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Pensées sur la rentrée

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Clouds over Saint Henri - Summer 2013
Clouds over Saint Henri – Summer 2013

It’s official, Montréal’s exceptionally large student population is now safely locked away in their classrooms and lecture halls, allowing old people to once again return to our city’s streets, public spaces and transit systems, confident in their knowledge they won’t be subjected to anything too shocking from the young folk for many dreary months.

Fall announced itself over the long weekend in an odd manner: Saturday was humid with low, thick clouds, breaking in the afternoon. Sunday was a reminder of some of the really beautiful (yet unfortunately few) sunny summer days where all manner of colour explode all around you. And Monday, well, by Monday the party was over – fall was back with a vengeance. It was an odd day of alternating mugginess and fresh river breezes, clouds rolling all day with small breaks to show the azure skies behind. By dinner time the rains that held off all day soaked the city through and through, and then the clouds broke again, before returning with thunderclaps and lightning dancing across the night sky. And today the smell of poplar leaves lingering in my nostrils… autumn; the dynamic flourish of life before death.

What a town to live in. Today I got giddy thinking about walking through the forest on the mountain five or six weeks from now on a sunny day when the leaves look like an artist’s impression of fire in stained glass. Orange, yellow, red and green on a blue background.

What a pallet!

In any event, no more chromatic deviations, on to the task at hand.

Our schools kinda suck.

Granted in absolute terms we’re doing just fine, but on a national and provincial level our public schools have a lot of problems we’re not addressing. The drop-out rate in the public French sector is embarrassingly high. Some schools sit half empty while other burst at the seams, and in some cases these schools are within a block of each another. Street gang infiltration is a surprising and serious problem inasmuch as the casual disrespect shown towards inner-city students by the local police force (who all too often assume any group of three or more non-white adolescents constitutes a street gang). And if all that wasn’t enough some of these schools are stuffed full of asbestos or have had water infiltration for so many years toxic mould is sprouting in the air ducts.

The people deserve better. The kids deserve better. We shouldn’t have to pay a fortune to send our kids to private schools, the public sector must provide. After all, it’s one of the things our taxes pay for, and we pay a lot in taxes. There’s absolutely no legitimate reason our schools and public schooling system should fail the way it does, causing social problems, furthering the class rift, costing what it does without producing the results we want. The denigration of the public education system further impoverishes the middle class and drives suburban flight. There’s no pride in having to pay for your child’s education – it’s a failure of the state we live in.

I’m astounded we don’t demand better.

Perhaps we inadvertently lost sight of things, but a cursory examination of the local public education system offers some glaring examples of how and why local public schooling seems to be on the decline.

The fundamental problem is the near total lack of efficiency. Multiple boards, multiple unions, unnecessary duplication, inefficient space usage, poor maintenance, no standardization, – the list goes on and on.

Segregation, in my opinion, is the source of what ails and may ultimately severely damage our local public education system. The PQ’s decision to eliminate religious school boards in the late 1990s was a move in the right direction and a move towards greater efficiency and a positive reinforcement of state secularism. Montréal should take this a step further and unite all the school boards operating on-island into a single city-administered department of education. Ending segregation may save us a lot of money.

Imagine an end to linguistic segregation in Montréal public schools – I can’t think of a better way to integrate immigrants into our society than by demonstrating our own ability to integrate the minorités-majoritaires. Think about it. We send the kids of the people we want to integrate into our society to the overcrowded and underfunded French public sector, which in this city is losing Franco-Québécois enrolment to the private sector, while Anglophone schools with French Immersion and International Baccalaureate programs sit half empty. It’s insane; if there was just one board student distribution would be more even – no empty schools, no over-crowding. Integrating the school boards cut could busing budgets since students would simply go to the school nearest their home, rather than being shipped halfway across the city. Everything would be streamlined – from text book selection to resource allocation to cafeteria services, providing the potential for major savings as new areas of efficiency are exploited.

One island, one school department, but ultimately two languages.

This is the fundamental compromise – this new arrangement would require the integration of English and French school boards, their teachers and respective staff. It would mean all Montreal children would be taught the same regardless of what language they speak at home, and thus, the language of instruction and internal communication for this new island-wide education department must be officially French.

But not absolutely French. A good compromise cuts both ways.

If the English boards were to accept a French education department for the whole island, the French boards would have to accept a degree of bilingualism in public education for all Montreal children. I’d argue 30% of class time ought to be in English and 70% in French from kindergarten all the way to grade 11. This mix will, in my opinion, would thoroughly guarantee the survival of the French language and culture in Montréal while simultaneously providing a foundation of English-language instruction necessary for life in Canada. I’m pretty sure the end result would be a greater appreciation of both languages by all Montrealers, regardless of mother tongue or cultural background.

There are many reasons we should head in this direction – we’ll save money, get more bang for our collective buck, better ensure social cohesion and create the winning conditions for a local public education renaissance. We have all the social and economic reasons to pursue this, and yet, we’re incredibly cynical.

I’ve been told this could/would/should never happen.

That disappoints me.

I think Montrealers ought to have a greater say in how our children are educated, and ending segregation in our public schools, regardless of whatever the current provincial government may say, is the right way forward for our city.

Commentary, Cultural commentary, Social commentary, Sovereign Socialist, Sovereign Socialist featured article

The World Cannot Afford to Subsidize Hate – The Case Against Sochi 2014

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Russia athletes protesting 'anti-gay propaganda' laws - photo credit to Reuters
Russia athletes protesting ‘anti-gay propaganda’ laws – photo credit to Reuters

I guess I’m a bit late to the party, so to speak, but I’ve had a hell of a time wrapping my head around this one.

I guess I’ll start from square one.

I studied history voraciously in university. I was of the mind that the better you knew the past, the better you can anticipate the future. Humanity is an evolving species and change is certain, but we’re also highly predictable creatures of habit with a penchant to try and convince ourselves we aren’t evolving, that the past is irrelevant because it exists in a different time and context. I see things differently – ours is a history of error and success, and in my humble opinion, the scales are tipped heavily towards error. of course it would; biologically our species hasn’t advanced much past the ‘terrible twos’. Those who think we’re going through our adolescence are optimistic, and ultimately aren’t taking the long view. If we survive ourselves, we may be around for a very long time indeed.

But it’s extremely frustrating, having all this historical knowledge, as you begin to see just how frequently we repeat the errors of the past, and just how incapable so-called ‘leading nations’ are at actually preventing the massive man-made cataclysms that have so characterized the last few centuries of our collective experience. What we were supposed to have learned once and for all during the 20th century is that the policies of hate, the dehumanization of minority groups wherever they may be found, and the disenfranchisement of people based on their race, creed, gender, sexual-orientation, religion, class etc. is simply wrong, inexcusable.

The society I grew up in was one filled with survivors and the progeny of survivors. Survivors of the most terrifying conflagration humanity ever created and triumphed over, ours is a nation unfortunately forged in war. Whether a survivor of Dieppe or the concentration camps it didn’t matter much, the lessons learned were supposed to be universal.

Today it seems as though we’ve learned nothing at all.

Across Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia nations which, twenty years ago, were under the iron grip of a massive empire begging for freedom and democracy are today ‘choosing’ to head off down the road of dictatorship, petty nationalism and human rights abuses that would make any self-respecting Canadian’s – regardless of local political orientation – skin crawl. In Hungary the government and other far-right parties are openly discriminating against Jews and Gypsies, if not persecuting them outright. Nazi-inspired political groups terrorize immigrants in Greece while far right nationalists do the same in the United Kingdom. Ugly conservatism has reared its head in France, mobilizing hundreds of thousands to riot in the streets of Paris against marriage equality for homosexuals, while in Turkey it aims to set back the clock on what was once the leading light of secularism in the Muslim world. The most powerful militaries in the world sit out the carnage in Syria and Egypt as political instability in those countries lead to the creation and empowerment of various Islamofascist organizations vying for control in increasingly complicated asymmetrical civil wars.

And on top of all this mess a small group of Nordic countries, arguably among the wealthiest and most developed in the world, are supposed to go to a Black Sea resort early next year to participate in what is supposed to be a great human endeavour – the Winter Olympics. It is marketed and popularly understood to be an opportunity for people of diverse backgrounds to come together, look beyond their individual differences at the underlying bonds of the human condition and enjoy the peaceful competition of sport. And I suppose to enjoy each other as well – the Olympic Village in London ran out of condoms in two days last year…

Unfortunately, and following a discriminatory trend popping up all over the globe these days, the Russians have recently passed laws that criminalize ‘homosexual propaganda’, and these laws will (at least according to some senior Russian officials) be applied to the fullest extent. In effect that means athletes from the LGBTQ rainbow of sexual diversity will have to keep their orientation to themselves (hiding who they are) for fear of arrest, to say nothing of potentially getting beat up by the anti-gay gangs that have quite suddenly popped up. Russia is, at least at a government level, increasingly homophobic and Christian supremacist, and this is on top of their already notoriously poor human rights record, corruption, lack of transparency and democracy.

Now some might say ‘too bad, it’s their laws, their culture, and they’re inviting us, so follow their rules’. This is a position that has been made many times over by elements of the conservative fringe in this country, in addition to a number of people who really haven’t spent much time actually thinking about what’s going on.

And I said before, this is another instance of history repeating. In 1936 it was patently obvious Nazi Germany was becoming exceptionally problematic from a human-rights perspective. Their anti-Jewish laws had been on the books for some time by the time the games began, the Nazis themselves had tried to prevent Blacks and Jews from participating, and had cleared all of the Roma to a concentration camp prior to the opening ceremonies. Though they would ultimately make small concessions to the international community to avoid a total boycott, this amounted to little more than taking down anti-Semitic signs in Berlin and letting foreign Blacks and Jews participate. The policies that would lead directly to the Holocaust were still very much in effect, and the leading nations of that time opted to do nothing at all. And keep this in mind too – just a few months before the games began, Germany had violated the Versailles Treaty by occupying the Rhineland. A few months after the games ended, they’d violate it once more by sending the Luftwaffe to assist General Franco’s fascist coup against the elected Socialist government of Spain. Germany’s assistance allowed Franco to triumph over the Socialists by the time Germany invaded Poland in September of 1939.

Then, as now, many argued that there was no place for politics at the Olympics.

Suffice it to say I disagree, the Olympics are by their very nature intensely political, not to mention an ideal arena to push political agendas, particularly when their aimed at calling out renegade nations for their abusive practices.

Consider it this way – there’s a reason there have so far never been any Olympic Games in South America or the Middle East – there’s plenty of money to make them happen (and indeed Brazil will get its opportunity in three years), but politically these nations are either currently too abusive towards their own people or have been up until quite recently. This is supposed to be one of the key lessons from Berlin 1936 – don’t give the games to nations with piss poor human rights records run by authoritarian dictatorships. It seems like a pretty straightforward rule to follow too, no?

Is Russia a dictatorship with a piss poor human rights record?

Sorta.

On the dictatorship front I would argue it’s increasingly looking that way, though in a fashion that’s not too different from what we see in the United States. The Russians know this very well. Whereas the United States is managed by a somewhat populist plutocracy processing legislation through a thoroughly morally corrupt and totally ineffective legislative body to give the appearance of multi-party representative government, Putin systematically eliminates any and all opposition for ‘moral corruption’ to ensure he and his group of populist plutocrats are the only viable option left. Sometimes I’m not sure which system is worse.

As far as human rights are concerned, they’ve put themselves in an enviable position by supporting Edward Snowden’s asylum, part of what is doubtless an effort to portray itself as the global defender of individual privacy, though I think we’re all sophisticated enough to see this for what it is – more leftovers from the Cold War and a chance for Putin to relativize the discussion of individual rights vis-a-vis government interest. We’re dealing with an extremely intelligent, calculating and ruthless man. Quite frankly I think Putin is a problem the United States is intellectually incapable of handling, but that’s another issue.

My main concern is what Canada should do.

While I would argue strongly in favour of boycotting the Sochi Games, I recognize this certainly won’t do much to improve relations between us and the Russians, and that there is a strong case to be made for competing and protesting in various ways on their turf, though of course this too is problematic.

It would be best of all for Canada to lead a global boycott (i.e. try to convince other nations to follow our example) and also provide an alternative to the Sochi Games. As it stands our country is well suited to host a Winter Olympiad, as at least three of our largest cities have the infrastructure and facilities necessary to do so. Moreover, boycotts and alternative games are nothing new – Barcelona proposed a ‘Peoples Olympiad’ in protest of Berlin 1936 up until the Spanish Civil War broke out. Twenty-eight largely African nations boycotted the 1976 Montreal Games when the IOC failed to suspend New Zealand for participating in a South African rugby tournament. Later, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 the Western powers (under Jimmy Carter’s leadership) quickly boycotted the 1980 Moscow Summer Games. The Soviets in turn boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Games and as a result various other competitions occurred, such as the Liberty Bell Classic, the Goodwill Games, the Friendship Games etc. We’re not exactly through the looking glass here.

I believe we should register our disapproval as officially as possible – we should make it clear to the Russians we don’t approve.

But regardless of the Tory’s official position (they’re so far saying they won’t boycott), we the people can do our part to register our complaints – people can boycott Olympic sponsors and simply choose not to watch the games. There’s nothing unpatriotic about it, the athletes don’t really need your support – they, much like the soldiers, are well taken care of by government up to the point they’re deemed no longer useful. Feel free to support them then.

Making it clear to corporate sponsors the people won’t buy their products may be the quicker way to accomplish something – I doubt McDonald’s or Coke (and just how the fuck did they become Olympic sponsors anyways?) would want to face that kind of bad publicity. Perhaps it is wiser to target the sponsors…

I’ll close on this as I feel this post is going off in too many directions.

There are rumours John Baird, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, is gay. If this is true I would hope he comes out as quickly as possible – there’s no reason to stay closeted and I honestly don’t think he’d lose any support from his base – at least I’d hope not. Baird has been vocal about his disenchantment regarding Russia’s ‘anti-gay propaganda’ laws and has been vocally critical of other hate measures adopted by other nations. He has been especially critical of ‘kill-the-gays’ bills introduced (often with a lot of assistance from American conservative evangelical missions) in various African nations. A few weeks back, an organization that apparently represents the socially conservative base of women voters in Canada (aptly named, à la Fox News – REAL Women of Canada) came out and blasted Baird for using government resources, tax-payers money and his office to push ‘his personal values and views’ on a sovereign nation. Read this interview by rising-star journalist Justin Ling to get an idea of where this fringe hate group is coming from.

This sentiment was somewhat echoed by Montreal’s own Ted Bird a few weeks earlier when he wrote that Russia’s so-called anti-gay laws was in fact a moral and not political issue. Bird argues that a boycott would ultimately prove futile and that the measures enjoy broad support in Russia. Further, Bird said that Russia will evolve at its own speed, and that it always has, but that we shouldn’t push a boycott simply because the Russians won’t approve of personal displays of affection between athletes in the Olympic Village.

What an interesting idea – that Russia is evolving. From a socio-political and socio-cultural perspective they seem to be regressing. Their life expectancy has dropped, unemployment or chronic under-employment has increased, class distinctions are more apparent, far-right organizations have popped up like mushrooms on mouldy carpets and whatever progress they made becoming a democratic participant in the affairs of the First World seems to have been cast aside for a return to a new aristocracy and benevolent dictatorship. Putin is the new Czar. Russia legalized homosexuality in 1993; twenty years later they’re making moves to re-criminalize it. What the fuck happened?

I personally feel it is entirely within Canada’s right to tell other nations what to do – especially when it comes to human rights. Call it one of the advantages of having a nearly clean human rights record, a working democracy and an ultimately humanist society – we get to call the shots when it comes to human rights and it’s entirely within our right to tell others when they’re no longer meeting our minimum standards. It’s wholly within our responsibility as a nation to speak up and to push what we believe is right – it is in the interest of all the nations of the world to have Canada as their friend and support our efforts regarding improving the human rights situation worldwide.

And while I can’t imagine we’ll also start boycotting Saudi Arabia, Israel or China for similar human rights abuses, this doesn’t mean going after Russia now is hypocritical. What matters is what we do next, what happens now and after Sochi, and how we conduct ourselves moving forward.

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Montreal Mayors: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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Michael Applebaum & Laurent Blanchard - photo credit to The Gazette
Michael Applebaum & Laurent Blanchard – photo credit to The Gazette

Meet Laurent Blanchard, Montreal’s latest mayor.

By my count he’s number 43 in a list that stretches back to our city’s first mayor, Jacques Viger, in 1832, the year the city was incorporated.

Jacques Viger
Jacques Viger

To date Montreal’s mayors have been predominantly of the (at least publicly heterosexual) French Canadian male variety, though we once had a tradition of switching the lingua franca of our mayors with each election (i.e. from 1832 to 1908 mayors here alternated from Francophone to Anglophone).

Henry Archer Ekers
Henry Archer Ekers

The last ‘traditionally Anglophone’ mayor of Montreal, from 1906-1908, was Henry Archer Ekers, one of the founders of The National Brewery (also known as the Dow Brewery), which brewed Dawes, Dow, Ekers, Boswell and Fox Head ales, and whose siege sociale still stands at 990 Notre-Dame Ouest, a prime example of Northern Art Deco industrial architecture).

Jane Cowell-Poitras

Rounding out the necessary nod to diversity in the workplace, we’ve had several Irish and Scottish mayors, at least one born in Massachusetts (John Easton Mills) and more recently both our first woman mayor (Mairesse? Mayoratrix? Mayoress?) Jane Cowell-Poitras and our first ‘minority’ mayor, the effortlessly bilingual and arguably multi-cultural Michael Applebaum, culturally exotic only by the standards of the most militant variety of separatist Québécois supremacists.

Michael Applebaum
Michael Applebaum

Monsieur Blanchard is third in our year of four mayors, replacing the disgraced Michael Applebaum for a four month period until the next regularly scheduled election. I really hope he manages to somehow last that long without fucking up by getting named at the Charbonneau Commission, in which case it would be as a result of stuff he did several years ago but either way, yet another black eye for our fair city and further proof that the political establishment here is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.

Gerald Tremblay

So there’s your défi Monsieur Blanchard – don’t fuck up. Keep your head down, kill people with kindness (but don’t lay it on too thick) and for the love of God – stay away from Italian restaurants.

***

Some assorted thoughts for our new mayor:

Point number one, unlike his predecessor, Mr. Blanchard should not propose to ‘clean up city hall’ or state, dramatically as had his predecessor, that a new leaf had been turned. Applebaum is up on 14 counts of fraud, conspiracy, accepting bribes etc. He’s retained former Tory MP Marcel Danis as legal counsel, and resigned the mayoralty ‘to focus on the case’.

Innocent people don’t typically tend to have a case to focus on. They’re innocent, after all. If the allegations against him are as spurious as he claims, why hire a top-shelf lawyer?

Put it this way – he might believe he’s innocent and that there’s a vast conspiracy against him. Word from the grapevine is that Applebaum was a jumpy character back when he was the borough mayor for Cote-des-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de-Grace, several times indicating he thought various concerned citizens trying to jump-start the Empress Theatre as a community cultural centre were his ‘political enemies’.

I must have forgotten about all the political intrigue and conspiracy coursing through the halls of power in Cote-des-Neiges.

Point two would be to resist the awesome temptation of being bribed or otherwise caught up in shady real estate transactions, something I think is genetically programmed into nearly all politicians – criminals in sheep’s clothing for the most part, and this city, province and rather obviously the federal government have provided so many fantastic examples of late its difficult to imagine any other reason to get into politics in the first place.

It’s good to know all these ‘pillars’ of various communities are so concerned about the message they send to the ‘most precious resource’ they all seem to work into their photo-ops. Children? they could give a damn – kids don’t vote after all.

So there’s point three – no photo ops with old people, minorities, children or the handicapped. In fact, try not to have any photo ops at all – we want you to sit at your desk and do your job, and we don’t need a photograph to prove this point. A small video camera with a live feed is what I want, so all citizens could tune in and watch the mayor working.

Because we’ll no doubt need to keep our eyes on him.

I don’t know much about Mayor Blanchard other than that he’s a career local politician, was formerly of the former Vision Montreal (Louise Harel stepped aside so that a coalition government could be formed, though it looks like that just means supporting Marcel Coté as leader of something called cityhallmtl but I’ll talk more about this later), had worked as a political attaché in the latter years of the Doré administration, and had previously worked in publishing. More recently he’s been the head of the city’s executive council, part of Applebaum’s ‘coalition government’ initiative.

Personally, he’s old guard, but I won’t judge him too harshly. If he makes it through four months and I enjoy living here while he’s in power, I guess I’ll have little to complain about.

Mr. Applebaum and his predecessor’s story are already well-known. Applebaum has been implicated by the SQ and CEIC in shady real-estate deals while he was borough mayor of Cote-des-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de-Grace. You’ll be delighted to know he’s allowed to vacation abroad despite the 14 charges hanging over his head.

Our last elected mayor is Gerald Tremblay (who received a whopping 159,000 votes in 2009, with less than 40% of citizens participating), who as you may remember stepped aside in November of last year after the heat from so much damning testimony from the Charbonneau Commission became unbearable. Keep in mind that Tremblay hasn’t been charged, just named. Perhaps he was truly not implicated, but just turned a blind eye. Maybe he had been threatened, or really naive. Who knows. The Commish has recessed for summer break.

Crime needs a holiday.

Since I started writing this the interim mayor of Laval resigned because of his apparent involvement with escorts. He started his day by saying he’d never resign and that it was a blackmail attempt. Four hours later he hung up his hat. That was six days ago.

I love the dedication and their ability to flat out do the opposite of what they earlier said they wouldn’t do, without any attempt to justify their switch. They don’t think they owe us an explanation. They never do.

Personally I don’t get it – an escort is just someone you pay to have sex with, hardly scandalous especially given it was the mayor’s money, and not that of the taxpayers of Laval.

Oh, wait… I think I see the problem now.

Back to the shit show in Montreal.

Pierre Bourque (at left)
Pierre Bourque (at left)

It seems that nearly all of our mayors in recent memory started with high hopes and ended their careers in one kind of scandal or another. Tremblay advocated an end to forced mergers and promised local small government and commonsense solutions. Prior to him, Pierre Bourque promised to actually deliver on civic improvement initiatives his predecessor didn’t deliver on and cut ‘big government’ waste. He committed political suicide by pushing through forced mergers with the help of the PQ, a measure which literally blew up in his face and sunk his political career. Bourque’s predecessor, Jean Doré, won in a landslide against Jean Drapeau in 1986 (along with the Montreal Citizen’s Movement) by promising to be a more people-focused and less dictatorial mayor than the former Grand Chief Drapeau.

Jean Doré
Jean Doré

He further promised not to get mixed up in the costly mega-projects characteristic of the Drapeau Era, instead preferring to cut waste at City Hall while developing grassroots initiatives to improve city living. He ended his two terms in office caught up in a failed real-estate mega-project (the Overdale Debacle) and was deemed an unfit leader because of an apparently lax attitude to running a tight ship. It didn’t help that he had a $300,000 window installed in his office, nor that he razed a low-rent but viable neighbourhood for condo projects that were never built and had a police force running wild beating up gays and viciously murdering minorities while turning a blind eye to the biker gangs.

Jean Drapeau

Prior to Doré we have Jean Drapeau, a comparatively ‘good’ mayor in that he presided over the city’s last prolonged period of sustained development and growth. Drapeau began his thirty year career as mayor first in the mid-1950s, when he was a crusading urban reformer who won on a platform of eliminating corruption and vice (sound familiar?), largely by tearing down slums. Drapeau greenlighted expropriations for mega projects throughout his tenure, leading to the elimination of the Quartier de Mélasses (where Radio-Canada is today), Griffintown, Goose Village, a sizeable chunk of what was once Chinatown’s northern extension (where Complexe Guy-Favreau and Complexe Desjardins stand today) and what would eventually be converted into an arguably still working 1950s social housiong project, the Habitations Jeanne-Mance. He’d be defeated by Sarto Fournier in 1957 (Fournier was very well connected to Union Nationale boss and Banana Republic dictator Maurice Duplessis, the super-villain who ruled Québec before the Quiet Revolution) but would be returned to power three years later as part of the well-tempered societal modernization of Quebec and Montreal in the 1960s. Drapeau changed his campaign tone too – from now on it would be about putting Montreal on the map. He’d be greatly assisted by Liberal premier Jean Lesage and later premiers Bourassa and Lévesque, in addition to Prime Ministers Pearson and Trudeau, all of whom were very, shall we say, Montreal-focused. It’s good to have friends in high places – makes me wonder what goodies might float our way with a Montrealer as Prime Minister in less than two years…

From 1960 to 1986 Jean Drapeau was mayor and not universally liked (though, somehow, he managed to cultivate over 80% of the popular vote and faced no serious opposition during his time in office). Under his tenure the city grew and changed dramatically. Drapeau was instrumental in delivering the Métro, the modern city centre we enjoy today, Expo 67, Place des Arts, the Olympics and even the Montreal Expos baseball club. No mayor has done as much for our city before or since his reign (and at thirty years, what a reign it was).

Camillien Houde
Camillien Houde

But for all the good he did it is weighed down by his own corrupt practices. Mafia involvement in the construction of Olympic facilities and corruption within the unions were primary factors contributing to the massive cost overruns associated with the games. There are a number of apartment towers throughout this city built with concrete originally intended and ‘delivered’ to the Olympic park construction site, yet re-directed by those in the know. Drapeau was responsible for the nearly-criminal act of destroying Corrid’Art and his slash and burn style of urban redevelopment was not only inelegant but often antagonistic to the people’s interest.

Drapeau may have even ‘cooked the books’ during an election in which his opposition was eliminated after being infiltrated and broken up by the Montreal Police, rendering votes for his opponents ineligible and giving Drapeau a victory with over 90% popular support. Those were the days…

As a city, we need to decide what we want in a mayor, so that we don’t get sucked up into a pointless popularity contest that delivers nothing but more of the same. We need to establish our own metrics for judging a mayoral candidate’s chances of winning, and not fall prey to sophisticated marketing techniques that sell us yet another hands-off mayor. Perhaps most importantly, we need a mayor who fundamentally understands this city, its people, and what makes it great. We need to decide what kind of mayor our city needs, now and for the next ten years. Do we want a builder? Do we want a reformer? Do we want an architect? Do we want someone who’s politically well-connected? Do we want a renovator, a renewer or a redeveloper?

I think we all should spend a moment a think about what we want in a mayor – not just the qualities of the person but most importantly their plan for this city, whether it be growth or renewal – before we head to the polls in November. Otherwise the best we can hope for is another Drapeau, and his breed are rare these days.

But if we ask ourselves first what we want in a mayoral candidate, and define the context of the election before the candidates or media has a chance, the people ultimately manage to wrestle a bit of control over the rhetoric and could maybe make this election about something, rather than simply being the inconvenient selection of our next underwhelming mayor.

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Annual Fistfight with Police Ends in Multiple Arrests

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Montreal Mayor Gerald Tremblay Condemns SPVM Police Brutality Parody 2

Once again Montréal was the scene of it’s much beloved annual fistfight between students/activists and the city’s police, leading to a record-breaking 250 tickets being handed out, an as yet undetermined number arrests and several officers taken to hospital for treatment.

Mayor Applebaum could not be reached for comment, but a pre-typed statement indicated he had absolutely nothing to do with unethical and preferential re-zoning legislation, resulting in a multi-million dollar residential development project he most assuredly did not personally benefit from. His press-attaché noted that he had recently become an admirer of MP Peter Penashue’s method of answering unscripted questions from the public.

I kid – no one asked him what he thought.

Who could possibly care – all this was expected anyways.

The Anti-Police Brutality Coalition’s seventeenth annual anti-police brutality march was over pretty much before it got started, which I can imagine any sensible person might suppose, given the heightened police presence in general as a consequence of long-running and utterly futile demonstrations against education-specific austerity measures employed by our most recent minority separatist youth-parliament.

In fact, it seems as though police from the GTA were called in to bolster SQ and SPVM ranks, something I’m sure didn’t sit all too well with a bunch of activists who are convinced of a broad state conspiracy in which all police forces are working together to clamp down on dissent etc. etc.

Yes, we live in more of a conservative state than we’re generally used to, but it is not a police state.

And though the Montréal police do not have the best of reputations when it comes to apparent ‘over-zealousness’ (to use a term recently batted about the local press) in dealing with demonstrators, to do have a very real problem killing people needlessly, be they poor, young, immigrants or orderlies walking to work on a sunny summer morning.

That said, the COBP should know better by now that they have no hope of holding any kind of peaceful demonstration if the people they attract have no actual interest in having a peaceful demonstration.

Among other things, they know full well that the law states the planned march/demo needs to be approved by the SPVM ahead of time. While I’m certain the opinion of the membership is that doing so would be a waste of time, I’m also willing to bet they didn’t bother just to cover their own ass.

In any event, apparently the cops were more than ready for it and employed what I would consider to be excessive force in quickly dispersing an already illegal demonstration. Considering the actions of some of the protestors (but by no means a small number) – including blocking irate drivers rather than simply letting them pass – police action doubtless had the tacit approval of the working classes too busy getting on with their jobs to participate.

I didn’t see much but considering how many local journalists covered the events, I feel like I was in the thick of it. Kudos to all the brothers and sisters out there reporting and recording for posterity the very minutiae of our lives. Once we sober up we might be able to make sense of it…

***

Is it me or this all a bit nuts?

For COBP, does it not discourage the general public from taking their issue seriously (and let’s face it, there aren’t too many organizations out there who are actively engaged in at least drawing attention to police brutality, save perhaps for Julius Grey (for those who can afford his rates) and the Center for Research-Action on Race Relations’ Fo Niemi, who is specifically focused on race-relations)?

Where are their lawyers?

Where’s their legal fund?

When do they hold their fund-raisers or issue their press releases?

What relationship do they have with the voting public? Which local politicians and elected officials also care about this problem of police brutality and have the interest of COBP in their hearts and minds when they’re developing legislation?

If these seem like ridiculous questions (as they might pertain to COBP) then I think you get my point – they exist but to use ‘direct action’ against the police as a single entity instead of using public appeal to push out the truly rotten apples in this bunch.

But of course, if the organization is opposed to very concept of policing in the first place (an easy position to take when one grows up in the nearly-no-crime suburbs, but I digress) then there’s simply no chance an event like this will go anywhere but South.

As for the police, the sheer number of police who are available (and seemingly enthusiastic about such operations) is disturbing – but maybe not for the reasons you think.

Montréal police make, on average, $19.50 an hour, and work about 65 hours over two weeks. They are close to the very bottom in terms of police salary nation-wide (ballpark $33,000 per annum for the young cops who handle the bulk of the work, especially the dangerous stuff). These are, predominantly, family-oriented people who live in the suburbs, and signing up for riot duty is a surefire way of making a little more green to help pay all the bills a typical nuclear family might incur. Toronto cops make three times as much as their Montréal counterparts.

What I find disturbing here is that we have an abundance of police officers who require more work, shitty work, and further still that there’s clearly a burn out in process if police need to be ‘imported’ from at least three different forces in the GTA.

This is bad news. On top of all of this is the anachronistically-named Policeman Brotherhood’s request that the ‘test-schedules’ implemented a year ago become the new normal (something beneficial to the load of new parents on the force, and a plan which has been rejected by the city leading to the possibility of more ‘fashion-protests’ wherein the police don’t wear their new all-black uniforms) and union boss Yves Francoeur’s on-going feud with the city’s director general Guy Hebert, asserting the latter wanted to sack SPVM police chief Marc Parent.

While I don’t think the SPVM will strike as they did back in 1969 (leading to an as-yet un-matched orgy of violence, chaos and destruction in our fair city), more student unrest could result in such drastic action. And why not? All we need is for the police to say they won’t work for a defined period of time and we can sit back and witness the city tear itself to pieces, seemingly for the sport of it.

It would be as silly and needlessly destructive as maintaining an annual anti-police brutality that habitually results in police brutality. It takes two to tango after all.

A thought: next year, what if COBP held a candlelight vigil on St-Jean or Canada Day, in front of City Hall, or in Place Jacques-Cartier (or any other high-tourism location), as opposed to what they currently do, which is in essence to bring a knife to a gun fight, giving the police every reason to use irregularly strong force and then decry the actions COBP instigated.

There are saner ways to achieve social change.

In any event, for your viewing pleasure, a CBC report from the 1969 Murray Hill Riot.

Those were the days… people used to get killed in Montréal riots. It occurs to me that there’s a part of the current student/activist mentality that yearns for the street battles of Paris, Chicago or Prague circa 1968.

That was a long time ago, and time’s have most definitely changed. Their issues are not our own, their methods useful for purposes we no longer have. But there’s nonetheless a palpable sentiment public demonstrations, marches and rioting is all part of the process on the road to social progress.

I doubt it – at least with what I’ve seen here, and I came up in my more formative years in precisely this environment.

Yes, there’s a lot to be royally pissed off about, far more today than eight years ago in my opinion. But we’ve known nothing but widespread and regular public demonstrations for a considerable time. Most have been peaceful, but there seems to be a troubling number that quickly turn south and further isolate the movement for social change from the general, and voting, public.

Such a situation is untenable. If violence is to be avoided, those organizing against state-sponsored violence must do all they can so as not to elicit it. Again, as I said before, we don’t live in a police state.

So why provide the justification for a such a state to exist? We, the youth, have no power but our ability to use modern communications technology to make our point heard, quickly and often with devastating effectiveness. In the last weeks, we saw how idiotic PQ policies quickly wound up making our province an international laughing stock and yesterday saw the birth and death of Amir Khadir’s equally idiotic notion we should commemorate the terrorist and murderer Paul Rose.

We can’t find a better way of getting our point across?

Are we even trying?

Cultural commentary, History and Culture, Kondiaronk - My Montréal Experience, Political commentary, Québec sovereignty, Social commentary, Sovereign Socialist, What were they thinking?

An Incomprehensible Display of Political Incompetence: Amir Khadir Must Resign

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The slovenly and unkempt Paul Rose, attempting to demonstrate his solidarity with the world's oppressed.
The slovenly and unkempt Paul Rose, attempting to demonstrate his solidarity with the world’s oppressed.

Earlier today perennial last-place contestant Québec Solidaire issued a statement pertaining to the death of the convicted terrorist, felon and murderer Paul Rose.

Further still, MNA Amir Khadir insinuated that he will table a motion before the National Assembly that something be done to recognize Rose’s efforts – as an activist and militant separatist, Rose was also involved in several parties that would eventually become Québec Solidaire, a party I once honeslty thought I’d support. According to Khadir, it’s all about paying tribute to those who helped shape Québec’s identity and history.

Right – this sounds curiously similar to Southerners who parade around Klan memorabilia and Confederate flags as innocent tokens of ‘a spirit of independence’.

The FLQ, a terrorist organization that sought to secure Québec independence through armed insurrection, bombings, robberies, kidnappings and, eventually the murder of Pierre Laporte, has been given a similar treatment by modern day separatists, so fuelled by piss-poor revisionist history they refuse to put the issue plainly.

Too many times they have asserted that Laporte simply died, that his kidnapping and beatings at the hands of a gang of illiterate thugs had no impact on his demise, that he suffocated on his own crucifix, that he had tried to escape and got cut up so badly he bled out.

And now Québec Solidaire is going a step further in what can only be described as the worst kind of political opportunism, seeking to pick up a little more support at the expense of the vastly unpopular Parti Québécois.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Québec Solidaire would call for tributes for a man convicted of murder, there’s the bigger issue in that QS is by extension advocating violence as a legitimate method of either forcing a political issue to the fore or of accomplishing a political goal of one kind or another.

Does it give anyone else the willies QS polled so high amongst student activists? The very same militant students, in fact, who refuse to negotiate and who are equally unwilling to even try and keep their ranks calm during their monthly protest marches.

What shall we do as a society when the next FLQ rears its ugly head? Will Amir Khadir be responsible for a kidnapped education minister?

***

I’m a combination of too tired and too mortified to make much sense here. I honestly cannot believe any self-respecting individual, a doctor and father no less, could possibly have anything positive to say about this horrible man. For the record, I believe in rehabilitation, and I’m more than willing to accept that people can change fort he better. But that requires remorse, something Paul Rose never showed.

We should remind ourselves that René Lévesque set the stage for peaceful political negotiations by coming out, during the height of the October Crisis, and joining his arch-rival Pierre Trudeau in savagely denouncing the FLQ for what it was – a group of uneducated schmucks, petty criminals, who killed and maimed janitors, maids, night watchmen and other working class types before finally killing Laporte. Lévesque made his point clear – he didn’t want to lead a new country if that country couldn’t come into existence without violence. He set a high moral standard most of Québec society agreed with.

After all, Laporte may not have been the most popular politician according to the fringe separatist/anarcho-syndicalist/Marxist-Leninist types who composed the FLQ back in 1970, but he didn’t deserve to die in such a way.

When they kidnapped him from outside his modest suburban home, he was playing football with his adopted son. Paul Rose organized the Chenier Cell’s kidnapping operation.

What a monster eh?

I wonder if Mr. Khadir has ever feared being kidnapped by political extremists while enjoying quality time with his children? I shouldn’t think so.

Politicians and activists get kidnapped and killed in his native Iran. He moved here the year after the October Crisis, so perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt – politicians aren’t typically terribly knowledgeable about e=historical events, even if they were alive while they happened. Fuzzy memories…

***

I’m calling on Mr. Khadir to renounce violence as a means to achieve political goals and resign, immediately. Obviously there’s little hope he’ll do the right thing, but what the hell – it needs to be said, he has no right to represent any Québécois.

It’s grossly hypocritical, inconsistent and so devoid of logic, rational thinking or even a basic understanding of Québec social and cultural norms you’d think these statements came from a recent Republican immigrant from the most inbred counties of West Virginia.

But no, Mr. Khadir is a self-styled progressive, doctor, and seems to be interested in running an independent country. This is what an apparently educated man thinks.

I’m at a total loss. People wonder why I have no interest in being a politician…

Québec Solidaire is dead to me as long as this clown retains his seat.

A modest proposal, Cultural commentary, Economic commentary, History and Culture, Kondiaronk - My Montréal Experience, Let's make this an election issue, Political commentary, Québec sovereignty, Social commentary, Sovereign Socialist, Sovereign Socialist featured article, West Island

Separatism is a Scam

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20120814
Not the work of the author, though this author would gladly high-five the illustrator for a job well done

This article was originally published on Forget the Box.

I was remiss to discover that a recent poll suggests maybe as many as 42% of Anglo-Québécois thought of splitting the province and moving elsewhere when the PQ got elected back in September.
And a few days later another poll suggested 58% of Anglo-Québécois said they feel comfortable and integrated into Québec society, enough so, I would imagine, that they feel no urge to leave.
This number needs to be far higher, but it takes a community – a real, tangible community – to do something about it. A community that doesn’t exist by virtue of handouts from various levels of government, nor to please care-taker cabinet ministers, one which carves its own path as it sees fit, secure in its ability to fund and stimulate its own growth and development. If Québec’s Anglophone community can do this, we could secure Québec’s place in Canada.

And why not, what’s not to like? Québec is a good place to live, despite the corruption and high taxes. We have an evolving social state that can provide immense benefits you simply won’t find elsewhere in Canada. We live with tangible public freedom, safe and secure from too much external pressure. And if we figure out how to become masters of our domain we can and will achieve a prolonged economic resurgence, one immeasurably beneficial to all strata of our society, further serving to position Québec in its rightful place within Confederation – the voice of progress, the province of the future.

Québec has potential. Québec is a safe bet.

Besides, with every new generation of Anglo-Québécois, we become more integrated and better adapted to this society, and our inherent integration better suits us to the evolving global village in general – we become international citizens by virtue of the society of our birth. This, in conjunction of what we perceive to be an unstable socio-political situation at home convinces some to leave permanently; our numbers have indeed been reduced by roughly a quarter-million people over the last forty years. But for those who stayed, our acceptance of bilingualism has quite frankly put us in an excellent position to reap the benefits of multilingualism and multiculturalism as personal lifestyle choices.
So why not choose to be Anglo-Québécois, the quintessential example of the culturally integrated Canadian?

Somewhat paradoxically, if you don’t feel your French is sufficient enough to live and work in Québec, it’s likely more than sufficient for a wide variety of well-paying government posts throughout the vast expanses of our immense nation. And doubtless you’ll find not only Québécois ‘ex-pat’ communities in all major and minor Canadian cities, but local Francophone populations as well.

And yet despite all this we’re to believe that the French fact in Canada is under immense pressure to assimilate into, get this, a vast and apparently omnipotent Canadian identity, clearly defined as the opposition to everything that Québec is.

The Québec sovereignty movement defines itself in how it is not Canadian, but curiously it also assumes the monolith of Canadian identity, one that simply does not exist.

There is no ROC from which the separatist movement can define itself against, and separatism for that and many other reasons is quite simply a scam.

A nationalist movement based on a snake-oil salesman’s understanding of history, as opportunistic and omitting as you might expect.

***

As a person who has worked for two non-profit academic organizations that dealt expressly with the articulation and popular development of Canadian identity, culture and society, I can tell you there is no single, definitive Canadian identity. At our best we’re cognizant that ours is an evolving identity striving for a broad set of rights and responsibilities common to all citizens as framework for a modern political identity, but at our worst we define ourselves in terms of what or who we are not. You’ve doubtless heard the warning before – Canada cannot be defined in terms of how un-American we are. So too for that reason, Québec cannot define its character and identity in terms un-Canadian it is. When you look to see what lies tat he heart of Québec society, you find the very roots of Canadian progressivism, and that from which all of Canada grew.

And we’re expected to believe the trunk will live long and prosper while the roots are ripped from the soil; it astounds me how a political party has been able to convince so many of us of the seriousness of their message without ever producing any kind of plan for exactly how they propose to remove an already sovereign province from Confederation.

The PQ tells us not to worry about it – we’ll figure it out as we go along.

It’s not just that the PQ is both inept and lackadaisical in their efforts, it’s that they haven’t really ever bothered to explain to the public what they would do in a simple and straightforward manner. It’s as if they don’t even believe in the likelihood of separation, so much so that they wouldn’t bother wasting the time or energy to draw up a ‘to do list’ of sorts. No, no of course not – under promise and over deliver, right? Keep it vague; keep it emotional.

Ours is tabloid politics. Sensational. Scandal-plagued. An ad-man’s wet dream, presto plastic pop politics, delivered straight to the heart like hot lead from propaganda machine gun. We don’t have a government; we have a bullshit machine that feeds the media, keeping us distracted from the fact that we who disdain and decry the mindless election of the federal Tories have subsequently elected a government with a leader of similarly dubious charismatic qualities and a profound lack of innovative, imaginative spirit or long-term vision.

The students are learning this lesson quite literally as we speak.

So are all the small-business owners who have felt the sting of an inebriated sense of entitlement by a marauding gang of over-zealous ‘language cops’ – have you ever heard of anything quite as absurd as this?

Remove steak from the menu.

Remove WC from atop the washroom door.

Pasta is an unacceptable term in an Italian restaurant.

Use masking tape to cover the On/Off button on your microwave.

And chew on this while we’re at it – the OQLF has a budget of $24.7 million – enough to pay full annual tuition for nearly 9,000 students.

The PQ wasn’t happy at how quickly world media picked up the story and was hypercritical of the current, temporary separatist government.

In her efforts to garner international support, Marois has come up flat, embarrassingly so.

***

But back to us, those who are smart enough to brush this off and say to hell with it, I’m going to ride this out. How long can idiocy of this magnitude really last?
We can’t speak for all of Québec and we might not be able to do much at the moment to change things on the whole, but we can at the very least determine to coalesce into a more cohesive whole.

If we stay and grow we don’t just secure our own social and cultural survival, we’ll gain economic and political power too. If we stay we’ll eventually attain full acceptance from the Francophone majority, if not full integration. And if we stay, succeed and grow we will also fundamentally change the social and political balance in Canada, for there will be a post-modern Métis society concentrated in South-western Québec, as Québécois as they are Canadian, sustaining itself.

But make no mistake, the people who keep the peoples together will have no choice but to support themselves completely. There’s no White Knight coming to save us; if we don’t save ourselves, by finding our own opportunities, developing our own charities and eliminating out-migration, no one will.

***

Over the last few weeks the Anglo-Québécois community has felt the sting of a vindictive and comic government hell-bent on the destruction of Canada via the removal of Québec – the original Canada, the place from which all of Canada grew, from where all the money, labour and intellectual capital flowed for the hundred or so years prior to and immediately after Confederation. The PQ will have you believe that Québec has no place in such a nation, and further still has so little in common with the Confederation that it must go forward as an independent country. They’ve been beating this drum for more than forty years, and it’s been about that long that Québec has generally been on the decline in terms of political influence in Ottawa and economic influence nationally.

As the movement developed over the years it moved from the original goals of a) securing the French language through legislation (mission accomplished by the way – Bill 101 as it was written in 1977 is more than sufficient to guarantee the supremacy of the French language in Québec forevermore), b) minimizing the revenue waste and corruption of the previous Liberal and Union Nationale governments (again, job well done – Lévesque’s government from 1976 to about 1981 was one of the least corrupt in Canadian history) and c) re-negotiating Québec’s place in Canada (again, kudos – though the 1980 Referendum was a Federalist victory, Trudeau made good on a campaign promise to repatriate the Constitution and develop a civil rights charter, itself based on the PQ-written Charte des droits de l’homme; the original referendum question was to do just this – re-open Constitutional talks, not independence, so again, I doff my hat in memory of Oncle René).

But as many go-nowhere independence movements, the PQ has transformed into something far less inspiring, and polls continue to suggest that interest in separation is still far too low amongst Franco-Québécois, meaning that regardless of Pauline Marois’ narrow-minded vision, the so-called winning conditions still elude us.

And as such we’re stuck in an interminable limbo.

In the meantime the PQ government has no choice but to feed the machine as it were, and as they backtrack on various campaign promises and make horrific cuts to healthcare and education (something that affects all Québécois, regardless of mother-tongue), and so, true to form (because we’ve seen this many times before), they push increasingly unnecessary, needlessly divisive and draconian legislation designed to fight a war of political attrition against a non-existent enemy.

Enter legislation to eliminate government funding for Anglophone CEGEPS, of which there are five out of 48, with roughly 30% Francophone enrolment.

Or legislation such as Bill 14 that seeks to eliminate the bilingual status of a number of small ‘historically English’ communities throughout the province.

Or another bit of legislation, designed to require many small enterprises to function in French.

You see, the Anglo-Québécois are viewed as suspect requiring such legislation – it’s all too often about making it clear English won’t be tolerated so long as the façade of French linguistic annihilation can be maintained for all the good it does for our overly sensitive local media; geographically almost exclusively found adjacent to the Ontario and American borders they almost exclusively vote against referendums and the PQ. They can’t be swayed to vote in favour of separation, and so because nothing of substance can be done about it, a joker, a halfwit troll enters the arena as custodian of the Anglophone community of Québec. And his office churns out saccharine pop-propaganda, cutely entitled ‘Notre Home’ to remind us we’re Québécois too – that we belong.

It’s insulting, it’s juvenile and transparent in the worst possible ways, but it’s no need for alarm.

To borrow a line from the Simpson’s, the PQ is as impotent as a Nevada gaming commissioner.

Somewhat to his credit, Stephen Harper hasn’t bitten. The alarmist press claims its delicate and conscientious leadership on his part but I see it as simple dismissal. Harper takes the approach of a successful Second World War Battle of Britain bomber pilot – they never bothered learning the names of the green new pilots in their squadrons until at least five sorties, as the chances of a new pilot going down in flames the first time out was so unbelievably high. Harper’s not going to take Pauline Marois seriously until she either does something incredibly drastic (like a Unilateral Declaration of Independence) or has survived several elections and established a majority.

Neither of these scenarios seem likely to me – Marois and the PQ are filling a vacuum until a real party is established. And let me be perfectly clear – the PQ is not a party; it wasn’t created as a party, merely a protest movement to get Québec the recognition and respect it rightly deserved. Today it perpetuates old stories of racial and linguistic divides to perpetuate it’s very own raison-d’être. There’s no vision in reactionary, stifling social policy; Harper will learn that lesson himself in 2015. We can only hope Marois takes off long before that.

In the meantime the Anglo-Québécois needs to keep its collective head.

We cannot become a Diaspora. We don’t nearly have enough self-confidence. At best, if we do nothing, we die out slowly, a cultural oddity of no real significance.
And many of us think that way – tell a minority they’re the cause of the majority’s problems often enough and they tend to believe it. Those who have the means leave, and those who don’t grow sad, hold grudges, begin to hate, etc.

We’ve seen it a thousand times before. We’re human, and not too highly evolved either, because we continue that which does not work, that which has failed so many times before, and we keep it up because it’s all we know – we’re used to it. We’re so unimaginative and easily swayed by mere propaganda we habitually miss the forest for the tress, unable to grasp the reality of our situation.
We’re an odd minority, that’s certainly one way of looking at it, and more often than not it tends towards questioning how we ever came to be in the first place. We’re told we’re rich, powerful, conservative, monarchists even, regardless of who we really are and we truly do. We’re a scapegoat and a political tool. What’s ironic is that those of us who stayed – and who continue to stay – are those who lack the means to adequately safeguard our society and culture against unwanted, coercive assimilation.

The WASPs left long ago, Westmount shed its Rhodesians, and the language of corporate Montreal is most assuredly French.

But most importantly, and never forget this, French hasn’t disappeared, and neither have we.

But we’d nonetheless be very wise to not let the PQ bother us, to simply carry on with what we’re doing, living our lives as we see fit.
T
he question is not about whether Québec will separate, but rather how long it will take the PQ, as occasional agent of minor governance, to make this province uncomfortable for anyone who doesn’t see eye-to-eye with them, Anglophone, Francophone and Allophone alike.

They’re trying to shore up their position not by attracting new supporters, but by pushing people out of the contest altogether.

The only suitable response for those who have no interest in being dictated to is to learn French, integrate and bring our point to ‘les autres’.

Ultimately, ours is the position of open acceptance, and it’s the only way forward.