Worth the watch. Applies as much to the Fed as it does provincial politics.
Specific note: this speech is in English and mostly focuses on federal politics, which Mr. Coyne follows closely. That said, it applies 100% to Quebec politics.
It is foolish to think Quebec’s democracy is any more vibrant or effective than democracy in other Canadian provinces. Our politicians tell us constantly how fundamentally different we are, but when it comes to the shite that is modern politics in Canada, Quebec is no better than any other province.
Coyne points out the grim fact – our Prime Ministers have been full of shit, consistently, going back forty years (and yes, very much including Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the last good prime minister I can think of broadly speaking).
Quebec has it’s own political bullshit. If you watched Thursday’s ‘leaders’ debate you would have witnessed Pauline Marois, François Legault and Françoise David gang up on Philippe Couillard for expressing his thought that bilingualism is an asset to anyone living in Quebec.
He was almost accused of being a traitor to his race.
Anyways, I’ll talk about that a little more in a later post.
Listen to Coyne, he knows what he’s talking about. Fixing our democracy is going to take a national effort, and if it isn’t done soon there simply won’t be a Canada worth saving in the future.
Also – pay particular attention to his comments on the problems with our ‘first past the post’ system. Understanding why this system doesn’t work is key to understanding the major underlying deficiencies with our political system, because we have a democracy that propels massive disenfranchisement.
What can I say, the early spring of 2014 has proven to be a rather exceptional moment in time.
I feel overwhelmed by the noise generated by the provincial election, especially as it contrasts with far more important and interesting developments elsewhere. There’s so much going on right now it’s hard to keep track of everything.
Russia has annexed Crimea after all and much to the chagrin of the nations aligned and not. The situation has some eerie similarities to how the last world war got started, and the world powers and traditional allies don’t quite know how to address the problem, leaving us all to wonder what happens next when this kind of power is left unchecked?
As of today, March 19th 2014, Ukraine has announced they will remove their forces from Crimea, conceding the region is lost. The United States has indicated there will be no American military action in Ukraine.
And there’s still the case of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, missing now since March 8th. A fully loaded Boeing 777 simply vanished without a trace, and all the reconnaissance, search and rescue and sonar systems in South-East Asia and zipping through Low Earth Orbit can’t seem to find it.
MH370’s disappearance reminds me of how big this world still is, despite all humanity has accomplished trying to make it small and manageable. It amazes me that something so big, so obvious and apparent, could disappear so. While speculation abounds as to the cause of the disappearance, one Canadian pilot makes a compelling argument in favour of an on-board fire and various efforts that would have been made by the pilot to overcome it.
Unfortunately, thanks to a combination of Malaysian officials’ incompetence early on in the investigation, too much time was spent looking in the wrong places, and now there’s an over-focus on foul play on the part of the Muslim pilot.
And here I was thinking disappearances were a thing of the past. Every day that passes the humbling effect increases…
Ceci n’est pas une premiere ministre
And on the national level the Premier of Alberta and the Federal Finance Minister both just resigned, just like that.
It always amazes me how common it has become for people apparently oozing leadership skills can just up an quit a difficult job without any real repercussions. It only serves to remind me politicians do not live in the real world of you or I. In our world quitting can be as bad as getting fired or laid off, worse considering there’s no employment insurance for quitters.
Fortunately for both Alison Redford and Jim Flaherty, their respective salaries were sufficiently high enough they won’t have to worry about feeding themselves and paying the bills for some time.
I wonder if it has anything to do with those fireballs seen in the Maritimes a couple days back. Two in fact, back to back. Maybe our nation’s elites know an omen when they seen one.
Mayor Coderre gave the green light to demolish what remained of the former architectural gem back on Valentine’s Day of this year (what a sweetheart!) but his decision was quickly shot down by culture minister Maka Kotto who put a thirty-day moratorium on the planned demolition to study the house and it’s architectural and historical merit. I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that the province would also investigate how the structure could be integrated into the $1,000 per month ‘student condos’ project going up on the site.
Alas, such was apparently not part of the PQ’s mandate. Rather, they determined only that the house had no architectural nor historic value whatsoever, and then repealed the moratorium.
Local heritage activists had considerable evidence to the contrary, in addition to recommendations on how part of the remaining structure could be saved via integration into the new residence. Coderre’s statement from back in February was that the house’s structural integrity had degenerated to the point there wasn’t much left saving and what remained would be dangerous to work around.
Based on the outcome of this election a referendum question might be off the table for as long as the next four years (assuming, somehow, Couillard manages a majority, sticks to his federalist inclinations and a Montrealer becomes Prime Minister next fall – it’s unlikely but within the realm of possibility. Think of what that might mean for our city, with francophone federalists at the three key levels of power).
Much like the now infamous Pineault-Caron family shown above, all the Quebec Liberals need to do is simply let the PQ continue talking, and they’ll reveal themselves for who they are: fundamentally, inherently racist and appealing to a myopic minority of citizens who would literally step over their own mothers to achieve this twisted vision of national self-determination.
In the last week we’ve witnessed a PQ candidate get unceremoniously ejected from the party for Islamophobic (and just plain dumb) posts on his facebook page. Jean Carrière was forced out and rightfully so, but it makes you wonder about the PQ candidate vetting process. This is politics 101 – nothing offensive on your most public medium.
You’d think a guy with a head this big would know the really obvious stuff.
And then a PQ candidate came out and compared the ritual of baptism and the medical practice of circumcision to rape.
Yeah, you read that right.
Gouin-riding candidate Louise Mailloux was also busted for – get this – propagating a well-known conspiracy theory originated by the KKK that Rabbis collect a tax from goods certified as Kosher and then use those funds to support the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.
Louise Mailloux holding up a photocopied image of sheiks to prove a point about something…
Worse, Ms. Mailloux has issued an apology, for hurting people’s feelings.
And in turn, Pauline Marois stands by Ms. Mailloux.
Perhaps if any of these women had Jewish friends or acquaintances they might not be so public with their anti-Semitism.
It’s truly disheartening that some people in this province clearly aren’t concerned with multiple and very public displays of racism by a party ostensibly designed to protect a minority group from the apparently unrelenting assault of cultural assimilation.
If I could issue edicts I would demand our politics were racism free and didn’t involve propagating ideas dreamt up by hillbilly klansmen, but I suppose Ms. Mailloux feels some kind of kinship for the ‘oppressed whites’ of the American South…
And who can forget the spray-paint attack on Bernard Drainville’s PQ riding office in Longueuil?
Just a quick aside, Drainville’s office was tagged with the message above and swastikas were drawn over Pauline Marois’ face.
In this case it’s the spelling that’s off. English speakers with an interest in protecting Judaism and Quebec politics likely would not have written “dont” in lieu of the far more common (and correct) spelling of “don’t”. Also, another word for yarmulke is kippah – with an ‘h’.
As much as some people would love a race war, I have a feeling this might actually be the work of an over-zealous PQ envelope-licker inspired by the likes of Pierre Poutine.
The man who owns Quebecor, Videotron, Sun News Network and the Sun Newspaper Corporation, arguably the single greatest sources of hysterical Francophobia, Anglophobia and general Islamophobia (not to mention piss poor journalism) in the entire country, is running with the party that once branded itself as a working class social grassroots movement to protect and preserve French Canadian culture from the perceived threat of Anglo-American monoculture.
So am I worried about Quebec becoming an independent country?
No.
The repercussions to the PKP announcement were swift. The major provincial unions, already siding up against the proposed secularism charter, have now indicated they won’t be supporting the PQ at all, marking a historic break between the Parti Quebecois and its traditional voter base.
What politicians consistently fail to realize – and this really is a national phenomenon – is that you can only be overtly contradictory, hypocritical, full of shit (however you want to say it) up to a certain point before people get fed up and reject a party en masse. Consider the Tories in 1993. Nine years of Mulroney’s bullshit and Canadians *destroyed* the political entity known as the Progressive Conservatives. What little remained quickly succumbed to the influence of the Reform Party, giving us the unholy amalgam of perverted Western ‘nationalism’, the oil lobby and social conservatives who hate gays and love war. Consider the Liberals under Ignatieff.
This here’s a photo of what Montreal looked like back in the early 1930s.
To situate yourself, first you’re looking ‘Montreal east’ – that’s the Jacques-Cartier Bridge under construction, and by my guess I think the airplane was flying near the intersection of Rue de la Montagne and Boulevard Saint-Jacques, or Mountain and St. James as it was colloquially referred to back then.
This is Montreal right before the Depression really began to be felt in Canada, and right after about fifty years of considerable and near constant economic growth for our city.
This is Montreal back when Canada had but one metropolis.
This is Montreal back when it defined what metropolis meant in the Canadian context.
If you stare at this photo long enough you’ll see all that remains, and there’s a lot all things considered.
But consider as well that just about everything in the lower half of the photo is gone.
In the contrast you can see the effect of monumental construction projects and just how much space is actually eaten up by the Ville-Marie Expressway.
The depopulation of the central core of our city is clear, but so too is the amount of space we demand on an individual level also glaringly apparent. Back in the 1930s there was a lot more happening, so much more life, packed tighter together. At the top of the picture is more-or-less the limit of the ‘urban’ montreal of the day, and it wouldn’t have extended much father in other directions either.
This is back when NDG was the suburbs.
Montreal’s population was recorded at just under one million people in 1931, and you can imagine the majority of those people would have lived and worked in the area photographed above.
Montreal witnessed a steady decline in population between 1971 and 2001, from our all-time high of 1,766,000 to 1,583,000 at the start of the new millennium. The city lost 183,000 people, largely to suburbanization, during that thirty-year period. Concurrently, the city deindustrialized (as other major North American cities did at the time) and gave up considerable tracts of land to highways and parking lots, facilitating the new white collar workers who worked in the new corporate office towers of the urban core.
It’s unfortunate, because we’ll never have this kind of urban density again, and as a consequence I doubt we’ll ever be able to truly replicate the urban lifestyle aesthetic of our first metropolitan era.
In all the renderings of exposed highway trenches developed for the city, they all sort of look like this – like canals in an American Venice
Hand-in-hand with the redevelopment of Dorchester came the construction of a major east-west highway, today known as the Ville-Marie Expressway. The Ville-Marie was a success in one manner of thinking because so much of it was put underground (as opposed to above ground, such as Metropolitan Boulevard north of the mountain), meaning it could be eventually covered over again. Unfortunately this took a lot longer and had a more deleterious effect than city planners had imagined. In the 1960s, when planning and construction of the Ville-Marie began, there was this idea, as you can see in the above rendering, that the new ‘sunken’ highway would take the form of a post-modern canal, stimulating new growth immediately next to it. This didn’t really happen as developers were disinclined to build right next to an open highway trench. Moreover, planners back in the 1960s failed to realize just how unappealing an open highway trench would actually be for all the people walking around above.
View of exposed sections of Ville-Marie Expressway, from the Tour de la Bourse, circa 2000
This is what the Ville-Marie looked like right before the first serious efforts to recover the lost land actually began. Notice that parts weren’t completely open – the tunnel roof is visible – but that for whatever reason no efforts had been made to reclaim this space. This would change at the start of the new century with the planned redesign of Victoria Square and the development of the Quartier Internationale.
The exposed section, recovered. Notice the CDP Capital building lower left corner, and the enlargement of the Palais des Congrès, over the former exposed tunnel
During 2002-2003 the square was completely redesigned, concurrently with the construction of the CDP Capital Centre, the enlargement of the Palais des Congrès and the construction of Place Riopelle between the two. All of this was located atop the tunnel. The CDP Capital Centre is particularly impressive (and I’d encourage you to visit it during normal business hours) as the architect designed a building that sits atop the tunnel but doesn’t place any weight on it – the atrium is in fact located directly above the tunnel, with the weight of the building pushed off on to either side.
At around the same time, the Underground City was extended to connect the once separate eastern and western axes through this area. Arguably the most impressive and least used parts of the RÉSO can be found here.
So clearly it is possible to build on top of the tunnel/trench.
The question comes down to cost.
The last remaining exposed part of the trench – a prime location for new construction
This is the remaining open part of the Ville-Marie Expressway, between the new CHUM superhospital and the Palais des Congrès. As you can see, it’s a considerable amount of space. Mayor Denis Coderre wants to build a park atop the highway trench on the easternmost portion. Transport Quebec, the provincial transport ministry, has said, unequivocally, no. They argue it will cost too much without giving any idea as to what they think it will cost.
This is called ‘convenient political obstructionism. It isn’t the plan they don’t like, it’s that the Mayor of Montreal is planning it and, for reasons that still make no sense to me, a highway used almost exclusively by Montrealers is outside the jurisdiction of City Hall.
And as to the other two-thirds of the trench, well, there’s enough space here to build an entirely new Palais des Congrès (not that I’d advocate for another convention centre in the same space, but simply to illustrate just how much area we’re actually talking about).
It strikes me as odd the city, province and various private developers couldn’t get together and devise a plan to cover over this remaining section. If costs are as prohibitive as the province seems to believe, then perhaps the recovering job ought to be a public-private partnership. Get private developers to front part of the cost so that they can get the rights to build above. Something tells me this would be an excellent location both for office towers and condominiums, given that this open hole happens to be in the middle of just about everything. I can imagine living and working here would appeal to a lot of people.
The next phase – this is passed for a park on top of a highway in 1982; neat idea, poor execution, worse location.
And just in case there’s any doubt it can be done, it has been done before. The Agora pictured above is probably one of our city’s least used (and enigmatic) public spaces because it’s terribly uninviting. Moreover, due to its design and the relative poverty of the surrounding area for far too many years, it was taken over by local homeless people. My first apartment in Montreal was right in front of it and throughout the summer the entirety of Viger Square was a makeshift homeless campground. The single biggest problem with the public spaces created above the Ville-Marie in the late 1970s and early 1980s is that lines of sight across the spaces are blocked by walls and hedges.
I don’t want to see the Agora torn down because I think it might work very well in another part of town, but the fact remains, these places aren’t being used as best they can.
Especially considering the creation of the Ville-Marie Expressway caused the stately Viger Square to be destroyed.
What I’d like to see is large, green, urban parks with clear sight lines across, much like Viger Square before it was demolished to excavate for the Ville-Marie. Given the new housing built in the area in the last decade, I think it would be wiser to create a more traditional green space in this area and move the post-modern agora a little closer to the city centre. I think the agora would work much better in an area in which thru-traffic can be guaranteed and stimulated. This is simply impossible where it currently stands largely because it’s bounded by two major boulevards and there’s not much going on in its current location to stimulate the much needed ‘ballet of the streets’.
All that said – this is our city, our highway, our public spaces and ultimately our problem. The effort to remove the scar left by our efforts to modernize fifty some-odd years ago has only been partially achieved. In order to build a more cohesive city, and further to beautify it and increase population density, we must be given the tools to be masters of our own domain.
2. Is there any actual empirical evidence either the French language or French culture of our province and/or country is in any way threatened?
3. Given that there is no official effort to assimilate Francophones in this country, why are separatist parties so concerned with the spectre of assimilation?
4. How would ten million ethnic French Canadians, almost all of whom speak and work in French on a daily basis, lose their language and/or cultural identity anyways? (without some kind of external compelling force)
6. If we’re to have yet another referendum, what will it be on? Independence? Sovereignty? Sovereignty-Association? Another round of constitutional negotiations? Why isn’t this clear?
7. Is it right to destroy one country in order to build another?
8. When was the last time an ethno-nationalist movement created an ideal society anyways?
12. How can we continue to justify spending $25 million per year on the OQLF when the only good thing to come out of the organization was a report that stated, unequivocally, that French is not threatened and that Bill 101 doesn’t need beefing up?
14. How can a political movement designed to protect minority rights (the PQ, as it was originally conceived) turn around and infringe upon minority rights (the PQ, today) and claim any kind of political legitimacy? Bill 60 is institutionalized racism: it specifically singles-out religious minorities working in the public sector and demands they choose between their jobs or wearing religious garments or symbols.
The belief that Anglophone capitalists were recklessly redeveloping the city and destroying an element of our cultural aesthetic was somewhat prevalent among the early urban preservation movement and sovereignist movement, and indeed there was a lot of overlap in terms of public demonstrations of the time. Sovereignists, favouring a more socially-conscious method of urban redevelopment that encouraged public repossession and conversion of heritage properties by the state, were quick to join demonstrations against the destruction of entire neighbourhoods and iconic mansions. It was somewhat ironic, given that the people of the Square Mile during it’s golden era (from 1880 to 1930) were often thought of as those who oppressed working class French Canadians. In many ways the excess of the Square Mile and its people (who controlled 70% of the nation’s wealth for a time) played a role in the development of the Quebec independence movement.
In his judgement as culture minister, Maka Kotto believes the Redpath House is of no *ahem* national heritage value.
Really?
I’ll grant that the home isn’t the actual house of John Redpath (but I’m fairly certain is the last of the Redpath family’s Square Mile homes), and I agree with the minister for deploring that nothing was done back when the house was in better shape.
But the minister simply asked that the owner do something to remind passers-by that the home once stood there and should be recognized.
Like a plaque. Or maybe the Sochaczevski’s will call their new condo building ‘Le Redpath’.
Oooh! Sounds historical!
I just don’t understand why the province wouldn’t mandate that the new building incorporate part of the old. I’m not keen on this generally speaking but when it’s the only option in lieu of total demolition I’d go for it. Clearly the walls aren’t in that bad a shape – they’re still standing after thirty years of abandonment. At least if the few remaining Queen Anne style architectural details were preserved it wouldn’t be a total loss.
Either way, very disappointing. Pretty much everyone loses with the exception of the family who was jerked around for a generation by an incompetent heritage preservation bureaucracy.
And they’ve been on the losing end for thirty years. It’s hard to feel bad for rich people who find themselves unable to make more money, or feel good for them when they finally get some justice and can proceed to tear down some history to put up another god forsaken condominium in a high-density neighbourhood.
So I’m all kinds of conflicted on this one.
Ultimately I can agree with the minister – something should have been done long ago and shame on those responsible thirty years ago for not reacting as people today would have preferred.
You can understand why this really doesn’t make me feel any better. Blaming people from long ago for making poor decisions does nothing to protect the past from future development.
