English Canada: they hate just like us!

Who knew Grapes could swear so much? (NSFW-ish)

Don Cherry does and says what he likes on the airwaves of this country’s national broadcaster, and there isn’t really a damn thing you can do about it. Be it visors, Quebecers, hard hits, soft Swedes or Canada’s non-involvement in the Iraq War, Cherry has run of the roost. It’s part of his schtick: a rhinestone-encrusted version of Canada’s lunchbucket everyman, a plain talking rube with a chip on his shoulder and a buzzsaw for a mouth. Bully for him if this schtick is worth at least $700,000 a year, making Cherry the CBC’s highest paid contract worker, by far. He’s incredibly popular, after all, and success, even when draped in velour and hubris, deserves to be rewarded.

As it turns out, though, Cherry’s schtick actually isn’t a schtick at all. Cherry really can literally say whatever he wants on CBC, on hockey or otherwise, with very little fear of reprisal. Despite having a comprehensive third-party complaints process worthy of any governmental body—and despite the fact that Cherry is, practically by definition, a walking liability—any complaints about Cherry are likely to fall on deaf ears. That’s because those who field complaints about him have a vested interest in keeping him, and his very profitable words, on the air. More on this rock ‘em, sock ‘em conflict of interest after the jump.

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The truly incomparable Jean Dion outdoes himself with this indecipherable bit on prorogation (even if I wanted to translate Dion, I couldn’t):

Le citoyen, un «inconditionnel du bicaméralisme» selon ses propres termes, possède bien une collection sur cassettes Beta des meilleurs moments de l’étude des crédits budgétaires en traduction simultanée, mais cela ne lui suffit pas. «C’est du vieux stock, et je veux du neuf», a-t-il mentionné. «Or chacun sait qu’il n’y a personne comme des politiciens pour proférer des nouveautés.»

I can’t figure out if he’s making fun of the government or those who obsess about it, so I’m just going to assume he’s making fun of everyone. I love that guy.

$39.8 billion: That’s how much Quebec’s Caisse de dépôt et placement lost in 2008.

After watching a quarter of its total value vanish into the ether, the Caisse naturally opted for the most reasonable course of action—it sought to reinsure nervous investors by preaching and exercising extreme caution in the face of what could very well have been a devastating economic and political crisis.

Wait, you didn’t believe that did you? Continue…

Ages and ages ago I wrote a column wondering why the powers that be spent so much money on street cameras to scare drug dealers, harass hookers and comfort the paranoid, and not on cameras to scare speeders, harass red light dodgers and comfort pedestrians. Someone must have been asking themselves the same question; last August, the Quebec government instituted a pilot project in Quebec targeting some of the biggest trouble spots in Montreal and Quebec City. You practically have to be blind (or talking on your phone, another no-no) to miss the warnings. Still, people do:  nearly 24,000 tickets were mailed  out in five months, to the tune of nearly $4 million. That’s $10 million in a year in revenues from a pilot project–which is set to expand further across the province in the coming year.

Meanwhile, drug dealers remain one of Berri Metro’s most consistent charms, cameras and residents be damned. Sometimes big brother doesn’t quite work. But when he does, boy, he pays off big.

I really wish I had a good reason to post this. I don’t, but here it is anyway.

Rush Limbaugh, raw and unplugged, courtesy of The Onion:

I’ve imagined my death a thousand times over, and it’s always the same. In my mind’s eye, a serene setting comes into view. I see a funeral procession driving down some small-town Main Street in Nowheresville, U.S.A. On one side of the street, a collection of sycophants and morons are paying their respects in subliterate, sanctimonious tones. Meanwhile, on the other side of the street, I can just make out the faint image of a young boy, his brow furrowed in confusion, clutching the hand of his father. “Who is that man, Daddy?” he asks as the hearse containing my bloated, lifeless body rolls by. “Who is that person they speak of?” The father will then lower his head and say, “There, my son, go the remains of Rush Hudson Limbaugh, the most abominable lump of festering dog shit in the history of American broadcasting. May the likes of him never again soil or tarnish the greatness of our fair country.”

If you haven’t yet read John’s piece about how difficult it’s going to be to balance the budget, what are you waiting for? In much the same vein, the good folks at Léger Marketing (yes, this is another poll-related story) have released the results of a survey in which they asked Quebecers where they would cut if they were given free rein to get Quebec City back in the black.

Here are the top 10 suggestions:

1. End the financing of private schools.
2. Significantly increase taxes on business.
3. Allow the establishment of fully-private health clinics.
4. Introduce tolls on certain bridges and roads.
5. Bring in a system to moderate access to health services.
6. Abolish school boards.
7. Close down Quebec’s diplomatic outposts.
8. Significantly increase the user fees for $7 per day daycare.
9. Abolish CEGEPs and tack on an extra year for high school.
10. Significantly reduce subsidies for festivals and cultural events.

The last item on the list is especially intriguing—I seem to recall there being a bit of a backlash last time someone tried it. Otherwise, no big suprises, except perhaps that Quebecers really don’t seem to have much of a problem with user fees.

Pierre-Karl Péladeau, the head of telecommunications behemoth Québecor, published an open letter in this morning’s Journal de Québec blasting unions for hampering the province’s economic progress. Not surprisingly, the missive isn’t going over very well. For those of you who can stomach record-breaking run-on sentences, here are the juiciest bits, translated into la langue de Gainey:

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Léger Marketing released the results of its latest poll into the political leanings of Quebecers yesterday. Here’s where the federal parties stand (the numbers in parentheses represent the change since Nov. 27):

Bloc: 40% (+3)

Liberals: 23% (+3)

Conservatives: 17% (-3)

NDP: 15% (-2)

Whatever it is that’s ailing the Conservatives elsewhere (prorogation? Afghanistan? widespread grumpiness?) appears to be hurting them in Quebec as well, with their votes fleeing to the usual places—to Mononc’ Gilles and Professor Ignatieff. With no election on the horizon, it may not mean much. But the Liberals, Tories and NDP have to be hoping one of them can definitively pull ahead as the mainstay federalist option in the province to avoid splitting the vote and handing 55 seats over to the Bloc.

One of the things I like about Léger’s polls is the regional breakdown. Of course, the usual disclaimers about very small sample sizes apply, but here’s where everyone stands in Montreal/Quebec City/the rest of Quebec (i.e., les régions):

Bloc: 36 / 30 / 48 (-2 / +4 / +10)

Liberals: 27 / 14 / 20 (+4 / +2 / –)

Conservatives: 12 / 30 / 18 (-3 / -8 / -2)

NDP: 18 / 20 / 10 (+2 / +1 / -8)

A few things stand out:

-The NDP is considerably more popular than the Liberals in Quebec City. Huh.

-The Conservatives appear to have lost some ground everywhere, but are likely most worried about losing a good chunk of their base in and around Quebec City. They’re simply not competitive enough in Montreal to be able to afford that kind of collapse.

-The Liberals remain a force in Montreal. Of course, given the linguistic divide in the city, it’s hard to imagine this not being the case. But it’s still noteworthy.

-Whatever support bled out from the Bloc to the Tories and the NDP, especially in the rural areas, appears to have gone back to Duceppe and the gang.

Lysiane Gagnon gets warm and fuzzy over Montreal’s Haitian community in today’s Globe:

The less educated [Haitian] immigrants are concentrated in the taxi business, where they thrive. They know the city by heart. They buy their own taxi licences as soon as they can, and they keep their cars meticulously clean. And they’re nice, smiling and polite. The mother of a friend used to ask for a Haitian driver whenever she needed a taxi; she was old and frail, and the Haitians, with their traditional respect for the elderly, would always help her in and out of the car.

And, by way of dictionary.com, a helpful definition:

pa•tron•niz•ing –adjective

displaying or indicative of an offensively condescending manner: a patronizing greeting, accompanied by a gentle pat on the pack.

Well, this is interesting. Senator Jerry Grafstein, Raymond Heard and Beryl Wajsman want to buy some of what the Aspers are (reluctantly) selling. To wit: Grafstein, Heard and Wajsman (‘Grafstein heard a wiseman.’ The jokes, they write themselves!) are heading up a consortium to buy the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. (The short of the long: the Gaz and the Citizen make money; the Post doesn’t.) The Toronto Star has a bit here. So does the Canadian Press, though with two boo-boos in the last line. (The Suburban is actually Quebec’s largest English weekly, and Wajsman hasn’t  hosted a show since 940 AM went all-music in 2008.)

Details on money, partners, etc. to come. And they say print is dead…

Steven Blaney delivers the goods.

Via Jean-François Lisée over at our French-language sister site comes video evidence the Conservative script for explaining last December’s prorogation still has a few holes in it. During a panel discussion alongside opposition MPs on Radio-Canada this past Monday, Steven Blaney, the chair of the Quebec Conservative caucus, was forced to rely on the escape hatch of last resort: make things up as you go along.

Blaney baldly stated bills that were on the order paper would be “automatically re-activated” once Parliament comes back and that shutting everything down simply “prevents debates from going on forever.”

Of course, as his fellow panelists were all too eager to point out, and as everyone with even a passing interest in these things is seemingly aware, that’s patently untrue. (Though, to give Blaney credit, it’s true that prorogation prevents debates from dragging on, if only because it prevents them from taking place at all.) Blaney’s baffling ignorance of parliamentary procedure should perhaps come as no surprise given his other justifications for his extended winter vacation:

* “Stephen Harper is showing leadership.”

* “Our role as parliamentarians isn’t to kill time in Ottawa, it’s to deliver results… Right now, it’s to consult with our people on the budget, solve constituent issues, take care of immigration cases.”

* “What [constituents] want is a government and parliamentarians that deliver the goods.”

As Blaney so succinctly put it, “don’t take Canadians and Quebecers for a bunch of idiots.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

For those of you in the 514 who a) like to drink; and b) have a gigantic, outsized heart beating in your chest can head on down to one, two, three or even four of Montreal’s choicest watering holes and get wet while supporting a good cause.  Both Blizzarts and Blue Dog are donating a big chunk of their sales tonight to Partners In Health, a grassroots health organization with a heavy presence in Haiti; Sparrow, meanwhile, will do the same with a percentage of its food sales (the burger will break that big heart of yours, let me tell you…) More info is available à la facebook here.

On Friday, meanwhile, the hirsute gents at Korova will give a percentage of drink sales and take up a volunteer collection at the door, with proceeds going to Oxfam Québec.

It’s a hell of a decent thing, so come one, come all.

The Gazette’s Don Macpherson boldly predicts 2010 won’t be all wine and roses for Quebec Premier Jean Charest:

A year of recession and losses at the Caisse de dépôt ended with Charest being hounded by demands for a public inquiry into alleged corruption in the construction industry and with his government’s satisfaction rating at only 34 per cent.

And this year, things might get even worse.

The new year begins with Charest’s government facing problems in three key areas: political morality, public finances, and identity.

According to Macpherson, those problems are: persistent demands for an inquiry into dodgy dealings in the construction sector, as well as a perceived need to tighten ethics rules; a budget that will need balancing in the short term; and lingering identity and language issues that could prove to be a boon to the PQ’s fortunes. There’s nothing really, truly terrible on Macpherson’s list, but I can see why Charest and the gang might want to start burnishing the government’s image as soon as possible to prevent any of those issues from snowballing into something like, say, the Bouchard-Taylor Comission. Continue…

It certainly says something about a country when equalization payments are regularly a matter of national obsession. Exactly why the transfer of tax revenue from one part of the country to another, a topic about as sexy as unbuttered toast, is something worthy of excitement and outrage should be subject of another national obsession: the Royal Commission, chaired by “not that” Charles Taylor, perhaps, or maybe the lovely Jian Ghomeshi. (You know, for the kids.) Or maybe a CBC miniseries starring Sonja Smits, Brent Butt and a Québécois actor you’ve never heard of, with a special guest appearance of Bruce Gray as Don Cherry. Think of the ratings!

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