Tag Archives: Quebec politics

| Montreal

Anglo myths exposed

Montreal philosopher Pierre Desjardins has an article in Quebec City’s Le Soleil about how horrible Montreal is. It’s getting some reaction from defensive anglo Montrealers who object to his suggestions that Westmount anglos control everything.

That, combined with some comments on Patrick Lagacé’s blog about the Office québécois de la langue anglaise has forced me to conclude that there are many unilingual francophones who need some education about the other solitude.

So as a public service, I’m going to dispel some myths concerning the Maudit Anglais (in a language that its targetted audience won’t understand, just to be ironic). Though there may be some anglos who fit these descriptions, they aren’t the majority.

Continue reading →

| Montreal

The tuition debate is over

As if to deliberately underscore how chaotic and disorganized the student activist movement is, two separate, competing protests are being organized over the next two weeks concerning tuition and accessibility of higher education.

The first, by the CEGEP-heavy, highly militant unlimited-strike-at-the-tip-of-a-hat ASSÉ, is this Thursday afternoon. (The event’s tagline is telling: “Parce que la lutte continue, tabarnak !!!”)

The second, by the bigger-budget, more organized PR-savvy FEUQ, is the following Thursday.

The reason behind the two protests is nothing more complicated than the two groups engaging in a pissing contest with each other. Rather than put aside their differences and come together, student groups prefer to fight and sue each other.

But even if this wasn’t the case, the protest is pointless for one simple reason: They’ve already lost the battle.

In the last provincial election, Liberal leader Jean Charest made it abundantly clear he intended to unfreeze tuition and raise it by a small amount. ADQ leader Mario Dumont even wanted to go further. Those two parties took over 2/3 of the seats in the National Assembly.

The public, meanwhile, made it very clear that keeping Quebec’s tuition the lowest in Canada is not their top priority. Even some students think our tuition is too low, and would prefer to see more student money go into the education system.

These protests (and the laughable “unlimited general strike”, which hurts no one but the few students participating in it) are organized on the assumption that the public supports them. But it doesn’t. And tying up downtown traffic so that some hippies can yell how $200 a course is too much to pay for university education isn’t going to help their cause at all. It will just piss people off and make them think that these students have far too much free time on their hands that they could be spending earning money to lessen their tuition load.

The tuition debate is over as far as the government is concerned. If you’re going to try to revolutionize the way Quebec finances post-secondary education, you have to convince the voters to think like you. That means a big, honest education campaign, not a protest.

And don’t hold your breath expecting attitudes to change overnight.

| Media, Montreal, Slow News Day

Angryphones and frangryphones

CBC has a story about a new protest by French-superiority groups Impératif français and Mouvement Montréal français: They want to change when “For English, press 9” appears on government-run automatic telephone menus.

As it stands, many government departments have it at the beginning of their menus, so that anglphones don’t have to sit through French options they don’t understand. But the French groups want the option to be read only at the end of the French menus.

I honestly have no words to express how stupid this is. Arguing over automatic telephone menu orders is trivial enough, but what exactly are they trying to accomplish? Save time for francophones who have to endure that two-second delay? Help anglophones learn French by forcing them to sit through menu options?

No, this is just a pointless power grab and pissing contest. And unfortunately for us, the government actually listened. So if you have to wait through a five-minute list of menu options before finding out what number to press to get English service, you know who to blame.

Shouldn’t journalists correct wrong information?

During the CBC News at Six report on this scandal, it featured a few man-on-the-street soundbites from Montrealers about the issue. Naturally, the people interviewed said what the journalists could not: That this is a stupid issue to focus on and people should get a life.

But one of the interviewees defended the English language (because in Quebec, English needs a defence), saying it was the most commonly-spoken language in the world.

Of course, as any knower-of-pointless-facts would tell you, that’s incorrect. Mandarin (Chinese), with over a billion speakers, is spoken by more than twice as many people as English (which is second or third with over 300-500 million, depending on your source). French is ranked in the teens with 130 million (60 million natively).

But this apparent misinformation went uncorrected by the journalist. Why? Did she not know this (in which case, why didn’t she confirm it?), or are statements from random people on the street not subject to the same fact-checking treatment as those from journalists?

Quebec Office of the English Language

Another thing mentioned on the CBC evening news today was the creation of the Office québécois de la langue anglaise, a bad joke grass-roots English rights group that hopes to pressure businesses into providing bilingual services. Considering the word “racism” appears on their forum, you can guess what kind of people this website is attracting. No doubt it will serve to hurt its cause more than it helps, by propagating the angryphone stereotype.

(UPDATE: Patrick Lagacé and his commenters have some things to say about this new group)

UPDATE (Nov. 10): We should send the Anglo Rights Brigade to Laval University, where it seems they’re clearly needed.

| Uncategorized

School boards: What will we do with them now?

Now that school board elections are over, with absolutely atrocious voter turnout, the inevitable we-have-to-do-something leadership-by-hindsight begins.

Some of the options being considered:

Abolish school boards entirely: This is the ADQ’s solution to the problem, and the excuse for reason why they want to force a real election. Administration of schools would fall to municipalities, the provincial government, and the schools themselves, removing a layer of bureaucracy. Unfortunately, as municipal mergers should have shown us, it’s not that easy. The bureaucracy created by the change might be as large or even larger than the bureaucracy it’s replacing.

Give school boards more power: For those (like me) who complain there aren’t any issues to be decided here (things like school taxes and curricula are set by the Quebec government), this might make elections more interesting. But it would also make the boards inconsistent, and that could lead to problems down the road.

Tie school board elections to municipal elections: I can’t see how this isn’t a good idea. Let’s reduce the amount of times we need to go out, update a voters’ list and wait in line to cast our ballots.

Here’s one I’d like to suggest adding to the list: Have school board commissioners appointed by municipalities instead of elected by the populace directly. This may sound anti-democratic at first, but the system it’s replacing isn’t perfect either. This solution would keep the bureaucracy as is, but the decisions about how local schools would be run would be left in part to the municipal governments they’re in. (Municipal politics aren’t high on voter turnout either, but it’s better than school board elections — and most people can name their mayor at least.)

Just a thought.

| Canadiens, In the news, Montreal

BTK: Bertrand Targets Koivu

Guy Bertrand, the lovable lawyer and rabble-rouser, has finally shown his face in front of The Commission, and shown what a hero he is by clearing up once and for all what the greatest threat is to the French language and Québécois culture:

Saku Koivu: Menace to société

Saku Koivu.

You see, because the Finnish player who happens to be the captain of the Montreal Canadiens has trouble with his third language, he’s violating our rights by not allowing hockey fans to be served in French.

When Koivu is inevitably found guilty in a court of law for crimes against humanity, should we subject him to lethal injection, the electric chair or just force him to be a panelist on Tout le monde en parle?

UPDATE (Nov. 1): Gazette letter-writers come to their captain’s defence and let Bertrand have it. La Presse’s André Pratte points out that anglophones, not francophones, are in linguistic danger in Quebec, and François Gagnon has some good insight into the matter.

| In the news, Media

Slap heads?

I always find myself irked somewhat when I hear English translations of Québécois terms. When “dépanneur” becomes “convenience store” or “St. Jacques” becomes “St. James”. It just seems so weird, as Quebec anglophones tend to use the French terms, almost as if they were untranslateable.

So while I’m reading this Globe and Mail piece on Têtes-à-claques, their translation of the term into “slap heads” threw me for a loop.

I suppose the translations are necessary for the English-speaking population outside Quebec, but the language loses something in its flair.

A similar feeling came over me with the English media’s reporting of Girouettegate. After an insult by Mario Dumont, the word “girouette” has been added to the list of banned words at the National Assembly. But the CBC and The Gazette, among others, have used the term “weathervane”, which is an accurate translation but again loses some of its flair.

Maybe knowing both languages makes me overly snobbish about these things.

| In the news

Overpass collapses will probably happen again

The Johnson Commission into the De la Concorde overpass collapse submitted its final report to the government last week. The report, which is 222 pages long, is available (in English!) as a PDF on its website. (The last page of the report laughingly self-congratulates how much it’s saving the environment by printing on recycled paper, even though the previous page is entirely blank.)

De la Concorde, seconds before disaster

(Above: the last photo taken of the De la Concorde overpass before its collapse, by a Transport Department road supervisor sent to pick up some fallen concrete. The commission absolved him of responsibility since he wasn’t an engineer.)

In short, the causes of the collapse were as follows (disclaimer: I’m not an engineer, so some of my explanations might be a bit off):

  • Improper, low-quality concrete used in its construction, in turn blamed on confusing design instructions and insufficient supervision.
  • Improper placement of reinforcing steel rebar.
  • Insufficient drainage, leading to water, ice and salt weakening the concrete.
  • Insufficient supervision and inspection of construction.
  • Common practices in use during the time of construction that science would later show needed reinforcing to counter the effects of concrete shear.
  • Missing documentation at the MTQ concerning the structure’s construction and repair history.
  • Improper repair of the structure in 1992, which ended up weakening the structure.
  • Insufficient and inadequate inspections, with imprecise inspection reports.

All that comes down to the big cause: cutting corners to save money. Cutting corners on inspections, on materials, on competence, on time. Each, by itself, isn’t dangerous. But put enough together and they spell disaster. The blame was, in the end, so spread out that no individual can be considered liable.

So now the government is going to create an independent agency for road inspections (to counter the “culture of negligence” at the MTQ) and spend billions of dollars to catch up on infrastructure maintenance.

What gets me about all this is that the transport department (and the commission itself) has been working overtime trying to convince everyone that our structures are safe.

The implication in that is that the de la Concorde overpass collapse was a one-time thing. A fluke that can’t be repeated. But while there were a lot of coincidental mistakes that contributed to the collapse, not a single one of them is guaranteed not to have occurred with other structures. There’s no guarantee that there isn’t a structure out there with bad concrete, or improperly-placed steel supports. Nothing stops a similar collapse from happening to another structure.

That said, the transport department has already changed the way it maintains overpasses, and has inspected many of them thoroughly. The culture of negligence and cost-cutting corner-cutting has, for now, been replaced with a healthy fear of a similar event happening again.

It’s debatable how long that fear will last. After the Challenger space shuttle exploded in 1986, NASA started to become overly cautious about safety in its missions. But eventually cost-cutting reared its ugly head in 2003 when the Columbia burned up on re-entry. Though the direct causes were different, reports cited an attitude at the organization that encouraged disregarding small risks to keep missions going.

Hopefully we won’t forget the lessons of de la Concorde in 20 years just to save a few bucks.

| Blogosphere, Slow News Day

Don’t blame anglos for mocking Marois’s English

Apparently Pauline Marois has finally become sick and tired of people mocking her inability to speak in English during press conferences.

As I scoured the Internet for examples of this mockage, I noticed something peculiar: the ones doing the mocking are francophones.

It looks like it started earlier this month with a small TQS piece which included some clips of embarrassing stumbles. From there, it was linked to from Patrick Lagacé’s high-traffic blog and from there to a few lower-traffic anti-PQ and anti-Pauline blogs. The next week, the clip made an appearance on Jeff Fillion’s radio show, which had tackled the issue previously a couple of times.

A couple of English blogs also picked up the story, but somehow I don’t think those are the ones she’s complaining about.

Frankly, I’ve always been surprised that even those separatist leaders who are fluent in Shakespeare’s language bother to use it in front of the media, considering their positions on French being the one and only language to use in this province (an idea she brought back into the spotlight this week with proposed changes to immigration laws). If they’re so stubborn about other languages being used on commercial signs, why are they trying so hard to cater to a public that will never vote for them using a language they want all but outlawed?

Or perhaps a more interesting question is why it’s the francophones who are mocking her inability to speak English. Or why she cares.

| Business, In the news, Montreal

Mouvement Montréal français is right about Second Cup

A protest by members of Mouvement Montréal Français yesterday has prompted Second Cup (in one of the shortest press releases I’ve seen in quite a while) to announce offhandedly mention that it will review its policy concerning its signs.

The tiff was caused when the coffee giant decided it would remove “Les Cafés” from its coffee shop’s signs and just become “Second Cup”. They can do this, despite Bill 101, because Second Cup is a registered trademarked, like McDonald’s, Wal-Mart and Future Shop.

MMF wasn’t happy with this. So they protested. No firebombing or anything like that, but they held signs and asked people to take their patronage elsewhere (Starbucks? Java U? Tim Horton’s? Dunkin Donuts?)

Good for them.

I’m no fan of Bill 101, and I oppose government over-regulation of commercial signs. But this isn’t government regulation, it’s regular citizens expressing their right to free expression in attempting to get a company to change its ways. Second Cup’s signs should be French not because the government forces it on them, but because it’s respecting the population to speak to them in their language. Imagine having English-only signs in China, or Spanish-only signs in the U.S. It’s understandable for a mom-and-pop operation or a store in an ethnic village, but for a major company it’s a slap in the face to French-speaking Quebecers.

Second Cup’s move was just plain stupid. It’s not like nobody recognizes “Second Cup” when it’s “Les Cafés Second Cup”. Instead, this smacks of a decision made by a clueless manager who has far too much free time on his hands and doesn’t know anything about Quebec politics.

Hopefully they’ll come to their senses and leave “Les Cafés Second Cup” alone.

| Uncategorized

Universities are cesspools of cronyism

Le Devoir has an op/ed today about university governance. In it, an executive at the university teachers’ association talks about how university governing boards aren’t representative of the teachers and students involved in the universities. Instead, they’re filled with rich, connected businesspeople who buy their way onto them through donations to the universities.

The problem isn’t so bad on paper. Universities reserve more than half the seats on their governing boards for members of the community. This can mean businesspeople, community leaders, people at other educational institutions, retired educational industry professionals, doctors, lawyers, etc.

The problem mainly lies in the fact that these seats are self-selecting. They’re the highest governing bodies at their institutions, answerable only to the government, and so the boards basically control themselves. Nominations as members of the community are dealt with by a nominating committee of the board.

This causes two related problems: the people who are nominated tend to be friends or business associates of people already on the boards, and dissenting views get actively or passively shut out.

When I was at Concordia, I wrote a piece about the corporate connections of the members of Concordia’s Board of Governors. A little bit of Google searching found a lot of associations between most of the members’ companies. One acted as a lawyer for another. One serves on the board of the company whose CEO is the wife of another member. And so on.

In some cases, these associations are perfectly reasonable, having been formed after the two were appointed to the board together. But the chronology doesn’t solve the problem that the fat cats are friends and do things together.

There’s also other problems: These connected rich people tend to be more likely to receive honourary degrees, have buildings and academic programs named after them, or receive other official praise from the universities they’re connected to, in exchange for their generous donations. (Technically, board memebrs can’t receive honourary degrees while they’re on the board, and paying for such degrees isn’t allowed either. So we see a lot of anonymous donations, or PR people stressing that donations aren’t made with strings attached. And degrees are handed out after people retire from the board.)

The government needs to step in and solve this problem with new rules. Representation from academics and students needs to be increased. More non-business types need to be brought in. Academic decisions need to be deferred to academic bodies. And tough conflict-of-interest rules need to be established.

Business leaders should be on boards of universities. They have experience running large organizations, and have a lot of expertise they’re willing to share. But the power this gives them is very big, and it needs to be kept in check.

| Uncategorized

Killing the plastic bag won’t be that easy

Today is Blog Action Day, which as I already described is a really silly idea. But I’ll humour them anyway by talking about an environmental issue that has gotten a lot of press here recently: plastic bags.

Plastic shopping bags, especially those from grocery stores, are considered one of the bigger environmental issues facing us (they’re not actually such a huge issue, but they’re treated that way). They line streets, clog sewers, choke children and make crank-calls to your boss. They have a high volume and low weight, which makes recycling them inefficient.

So various jurisdictions are looking into ways to reduce or even eliminate this urban blight. Quebec is considering imposing a tax on them to reduce their usage, while a Maxi store in Sherbrooke has decided to eliminate them in favour of reusable bags, bins and favourable publicity.

Other countries around the world have taken different approaches to these bags since bout 2002 (Wikipedia has a roundup), most being a mixture of financial disincentives and voluntary compliance. So far (unless I missed one), no industrialized Western nation has banned them outright.

No magic answer

Plastic bags are clearly detrimental to the environment and their use should be heavily reduced. Even the plastics lobby thinks so (though their propaganda literature suggests otherwise). But the proposed solutions all have problems:

Taxes: Serge Lavoie of the plastics industry makes some good (albeit extremely self-serving) points about why this is problematic. Well, actually he makes three points, two of which are bullshit. He says plastic bags aren’t a problem, but then says they’re a minor problem, and then points to other problems and asks why we aren’t tackling those (I’ve heard similar arguments about why we shouldn’t criticize Israel for human rights violations). He also points to legislation and public opinion polls, which only proves that their lobbyists are working hard. But the point that makes a lot of sense is that people are going to find ways around the law. It’s already happened in Ireland, where people are using bags that are worse for the environment but not subject to the tax. Simply put: when money is involved, the market will find a way around it.

Voluntary compliance: The argument against this one is simple: People say things that make them look good, but greed and laziness set in when nobody’s looking. People are already aware of the problem, and many are changing some of their habits, but voluntary compliance alone isn’t going to solve the problem.

As someone who does most of his grocery shopping lugging around a big green bin, I can attest to other problems with the system as it is now:

  • Bags are still considered proof-of-purchase. It’s ludicrous when you think about it, because it’s easy to slip something into a bag, but it’s how many stores distinguish between stuff you’ve bought and stuff you haven’t. Re-using bags leads to confusion and suspicion. Half the time when I go by the cash at Loblaws, the cashier has to ask me whether or not I’ve purchased the reusable bin I’m using.
  • Minor inconveniences at the cash. Aside from the aforementioned suspicion, there’s other annoying problems. Groceries are placed in bags automatically unless you ask for something different. Rebates offered for not taking plastic bags aren’t always applied. My favourite is when trying to use the self-checkout at Loblaws. Not only is the system geared for bags (using a bin means balancing it on the scale and hoping it doesn’t fall), but you need operator assistance before you can start scanning your groceries. If a big chain like Loblaws makes it difficult, imagine what it’s like for smaller places.
  • Remembering to bring your bags. I don’t own a car, and a lot of the time I do groceries it’s on the way home from something. So I don’t have my big cumbersome bin. Plastic bags are small enough to put in your pocket, but not everyone will think ahead necessarily.
  • Merchants give good PR about protecting the environment, but in reality they just don’t care. They have no problem polluting as much as they can behind the scenes. They build massive buildings with ultra-high ceilings and keep them super-heated in the winter and super-chilled in the summer with wide open doors. Merchants in San Francisco promised to put a lid on their plastic bag use to avoid a tax on them, but ended up doing nothing.

Outright banning: This extreme step has been proposed in some developing countries as well as many small cities and towns. But they run into similar problems as taxing above: people will simply find a way around the problem, and that way might have even worse environmental consequences.

Finally, any drastic measure also ignores the fact that most households have already found ways to reuse plastic bags. There are two most common:

  1. Garbage. Put the bag in the kitchen garbage can, dump everything unrecyclable in it, tie it up and throw it in the big garbage bin at the curb. Depending on your output, households can go through at least a couple of these each week. (That would survive a reduction, but not an elimination of plastic bags)
  2. Poop scooping. One or two bags a day, per dog, are used to scoop and dispose of dog poop.

In both these cases, an alternative would need to be found. Using no bags would be impractical, because humans would have to get their hands dirty touching the slimy grossness. Purchasing bags is an option, but would probably be unpopular since we currently get them free. Instead, I can imagine a lot of dog poop going unscooped as a result of this ban.

Biodegradable bags: This is the solution that seems to be the magic solution to all these problems. BioBag Canada certainly thinks so. But these bags are still in development, and very expensive compared to plastic bags. The industry also argues that biodegradable isn’t necessarily better in landfills, because it releases methane and carbon dioxide, while plastic bags just sit there and do nothing. Despite that, I think this will eventually be a favourable option.

Hypocrisy

Finally, I’ll add one bit of ludicrous hypocrisy to this debate: Cities who are starting green projects are requiring use of disposable bags where they aren’t necessary:

  • In Côte-Saint-Luc, residents who are part of a pilot curbside compost pickup project are being given a short supply of compostable bags, which they will then have to replenish by paying for them out of pocket. They then place these bags in a special bin that will be emptied into trucks. But why the middle man? Why not just throw your food scraps directly into this container? Yeah, stuff might stick to the inside, but what’s the worst that’ll happen? It’ll decompose?
  • Even worse, Ville-Marie has phased out recycling bins in favour of clear plastic bags that look a lot like garbage bags. They seem to think it’s better that way. Maybe they’re right, but I see a lot of confusion between garbage and recycling, bags ripped open by raccoons looking for food and homeless people looking for returnable containers. Not to mention that it costs money and looks awful.

Baby steps

So what’s my solution? Everything in moderation. Voluntary measures will probably be the most successful in the short term. You don’t want plastic bags clogging your sewers? Don’t bring them home from the grocery store. Bring reusable canvas bags when you shop. Get retailers to do more to encourage use of reusable bags and bins, as well as collecting used bags.

Innovative ways to reduce bag use, combined with phasing in of compostable/biodegradable bags where preferable, will probably be the eventual solution to this problem. But any solution has to be cheap, convenient, practical and aesthetic if it’s going to succeed. Trying to force it is asking for it to backfire.

| In the news

Can’t we just agree that the Charter amendment is a stupid idea?

Can we stop with the news stories about the moronic idea from the Quebec Council on the Status of Women to ban hijabs and change the Charter to make gender equality rights trump religious belief?

Apparently not, as more politicians with the foresight of moths are actually getting behind it, already coming up with ways of ranking our fundamental rights.

It goes without saying that experts with brains oppose the amendment, for the simple reason that when we start saying some rights are less important than others, we begin de-valuing them. They also point out that religious rights don’t trump those of gender equality, and changing the Charter in such a way would not fix the problem, but likely have tons of other unintended consequences.

And even if that obvious flaw hadn’t been pointed out, it’s not like making the change would suddenly cause devout Muslim women to run out into the streets in bikinis, thanking us for allowing them the privilege of dressing immodestly.

It’s a horrible solution that fails to solve a non-problem. Let’s just agree to that and move on.

| Media, Video

Oh the poor oppressed Quebec white man

Did you know we live in a plutocracy?

Michel Brûlé knows it. He knows the big Quebec media is out to get real Quebecers. La Presse is friends with Jean Charest, Radio-Canada is “radio propaganda”, CBC has Don Cherry.

And more importantly, English Canadians are in bed with U.S. Americans because we watch their TV shows and we’re pro-war or something.

Oh, and we’re under control of “U.S. feminists”, who have convinced Quebec’s women that they have to go after all men, when in fact it’s just the English-speaking ones who are oppressing them. (He insists, meanwhile, that objectifying women is OK because he finds them very pretty — but only in ads for sex shops, not beer.) He also says Quebec women are too stupid to realize the need for Quebec independence to free it from the English Canadians, because they only voted 45% yes in the 1995 referendum while men voted 55% yes.

This is what he explains, in his opening videos (which I can’t link to*) to Les Dents du Québec.TV, his new citizen media website.

His thesis: (French) Quebec men and women must band together and end the battle of the sexes so they can fight their real enemy: the English language.

I’m all for citizen media, and giving people the right to express the opinion that the French language is endangered in this province. And his point about how much American TV we watch concerns me as well.

But I’d take him a bit more seriously if most of his ideas didn’t make him look like the other side of the Reform Party coin.

* Seriously folks, what’s with all these video sites that don’t allow people to link directly to the videos? That’s not even Web 2.0, it’s the kind of bone-headedly simple hyperlink technology that gave birth to the Internet in the first place.

| Slow News Day

I’m unconvinced no-fault insurance has to go

The Gazette’s Max Harrold has an interesting feature today on Quebec’s no-fault driving insurance system. He asks whether or not we should consider eliminating it and allowing victims of vehicular injuries to sue in cases where negligence or recklessness directly leads to serious injury or death. It features three interviews with grieving family members (the third is the mother of Jessica Holman-Price, who was killed by a dump truck turning a corner). All three want the law changed so the guilty pay the innocent instead of getting compensation from the government. (See comment below)

The no-fault system is pretty simple: Everyone’s a part of it, drivers can’t sue each other even if one is clearly at fault, and anyone who sustains an injury gets compensated. In exchange, Quebec has Canada’s lowest insurance premium rates.

But the problem, as the article points out, is that even in cases of dangerous driving (speeding) and impaired driving (drunk driving), perpetrator and victim are treated the same, both compensated based on their level of injury. Only criminal charges can be brought, which then result in probation or light sentences.

Despite the opinions of the families (and really, it’s kind of hard to argue with a grieving widow or mother), I remain unconvinced. It’s not that there isn’t a problem of justice here, but I think other methods are more likely to solve it:

  1. Impose stiffer sentences for drunk driving and dangerous driving, especially when such actions result in death. Speed racing that causes death, for example, should be considered homicide. Make license suspensions longer or even permanent in extreme cases.
  2. Use Manitoba’s system where drivers convicted of criminal charges related to an accident have to pay back any compensation they’ve been given as a result.
  3. Increase the number of police cars on the road so these accidents don’t happen in the first place.
  4. Find some way of forcing those found guilty of criminal offenses to pay the innocent, either by imposing a fine or by allowing lawsuits only when serious convictions have taken place.

Nobody wants to get into a car accident. Even those who are insanely reckless don’t expect to crash. So nothing will seriously act as a deterrent to accidents causing injury (though there are ways to attack the causes of those accidents).
In the end, no-fault insurance isn’t always perfectly fair, but it’s a compromise that keeps lawyers from sucking out all our money after we’ve already been hurt.

| Uncategorized

More xenophobia at the Bouchard-Taylor commission

The expressions of blatant xenophobia at the Bouchard-Taylor commission on reasonable accomodation is continuing with no end in sight:

  • The Quebec council on the status of women seeks to impose a dress code on all public employees, preventing them from wearing “visible religious symbols” like a scarf over their head or a little hat. Of course, it goes without saying that Catholics wearing crosses around their necks are specifically exempt. They get special treatment because they believe in the correct God.
  • The group also wants the Quebec charter amended to make sure that gender equality usurps religious freedom. This makes sense, but does that mean that women could sue for the right to become priests? If they’re for gender equality in all religions, then they must be in favour of that as well.
  • Pauline Marois is opining that the solution to reasonable accommodation is … wait for it … Quebec independence. In a statement that sounds almost Third Reich-ish, she suggests that independence would remove “ambiguity” concerning what Quebec is. Instead, immigrants would see it as the racist, intolerant, French-only haven of backwards ideas we all know and love. And if these ethnics want to join us, all they have to do is rid themselves of their religion, their culture, their language and anything else that makes them different.