas from a handful of European cities that have made the same transition, reportedly with quite a bit of success.

The measure will be put to city council at its emergency meeting this week for a vote. Rotrand said tearing up of streets could happen within two weeks of the special bylaw passing.

The game story doesn’t want to talk about it. It’s too painful. But it has to come out.

“It was … awful,” the story said, trembling while sipping coffee at the Gazette office yesterday. “He just wouldn’t stop. I told him it wouldn’t work, but he just kept pushing. I couldn’t recognize myself at the end.”

The game story, covering the Canadiens’ game against the New York Rangers Saturday at the Bell Centre, knew it was going to be bad when it heard it was being assigned to columnist Dave Stubbs. It had heard the stories, of the run-on sentences, the strained connections with irrelevant facts, the obsessions with long-dead goaltenders nobody knew about when they were alive. “But I wasn’t prepared for what would happen to me that night.”

By the end of the night, Stubbs had taken what should have been a 300-word game story and turned it into a 6,000-word column about… “I don’t even know what the point was,” it said.

“At one point, he compared a video review to the Supreme Court decision over the presidential election in Kenya. He compared a second-period slump with that sinkhole at the Trudeau Airport parking lot. And then he said something about how a speech from the head coach was like the North Koreans declaring war on South Korea. And that was just the stuff I could understand.”

Stu Cowan, Stubbs’s editor at the Gazette, said he saw the warning signs, but didn’t do anything at first. He thought it was the harmless fun that sports writers have trying to turn the daily they-win-they-lose stories into something more interesting. He said he first realized he had a serious problem when Stubbs went on for 350 words about the Canadiens’ record on days when a new pope is chosen. “I knew then that we had to stage an intervention. I just wish we had gotten to him sooner.”

Cowan said the Gazette would cover the cost of treatment for the game story and its family. “It was the least we could do,” he said.

Stubbs was met by friends and colleagues later in the day, who asked him to seek treatment for his problem. At first he said there was nothing wrong, and everyone on Twitter loved what he was doing. But slowly, as the gravity of the situation was explained to him, he broke down, confessed about his grammatically abusive childhood, and said he would check himself in to be treated the next day.

Just after he finished a 14,000-word essay on John Aiken, a goalie who played one game in relief of Jacques Plante in 1958.

Onlookers watch in confusion as Montreal police arrest themselves Sunday afternoon. Arrests continued into the night.

About 50 Montreal police officers arrested themselves late Sunday night after they failed to respect a municipal bylaw that required them to provide themselves with their itinerary in advance.

“It was brutal,” said one arrested officer, who didn’t want to be named for fear of recriminations against himself. “We kept ourselves out there for hours in the rain, without the ability to go to the bathroom or eat.”

The 50 officers told themselves at first that their protest would be allowed to proceed despite being declared illegal under city bylaw P-6. But before the march could get going, things got pushy and the police quickly found themselves inside their own kettle.

“I thought, oh crap, we’re going to arrest ourselves,” said the officer, who showed off a bruise he said he got when he hit himself in the chest with a baton.

According to witnesses, the police kettled themselves for about three hours as they proceeded with self-arrests. It was longer than usual for such a small group because of the difficulty filling out paperwork and searching oneself while handcuffed, the officer said.

Police gave themselves a ticket of $637 for violation of the bylaw and illegal assembly, an amount multiple officers said was “absolutely outrageous.”

“It’s clear we’re sending a message to ourselves here,” said another officer, Constable Laframboise, who is also a union vice-president. “What happened to freedom of expression and assembly?”

A Montreal police spokesperson said the force acted properly, and was only restraining itself for its own safety and for the safety of the public.

“I was disgusted,” she said. “The fact that people could say the awful things that I searched for…”

Janet Legendre, a reporter with HuffPost Québec, was sitting at home, watching a scene on television involving a black actor. It was somewhat controversial, but never would she have imagined that, by merely putting racist words into a search engine, she could find exactly what she was looking for on the worldwide microblogging site.

For obvious reasons, I won’t use the words here, but they were awful. Words that nobody would consider acceptable in civilized society. Deliberately hurtful words.

“They were words I didn’t think people used anymore until I searched the Internet for them figuring people were using them.”

Legendre said she was proud of her investigative journalism work. “Those quotes were really hard to find,” she said. “Some of them required some interpretation to be considered so shockingly racist. Others sounded like they might have been said sarcastically or unseriously or just for shock value. But through hours of searching I found three Twitter comments and that was enough to make a gallery.”

The 14, 15 and 17-year-old boys who made the Twitter posts (since deleted) did not respond to requests for comments.

A line of hostages is slowly let free by the roads that have taken them hostage for years.

Quebec roads allowed 1500 motorist hostages to go free on Monday, prompting analysts to wonder if a peace accord between roads and the cars that drive on them might be on the horizon.

“We do this because we are a peaceful road network,” said Quebec roads leader Otto Root. “We have no wish to harm drivers, we only ask that they allow us to be treated for our injuries.”

Quebec drivers have been held hostage by the roads for years now, according to journalists at TVA and the Journal de Montréal. Monday morning’s move to release some of them is the first peace move in recent years by the militant roads that call themselves the Root Barrais.

But some drivers aren’t buying the apparently peaceful offering. “We’ve seen this kind of thing before,” said Rick Les, who has been several minutes late to work for what seems like forever. “I’m not buying it this time. Either they release all their hostages or we’re not going anywhere.”

Representatives from the government said negotiations have picked up in recent days, and credit the hostage release to intense talks with the hostage-takers. “We take this as a sign of good faith,” chief negotiator Claude Poirier said. “We’re 10-4 with talks continuing.”

Root said further hostage releases could be possible if talks continue to be fruitful. “But rest assured, we won’t withdraw. The Root Barrais aren’t going anywhere soon.”

A week after Radio-Canada announced it was rebranding itself as “Ici”, the CBC has taken a similar turn and will also soon be adopting a new name. The announcement is set for tomorrow, but three independent sources have told me the new name will be the Canadian Belonging Channel, keeping the same CBC abbreviation.

That’s for television, anyway. But other media will continue with this theme, with the word “belong” playing a big part. Similar to “Ici Première” and “Ici Musique”, the radio networks will be called “Belong One” and “Belong T[w]o” (the brackets are their addition, not mine).

According to what I’ve been told, the CBC plans a lot of word play with this, not only with the word belong but its first two letters “be”. “Be short, be long, be Canadian” is one suggested slogan, though it’s not clear if that’s one they’ll use.

Like with Radio-Canada, the official name of the company, which is set by Parliament, won’t change. It will remain the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This exercise will be merely a rebranding effort.

I agree the CBC is due for a rebranding, just like any other media, but I’m not sure about the “belong” theme. I guess we’ll have to see when it’s rolled out.

Oh, and in case you’re curious, I’m told the font used for the word “belong” here is Avenir Light. Interpret that how you will.

Though the CRTC has decided for now that CKLX-FM in Montreal must remain a specialty jazz station, the writing is on the wall that it will eventually become Radio X full-time and abandon the unsuccessful format.

A competing station in Montreal is seeing that as an opportunity. CJPX-FM, Radio Classique, has announced that it will combine its musical selection with that of the former Planète Jazz and adopt a classical/jazz mix format, starting April 15.

“We know there was a small but loyal audience for Planète Jazz,” the station’s manager said in announcing the change on the air this morning. “We want to welcome them on board while ensuring we still provide our listeners with the best of classical music.”

It’s not clear at this point how the format will work precisely, whether the musical selections will alternate between the two or whether certain parts of the day will be set aside specifically for one of the two genres. The station said it would experiment, in consultation with listeners, to determine the right mix.

Loyal Radio Classique listeners might not like the introduction of jazz, and the station seems well aware of this. But like Planète Jazz, Radio Classique is a low-rated station and could use all the listeners it can get. Clearly it sees this move as a way to get the best of both worlds.

We’ll see later this month if that theory works.

The Great Pavement Change on Highway 40/417 at the Quebec-Ontario border

Tired of motorists from here and abroad comparing Quebec highway pavement with its neighbours by noticing the changes at the provincial and U.S. borders, the Quebec government has mandated the Transport Department to shorten repaving cycles for five kilometres of roadway at each of the borders so the Quebec pavement looks better than its neighbours.

The directive, which I acquired through an access to information request (the documents are large, but I hope to post them later today), requires the repaving of the following highways once every two years, or whenever the highway across the border is repaved, whichever is sooner:

• Autoroute 5, from kilometre 0 (the Ontario border) to 5
• Autoroute 15, from kilometre 0 (the New York border) to 6 (Route 202)
• Autoroute 20, from kilometre 0 (the Ontario border) to 5
• Autoroute 40, from kilometre 0 (the Ontario border) to 5
• Autoroute 55, from kilometre 0 (the Vermont border) to 5
• Route 101 from the Ontario border to Chemin Kipawa
• Route 117 from the Ontario border to Chemin Kanasuta
• Route 132 from the New York border to Chemin de la Pointe Fraser
• Route 132 for five kilometres on each side of New Brunswick Route 11
• Route 133 from the Vermont border to Chemin du Moulin
• Route 139 from the Vermont border to Chemin du Pinacle
• Route 141 from the Vermont border to Chemin Charest
• Route 147 from the Vermont border to Chemin Poulin
• Route 148 from the Ontario border (near Pembroke) to Chemin de Ceinture
• Route 161 from the Maine border to Route 212
• Route 173 from the Maine border to an unnamed road five kilometres in
• Route 185 from the New Brunswick border to the Hydro Québec station
• Route 203 from the New York border to Route 202
• Route 209 from the New York border to Route 202
• Route 219 from the New York border to Route 202
• Route 221 from the New York border to Route 202
• Route 223 from the New York border to Route 202
• Route 225 from the New York border to Route 202
• Route 235 from the Vermont border to Chemin Chevalier
• Route 237 from the Vermont border to Chemin de Saint-Amand
• Route 243 from the Vermont border to Chemin de la Vallée Missisquoi
• Route 247 from the Vermont border to Rue Woodside
• Route 253 from the Vermont border to Chemin des Côtes
• Route 257 from the New Hampshire border to Route 210
• Route 289 from the New Brunswick border to 4e Rang
• Route 301 from the Ontario border to Chemin des Outaouais
• Route 338, from the Ontario border to Chemin Sainte-Claire
• Route 340, from the Ontario border to Chemin Saint-André
• Route 344 and Rue Maple (in Grenville) from the Ontario border to Route 148
• Route 389 from the Labrador border to Lac Mogridge
• Boulevard Interprovincial from the New Brunswick border to Route 132
• Boulevard Docteur Camille Marcoux in Blanc-Sablon from the Labrador border to Rue Goodchild

That’s almost 40 highways and provincially-maintained roads that will get much more regular maintenance now.

What’s interesting about this plan isn’t so much that the government is being selective about highway maintenance, but how it’s being budgeted. There are rules that prevent the government from giving more money to certain roads for political reasons. So instead, the increase in maintenance costs is being considered a tourism expense, a way to make Quebec look better to potential visitors (though I don’t know how many are crossing the border at New Hampshire).

Critics will undoubtedly pan this move as a pathetic attempt to make things look better than they are. But the government is betting that eliminating the border comparisons, as transparent as they are about it, will at least help the province in bar-room arguments.

If it works, maybe the next move will be to make the roads gold-plated.

Global Montreal has found an innovative solution to the technical problems that have plagued its morning show since its launch two months ago: It will be asking members of the audience to come in and handle the duties of an audio technician for a day.

The hosts announced the contest this morning on the air. Winners, if I can call them that, will be brought in at 5am, taught how to control the audio levels for hosts, callers, studio guests and prerecorded video, and then given the job for three hours from 6 to 9. Afterward, they’ll be given a tour of the studio, a chance to meet the on-air staff. They’ll even see their name in the credits for that show, and to top it all off a free dinner at a mid-scale restaurant.

Asked whether this is a sly method of getting people to work for (near) free, Global News spokesperson Rich Aufmaias said he didn’t see it that way. “We made it as our goal when we started this show to connect with the community. Bringing them in one at a time is a great way to do that, and allowing them to push buttons and work at a real live television station is something many of them will jump at, I think. Besides, it’s only for one day.”

The better question isn’t so much whether this is legal but how long it could last considering the number of viewers the show has, and the number of them who would want to drive downtown for 5am on a weekday.

“We expect we won’t be able to do this forever,” Aufmaias said, “but that’s no reason not to do it. When we’ve run out of volunteers, we can move on to something else.”

The contest will commence next week, with the first winners brought in the week of April 15.

YouTube’s surprise announcement that it was shutting down at midnight and finally declaring a winner for its eight-year contest came to a relief to many of the millions who submitted entries, but horror to news directors at local television stations who say they will now struggle to find fluffy filler content for the ends of their newscasts.

“Like everyone, I’m happy that the YouTube contest is coming to an end,” said Global News assignment editor April Fishman. “But we’ve become so dependent on just going to YouTube and stealing video from there. Music videos, viral videos, stock footage, eyewitness accounts, clips from TV shows. All of it was there so we could access it and air it without having to go through the trouble of getting the original or asking permission. I don’t know what we’re going to do about it now. Those people who used to handle those things before YouTube, they were laid off years ago.”

Global and other television news networks are furiously working out alternative plans for sourcing video. “We’re downloading as many popular videos as we can,” said CTV’s Fehk Naim. “And we’re looking at alternative video websites. Does Google Video still exist? What about that site … Vimo or something? We’re going to have to figure out how we can rip videos off of there now too.”

In the meantime, anchors have been told they might be called upon to increase the amount of small-talk banter they engage in to fill time at the end of their newscasts.

“It’s okay,” said CTV anchor Mutsumi Takahashi. “I’ve been in this business long enough to be able to handle it. Besides, I have plenty of dog stories I can tell.”

Montreal newspaper La Presse is upping the stakes in its $40-million La Presse+ iPad project. In order to ensure its free daily digital publication gets seen by as many people as possible, La Presse will be distributing free iPads to all 6.5 million adult Quebecers beginning in May.

“We’re putting every conceivable effort into this project,” publisher Guy Crevier said in a note to readers in this morning’s paper. “We want to make sure that the minor limitation of not having an iPad doesn’t prevent Quebecers from having access to this wonderful free product.”

Crevier wouldn’t say how much the iPad project would cost with this added expense. At about $500 per iPad, buying one each for 6.5 million Quebecers would cost $3.25 billion, but one would expect such a large purchase to get a volume discount of some sort.

“It’s a small price to pay for the kind of result we’ll get,” Crevier said, painting a picture of the city’s streets being filled with iPads bearing the La Presse logo.

Many details of the program are still to be worked out, but we know that the cutoff age will be 18 or 16, that people won’t be able to replace iPads that are lost or stolen, and that people will have to come to the La Presse office and register for their free iPad. The free iPads will also be equipped with special La Presse software and will have La Presse branding on them, coming in a free red La Presse-branded cover.

Details of the project and how to register will be available at lapresse.ca later today, Crevier said.

Soon-to-be-former Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau, whose company runs La Presse’s competitor the Journal de Montréal, couldn’t say anything intelligible when asked for comment. He appeared to be upset.

I saw the first episode, it was okay.

The Montreal Impact, frustrated that it hasn’t been able to reach a broadcasting agreement in French-language radio, has taken the unusual step of turning to a university radio station.

The Impact had been in talks with Cogeco for games to air on CHMP 98.5FM in Montreal, which also airs Canadiens games and Alouettes games now that CKAC Sports no longer exists. But with news and sports sharing the same station, there wasn’t enough room on the schedule for all the games.

The Impact has deals for English radio (CJAD), English television (TSN/TSN2) and French television (shared by RDS and TVA Sports), but nothing for French radio so far, opening the door for CISM.

“It was actually their idea to come to us,” said Impact president Joey Saputo. “I guess they thought it was a joke or something, but we took it seriously and once we expressed interest, they took it seriously too.”

Université de Montréal’s CISM 89.3 FM will broadcast home games only (they don’t have the budget to do away games) for the season, with a broadcast team made up mostly of student volunteers. Gilles Nohnsépavré, who was named head of a new sports department at CISM, said the students would be teamed up with some broadcast veterans. There’s no word on who would form the on-air broadcast team yet, but Nohnsépavré said the plan is to team a professional play-by-play man with one or more student analysts.

CISM’s first Impact game will be next weekend, when the Toronto FC visit Olympic Stadium. The game begins at noon.