No surprise in Senator Boisvenu’s rhetoric

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 4:43 PM - 0 Comments

In retrospect, it’s really not all that surprising that Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu invited the country’s most heinous murderers to quietly off themselves in their cells. This is the man, after all, who on account of his background as a victims’ rights advocate was recruited by the Conservatives to add a whiff of legitimacy to their law-and-order agenda. With Boisvenu, the Conservatives got two good things rolled into one incredulous package: he’s a warm Conservative body from Quebec, where (for a variety of reasons) Conservative fortunes haven’t been great; and he has a very tragic backstory that could be properly politicized—it’s the second line of his official bio—in pushing through the crime bill.

He had an irrational approach to crime prevention and the like well before he advocated for the self-murder of certain prisoners. Here’s the guy who, when faced with a damning (?) Statistics Canada report documenting how the country is significantly safer than in 1999, had this to say: “Someone, somewhere is manipulating the numbers.” He’s the guy who said he was “going to talk to those [StatsCan] guys” because, well, things can’t possibly be any safer in Canada because rapes, murders and assaults still happen. He’s a guy who in describing himself as “tough on crime” suggests that anyone who doesn’t see things his way is somehow “soft on crime.”

Boisvenu’s sortie today is a reminder why dispassion is crucial when crafting crime legislation—dispassion that the government is sorely lacking.

Curtains on Duceppe’s second act

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 7:10 AM - 0 Comments

Jacques Boissinot/CP

Righteous outrage always came naturally to Gilles Duceppe. It seemed to live just behind those icy blue eyes of his, to be summoned on command usually when the cameras were rolling. It was his shtick, part and parcel of a narrative crafted over 21 years in federal politics: sovereignists are the only beings morally capable of defending Quebec’s interests in that foreign land of Ottawa. “The smell of scandal is wafting from the office of the Prime Minister,” the former Bloc Québécois leader belted, eyes ablaze, in a typical stump speech last April. “The Bloc will force Stephen Harper to be accountable as it did with the Liberals and the sponsorship scandal. That we will do.”

Odd, then, to see Duceppe embroiled in a scandal of his own, one that has already sullied his formidable reputation and will in all likelihood spell the end of his political career. Certainly, for a man who prided himself on his hot-blooded honesty, it doesn’t look good: as La Presse reported, Duceppe’s party paid its director general Gilbert Gardner with parliamentary funds for upwards of seven years. This is an apparent violation of House rules, which state that such funds must be used for parliamentary, not partisan, ends. La Presse also reported that Duceppe’s office paid the spouse of his chief of staff and allowed her to use parliamentary resources as she produced a book commemorating the Bloc’s 20 years in Ottawa.

The news has already stymied his attempted usurping of the Parti Québécois leadership—a move that, had it been successful, would have ushered the 64-year-old into the second act of his political career.

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Whitewashing Joe Paterno in the National Post

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 8:27 PM - 0 Comments

I don’t know Father Raymond J de Souza beyond his handsome National Post faux-woodcut that, more often than not, serves as a reminder not to read the words appearing below it. My Thursdays are busy enough without a side order of Catholic guilt, thanks, and I dare you to try to get through an entire column without a feeling that Father de Souza is busy wagging his finger at something, somewhere. Sacre-moi la paix, as they say in these parts.

So it was nice to see Father J take on the recently departed Penn State coach Joe Paterno recently. I mean, if you’re going to wag your finger at someone, it’s might as well be the guy who suppressed information regarding the alleged pedophiliac excesses of one of his former coaches, right? Paterno, the man who kept quiet in the face of wickedness, thereby arguably allowing it to continue—namely, with two other pre-teenaged boys in the years following. Slam dunk, no?

No. Rather, Father de Souza inexplicably offered up 786 elegiac words for dear old JoePa. Here are a few choice cuts from his column, annotated for your enjoyment.

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The Bloc wants in on the inquisition

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 12:52 PM - 0 Comments

I’ve got a piece about what Duceppe’s wee tumble from grace means to the sovereignty movement in this week’s dead tree, but a bit about the nuts and bolts.

As we now know, courtesy of La Presse’s excellent Ottawa bureau, Gilles Duceppe paid Bloc director general Gilbert Gardner (to the tune of $100K a year by the end of his mandate) with funds designated for parliamentary, not partisan, ends. Yesterday, Le Devoir tried mightily to run interference, saying the wording was broad enough to allow for such a thing. For the record, here’s the wording of the parliamentary bylaw: “The funds, goods, services and premises provided pursuant to the by-laws are to be used only for the carrying out of Members’ parliamentary functions.”

Do “parliamentary functions” include a campaign to attract the cultural community vote to the Bloc Québécois, which Gardner spearheaded in 2004? Does it include coordinating research and activities with the Parti Québécois, which Gardner also did in 2004? Continue…

Life after the Bloc

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, January 20, 2012 at 4:51 PM - 0 Comments

Thierry St-Cyr was the Bloc MP for Jeanne-Le Ber from 2006 until he succumbed to Tyrone Benskin and the NDP’s Orange Crush/Wave/Tan/what-have-you last May. Like Benskin, who regularly puts his acting and oratory skills to truly righteous use in the House of Commons, St-Cyr has been doing some recycling of his own. The flier, above left, dropped into Maclean’s mailbox this afternoon. St-Cyr’s advertisement for his real estate services bears an odd resemblance to a certain someone’s campaign picture, no?

Also: love the tagline. “Getting a sovereign service… is better!”

Cheeky. And cost effective.

Anglo represent

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 3:38 PM - 0 Comments

Mike Paterson is a Montreal comedian whose screwfaced mug and delightful porcine squeal has made me laugh and, occasionally, haunted my dreams. Describing him and his routine is tough, but here goes: Mike Patterson is what would have happened if Sam Kinison and Bobcat Goldthwait had somehow procreated following some unspeakable tryst in the Comedy Nest men’s room, and left the ensuing offspring to his own devices in the City of Montreal.

In the hilarious video above, Mike plays an Anglo rapper dishing on the travails of his downtrodden existence… by rapping in French. And yes, that’s the Montreal Gazette’s Bill “Smoked Meat” Brownstein making an appearance.

Harper’s French disconnection

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 3:10 PM - 0 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Peter White is about as conservative (and Conservative) as they come. He worked at Brian Mulroney’s side throughout the former prime minister’s nine-year tenure. In 2001, he turned his frustration with Jean Chrétien’s seemingly perpetual hold on power into a book, Gritlock, perhaps best described as a blueprint of how to neuter the then-powerful Liberal brand. In his free time, the former Hollinger Inc. executive has relentlessly pushed the Conservative brand in his native Quebec, both as a riding president and party organizer. And he’s sick of trying.

In a scathing open letter addressed to Canadians in general and the Conservative party in particular, White roundly criticizes the Conservative Party of Canada for ignoring francophones in general and Quebec in particular. “Today the voice of Quebec is virtually absent in Ottawa’s halls of power, or if present, it is a voice grown mighty small, and mighty easy to ignore,” White writes in the letter dated Jan. 12. “Since the election of May 2, 2011, many Quebec observers have concluded that Mr. Harper has consciously decided to ignore Quebec, now that he has convincingly demonstrated that he can win a majority without it.”

For some Conservatives outside the province, Stephen Harper might be forgiven for shunning Quebec. The Prime Minister has never been particularly popular in the province; he won a majority in last spring’s election thanks largely to a marked increase in support in Ontario and sustained support in the western provinces. In Quebec, meanwhile, the party lost five incumbent MPs (equalling half of its provincial caucus) and nearly a quarter of its popular vote. It marked the first time since the Conscription Crisis of 1917 that a government formed a majority with so little support from Quebec.

But while the rebalancing of power in favour of the West may seem natural for the Toronto-born, Alberta-bred populist, White says Harper’s Quebec brush-off will lead to a “de-Canadianization of Quebec,” in which Quebecers see less and less of themselves in the federal government—and turn (or return) instead to the Bloc Québécois. “Any competent demagogue—and there are several—could easily fan the tinder into flames by decrying the many petty slights inflicted on Quebec’s honour and pride at the hands of Ottawa since Mr. Harper has been Prime Minister.”

The sentiment is privately shared by a number of Quebec Conservatives, many of whom wouldn’t speak on the record about the party’s Quebec malaise. Some spoke of the lack of support from the party during the election, which has carried over into Harper’s first majority mandate. “To be successful, you need Conservative politicians regularly meeting with party activists, and in Quebec that isn’t happening,” says Bernard Côté, who served as adviser to former Conservative public works minister Michael Fortier. “I don’t know who is talking to who. Is it a lack of experience or desire? I don’t know.”

Contrary to the cliché that Quebec is a bastion of squishy leftists, a large swath of the province’s political landscape is receptive to small-c conservative ideals. Brian Mulroney twice swept Quebec largely by harnessing the conservative sensibilities of the province’s hinterland. In her 2007 book French Kiss, political columnist Chantal Hébert details how Harper made inroads in the province during the 2006 election campaign by appealing to those same sensibilities, and with a few highly symbolic gestures: recognizing the Québécois as a nation within Canada, and by beginning his speeches by speaking in French (a practice the Prime Minister continues to this day). An internal Bloc Québécois document written following that election noted, with barely hidden panic, how Harper resonated with “traditional, careful, old-stock French who … don’t see themselves in multi-ethnic Montreal.”

Harper’s French kiss effectively ended in the 2008 election, however, after announcing his youth crime bill and a disastrous decision to cut $45 million in arts funding from the province. Some say Harper hasn’t yet recovered from the slight. “Since 2008, there’s been a feeling that because Quebec shunned the Conservative party, that the Conservative party was going to do the same,” Côté says.

One example: the Conservatives only held their Quebec campaign post-mortem four months after the election, and it was co-chaired by Conservative campaign strategist Jenni Byrne. “All I know is that she doesn’t speak French,” says Georgette St-Onge, the Conservative riding president in Joliette. (Asked for comment, a Conservative spokesperson said “we have a strong and committed team” in Quebec. Neither Conservative MP and Quebec lieutenant Christian Paradis or Quebec adviser André Bachand responded to interview requests.)

White says he has met “four or five times” with Harper over the last two years, including an extended meeting last April, and he usually prefaces his criticism of the Prime Minister with praise for the man who united Canada’s right. He says there are fairly simple solutions to Harper’s image problem in Quebec—“Get him on French television to talk only about hockey” is one of them—but “the fact that he doesn’t do any of this makes me come to the sad conclusion that he doesn’t give a damn,” White said in an interview with Maclean’s.

“His image here is the pits. I’ve had francophones say to me publicly that they think he’s got ears and a tail, and he eats babies. And these are conservatives. They can’t understand why Harper doesn’t fix his image. Everyone knows he doesn’t eat babies, but he does everything he can to make people think he does.”

It isn’t only national unity at stake, White says, noting how the NDP has usurped much of the province, and that the Liberal party is slowly rebuilding its brand here. “Re-securing Quebec would re-energize the Liberals’ Ontario base, and all of a sudden Mr. Harper’s studied (or otherwise) avoidance of Quebec will become a problem for him,” White writes in his letter. “In politics as in life, you deserve what you tolerate. And most Quebec Conservatives are fed up.”

*****

READ PETER WHITE’S OPEN LETTER:

Leaving the Church of the Parti Québécois

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 3:29 PM - 0 Comments

Floor crossings in parliamentary democracies aren’t particularly rare. A CBC sampling here shows that there have been four defections to the Conservatives since 2005, and one—Belinda Stronach—from Stephen Harper’s party. My favourite floor-cosser remains Jean Lapierre, whose take on the status of Quebec in Canada was so fluid he hopped from the Liberals to the Bloc Québécois and back again. Lise St-Denis just went from the NDP to the Liberals. Sure, politicians bitch and moan about the practice, but never too loudly, lest a future defection makes them a hypocrite. If there’s an upside to such defections (and I realize this is a bit of a stretch, but what the hell) it demonstrates that our politicians aren’t so partisan as to be above switching sides if they are ideologically (or, as is unfortunately the usual case) opportunistically irked by their own.

Ah, but not at the Parti Québécois. Here’s what happens when you leave that veritable church: one of your former friends writes a really, really angry essay about you. Then the leading nationalist broadsheet prints every single 2,400-odd pissy, chest-thumping, hair-pulling word. The apparent failure of the cause is placed squarely on your shoulders, and you go from a true and blessed supporter of an honourable cause to a spineless, destiny-slaying, bandwagon-jumping careerist overnight. Just ask François Rebello, who jumped from the PQ to the CAQ recently. This is what his ex-buddy Jocelyn Desjardins had to say about him when he joined the CAQ, which dares to want to put aside sovereignty to concentrate instead on things like education, the economy and rooting out corruption in Quebec’s political system.

I have a question for you. What sort of political destiny awaits a people whose only collective project has to do with questions of administration? Because putting questions [about sovereignty, etc] on the back burner can’t not have an effect on the political destiny of a people. Any people who lose sight of their national destiny, even for one political mandate, are doomed to subordination, submission and ‘minorization.’ [...] What hides behind “real issues” is an abdication of our destiny.

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Big tent? Not yet.

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 11:03 AM - 0 Comments

So, the PQ lost another MNA from its caucus. No news there, really. The party started hemorrhaging members and support mere months after it gave its leader, Pauline Marois, a 93 per cent approval rating last April. You think your family is weird/backstabby/passive-aggressive? Try being a péquiste for 10 minutes.

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Asking for an outbreak of preventable diseases

By Kate Lunau and Martin Patriquin - Monday, January 9, 2012 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph By Andrew Tolson

On April 8, Pierre Lavallée took a call from Quebec’s public health office. Lavallée was into his fifth and last year as principal at Marie-Rivier high school in Drummondville, a town of about 67,000 an hour’s drive east of Montreal. He learned that a school employee had gone to the emergency room with a fever and rash the day before. Doctors quickly isolated the woman and rushed her to intensive care, where she was diagnosed with measles, a highly contagious and potentially deadly virus. According to the World Health Organization, measles was eradicated from the Americas in 2002.

Later, just after four o’clock, Lavallée received a fax from Dr. Danièle Samson, the director of infectious diseases for the region. “The staff and students at Marie-Rivier were in contact with a person very likely suffering from measles,” it began. The letter was to be forwarded to 1,475 students and staff, but most had already left for the weekend, so it was only circulated the following Monday. “I actually had measles when I was six or seven years old,” says Lavallée. “It was 40 years since I’d even heard of it popping up.”

Thus began what the Quebec government calls by far the worst measles outbreak in the Americas in 20 years. Over the next eight months, 763 cases were reported in the province, the vast majority in Mauricie and Centre-du-Quebec, a region that includes Drummondville. Roughly 11 per cent of those who were infected were hospitalized. Even a few who were inoculated as children caught the virus. “I didn’t think I could get it,” says Pascal Tarakdjian, 38, a science teacher at Marie-Rivier and the second confirmed case at the school. “I went to the hospital and told the staff that I might have measles symptoms, but they didn’t react because they didn’t know.”

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Happy holidays and all that

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, December 23, 2011 at 1:27 PM - 0 Comments

From Phil, me and Cyrano de Bergerac (pictured above), have a solid holiday and and even solid-er 2012.

‘The CBC continues to ignore our daily newspapers’

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

In its home province, at least, Quebecor is very much the incarnation of its name. The company’s myriad media properties are populated by old-time separatists and fleur-de-lys blue nationalists for whom the Canadian flag is a nuisance at best and an incursion at worst. Le Journal de Montréal, the scrappy populist tabloid founded in 1964, remains the organ grinder of choice for Quebec’s long-standing language debates, and it is clear on which side the paper falls. “Soon [the English] are going to call us frogs and pea soup in the street, just like when I was young!” opined Gilles Proulx recently. Quebecor’s news agency regularly publishes the words of former FLQ member Jacques Lanctôt, whose kidnapping of British diplomat James Cross touched off the October Crisis of 1970.

Beyond Quebec’s borders, though, Quebecor’s message is decidedly different. “Coast to coast and as Canadian as you are,” intones the promotional baritone over scenes of flowing rivers and snow-capped mountains, during a commercial for Sun News Network. Far from disparaging it, the network uses the Canadian flag extensively in its branding.

You might call it Canada’s two-faced media empire. Yet while Quebecor’s French and English divisions may be firmly ensconced in their respective linguistic and cultural solitudes, they share the overriding editorial bent of the company itself—and that of its president and CEO, Pierre Karl Péladeau. The reclusive and often contradictory Péladeau has a well-known disdain for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and has used his media holdings to attack the publicly funded Quebecor competitor—attacks that have taken on a new level of intensity over the last two years. Quebecor’s lawyers recently scored a victory against the CBC, when the Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the CBC must make public certain financial records.

The CBC, wrote Sun News host and columnist Ezra Levant recently in a typical broadside, is “a mega-corporation that demands a yearly $1.1-billion bailout from taxpayers, violates transparency laws and doesn’t register its secretive lobbying.” Yet Péladeau has been personally petitioning the CBC for a chunk of those taxpayer dollars while his media properties deride the CBC’s very existence. Over a period of 15 months, the Quebecor president, who oversees in excess of 16,000 employees, sent 12 personal letters and one handwritten fax to CBC president Hubert Lacroix requesting (and at times demanding) the CBC print its advertisements and promotions in Quebecor publications.

The letters, obtained through an Access to Information request and posted at the bottom of this article, reflect Péladeau’s combative nature—as well as his belief, however unsubstantiated, that the CBC has a long-running boycott of Quebecor. “[The CBC’s] total absence from [Quebecor daily] 24 Heures and but a small presence in Le Journal de Québec is flabbergasting, while both our competitors Metro and Le Soleil received the lion’s share,” Péladeau wrote in a letter dated Aug. 31, 2009. The Quebecor CEO further admonished Lacroix for what he called the CBC’s “frankly disproportionate coverage” of the labour strife at Le Journal de Montréal at the time. Two months later, Péladeau wrote that it “was unacceptable to democracy” that the CBC hadn’t advertised its municipal election coverage in Quebecor-owned media.

“Dear Hubert, I know that advertising choices interest you, so I include pages from Samedi Magazine,” Péladeau wrote in a handwritten note on Nov. 23, 2009. “Don’t worry, it’s not Quebecor Media that publishes it.” The note included two CBC advertisements that Péladeau had apparently clipped from Quebecor’s dishy (and since defunct) competitor; in his note, Péladeau makes light of Samedi’s low circulation numbers. Another of his missives decries the lack of CBC advertising dollars despite “a rather favourable article” written about a CBC personality in a Quebecor paper. Others still include graphs, pie charts and demographic data supporting Péladeau’s argument against what he calls CBC’s “totally unjustifiable boycott.”

“The CBC continues to ignore our daily newspapers, which are the biggest in Quebec,” Péladeau wrote in his final letter to Lacroix last December. “I can but protest once more this discriminatory attitude toward the group I have the privilege of overseeing, and it is equally detrimental to state television that it deprives itself of reaching an important part of the population.”

While he admits the CBC has never officially boycotted its media, Quebecor spokesperson Serge Sasseville says the facts speak for themselves: “There have simply been no CBC/Radio-Canada ads (except, ironically, in November 2010, when CBC/Radio-Canada went on a campaign to boast about its access to information record) in Quebecor Media since the beginning of 2009, a date which coincides with the beginning of the Journal de Montréal lockout,” Sasseville told Maclean’s via email. As well, “our sales staffs have been informed by media placement agencies working on behalf of CBC/Radio-Canada that they had received explicit orders from CBC/Radio-Canada not to advertise in our publications.” Not advertising in Quebecor publications, Sasseville adds, is akin to “depriving many of the very people that fund the state broadcaster of valuable information about CBC/Radio-Canada programming and coverage initiatives.”

For its part, the CBC says it has “over the years purchased advertising in [Péladeau’s] papers,” Lacroix told Maclean’s via email. “As we have said to Mr. Péladeau in our replies to his letters, we run our campaigns according to our objectives and choose the most appropriate media to ensure their success. That is our business and our expertise. In the same way, we do not suggest to Mr. Péladeau how to build his marketing, promotion or advertising campaigns or launch his programs . . . We would note that Radio-Canada does not receive advertising from Quebecor.”

Doubtless, Péladeau’s anti-CBC campaign is at least partly ideological. What unites the differing editorial stances of his English and French properties, apart from their visceral dislike of the public broadcaster, is a populist, free-market ideology of lower taxes and less regulation. Though it has its own public sector connection: roughly 45 per cent of Quebecor Media Inc., Quebecor’s media group, is owned by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the province’s pension manager funded in large part by taxpayer dollars.

Then there is the matter of Quebec City’s arena. Quebecor recently inked a deal that would give the company naming rights to the future home of Les Nordiques, should the city land an NHL franchise. The deal, finalized in September, will see some $400 million taxpayer dollars put toward a new stadium, which would then be rented to Quebecor. The deal, which wasn’t put to tender, required legislation to circumvent the government’s own laws against using public funds for a private company.

Like his English and French newspapers, Péladeau’s own political bent is conflicted. His father, Pierre, was in favour of Quebec’s separation from Canada; today, his son owns a cable news channel that peddles the very flag-draped brand of Canadian patriotism Pierre Sr. disdained. Yet Pierre Karl Péladeau remains strongly attached to the Québécois identity. In 2009, after losing a bidding war for ownership of the Montreal Canadiens, Péladeau implied that he didn’t like how the deal was strictly financial; it would have been better, he said, had the team owners better reflected Quebec’s identity. (The team was bought by the decidedly English Montreal Molson family.)

Perhaps there is method in all of Quebecor’s seeming contractions. “He’s a businessman above all else,” says Jean-Martin Aussant, a former Péquiste MNA who has since launched Option nationale, a splinter separatist party. “I think Pierre Karl found a niche and exploited it.” And, in the case of the CBC at least, he’s doing what any good businessman would do, contradictions be damned: trying to hobble the competition.

REVIEW: The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 6:05 PM - 0 Comments

This book should come with a guarantee: “You’ll be wholeheartedly cynical about the political process in all its forms, or your money back!” In a brutally forthright work, the authors distill the process by which politicians gain and retain power. Their conclusion: be it tyranny or democracy or anything in between, it is favourable, even necessary, for politicians to be selfish, brutish and mean if they want to stay in power. “Politicians are all the same,” they write, and anyone “who thinks their leaders do what they ought to do—what’s best for their nation of subjects—ought to become an academic rather than enter political life.”

To the pair (who are, yes, academics), there are no such thing as despots, at least in the accepted sense of the word. Rather, the likes of Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein are beholden to the power brokers in their immediate circle. Successful despots keep this circle small, sublimated—but very well paid. They know that losing control of them means losing control of the purse strings and the men with guns. All of this might sound uncouth to your average Western democracy, but Bueno de Mesquita and Smith argue that what applies to despots also applies to democrats—the only difference being the democrats’ demise is the ballot box, not bullets.

But the ballot box is no panacea. Gerrymandering has essentially allowed politicians to rise to power thanks to small, highly motivated blocs of voters, while leaders who make noises about fixing the system find themselves abandoned by the “essentials” on Wall Street—and in their own cabinet. Those politicians who do good deeds do so because their hand is forced; South Africa’s F.W. de Klerk cut a deal with Nelson Mandela because his apartheid government ran out of money, not because he wanted to do away with the awful status quo. The authors are careful to illustrate a few of history’s bright points—Washington, Mandela, Nehru—but make a frightfully good argument by turning an old cliché on its ear. Power doesn’t corrupt. Rather, power inevitably attracts the corrupted.

Quebecers: the new racists!

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 8:36 PM - 0 Comments

As a general rule, academic papers don’t generate much buzz beyond the academics who read them and the parents of the people who write them. It seems Concordia University is trying its mightiest to reverse this disturbing trend, though, by sending out a press release chock full of (race) bait. “New racism in ‘reasonable accommodation’”, it reads. “Smoldering since the Quiet Revolution? Concordia study traces how politicians and media have pitted immigrants against ‘Québécois values.’” Oh, and this helps: the paper is written by a dude named Wong—a surname loaded with meaning ever since Jan Wong, then a Globe and Mail reporter, interrupted an entirely serviceable account of the Dawson College shooting to blame all such mass killings in Quebec on Bill 101. And this Alan Wong blames the media and politicians for appealing to Quebecers’ collective inner xenophobe. And the report is published in the Global Media Journal, which is sponsored and hosted by Purdue University. So: we have a paper from an English university in Quebec, in which a non-Francophone waxes academically on the purported racist tendencies of Quebecers, and publishes the whole exercise in an American journal. As colleague Paul Wells likes to say, what could possibly go wrong?

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ADQ goes poof

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 11:52 AM - 0 Comments

Interesting times, as always, in Quebec politics. You remember the ADQ, right? The right-y libertarian-esque party that veered weirdly into identity politics and helped spur that little spleen-bursting spat over immigrants and what not? Well, it’s no longer—swallowed up in one bite by the CAQ, the nascent political coalition led by former Péquiste minister François Legault. It’s an odd marriage spurred by a shotgun blast of political expediency: no sense, said Legault and ADQ leader Gerard Deltell, in further dividing the centre-right vote. That said, Legault himself told me of his misgivings about Deltell last summer—”too federalist,” Legault said of the former TV reporter—and the CAQ, which leads in the polls, will become even weirder when it inevitably starts attracting disillusioned Liberals and Péquistes. Legault has said he’s cast off the cause of Quebec sovereignty for the sake of the province’s purse strings and looming demographic issues, and has made it his mission to attract anyone and everyone, sovereignist or not, who feel the same. Continue…

A Bloc stat, by way of a plug

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 7:52 PM - 0 Comments

From my dead tree take on the remaining Bloc Québécois MPs:

“[I]n a recent analysis by Influence Communication, the four Bloc MPs combined only muster the same media attention as Raphael Diaz, the number four defenceman for the Montreal Canadiens.”

 

The Bloc’s four on the floor

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Christopher Pike

Every weekday morning at 9 a.m. when the House of Commons is in session, the four remaining Bloc Québécois MPs venture from their offices scattered about Parliament Hill to room 577 of the Confederation Building for their daily caucus meeting. It is an inauspicious venue for a party that for nearly two decades held the majority of Quebec’s seats, not to mention a near monopoly of virtue over the province’s political mindset. The room is roughly 10 by 20 feet and painted a pale blue. Bloc MP André Bellavance secured it last June, and then outfitted it with a table, chairs and a television. Fellow Bloc MP Louis Plamondon, the longest-serving MP in the country, recently joked that the room is so small they can hardly get the door closed once everyone is inside.

On one crisp Tuesday morning in October, room 577 was abuzz with the news of Michael Moldaver, Stephen Harper’s nominee to the Supreme Court. Moldaver, an Ontario native, doesn’t speak French, and to the Bloc his appointment was another linguistic slight on the part of the Conservative government. A month earlier, Harper had appointed as his director of communications a newspaper columnist who doesn’t speak French, and had recently announced that Michael Ferguson, a unilingual anglophone, would be the next auditor general.

The reddest of red-meat issues, though, was the government’s plan to scrap the long gun registry. A majority of Quebecers support the registry, and in November the province’s national assembly passed a unanimous motion opposing its demise. Yet the Conservative government was pressing ahead regardless—and would scrap the registry database itself, ensuring no other government could ever take up the cause. The two dossiers went to Bloc MP Maria Mourani, who serves as the Bloc’s spokesperson on both public security and official languages. Registering firearms and protecting the French language are ancient Bloc Québécois warhorses, and prior to last spring’s federal election Mourani would have been the go-to face of Quebec’s perpetual opposition to all things Conservative and/or Canadian.

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The trouble with Quebec politics, in a nutshell/by-election

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 4:20 PM - 0 Comments

Bruno Boutot/Flickr

Here’s your Friday afternoon understatement : Jean Charest’s Liberals aren’t popular these days. The government has encountered a number of scandals over the last year and a half, the mother of all of which—collusion and corruption in the provinces construction industry—has stuck to the Liberals largely because of Charest’s disastrous mishandling of the file. (To wit: for two years he said no, forget it, pas de chance to an inquiry into the industry… only to allow it, but not before the issue thoroughly stained Charest himself and, arguably, the Liberal brand.)

If there has ever been a time for a bellwether by-election, it’s now. You know, one where voters demonstrate their ire towards the government by electing a candidate from the opposing party, regardless of who it may be, and regardless of past voting history or traditional party alliances within the riding. A mini-revolt against the dreary status quo, in other words. And look at that! There’s an opportunity for as much in less than 72 hours! Continue…

See spot drag the human

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Canicross

It’s an odd thing, strapping yourself to a jumping, slobbering, overeager animal for the first time. Yet here you are, about to be yanked through the forest by your crotch, harnessed to something that barks when it’s mad, pees when it’s excited and has a brain roughly the size of a plum. What if the poor bugger’s heart explodes from pulling you, a two-legged mass about seven times its weight? What if a squirrel shows up? What if your friends do?

Funnily enough, no one else here in a wooded Quebec City park on a shivery Sunday morning, their dogs duly tethered, seems to be asking themselves these questions. In fact, despite being as novice as I am, the small group that’s gathered here is almost as eager as their pets are to run between the trees, harnessed to their proverbial best friends. The act of running behind one’s dog is called “canicross.” Part sport, part group activity practised by a sprightly, spandex-clad bunch to the point of obsession, canicross is the suddenly de rigueur alternative to walking your dog. In fact, you let the dog walk you—usually very quickly.

Quebec, the North American ground zero for canicross, has Canicross Québec. The group had 16 members in 2006; today there are 300. The association is the brainchild of Amelie Janin, a 28-year-old French chemist who emigrated to Quebec that same year; Héryk Julien, who runs the FouBraque canicross training school with his partner, Laurence Boudreault, sees Janin as something of a proselytizer. “She brought canicross to North America,” he says reverentially.

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François Legault to the rescue

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, November 18, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Tim Snow/The Gazette

Long before he became Quebec’s would-be saviour, François Legault was a businessman who, in 1986, co-founded a popular Quebec-based charter airline. Having been obsessed with efficiency in the private sector, Legault was reportedly put off by the cumbersome process by which new political entities are registered in the province. So when it came time for him to turn his Coalition pour l’avenir du Québec, Legault’s right-leaning pseudo think tank, into a full-blown political party, he chose a novel way to make it legit.

Rather than having 100 candidates mail in their support of the party and wait for the province’s director-general of elections to authenticate everyone—a part of the law that can take upward of two months—Legault and 100 of his supporters marched into the election authority’s Quebec City offices themselves. It was an irresistible bit of political theatre, a jaunty example of participatory democracy you rarely see from the right flank of Canada’s political spectrum: Legault the Pied Piper, literally leading his supporters toward the supposed reinvention of Quebec’s political scene.

Yet if Legault’s approach was novel, the popularity of this formerly retired politician is anything but. Legault, who has ridden high in the polls for nearly a year, is the latest in a long line of federal and provincial leaders from Quebec who find themselves suddenly, and almost absurdly, popular. The next provincial election is as many as two years away; still, given his sustained perch at the top of the polls, it is safe to say that Legault has benefited from the politician-as-saviour phenomenon, one seemingly as Québécois as Bixi bikes, depanneurs and the adding of curd cheese to gravy and french fries.

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Poor McGill

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

McGill University, as you may have heard, has been the site of various student protests as of late. There are several reasons why Montreal’s ivy-heavy institute of higher learning is a particularly ripe target for these things:

1) Its president, Heather Munroe-Blum, is probably the loudest president/rector in the province in arguing for tuition fee increases;

2) McGill is currently home to a nasty and protracted strike of much of its support staff;

3) Its campus is literally across the street from Jean Charest’s Montreal office;

4) It’s an historically English institution. Cue menacing music.

I don’t have much to say about two, three or four, except to say that they are aggravating factors in number one. Certainly, Monroe-Blum hasn’t done herself any favours in the PR department: with an annual combined salary of $585,481 (with a whopping $229,307 in perks and other compensation) she is, by far, the highest paid university president in Quebec. PR-wise, she would go a long way in the labour dispute if she publicly called on the university board to freeze her salary and do away with the most decadent perks. ($16K yearly car allowance? What, you can’t buy your own damn Honda Civic?) The changes of that happening, of course, are about as likely as Monroe-Blum actually owning a Honda Civic.

But to link rising tuition fees to Munroe-Blum’s salary—which protesters did last week when they occupied her office—cheapens the debate.

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Ladies and gentlemen Quebecers, your future has arrived

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, November 14, 2011 at 12:23 PM - 0 Comments

Here’s the new logo of Coalition Avenir Québec, former péquiste minister François Legault’s big tent party comprised of what he called “sovereignists and federalists who want to put the debate behind us.” Legault’s coalition, which only officially became a party on November 4th, has been ahead in the polls for the better part of a year—meaning Quebecers saw him as a leader even when Legault himself wasn’t sure. Kind of a neat logo, actually.

The question is, why do Quebecers always seem to look for a political saviour to pull them out of the doldrums? Read the next edition of Maclean’s to find out…

It’s a great racket

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, November 11, 2011 at 8:50 AM - 0 Comments

Mario Beauregard/CP

By appearances alone, Bernard Gauthier makes for a great villain. His nickname is Rambo, and though he came by it honestly enough—he served eight years in the Canadian military—it is fitting for a 200-plus-lb. man with a mohawk, an earring and a mouth that would mightily challenge even the most adept broadcast censor. A construction worker practically since he could pick up a hammer, Gauthier is arguably the most notorious and divisive union figure in Quebec today. He is a hero to the men he oversees as a representative with FTQ-Construction, while his critics, and there are many, see him as a thuggish throwback who rules fist-first over his territory.

“We are against violence, but honestly, telling a goddamn bastard that he’s a goddamn bastard feels good,” Gauthier told Maclean’s from his office in Sept-Îles recently. “It’s liberating. It takes out 50 per cent of the rage in your heart. And now you can’t do it. If you do, you’re accused of intimidation, tabarnac.”

Gauthier sees many bastards in his life these days, chief among them Jean Charest’s Liberal government, whose proposed law, Bill C-33, would remove the union movement’s power to dictate which members get to work on which job sites in the province. The practice, known as “hiring hall,” has long been a hallmark of labour codes across North America and Europe, and the Quebec government’s plan to strip it away has Gauthier furious. “We had a nice industry that was quiet, that was flourishing. It was going well, goddammit,” he spits. “Now they’re going to turn it all to s–t.”

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So-so-so, so much for union solidarity in Quebec

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 10:32 AM - 0 Comments

Fanny Levesque/Canadian Press/Le Soleil

By appearances alone, Bernard Gauthier makes for a great villain. His nickname is Rambo, and though he came by it honestly enough—he served eight years in the Canadian military—it is fitting for 200-plus-pound man with a mohawk, an earring and a mouth that would mightily challenge even the most adept broadcast censor.

A construction worker practically since he could pick up a hammer, Gauthier is arguably the most notorious and divisive union figure in Quebec today. He is a hero to the men he oversees as a representative with the FTQ-Construction, the largest construction labour union federation in Quebec; his critics, and there are many, see him as a thuggish throwback who rules jealously and fist-first over his territory.“We are against violence, but honestly, telling a goddamn bastard that he’s a goddamn bastard feels good,” Gauthier told Maclean’s from his office in Sept-Îles recently. “It’s liberating. It takes out 50 per cent of the rage in your heart. And now you can’t do it. If you do, you’re accused of intimidation, tabarnac.”

Gauthier sees many bastards in his life these days, chief among them the members of Jean Charest’s Liberal government, whose proposed law, Bill C-33, would remove the union movement’s power to dictate which union members get to work on which job site in the province. Continue…