Tag Archives: federal politics

| Media, Slow News Day

Just because it’s Facebook doesn’t make it news

Why is “someone expresses opinion about recent events on Facebook” always considered news? Yeah, there are Facebook groups (actually I found only one that has more than a few members) denouncing the rumoured Immigration Canada decision to discourage the traditional Sikh family names Singh and Kaur for new immigrants (a decision which the government clarified later wasn’t actually the case). But there are more members in the group demanding that the Spice Girls do a show in Montreal.

When was the last time a paper petition with 500 signatures got this much attention?

| Uncategorized

Get ready for a revolution (but don’t hold your breath)

Some anonymous radical leftists are calling for “5 days of decentralized direct action and economic sabotage” during the North American Security and Prosperity Partnership summit in Montebello, Quebec in August:

This is a call to action against the companies and governments who govern our lives through law and capital. Since the beginning of the invasion process, capitalism and state governance have perpetuated colonization on the lands of Turtle Island. This process has not stopped. Instead, it takes new forms through the neo-liberal agenda and continues under the authority of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP).

…

From August 17th to the 21st we encourage decentralized direct actions and economic disruption for the purpose of making the SPP and our resistance against it widely known. During these five days, we hope to hear of actions that will inspire further resistance to this under-the-table plot. We encourage a diversity of tactics, and propose sabotage as a potentially effective means of revolt.

Now, for those of you who don’t speak activist-ese, some definitions:

  • Turtle Island: North America. It’s a term the Crazy Left uses to make it seem as if they’re in touch with native issues. Because their primary concern right now is the name given to the continent.
  • Decentralized direct actions: Uncoordinated guerrilla tactics that no central figurehead can be arrested for.
  • Economic disruption: Vandalism. Smashing store windows, knocking down McDonald’s signs and tipping over mailboxes. Actions that don’t have any major economic impact but allow young adults to vent their unfocused adolescent outrage.
  • A diversity of tactics: Violence. Against things, against people, it doesn’t matter. Anything is fair game.

And these people wonder why we call them crazy.

| Media, Slow News Day

PEI’s license plates say more about the media than PEI

Ken Meaney, CanWest’s sole reporter east of Quebec City, has an article this weekend about new PEI license plates.

Actually, not exactly. The article is about anonymous comments left on the Charlottetown Guardian website about PEI’s license plates being available in French.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that any discussion of things like gun control, abortion, gay rights, religion, vegetarianism, immigration, and — in Canada — language rights on an open Internet forum is going to bring out people with strong opinions on the subject. Some of those people will have reasoned arguments and will listen to other points of view. Most will not.

The comments (and especially those of a second copy of the story posted the same day the previous one got national attention) mostly fall into the latter category, and quickly degenerate into Quebec-bashing, making rather outrageous claims about its language laws (Businesses are not allowed to have bilingual signs, people are not allowed to speak English in public, the Canadian government isn’t protecting the English language)

And yet somehow an entire article was written on this story and its 30 comments. One that wasn’t written about the original release of the new plates in April, which generated 76 comments on the Guardian’s website. But that one couldn’t easily be exploited with a stupid story to prod the populace with the language debate.

Is there no real news happening in PEI?

(Side note: The Guardian’s logo has the worst kerning I’ve ever seen)

UPDATE: The Gazette has a short editorial about the issue Tuesday. It theorizes that anonymous commenters on web forums might not represent the moderate views of the populace.

| Navel-gazing, TV

It’s not just sports, Jack

Jack Todd has a column in the Sunday Sports section about how our national sports networks, while covering the U20 World Cup, baseball, NHL free agency, Wimbledon tennis, PGA golf, CFL football, auto racing, and all the other major sports going on this summer, are missing something important: Water polo in Montreal.

It’s not just water polo, he continues. The networks aren’t covering amateur sports at all, really, preferring to sign up to simulcast an American feed rather than spend money sending their own reporters and camera crew to events happening here.

While I agree with the sentiment (and more on that below), I should probably add that frankly, I’ve always found it odd how few television channels are devoted to sports. Here, we have TSN, Rogers Sportsnet (with its four regional channels) and The Score showing general sports for 24 hours a day. Considering how many sports they should be covering, that doesn’t seem like enough. It’s not even enough to show all the baseball games that play on a given regular season night. So why don’t we have more channels? They could be owned by the same network, just show different sports.

Money, of course, is the answer, which is sad. And unfortunately it’s also the reason we’re not going to have major networks covering unpopular amateur sport until a fundamental shift happens in the sports media industry.

Of course, this problem, of Canadian cable channels repackaging American content instead of producing their own, is hardly new. Unlike broadcast channels, which have more stringent CRTC guidelines about locally-produced and Canadian-produced content, cable specialty channels don’t have to produce much of their own, and depending on how they’re licensed, don’t have to carry much Canadian content.

I would suggest regulation as a potential solution to that problem, but digital TV regulations in Canada are already far too complicated. Besides, many channels are meeting their CanCon requirements by playing reruns of 80s CBC shows or crappy CTV ripoffs of popular U.S. programs. And they’re meeting their original programming requirements (assuming there are any) with “news” shows, produced on a shoestring budget, effectively giving up on that timeslot and waiting until they can throw up another CSI rerun and soak up the ad money.

We have to vote ourselves, with our wallets. Channels that regurgitate crap and expect us to take it will see themselves disappear from my channel lineup. Spike TV is already on the chopping block. Star Trek was the only thing on there I watched, and they’ve removed DS9 from their lineup. Global-owned Mystery Channel is also going once I’ve caught up on my weekend House reruns. SUN TV (holy crap what an awful excuse for a channel) is going, since the only thing I’ve ever watched on there was Scrubs. G4TechTV Canada is headed out the door, Beat The Geeks notwithstanding.

This is the YouTube age. Making original television should be much easier than it was four decades ago. Television series make it to DVD within months. Why don’t we have more original programming?

Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out what to replace these channels with. Those same regulations prevent my cable company from treating all channels equally, and prevent me from selecting what I want à la carte.

Shame.

| Fun, Montreal

Hi, I’m from the RCMP. Mind if I cop a feel?

I went down to the fireworks competition yesterday to see Mexico’s entry. Last time, I viewed the display from an asphalt parking lot at the foot of the Jacques-Cartier Bridge. This time, I was going to go on the bridge itself, as so many other people seemed to be doing.

Once again, the crowds were massive. It was a worst-case scenario, with a U20 World Cup game just ending at the Olympic Stadium, the Carifiesta, Jazz Festival, Gay Village street festival and Saturday night summer party people all clogging the metro. Adding the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of fireworks viewers made it trying to get down there.

As I walked up to the bridge, I noticed RCMP vehicles parked at the end. The bridge is federally-owned because of some obscure bureaucratic reason that probably made sense decades ago, so the RCMP has jurisdiction here.

The problem was, they weren’t just blocking traffic. They were searching people. Looking in bags, padding the baggy pants. The usual half-assed bomb-searching stuff.

Now, I’m not the kind of gun-toting anarchist who thinks that we shouldn’t have police and that The Man is trying to oppress us. But something kinda pisses me off about a police searching people on a public road.

Is it the fact that it’s a federal bridge the reason? Or does closing it to traffic make it no longer public space? What law exactly gives police the right to search people walking on a public bridge?

(I might also point out that it’s obvious to anyone who has seen the Jacques-Cartier Bridge that the amount of explosives it would take to bring it down is far more than would fit into a knapsack, and if it’s the crowds that I was targetting, I could simply set one off in the metro, causing far more damage in a confined space.)

The display was nice (except for a technical difficulty which led to a five-minute delay just after it got started), with a good big-bang finish. But watching it from the bridge is excruciating. Three sets of bars were between me and the fireworks (had I been smart and early enough to go on the passenger walkway instead of the roadway, it would have been only one, but what’s the point of stopping traffic if everyone’s going to do that?).

Next time, I’m going to watch it again from the ground. No obstructions, and no violations of my civil rights.

Though it is kinda fun to walk across that giant bridge in the middle of the road with thousands of people and no cars.

| Business

A nickel for your thoughts?

A Winnipeg Free Press story today quotes NDP MP Pat Martin saying we should do away with the penny once and for all.

I’m finding it hard to disagree with him. Things that accept coins no longer accept pennies, whether they’re laundry machines, bus fare boxes, vending machines or video lottery terminals. Businesses grab rolls of them from the bank, they hand them out to us when we pay cash, and the worthless pieces of copper-plated steel stay in our wallets, pockets and coin purses until we can find some way to get rid of them.

It’s just a waste of everyone’s time. As it is when I get pennies back at the cash I dump them into those take-a-penny leave-a-penny things, not because I want to be nice, but because I don’t know what else to do with them.

Elsewhere online: Don’t believe my common-sense argument? Read this fact-filled paper on the subject (PDF).

| Slow News Day, West Island

Bernard Patry is still alive?

Pierrefonds-Dollard’s long-serving MP Bernard Patry, who apparently has spent his 14 years in the House of Commons trying desperately not to be noticed, is speaking out about a post office being moved out of his riding.

It’s kind of a strange issue for Bernie to come out of his coma to tackle. I liked that office, and it was close to where I used to live, but it’s now too small to handle the growing population in the northern West Island.

Would he be as outraged if it was moved to another location but still in an area he represents?

| 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.

| Movies, Technology

Guzzo is doing searches

The federal government’s new law against recording video inside movie theatres has come to its inevitable conclusion: Cinema Guzzo is now searching people who enter its theatres and seizing any type of camera, whether it takes video or not.

As you might expect, some people are not happy about this.

Guzzo can’t really be blamed for this. The law makes the cinema owner just as responsible if the law is broken, so they’re just looking after their own asses. But the idea that so much is contraband — food, drink, bags, cameras — inside a room where all they’re doing is projecting an image onto a screen kind of boggles the mind. Even aircraft luggage doesn’t get this kind of treatment.

Of course, it goes without saying that, other than proving the U.S. movie industry has our government by the ballsack, this bill doesn’t do anything. Michael Geist (whose blog should be on everyone’s reading list) has a roundup of its problems (and a cool video about it too), to which I will only add this: Movies recorded in a crowded movie theatre are of such bad quality that I’m surprised anyone actually does it.

Take this badly-camcorded Family Guy / Star Wars bit. It includes a laugh track, viewer commentary, a partially obscured, darkened, oblong screen (that the camera pans away from every now and then) and a barely-discernable original audio track. Is this kind of stuff the world’s greatest threat to the movie industry?

| On the Net

Hate will cure our country

There are those in Canada (outside Quebec) who believe the best solution to the issue of Quebec separation is to simply let it happen. These people, tired of being asked to learn French in order to work in the federal government, think allowing Quebec to separate will turn Canada into the English-speaking-only paradise it is meant to be.

The website Canada Divided represents one of these groups. They think all Quebecers are francophones and all francophones are separatists. Without them, they argue, language purity can be achieved. French is not part of the “Canadian identity” and somehow represents “ethnic segregation” (a xenophobic website denouncing segregation — now that’s balls).

The website is pretty bare, just a web forum and some links to videos. The videos are posted to YouTube, including:

  • This one where a skinhead oppressed anglophone seems to think that the only people hired to bilingual public-sector jobs in this country are unilingual francophones
  • This one which warns that the media (which, as we all know, is part of a giant Jewish francophone conspiracy) is ignoring the growing threat of multiculturalism against our fine country.
  • This one points out for all us stupid people that the French civil code, which Quebec law is based on, is actually COMMUNISM, and that Quebec is secretly annexing the rest of Canada.
  • This one notes that all our health care funding issues are a direct result of the government wasting money promoting bilingualism.

Honestly, it’s really hard not to invoke the obvious comparisons that come to mind. Couldn’t they at least have picked a non-bald guy and had him speak in front of a non-black background, maybe have him smile a bit?

| Video

Hi. I’m an original idea. And I’m one that’s been badly copied.

Just when you thought you’d had enough of those “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ad spoofs, the Young Liberals are at it, launching three videos making fun at the Conservatives.

Quoting their press release:

“Look, it’s no secret the Conservatives are a wealthy party who can afford all kinds of fancy marketing executives and focus groups,” admits Pickup, “but within the Liberal family we’ve got talent, we’ve got dedication, and we’ve got a clear vision for Canada of which we’re proud.”

No money, eh? Chuck Gui(l)té didn’t return your phone calls?

Come on, I expect more from you, Youth Campaign Director and Online Campaign Co-chair Denise Brunsdon (also a former McGill Daily staffer). You clearly had enough money for the press release and the website. That’s far more than the New Democratic Youth of Canada could do.

| In the news

Swift move, captain

There was a letter in yesterday’s Gazette from a “retired captain” (one assumes a captain involved in air travel of some sort) complaining that the Supreme Court’s decision to release cockpit voice recordings from Swissair Flight 111 was “unproductive”.

Except the Supreme Court did no such thing. First of all, the Supreme Court wasn’t the body that issued the ruling. It was the Federal Court of Appeal that did. The Supreme Court merely decided not to hear the government’s appeal of the case, which led to the Transportation Safety Board releasing the tapes (you can hear them here), which provided some nuance to the already released report on the accident.

The more egregious error is that the cockpit voice recordings were not what were released. Though the cockpit voice recorder was eventually found and studied, it was determined that the recorder failed six minutes before the plane crashed. And in Canada, CVR transcripts and audio are not made public.

What was released were the air-traffic-control tapes, which contain transmissions between ATC and the aircraft. Besides the fact that anyone with a scanner on that night could have easily recorded the transmissions, and that anything transmitted via radio signals in Canada can by definition not be considered private, the transcript of the ATC tapes had already been released quite a while ago. There really wasn’t anything new here, which makes the government’s reluctance to publish the tapes even more curious.

Far from unproductive or irresponsible, the courts’ decisions made perfect sense.