Tag Archives: Quebec politics

| In the news, Montreal, Public transit

Quebec parties’ transit promises

Now that the debate is over, I guess we can assume that the party platforms are out there. I was interested in how each party is looking at public transit. Even though the economy and health care are the big issues, it’s never been sexier to be green.

From news interviews and party platforms, here’s what I’ve been able to piece together about what the parties have promised for public transit in Quebec.

The promises are about what you’d expect: practical but uninspiring from the Liberals, pandering and expensive from the PQ, non-existent from the ADQ and completely unrealistic from the Green Party and Québec solidaire.

Nothing radical or even particularly interesting comes out of the main parties (the PQ’s promises, in particular, involve many things that are already being planned), but it does give an idea of what portions of the electorate each party is targeting.

Liberal Party of Quebec

  • Increase the frequency of train trips to Laval and the South Shore suburbs by 35% within 12-24 months, an additional 230 train departures each week, or 264,000 seats
  • 10,000 new parking places at commuter train stations (a 35% increase)
  • Consider Montreal proposal for construction of tramways

Total cost: $260 million ($200 million through the province, $60 million from the AMT)

Sources: Charest promises increased transit to Laval, Longueuil

Parti Québécois

  • Extend blue line east
  • Build a tramway to Old Montreal
  • Create a direct rail link to Trudeau Airport
  • Create express bus lines on Henri-Bourassa Blvd.
  • Create an LRT from Brossard to downtown
  • Build a commuter train to Repentigny
  • Build a commuter train from Longueuil to Châteauguay
  • Create reserved bus lanes on Highways 13, 15, and 19
  • Increase public transit use 16 per cent by 2013 (double the current Liberal goal)

Total cost: $3.6 billion, not enough says Normand Parisien of Transport 2000

Sources: PQ promises $3.5B for public transit, Transit union boss backs PQ

Action démocratique du Québec

The ADQ has nothing in its platform (PDF) about public transit beyond a vague promise to “modernize its management”, though Mario Dumont has said in the past he would make public transit an essential service, removing from its unions the right to strike.

Québec solidaire

  • Reduced fare for low-income earners
  • In the long term, the complete elimination of transit fares
  • Encouraging the use of fully electric vehicles
  • Increase use of collective taxis in low-density areas where bus service is impractical
  • Unspecified extensions to metros, commuter trains and bus network on the island of Montreal

Total cost: $1.2 billion over five years

Source: Party platform

Green Party of Quebec

  • Create high-speed rail link between Quebec City and Windsor
  • Extend Montreal metro’s blue line east to Anjou
  • Build tramways in Montreal (including, apparently, on Pierrefonds Blvd. in the West Island), Quebec, Longueuil, Gatineau, Laval and Sherbrooke
  • Electrify existing rail links connecting Quebec City, Alma, Gaspé, Sherbrooke and Montreal
  • Reduce the cost of transit passes by 50%

Total cost: $40 billion over 20 years (includes non-public transport measures), financed by a carbon tax and road tolls

Sources: Party platform (PDF), Transport plan announcement

What do you think? Which party has the best public transit platform?

| Opinion, TV

Why wasn’t the debate broadcast in English?

Richard Therrien points out that TQS was the only “généraliste” (read: broadcast) network that didn’t broadcast the Quebec leaders’ debate last night.

Well, that’s not exactly true. CBC, CTV and Global didn’t broadcast it either, even though all three are based in Montreal and have a duty to the people to bring these kinds of things to them. So the question is: Why didn’t they? Why wasn’t the debate broadcast on the English networks?

The basic answer, of course, is that it was in French. Rebroadcasting it would have required simultaneous translation, and wouldn’t have had as much of an impact on the voters. But does that mean it’s irrelevant? Unlike the federal leaders’ debate, we don’t have an English version to turn to. That was it. Two hours at a table was all we would get of the leaders facing each other directly, of the networks showing political programming that wasn’t paid for by the parties or filtered through news anchors.

The other argument you could make is that those who wanted to watch the debate could just turn to RadCan or TVA. But if that’s the argument, why bother having “broadcast consortiums” at all? Why not just leave it to Télé-Québec and CBC?

What’s worse is that anglos with cable couldn’t watch the debate translated either. While RDI and LCN carried it live, CBC Newsworld and CTV Newsnet didn’t. Even CPAC didn’t carry it live, though they repeated it later (it’s not on their online schedule, so I can’t tell if it’s being repeated again).

Of course, you could also argue that anglos don’t matter because they’re all going to vote Liberal anyway. So perhaps nobody but me is going to be outraged that a million Quebecers are being left out of this entirely.

But it bothers me that not a single anglophone television network, even those specifically devoted to news, could be bothered to show two hours of a political debate that will affect how this province is governed over the coming years.

Was simulcasting House really more important?

UPDATE (Nov. 29): CTV’s Barry Wilson touches on the lack of an English debate, without saying why his station decided not to show the debate live (or taped, for that matter) with translation.

| In the news, Opinion

Benevolent dictators, with rules

The Quebec government is planning a new law that would impose minimum requirements on university boards of directors/governors/regents/Imperial Senate. They include ridiculous things like gender quotas, and things that seem to make sense like requiring community consultation before big decisions.

One of the provisions requires that at least two thirds of the boards’ members must come from outside the university and be chosen from the “community”

That sounds great, in theory. Universities are government-funded, so they should belong to the people.

But in practice, there’s a major problem with these boards that the law doesn’t fail to address: How they are appointed.

Currently, board members are chosen out of applications from the community by a committee set up by the board, who then make recommendations to the board which are then approved by the board.

In other words, these boards are self-appointing. They literally dictate their successors like some sort of monarchy.

Fortunately, the boards of universities (which, in theory, can be overruled by the Quebec government) are benevolent dictators, take their responsibilities seriously and work to better the universities out of a sense of civic responsibility.

But these boards also have a very strange sense of what “community” really means. They’re predominantly business elites, CEOs of large corporations and their friends/wives/tennis partners. You won’t find many plumbers, community activists or artists here unless they bought their way onto the board with huge donations to the university. Though there’s never a formal quid pro quo, the reality is that your chances of being appointed to a university’s board are much greater when you’ve given a substantial amount of money in donations.

This is what the Quebec government has to deal with, this idea of informal shareholders who buy a stake in a university in exchange for a bit of control over it. But the government won’t do that because they rely on these donations to offset the huge cuts the government made to education over the past two decades.

All this makes the new law seem a bit silly, don’t you think?

| In the news, Navel-gazing

A journalist’s wet dream: Time for Election #3

Last night was my second of what will probably be three election nights at the paper in a span of two months. Election night is always fun (as I recounted in my previous post), and this one was no exception with the president, Senate, House, governors, ballot initiatives and everything else on the line.

First, Canada re-elected the least charismatic person on the planet. Then the U.S. elected the most charismatic person on the planet. Now, Quebecers go to the polls. Who will they elect?

(Yes we can?)

| In the news, Montreal, Opinion

It’s all about sovereignty, obviously

For those wondering when a politician would exploit the shooting and subsequent riot in Montreal North for transparently self-serving purposes, Affiliation Quebec’s Allen Nutik just sent out a press release:

As a champion of minority rights, AffiliationQuebec calls on Quebec’s cultural communities to select effective candidates to run under the AQ banner in order to elect relevant representation to send to the National Assembly.

The tense situation in Montreal North offers a unique opportunity for these communities to ‘break free’ from Quebec’s nationalist agenda, and to play a direct role in their own governance.

It’s amazing how many new causes are dummed up every hour to replace the apparently inadequate “kids mad ’cause cops shot other kid.”

| Video

Ceci est Sparta indépendantiste

Does anyone else find the music attached to this video unnecessarily menacing?

Is it that they want people to hate them, or do they think this is going to become some sort of armed conflict and The One True Way will prevail gloriously?

I’ll could also point out the irony of uploading a Parti indépendantiste video that’s militantly anti-English to a website that doesn’t have a French (or at least Québécois) version.

| Media, Opinion

Paris-Match screws up on Quebec

June 27, 2008

Speaking of Page One screw-ups about Quebec’s 400th anniversary, the local media is going nuts (and the local blogosphere doing the same) over the magazine Paris-Match‘s new issue about Quebec. It looks fantastic except for one minor error:

They thought it was the province’s anniversary, not the city’s. So the section focuses on the province, and mainly on Montreal.

Oops. I guess they don’t understand that subtle “à” vs “au” distinction. (Do they not have that in France?)

Here’s my question though: Why didn’t reporters pick up on this when they did all those laudatory stories about Paris Match’s upcoming issue earlier in the week? You don’t think they just rewrote a press release without thinking about it, do you? (At least Pierre Cayouette was scratching his head at the possibility they got this wrong before it came out)

UPDATE: This gem of a quote from The Gazette:

“We didn’t know there was a competition between Quebec City and Montreal and to be honest, it doesn’t really matter to us and to our readers. But we now see that it is sensitive issue here,” (editor-in-chief) Martin-Chauffier said.

I think someone needs to explain to this person that this isn’t a cultural difference, it’s a factual error.

UPDATE (June 30): The editor continues to not apologize for the factual error and hence imply that we misunderstood them and they know better than us what this is all about (Patrick Lagacé calls BS and isn’t letting him off the hook). I’m starting to understand why everyone hates the French.

Meanwhile, competing French media have taken notice of the mistake: Liberation has a piece from AFP on the matter (via mtlweblog) and 20minutes and Le Post also giggle at Paris-Match’s misfortune.

UPDATE (July 1): Regret the Error summarizes the situation with links to prestigious local bloggers.

UPDATE (May 28, 2015): Paris-Match screwed up again, saying Pierre Karl Péladeau wants to make Quebec City a country in a headline.

| Opinion

Why I love Quebec

As St. Jean Baptiste approaches, Patrick Lagacé asks us to say why we love Quebec.

Here’s a few of my reasons:

  1. Julie Couillard.
  2. Because politics here is never boring.
  3. Because we have a government that’s progressive yet democratic.
  4. Because we have a population that is actually bilingual, and doesn’t just pretend to be for show.
  5. Because we had a massively controversial independence vote that was decided almost within the margin of error, but it wasn’t followed by a civil war.
  6. Because the single biggest and most violent political crisis in our history produced a single fatality.
  7. Because of Les Francs-Tireurs and Patrick Lagacé’s hair.
  8. Because Québécois French is so funny-sounding.
  9. Because the Canadiens are not so much a hockey team as a shared religion.
  10. Because of all the pretty girls I’m going to see today on the way to work.

UPDATE: I see this has officially reached meme status. Which would make it my first meme. And hopefully my last.

UPDATE (June 24): Lagacé’s column compiles his readers’ responses.

| In the news, Opinion

Racism is OK when you’re white

A story came out on Wednesday about how the Defence Department union wants more women on emergency response units, because “a group of female workers were stripped naked and scrubbed down by an all-male team responding to an anthrax scare.”

I looked for it, but I couldn’t find any commentary from the blogosphere, the PQ or others calling sexism here and saying that emergency response workers should not be discriminated against because of their gender.

This is odd, because a lot of people make a fuss about the idea that only male police officers should address Hassidic Jews, or that only female doctors should see Muslim women as patients.

What’s the difference in these reasonable accommodations?

| Video

sovereignistgirl15

Pauline Marois has apparently taken to vlogging (on YouTube, no less, which doesn’t have a French Canadian version). In this video from a few days ago, she talks about how Jean Charest should accept the PQ’s proposal to amend the Quebec charter to include:

  1. A guarantee of equality between men and women, which is already there last time I checked.
  2. A guarantee of separation between church and state, except of course when it comes to having symbols of the One True Religion in the state’s legislature
  3. A guarantee of the Ultimate Supremacy of the One True Language to the exclusion of all others, even though we live in a country which has a law kinda saying the opposite

She also name-drops the Mouvement Montréal français, which I guess shouldn’t be so surprising, but will probably hurt the PQ later when the MMF inevitably says something outright racist.

| In the news, Opinion

Business isn’t smoking

On Friday night, part of Quebec’s anti-smoking law came into effect, which among other things completely bans smoking in workplaces, outlawing designated smoking rooms.

To which most people responded: “They allowed smoking rooms at work until now?”

Yep. And on Friday night at midnight, those rooms were closed for good, including one at The Gazette, which had its ashtrays removed and “no smoking” signs taped to the tables. It will be converted into a lunchroom.

Now, when copy editors take page proofs to read while having a smoke, they’ll be doing it outside. Which will be fine while the weather is good, but it’ll be torture when winter comes.

Another provision of the law, which will have more of an impact on the rest of the world, requires retailers to hide their cigarettes in a closed cabinet or otherwise out of the view of customers. This is to prevent young’uns from being exposed to them or something, I guess.

That provision reeks of wishy-washy nanny-stateism (either make it legal or don’t), but I don’t smoke so I really don’t care.

As the law came into effect, Couche Tard took the opportunity to remind customers that they still sell cigarettes and to “just ask” for them. (This law is going to cause a lot of uncomfortable and/or confusing conversations, I think). Right next to that ad was another from VizuelMedia, which is using this new law to its advantage and has created a business model that involves creating new cigarette “power walls” and selling ads on them.

And the Mohawks, well they’re just ignoring the law entirely.