Tag Archives: Quebec politics

| In the news, West Island

The Marois Mansion (next to) government land

The blogosphere is buzzing (do two posts constitute a buzz?) about the Pauline Marois camp sending a lawyer’s letter to The Gazette (inaccurately described as a “lawsuit”) demanding they retract allegedly incriminating statements about her made in an article by William Marsden this weekend.

The article is long and deals mostly with efforts to get areas of land rezoned from agricultural to residential (not too difficult when your party is in power — but if you can get through this part without lapsing into a coma, give yourself a cookie). These changes were made before Marois and her husband bought the land, but were supposedly done on their behalf. The really incriminating stuff — bribes in exchange for lies to get through loopholes — are based primarily on the statements of a retired construction worker who says he took $1,600 $500 in cash (see update below) after signing an affidavit about his use of an old cottage.

The other interesting part is the allegation that part of the estate (but no fixed structures besides a gate) are built on government-owned land (specifically, land reserved for the construction of the 440 highway extension, which would certainly have a negative impact on property values should it ever come). I’ve used the Google Maps aerial view of the property to draw a picture here based on details from the article:

The Marois Mansion

As you can see, the “built on government land” part is basically just a driveway, a couple of ponds and a gated entrance. And while I don’t mean to lessen the political implications of taking government-owned land for personal use (and because it doesn’t belong to you, not paying any taxes on it), I’ve seen many examples of homeowners using adjacent undeveloped land to walk their dogs, plant gardens or otherwise informally expand their backyards. (Though none would be so bold as to build a gated entrance to it.)

As for The Gazette, they’re not exactly sweating bullets. Marsden’s story seems very well researched, and the paper is standing by its reporter. And since Marois’s lawyer won’t comment on what he says they got wrong (seriously folks, why announce to the media that you’re taking legal action and then immediately refuse to comment on it?), I’m guessing this is more to save face than it is to right any real factual errors.

UPDATE (Sept. 25): The Gazette repeats its story from yesterday saying Marois’s husband Claude Blanchet sent a lawyer’s letter and is threatening to sue. (They’re milking this story for all it’s worth — as well they should.) The article creates one small hole in the original story: The neighbour now says it was actually $500 instead of $1,600 and that Marsden misunderstood him.

Meanwhile, Cent Papiers wonders why TVA is giving The Gazette lessons in journalism as shown in this LCN video (in which Marsden speaks funny-sounding French and is grilled over whether or not this is a “real story”). The funny thing is that this wasn’t such a huge story until Blanchet made it one. His threats to sue is what got every media outlet in town focused on the story.

Oh, and Pauline won her by-election yesterday. Congrats.

UPDATE (Sept. 27): Marsden updates his story with news that Marcel Turcotte, the neighbour whose affidavit is at the centre of this controversy, has issued another affidavit reaffirming his previous one, and contradicting what he told Marsden. It also mentions there was a 5-year lease from the government (1994-1999) for use of the public land. (The paper made it clear in the original article it couldn’t determine if such a lease exists.) Managing Editor Raymond Brassard is still standing by his reporter.

Meanwhile, Marois holds a press conference at her Ile Bizard home and vows to follow through with her threat to sue the paper. She takes issue with the suggestions of impropriety, though not with any of the facts of the piece, except for the previously-corrected figure of $500 instead of $1,600 (which she insists was a gift in exchange for the work he went through on their behalf, and not a bribe or pre-negotiated compensation for signing the affidavit). She plans to donate any money she gets to help promote sovereignty (because The Gazette is deliberately targetting sovereignist leaders, she says).

UPDATE (Sept. 28): The 5-year lease was cancelled in 1996, according to Marois, because of snowmobilers using the land. She also says they got permission to install the gate and gate posts at the street entrance.

Marois’s lawsuit has been filed and asks for $2 million.

And this funny letter in the Gazette today, defending Marois against the paper’s “cheap shot”: “If the English are smearing her, she must be very good.” The writer vows to vote for Marois next time around, which I’m sure will come as sad news to anglo rights groups who were counting on his support.

| Uncategorized

Bouchard-Taylor Commission legitimizes xenophobia

The news stories coming out of the Commission on Reasonable Accomodation (or whatever it’s official name is) have really been eye-opening. It’s no secret that we have paranoid xenophobes here. But this commission, going around the province (starting with small rural towns and ending in Montreal) seems to be legitimizing it.

Suddenly, it’s no longer taboo to express an irrational, paranoid fear of immigrants flooding in to take over your country. To suggest that a few dozen quiet immigrants with cloth over their faces settling in a town hundreds of kilometres away is going to somehow radically alter the way of life in a place that is 96% Catholic might have once been considered ignorant racism. But now that the commission is coming along, it’s giving these lunatics a forum in which to express their paranoia.

Tonight in a park, as I watched a free movie screening, one of the spectators shouted at the end, complaining that the film was not in French and that Quebec is a French-only province. The man was clearly off his rocker, and the crowd stayed silent in response. The young moderator of the evening, in an attempt at diplomacy, repeated an invitation to a post-screening party in the province’s official language, but the man was still yelling as she spoke in his tongue. He wasn’t interested in accomodation, he just wanted to yell.

Now if that same man were to walk into a commission hearing room and give those opinions into a microphone, suddenly it would become news. It would get into the newspapers, and would require acknowledgment and analysis.

I realize I’m generalizing here, but normal people have better things to do with their lives than attend these hearings. It’s the unemployed crazies who want someone to blame for their crappy lives that come to these town halls and blame immigrants they’ve never seen or met.

Perhaps there’s no alternative to this. We’re dealing with questions of morality, and that requires public consultation. But it still irks me that we’re giving an open mic to racist, xenophobic extremists and pretending like their opinions are justified.

| Media

Howard Galganov is still an idiot

Hey, remember Howard Galganov? He’s that anglo-rights crusader who was popular back in the 90s, ran for office a bunch of times (and lost) and eventually gave up on our province and moved to Ontario.

Well, Howard doesn’t let silly provincial boundaries stop him from opining, which he does now through his website. His latest diatribe talks about the declining anglophone population in Quebec, and he blames it on what’s clearly the most logical source: the anglophone media. (Except The Suburban and CIQC.)

His diatribe is long and venom-filled with overuse of the words “sell-out”, “racist” and other insults, so I’ll boil down his arguments:

  1. They wanted to be nice. Their refusal to let slip the dogs of war and stab at government with their pens was surely a missed opportunity.
  2. They didn’t support “anglo rights leaders”. Translation: They didn’t support me. As if the leaders deserve support regardless of whether their positions are sound.
  3. They’re like Jews who supported the Nazis. Nothing quite like a Holocaust simile to get a point across when everything else fails.
  4. Some say we should celebrate Bill 101’s anniversary. That’s simplifying the issue a bit. The Gazette’s opinion, for example, is that Bill 101 was a compromise that ensured linguistic peace. And even then, it also carried an opinion piece from Robert Libman saying it was devastating to the anglo community. CFCF’s Barry Wilson certainly hasn’t strayed from the anglo rights beat, and CBC doesn’t really have an opinion section.
  5. They called me “Angryphone”. That’s because you’re always angry.
  6. They equated me with francophone terrorists. Really? Has anyone called you a terrorist? You’re a radical on one side, just like Impératif Français are radicals on the other side. You may disagree with where the middle is supposed to be, but that’s something you have to live with.
  7. They didn’t sponsor rallies to raise money for lawsuits against the government. Is that really the role of the media? They raise money for literacy, but they tend to take a back seat to, you know, actually trying to change the law.
  8. They never said ethnocentric nationalism is wrong. I don’t see it that way. They routinely make the point of saying that the anglo and immigrant communities are important to Quebec. They were pretty united against the stupidity in Herouxville.

Galganov’s solution to the problem is simple and stupid: Have all the anglos and immigrants leave, shut down tourism and watch as their economy self-destructs.

Howard doesn’t seem to understand the problem. It’s not that Quebec doesn’t understand the value of its English-speaking citizens, though they do take us for granted. It’s that many anglophones are leaving the province because they can’t be bothered to learn some French.

In other words, the problem is people like Howard Galganov.

| Montreal, Public transit

Students will seek junk food

When I was in high school, a 250ml carton of milk could be bought for $0.20 in the school cafeteria ($0.25 out of the vending machine), thanks to heavy government subsidies. Soft drinks, candy bars and other junk food were also freely available, for a price.

Last week, the Quebec government announced that they would no longer allow junk food to be sold in public schools, in an effort to get kids to be healthier. It’s a sensible move: if you want kids to eat better, don’t dangle sweets in front of their faces.

This morning, La Presse reports that a special STM shuttle bus is being used to take kids to and from Mount Royal High School to the Plaza Côte-des-Neiges mall during lunch – ostensibly because they want to gorge on high-calorie foods. And the Marguerite-Bourgeois school board is trying to get them to stop.

The STM’s response is simple: They’re there to provide transit service to paying customers, not to second-guess their motives. “School extras”, the extra student-only shuttles that usually start mid-route at the school to take students home, aren’t there because the STM wants to be nice. They’re there to avoid dozens or even hundreds of students suddenly trying to get on the same bus after the bell rings.

Quebec’s junk food plan will help a bit, if only morally, to help control junk food intake. But students will go out to get what they want, even if that means they’ll have to take a bus to get there.

Expect a lot of weekday-only fast-food restaurants to start opening up near schools as a result of this policy.

UPDATE: Le professeur masqué has some thoughts on this issue as well. Another blogger asks if we’ve all gone crazy.

UPDATE (Sept. 26): The STM caves, vowing to only run shuttles to bring students back to school, a compromise about as stupid as the entire controversy.

| Business, In the news, Technology

Language police do good for a change

The Office québécois de la langue française has recently announced a deal with video game manufacturers concerning providing French-language games in Quebec. It will require, as of April 2009, that all games with a French equivalent sell that version here if it wants to sell and English version.

The deal, reached after months of discussions, is fair, reasonable, practical, and common-sense. It protects the rights of French consumers while limiting inconvenience to anglophone ones.

The OLF did this.

No kidding.

Hopefully this is just a first step in a change toward positive, realistic actions designed to promote the French language instead of restricting the rights of non-francophones.

| In the news

Your manner of dress offends me

The third in Jeff Heinrich’s series Identities today talks about what rules should be for minorities.

The poll of 1,001 Quebecers, which the Gazette is milking as much as it can out of, has somewhat predictable answers concerning whether women should be allowed to weir veils when teaching students, whether non-Christian religious symbols should be allowed in schools and whether non-Christians should be allowed time off work to pray. One third of the province is on one side of the debate, one third on the other, and the rest sway depending on the specific issue.

To give you an idea of how ludicrous this debate is getting, take a look at this:

About the only thing they are willing to concede is hijabs in public. Two in three – 66 per cent – think it’s OK for Muslim women to dress like that.

So in other words, a third of Quebecers think it should be illegal for women to wear scarves over their heads in public.

The minute the government starts imposing a dress code on the public is the minute I start looking for jobs in Ontario.

The article also includes a few interesting tidbits at the end, including the realization that more than half of Quebecers think the media is exaggerating the debate — more than twice the figure for political parties.

| Blogosphere, In the news, Navel-gazing

Everything you clearly don’t know about the Islamic veil controversy

The Gazette today began its five-day series Identities about reasonable accomodation, and their timing couldn’t have been better. The Bouchard-Taylor commission is beginning its public consultation tour of the province (Montreal is the last stop on their trip at the end of November), and a pair of conflicting rulings have been issued concerning the rights of Muslim women to wear veils in upcoming provincial and federal by-elections.

Continue reading →

| In the news, Media

Get your overpasses straight

Well, the Quebec government has started inspections on those 135 structures it says are “at-risk”. And of the 20 they’ve inspected so far, nine require major repairs or complete replacements.

Now here I was all eager to update my map of crumbling Quebec overpasses and bridges using this CBC Montreal story. It lists two bridges that will be replaced and eight more that will need major repairs. (Yeah, I know that adds up to 10 and not 9, but journalists don’t do math.)

It didn’t take long before I started having doubts about the list.

First of all, I can’t find out where they got it. The transport ministry’s website doesn’t have it in any of the documents related to their inspections of the first 20 structures, and no other news organization has any specific list of structures.

Secondly, their descriptions are vague. One of the overpasses needing “major repair” is “Highway 10 overpass in Marieville.” That’s great and all, but there are four overpasses on Highway 10 in Marieville on the list of 135 structures under review.

Finally, some of it is just plain wrong. One of the two listed for demolition is “Route 104 overpass in Franklin, Montérégie.” But Route 104 doesn’t go anywhere near Franklin. The western tip of Route 104 (in St. Jean sur Richelieu) is 59km away from the town. It was probably just a typo (there’s a Route 202 overpass in Franklin on the list), but it’s kind of important to get these things right, and without any other sources to back this already-faulty information up, I can’t use it. (UPDATE: LCN uses the same faulty description, so I guess it must be the transport department that got it wrong)

And that makes me cranky.

On the plus side, I found this proprietary (read: sucky) Google-Maps-style atlas of the 135 structures under inspection. Sadly, it doesn’t give any information about the status of the evaluations of the individual structures. But I’ll use it to pinpoint the location of some of the bridges I couldn’t map exactly.

And I’ve updated the list of City of Montreal-run overpasses which needed inspection to show most of them have reopened to heavy trucks.

| Uncategorized

Student lobby groups need a reality check

You gotta love student politics in Quebec. We have the lowest tuition fees in Canada, the highest taxes, and Montreal has the highest number of students per capita.

Yet this province seems to be the largest battleground for student protests in North America. They protest tuition fees, which are too high because they’re above zero (some protests involve CEGEP students, whose tuition fees actually are zero). They protest government cuts to loans and bursaries. They protest the colonial capitalist imperialistic racist empire bent on … evil of some sort.

And, of course, they protest each other.

Five student associations from Concordia, McGill and Dawson are suing each other over control of the Quebec chapter of the Canadian Federation of Students. Concordia’s graduate association is planning to pull out of the organization over this dispute which has seen two competing executives appointed. (UPDATE Sept. 13: The Concordian — yeah, I know — has a detailed story on what’s going on)

“Regional” (read: not Montreal or Quebec City) groups at UQTR, UQO and UQAR are threatening to leave the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) over their concerns the group is too Montreal-centric, and create their own lobby group to represent just their interests.

Currently there are three post-secondary lobby groups in Quebec. In addition to FEUQ (considerd the grown-up group because they sit down and negotiate with the government) and CFS-Q (considered almost renegade by its parent national organization and with little weight in Quebec because it only represents the two anglophone universities and an anglophone CEGEP), there’s ASSÉ, the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, which is a newer, more militant group that accepts nothing short of free education for all.

To give an example, the Concordia Student Union has been a member of all three organizations over the past few years, paying student money to three redundant organizations. They recently dropped ASSÉ (which was the cheapest of the three but also the most ineffective), and now pay money only to two.

And yet despite this, Jean Charest was returned to power with the clear intention of raising tuition, and fees are going up. FEUQ is threatening strikes, but they’ve already lost the battle. The public voted for tuition increases, and a few hundred students choosing to waste their money by not going to class isn’t going to get anyone to change their mind.

All three groups need to take a moment to figure out why they’re losing (even many students don’t support their positions — though I don’t see too many of them lining up to donate money to the universities), and change their strategy before they become even more irrelevant than they already are. Once that happens, student unions will start pulling their funding and the Quebec student activist movement will implode.

UPDATE (Sept. 25): A judge decides to keep the offices off-limits to both groups until the issue can be reviewed further. The SSMU is happy, while the CSU is not.

| Business

I’ll keep my Hydro-Quebec nationalized, thanks

Hydro-Quebec

The Gazette today has an opinion by two rich-guys (only half of which is online) saying we need to privatize Hydro-Quebec, and that doing so would save our economy, provide better services, make Quebec debt-free, promote environmentalism, protect our children and program our VCRs.

Privatization is always promoted as the silver bullet. Because governments are big, bureaucratic monstrosities who don’t care about efficiency or innovation, replacing parts of it with the private sector is advantageous. Private companies are lean, mean, innovation machines who always make the right decisions, have no corruption and provide the best value to the consumer.

In some cases, it works. When the barrier to entry is low, customers are well-informed and competition is high, the promised benefits tend to present themselves, though never to the extent that is expected by economic theorists.

What’s unique about Hydro-Quebec in this situation is that the main problem these two guys see with the way it’s run is that prices are too low. Higher prices, they argue, would promote conservation and allow us to sell more energy to the U.S. and neighbouring provinces, who pay market rates for it.

This is absolutely true (and as Jay Bryan points out, lower prices help the rich more than the poor), but it’s an argument for a rate increase, not for privatization.

Public utilities are bad examples of industries to privatize because competition is extremely difficult. Creating an infrastucture network encompassing hundreds of thousands of homes (or, in the case of provincial utilities, millions) is a monumental challenge, and so these private companies have to rely on pre-existing networks. That means they have to come to an agreement with the companies that own the networks (e.g. Videotron for cable, Bell for telephones) and essentially become resellers, charging customers more than if they went with the original companies, and allowing the two to point fingers at each other when something goes wrong.

Of course, all this is irrelevant here, because these two economic giants aren’t proposing a competitive market. Instead, they propose to either simply sell Hydro-Quebec (creating a private monopoly, which is just plain stupid) or sell shares to parts of it (which would force them to turn profits over to investors instead of the government).

The other main argument is money: Hydro-Quebec is worth so much that selling it outright would completely erase the province’s debt and then some. We’d save billions of dollars a year on interest payments and be able to reduce taxes and increase services.

That’s a great argument, and particularly seductive, but we’re still selling the furniture to pay the rent. Getting cash now is fine, but if it ends up costing us more in the long run by having to pay through the nose to a private company for our electricity, then it becomes less of a good idea. Bryan agrees, pointing out that such a one-time payment isn’t very meaningful, because they’d lose a giant, profitable asset in the sale.

Finally, I’d like to draw attention to a particular paragraph which speaks to the heart of the privatization debate:

“With representatives of the new shareholders on the board of directors, maximizing the value of shareholders’ equity and selling electricity at the market price would lie at the core of Hydro-Québec’s mission.”

In other words, private interests would be concerned only with the bottom line, and willing to bend any envelope to get there. Whether it’s outsourcing to China, cutting customer service, using independent contractors with the lowest bids (so you can wash hour hands of the situation when it’s inevitably discovered they’re scamming people), hiking prices or cutting off those who aren’t profitable, the private sector will try to squeeze as much money as possible from customers for less and less service.

It sounds great on paper, but in practice it’s just a waste of time and frustration.

UPDATE: Le Devoir recrunches the numbers, and concludes that selling off Hydro would be a really bad idea.

| Uncategorized

Voulez-vous protester avec moi?

The Montréal Français group is organizing a protest this Sunday, starting at 1 p.m. at Mont-Royal metro. They’re celebrating the 30th anniversary of Bill 101 and want it strengthened, specially in light of a recent court decision that ruled an extension of that law unconstitutional.

Oh to live in a province one day where people can speak French without fear of government repression…

| Uncategorized

Tuition increase just the tip of the iceberg

As the fall semester fast approaches from the horizon for students, some will be getting a wake-up call when they go to pay their tuition.

You see, in addition to the $100 a year tuition increase (which works out to $50 a semester, $10 a course or $3 a credit), universities are continuing to pack on administrative fees — taxes on tuition to pay for things that used to be included free.

At my alma mater, Concordia University, some of the new fees include a “Copyright fee” and a “Technology Infrastructure Fee”, even though the latter, at $4 per credit or $60 a semester, doesn’t include access to things like the formerly-free campus-wide wireless network — now they make you pay for that, which is pissing off some students.

Concordia’s list of “miscellaneous fees” is always good for a laugh, and was the butt of jokes at the Concordia Student Union back when it was controlled by the radical left. There’s a fee to apply, a fee to confirm attendance, a fee for the required student ID card, a fee to graduate, and a fee to mail your degree, among many others.

But while students make fun of these fees and protest against them, the number of student association fees (which the students themselves approve) has gone up considerably in the past few years. In 2000, there were 10 of these fees. Now the number has doubled. The newest fee, to be added in the winter, will support the “Sustainability Action Fund”. This isn’t to be confused with the entirely separate fee to run Sustainable Concordia, or for groups like the CSU or the Quebec Public Interest Research Group. In all, these student-managed fees account for between $8 and $12 per credit, which works out to $240 to $360 per year. (And that doesn’t include the student-managed health and dental plan, which is another $200 per year)

While some of these fees are opt-outable (most notably the health plan), most aren’t.

So before student groups start complaining about how their constituents are being nickel-and-dimed to death, perhaps they should start looking in their own backyard.

| Uncategorized

More security through obscurity in Quebec highway infrastructure

Must we continue this cat-and-mouse game? First the government wouldn’t tell us which overpasses were part of the 135 they considered unsafe-but-still-safe. Then they published the list. Now they’re refusing to publish inspection and repair reports for those bridges and overpasses.

The reasons are vague and legal-sounding, but about half seem to do with giving out trade secrets of private corporations.

I’m not interested in how Pavage Connerie Jean-Luc drills its core samples. I want to know what’s wrong with these structures and what was fixed about them. What about the law prevents the government from giving us this information?

| Business, In the news

Please leave your bags at the tax office

Plastic bag
“A Plastic Bag” by currybet

Quebec is considering a $0.20 per bag tax on plastic shopping bags. The intent is to cut down on their production, use and disposal.

I’m in favour of reducing the use of these bags. I have a green basket I use when doing grocery shopping. Those few bags I do use get reused to hold what little garbage I produce, and any which aren’t usable get recycled.

I’m even in favour of charging for bags. Something small, like $0.05 per bag, won’t make a big difference to the people who burn through money, but it might make some think twice about double-bagging that milk or using an extra one for the can of concentrated orange juice.

But I’m not crazy about the idea of a tax, that benefits neither the consumer nor the retailer, encouraging both to find a way around it. There’s an (admittedly self-serving) opinion in the Toronto Star which explains some of the cons to such a tax. Basically it comes down to the fact that people need something to carry their groceries in. In some cases this means finding loopholes — those bags which for some technical reason aren’t subject to the tax, and may be worse for the environment.

That’s basically my issue. We need an alternative. The green baskets are great, but they have a high initial cost (around $5), and you need to lug them around. The re-usable bags also require forethought, and might not be sufficient to carry a week’s worth of groceries. Their use should be encouraged beyond the $0.05 per bill rebate that Loblaws offers, but it’s not a complete solution. What about smaller stores? What about department stores like Wal-Mart? What about those clear bags we put fruit in? What about all that excessive packaging that’s used on electronics?

That, combined with the fact that plastic bags still seem to be the method a lot of places use as proof of purchase.

Once we handle these things, then we can talk about drastic measures to reduce bags. In the meantime, I don’t get why stores don’t charge a small amount per bag, and offer more incentives for people to bring their own bags (like, say, ending the policy of everyone having to surrender their bags at the cash when they enter).

UPDATE: The Gazette’s Max Harrold has some man-on-the-street reaction to the idea.