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.

Quebec’s latest imaginary boyfriend

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 6:32 PM - 0 Comments

Should it come as a suprise that what looked like a peace accord between Gilles Duceppe and Pauline Marois just two months ago turns out to have been a temporary ceasefire? According to credible reports, Duceppe is gunning for Marois’s job—and getting someone who was once very close to Marois, former PQ MNA Louise Beaudoin, who quit the party last year to sit as an independent, to help his chances.

Even considering the PQ’s rich history of backstabbing, Duceppe’s opinion of Marois has seemingly come a long way in a short time. His widely publicized November 8 letter had been unequivocal in its support of Marois. “With this letter, I want to reiterate a message to all sovereigntists,” the former Bloc leader wrote. “Let Pauline Marois and the Parti Québécois do their job.” But that was before Marois went ahead and… er, Marois and the rest of the PQ haven’t done much of anything since then. The National Assembly has been on break since December 9 and doesn’t get going again until mid-February. Continue…

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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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.

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 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…

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…

In Quebec, construction pigs fly

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 5:05 PM - 2 Comments

Here, your favourite two goddamned Englishmen finally dive arms-deep into the issue of Quebec, construction and Jean Charest’s latest 180-degree demi-pas.

PATRIQUIN Hi Phil. You remember Friday, right? You know, the day before the Habs’s truly undisciplined loss to Toronto. Yes, that long ago. Way back then, you and I started an email exchange about how Our Fair Premier Jean Charest flipped the mother of all flops and called a public inquiry into Quebec’s construction industry. I recently wrote something about Charest’s curious tendency to go back on his word after having incurred the maximum amount of political damage on himself, but this was a doozy, given that sometime in the last two years, the Preem basically had the words “no inquiry, let the police do their work” etched into granite and foisted up on the mantlepiece at Manoir Charest in Westmount. Continue…

Ron Maclean’s new book needs a better subtitle

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 12:55 PM - 4 Comments

How’s about “Cornered: Memoirs Of A Professional Carpet”? Has a nice ring to it, no? (Photo Toronto Life)

Venting pressure, assigning blame

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 6:37 PM - 4 Comments

Tony Tomassi, not exactly as illustrated

I have a piece about Jean Charest’s various flip-flops on key decisions over his eight-year tenure as Premier of this lovely place coming out in dead tree form tomorrow. Charest seems to have a knack for reversing himself once he’s inflicted the maximum amount of political damage on himself and the Liberal Party. The most recent, of course, is Charest’s musing that he’s open to an inquiry into the province’s construction industry. (He’s been saying no, nuh-uh, forget it, no chance, next question to the idea for the last two years.)

To paraphrase Rick James, serendipity is a helluva drug, and damned if Charest’s pertinent musings on an inquiry weren’t followed up by a truly astonishing score by the province’s Unité permenante anticorruption (UPAC): none other than former cabinet minister Tony Tomassi. The cops charged Tomassi, Charest’s erstwhile families minister, with two counts of fraud and one count of breach of trust.

There are many interesting things to consider when it comes to the timing of the indictment, as well of the subject. Let’s have a look:

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Meanwhile, in enlightened Calgary…

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 10:28 AM - 71 Comments

…courtesy today’s Calgary Sun:

Yes, by all means, put her in her place. Stay classy, Aspire Condo Living.

“Captain bulls–t”

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:03 AM - 3 Comments

Example number 437 of why Quebec satire kicks the bejesus out of its English counterpart. In English Canada, they get at the likes of Harper, Duceppe, etc by way of caricature. Jean Chrétien: he can’t talk properly, in either Official Language! That’s hilarious! Harper: cold, heartless and humourless! It’s funny cuz it’s true!

Meanwhile, here in Quebec: faced with the news that Jean Charest has once again refused to call a public inquiry into the province’s construction industry, Jean-René Dufort of Radio-Canada’s Infoman cuts to the chase and baptizes our fair Premier “Captain Bullshit.” Much more satisfying, no?

Bernard Landry writes

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 6:24 PM - 6 Comments

Bernard Landry dropped me a note a couple of weeks ago. There’s nothing particularly extraordinary about the former Quebec Premier publicly speaking out about something or other (it’s undoubtedly the source of many headaches for Pauline Marois); what is interesting is that he would do so to a designated Anglo journalist whose opinion, you’d think, would mean bupkis to him. That said, I’ve interviewed him before, and we once had a 10 minute conversation entirely in English outside the Gazette offices on St. Catherine. (I kept looking around for fear that it was part of some elaborate Just For Laughs gag.) Suffice to say he’s approachable and great with a quote, which is always nice for a person in my line of work.

As it happens, Landry took issue with how I used one of his more infamous quotations in a blog post about Sun News. (You’ll find it here. Hey Brian! Great Hair!) Referring to the wee shell game Quebecor plays with its news brands—ultra-patriotic outside of Quebec, fleur-de-lys blue nationalist at home—I wrote the following: “Hell, even former premier Bernard Landry, the man who once compared the Canadian flag to a ‘red rag,’ once wrote for Quebecor—before his union sympathies got the better of him and he gave up his column during the Journal de Montréal lockout in 2009.”

Landry took issue with my translation of “red rag”, and accused the English Canadian press corp of ignorance and bad faith. Ayoye.

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Corruption and Quebec, a slight refrain

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 3:53 PM - 16 Comments

This afternoon a Quebec City radio guy named Stéphane Gasse essentially asked me if, in the wake of a leaked report detailing widespread, long-standing and deeply rooted corruption within Quebec construction industry, I felt like doing a touchdown dance on the heads of all the critics who lined up to pillory the magazine last year for our cover story on the subject. The report, written by former Montreal police commish Jacques Duchesneau, details what La Presse’s Tommy Chouinard describes as a “the existence of clandestine funding of political parties by engineering and construction firms.” Radio-Canada got its paws on it yesterday.

Not at all, I said. Zen is a wonderful thing, and anyway the fact that the province of my birth has a political culture that allows such a thing to fester for so long is nothing to be happy about. One thing, though: I wonder whether Parliament will express its similarly profound sadness at a situation Le Journal de Montréal pithily dubbed “Corrupt To The Bone” this morning, as it did when we dared write about it almost a year ago?

Conservative Jacques Gourde: chutzpah with a capital ‘C’

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 4:25 PM - 9 Comments

“The resources of Parliament should serve to help all constituents of a district, in a non-partisan fashion.” – Conservative Jacques Goude, reacting incredulously at the news that the NDP might sell memberships out of MP’s district offices.

So, Gourde is so furious at the prospect of the NDP selling cards out of their offices that he lodged a complaint with the, uh, Board of Internal Economy. How nice. In other news, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney is appearing at events for Ontario Conservative leader Tim Hudak—on his own time, we’re sure. Yes, the same Kenney whose office “used government resources to raise money for the Conservative party” last March.

Oy vey.

Charest to overhaul construction industry (!)

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, September 12, 2011 at 3:37 PM - 6 Comments

Yes, he’s smiling. You would be too.

The government of Jean Charest announced plans to table a bill that will do nothing short of “initiating a complete in the construction industry that will mark a new era in work relations [in the province],” according to the very quotable words of Industry Minister Lise Thériault. The report (English-language highlights courtesy of the Gazette here) includes measures to remove significant power from the various construction unions. It is the fruit of a lengthy commission overseen by a five member….

Oh, hell, let’s just get on with the applause, shall we? It’s for you, Mr. Charest. A year ago our Premier’s numbers were in the cellar, the PQ had the force of public opinion behind it (as far as the construction business was concerned, anyway), a fellow named François Legault was far and away the province’s most popular politician even though he wasn’t running for anything, and hardly a day went by where he or one of his ministers was under attack for some sort of alleged skullduggery. In short, everything was sticking, and everything sucked.

Now where are we? The PQ is in full-blown Gong Show mode, François Legault has yet to start his party—and is still well short of its fundraising goals, from what I hear—and whatever lingering collective fury that remains over the construction industry will be in large part placated by this dandy, well-timed little report. Is it any good? Probably. Will Theriault’s Bill do anything? Yeah, sure, maybe. But that’s not the gobsmackingly-impressive part: it seems, with this construction-industry-overhaul-à-la-sauce-électorale, it seems Charest is going to ride out yet another storm.

Libs and NDP, in a tree: a problem in need of a vote split

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 5:17 PM - 50 Comments

Tania Liu/Flickr

There are several really good reasons why the NDP and the Liberals aren’t about to go beyond first base anytime soon (the political version of first base being where each side teases and scorns the other in equal measure.) The best is alluded to in this morning’s Globe and Mail editorial. Usually the Globe’s Front Street take on Quebec is about as specious and disconnected as you’d expect, but this one made sense. A leader out of Quebec, reason the Globe sages, would properly root the party in the province where it has its most MPs and where, arguably, the halo of Jack Layton seemed to shine that much brighter. And since whatever candidate steps up will have to speak French (one really, really hopes so, anyway), why not have him/her from Quebec?

So, imagine you’re the next NPD leader from Quebec. Why in the name of all things orange and green would you want to merge with the party that ranks somewhere amongst bad breath, parking tickets and syphilis, as far as Quebec public opinion is concerned? Put another way: you’ve just hauled in the most support in your party’s history, punted aside the long-reigning sovereignist Bloc Québécois and captured the eye (if not the hearts) of Quebec’s fickle voters. Is now really the time to start playing footsie with the party of Trudeau, Chrétien, adScam etc—the same one that, with the sponsorship scandal, gave the Bloc a new lease on life on 2004? If nothing else, this would be a fantastic way to give weight to the sovereignist argument that all federalist parties are the same.

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