Ignatieff’s bon/wrong mots

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 6:26 PM - 0 Comments

Try as I might, I simply can’t get outraged at Michael Ignatieff’s pensées on the inevitability of Quebec’s independence. Safely ensconced in the fragrant embrace of academia, Mike has every right in the world to wax whatever about Quebec and its future in this “very strange hybrid called Canada”, and how one day, Quebec may well exclude itself from… zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….

Sorry, dozed off there for a sec. Let’s try that again.

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A note to violent student protesters

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, April 20, 2012 at 3:51 PM - 0 Comments

Paul Chiasson/CP Images

Dear Red Square Types,

I’m writing this a few hours after you wreaked havoc on Palais des Congrès where your nemesis Jean Charest was giving a talk about the Plan Nord. Congrats on busting open that fire hydrant; lord only knows that the streets around there needed a good soaking anyways. Also, nothing shows originality and righteousness like smashing windows. By destroying so much property, you’ve officially put yourself into esteemed company: you now have that much more in common with those bands of addled mooks who destroy St Catherine Street after a monumental win or loss by the Habs at the Bell Centre. And, like those brave souls who break windows and clash with police, many of you did as much from behind a mask. If only you’d steal a few dozen pairs of tennis shoes we really wouldn’t be able to tell you apart. Again, congrats. You’re as brave as your average internet commenter.

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The comeuppance of Tony Accurso

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 12:47 PM - 0 Comments

This morning, Quebec’s anti-corruption squad Unité permanente anticorruption arrested businessman Tony Accurso, along with construction firm owner Normand Trudel and Richard Marcotte, mayor of the Montreal suburb of Mascouche (and former Liberal candidate). Charges are imminent. What follows is a look at Accurso’s influence in Quebec politics and construction industry. 

He was the guy who kept getting away.

More than any single individual, no man has better incarnated the decidedly shady connection between Quebec’s construction industry and its various levels of government than Tony Accurso. The construction magnate  and noted recluse would be an anachronism anywhere else in the country—an old-time throwback to when politicians fraternized with the men who build the roads and service the cities they oversee. Yet in Quebec, Accurso did just that with brazen regularity.  His yacht—appropriately named Touch—was moored in the Bahamas, and was the destination of choice for a variety of politicians and union types. Notably, Frank Zampino, then president of the city’s executive committee, twice lounged on Touch while the city was negotiating a $356 million water metre contract. You need only ask three questions to get an idea of the symbiotic relationship between the two—and the potential  consequence to the taxpayer.

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Conflicting interests at L’Actualité

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, March 26, 2012 at 1:15 PM - 0 Comments

Good news, English Quebecers: you have never been more attuned to Quebec’s French fact. According to Statistics Canada, which published a study on as much in 2006, nearly 70 per cent of you are fluently bilingual—up nearly three percentage points from 2001. For you young’uns, the news is even sweeter: nearly 90 per cent of you can speak la langue de Lévesque by the time you reach the age of 21. So pat yourself on the back, ladies and germs.You navigated the often fraught linguistic waters of this province and become, essentially, part of the majority.

Of course, L’Actualité isn’t nearly as sunny about your lot in its most recent issue. Written in large part by Jean-François Lisée, the poll and analysis package paints a rather harsh picture of younger Anglophones. “The future of French? Three quarters of young anglos don’t give a damn!” Lisée writes in his teaser blog post.

Our biggest finding is this: young Anglo Quebecers between the ages of 18 and 34, the next generation that is for the most part already active in society, are markedly frostier towards the French fact than older Anglophones. To the question regarding the right to work in French in larger companies, 74 per cent of young Anglos don’t give a damn about one of the most central aspects of Bill 101, never mind the simple respect of the Francophone majority.

Shucks. And it only gets worse, as the magazine helpfully points out in the survey presentation…

Young Anglophones brag on Facebook and Twitter of living very well in English only in Quebec and have zero interest in French. How did we arrive there?

…and in the hard numbers behind its CROP survey:

Three out of four young Anglophones [18-34] find it normal that Francophones should be forced to work in English. What a gift to offer Quebec’s French language charter, which turns 35 this year. We would cry.

And so on. I’ll leave it to someone more numerically inclined to take on the survey itself, which pollster and demographer Jack Jedwab did in Saturday’s Gazette. Nor is it worth debating whether L’Actualité’s editorial package is an illustration or a targeting of Quebec’s English population. The difference between illustrating and targeting is largely in the eye of the beholder, it seems. I’d only say that if your writer promotes the thing by saying that English people “don’t give a damn about the future of French,” and that its prefaced by a line like “Young Anglophones brag on Facebook and Twitter of living very well in English only in Quebec and have zero interest in French”—when your own survey says 82 per cent of Anglos say not having meaningful contact with the French language is actually undesirable—and the whole thing is literally illustrated by a worried-looking frog pondering a computer screen (see above) filled with English words, then maybe it’s time to reconsider your illustrative skills.

My main is what L’Actualité (which, like Maclean’s, is owned by Rogers Publishing) failed to acknowledge in its presentation of the findings.

That Jean-François Lisée is sovereignist in his convictions doesn’t bother me one iota. There are many sovereignist columnists in this corner of the world, just as there are ardent federalists. And there are many in between who have made a living out of hedging their bets on the subject, so the fact that Lisée is so upfront with his convictions is refreshing.

What L’Actualité failed to note in its cover story is that the person who conceived and wrote the survey questions, as well as the bulk of the editorial content, remains actively involved in Quebec politics as an advisor to the Parti Québécois. As La Presse’s Paul Journet noted in January, Lisée served as  emissary to PQ leader Pauline Marois in the PQ’s “electoral alliance” discussions with Québec Solidaire. More recently, Marois appointed Lisée to a 12-person committee devoted to, in the words of a TVA News clipping, “rendering the sovereignist option more seductive.” This last appointment cost Lisée his gig on Radio-Canada. “Jean-François Lisée involvement in a political activity is such that we have chosen to put an end to his participation on the weekly panel on Téléjournal [Rad-Can's The National equivalent],” Rad-Can flack Marc Pichette told Le Devoir in February. “Remember that none of the [other] participants are directly engaged in politics.”

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Plus ça change? Sort of.

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, March 14, 2012 at 1:46 PM - 0 Comments

Yes, this woman is smiling. Again. (Photo Le Devoir)

Funny things happen when you ignore your blog for forever. When we last checked into Quebec’s political scene, Pauline Marois was armpits-deep in the quicksand that seems to occupy the office of every PQ leader save for Jacques Parizeau. The Coalition Avenir Quebec, the not-really-a-coalition coalition of sovereignists, federalists and a gaggle of right-y types who don’t seem to give a damn either way (just cut my taxes already), was blowing up the polls, with Quebecers seeing a distinct Premier-like gleam coming off François Legault. As per usual, Jean Charest’s Liberals were governing from somewhere in the cellar of public opinion, content that PQ caucus members were too busy gouging each other’s eyes out to make any gain on the its three-year status quo cornucopia of corruption allegations, collapsing infrastructure and restive student groups.

What a difference forever makes. The PQ, to paraphrase the great Chuck D, has managed to get its shit correct, with Pauline Marois having convinced/coerced the usual dissidents to sheath the knives that, if PQ history is any indication, were destined for her back. In so doing, Marois last week overtook Charest in personal popularity for practically the first time in, oh, about four years—the first time an established party has been able thoroughly capitalize on the chronic nosebleed that is the Liberal government. “The PQ in Majority Territory” was the triumphant headline of the day in Le Devoir yesterday. It’s about time, frankly, because Marois was becoming something of a running joke: what would Jean Charest have to do to be less popular than Marois? Kill and eat a baby seal on live television? Buy a Hummer? Promote an Anglo? Because two year’s worth of bad headlines certainly didn’t work.

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Conservatives to Quebec senior: buy a membership, or else…

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, March 5, 2012 at 11:02 AM - 0 Comments

The always engaging Hélène Buzetti, of Le Devoir, has a nice piece on Fernand Coulombe, a 89-year-old fellow from Montmagny, who says he was harassed by a calls from the Conservative Party “demanding” that he pay for the $200 membership he promised to buy. One small detail: Mr. Coulombe never promised to buy anything.

The man [...] says he was called “three or four times” by a woman from the COnservative Party last June, after the elections. She demanded that he send the party $200 because he had promised to do so.

“She forced me, saying that I had promised. I didn’t promise anything! I don’t even know her, and I didn’t even vote for them.”

Mr. Coulombe received a letter from the Conservative Party addressed to him personally and dated June 3, 2011. Under the party logo, the following is written in bold letters: “Thank you for your generous promise of a $200 donation.” In the top right of the document is a bar code, a series of identification codes and Mr. Coulombe’s phone number. The man lives in an old age home.

“She was insistent. She said I had absolutley promised this,” Mr. Coulombe said. He says that the woman told him that he’d get most of his money back from the donation (probably due to the tax credit for political parties.) “She wanted me to give money to the Conservative Party and that I’d get the money back. I didn’t believe her at all.”

Classy. Also, whoops: Mr. Coulombe has voted Liberal all his life.

I [heart] The Point

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, March 2, 2012 at 2:15 PM - 0 Comments

It’s protest season in Montreal these days. Thousands of students have gone on strike, furious that their absurdly cheap tuition is going to be a little less absurdly cheap. Daycare workers just settled with the provincial government. So it was with a sense of righteous pride that my Pointe St Charles brethren noisily took to the streets this morning to protest the closing… of a liquor store.

From CJAD:

About thirty Pointe St-Charles area residents, some with children in tow, marched from their neighbourhood SAQ outlet to the riding office of their MNA, Marguerite Blais, to draw attention to their concern: that the SAQ will follow through with the planned closure of the liquor outlet at the corner of Center and Charlevoix.

The Pointe has a fine tradition of grassroots institutions: its community clinic; a decent farmer’s market that doesn’t soak its customers, à la Marché Atwater; a great community theatre. To lose any would be sad, to say the least.

But folks: it’s a friggin’ liquor store. And you can buy beer at the dep. Maybe leave the kids at home when you’re protesting its closure, at the very least?

A voice of sanity in RoboGate [sic]

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, February 28, 2012 at 3:05 PM - 0 Comments

Hélène Buzzetti, of Le Devoir’s Ottawa bureau, makes a very sage point about all this robocall business, by way of  Jean-Pierre Kingsley, former director of Elections Canada.

“[Kingsley] assures that Elections Canada has the means to investigate the question [of potential voter fraud], either with its own resources and those of the RCMP, which is already implicated, or by hiring outside firms.”

Exactly. The worst possible thing to happen to the investigation is to have the whole robocall bru-ha-ha-ha chucked into the maw of the shout-y, festering beast that is the House of Commons.

In passing, there’s a very easy way of at least mitigating the robocall problem: have an Elections Canada edict banning the damn things outright. But something tells me that’s not about to happen. Everyone, the NDP very much included, knows how well they work.

Method to Trudeau’s madness (no really)

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 3:05 PM - 0 Comments

Lord only knows why Justin Trudeau does what he does. Remember when, in 2008, he delivered a series of YouTube speeches where he alternated between French and English with dizzying, James Stewart-calibre earnestness? Or when he tumbled down some stairs during an interview, just for fun? Or when he swathed himself and his family in beaver pelts, or whatever, for the yearly Christmas card? Or when he said the environment minister was a piece of shit? Or when he actually went out in public looking like one of the Three Musketeers? He always seems to be swaying between self-aggrandisement and self-mockery, keeping the poor voting public guessing as to why, exactly, he says and does such outright silly things.

Given the track record, it’s tempting to chalk Trudeau’s most recent sortie, in which he mused favourably about a separate Quebec should the sulphurous reign of Harper continue unabated, as just another screwball Trudeau moment. As CCC (Colleague Colby Cosh) notes nicely today, Trudeau ain’t exactly his pappy when it comes to matters of the noggin. Cosh also nails it when he says that Trudeau’s wail against the Conservative status quo is the mother of all straw man arguments:

Harper’s party has not only accepted the legal fact of same-sex marriage, but has promised to shore it up against the disrepair in which the prior Liberal regime left it.

Exactly.

But maybe, just maybe, Trudeau’s wee pro-sovereignty speech might be something more than him trying his damnedest to fall on his face—figuratively, this time. Or Justin fell ass-backwards into a moment of political cunning. Either way, him chatting up the virtues of a sovereign Quebec in Harper’s Canada wasn’t necessarily the dumbest thing since bad facial hair.

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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.

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 - 1 Comment

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 - 1 Comment

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 - 64 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 - 11 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…