David Dodge's plea

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 8:46 AM - 56 Comments

The former governor of the Bank of Canada has released a new report calling for an adult discussion of the approaching health care crunch. Mr. Dodge made a similar plea to the Liberal conference in Montreal last year.

Free the rodent

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 31, 2011 at 1:15 PM - 6 Comments

Greetings from Montreal, where Jack Layton just promised to end oil subsidies and redirect the funding to clean energy sources.

The party has also released the following new spot.

The Commons: Rave-up

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, March 27, 2011 at 8:08 PM - 68 Comments

The circular amphitheatre, used in other circumstances by a circus school, was bathed in red light. A muscular DJ spun pounding dance music, the heavy bass shaking the floor. In the audience, signs and thundersticks waved approximately to the beat.

After a few warm-up acts, Justin Trudeau bounded on stage, vibrating with apparent enthusiasm. He wore a suit jacket, but no tie, the top two buttons of his dress shirt undone. He and a cohost proceeded then to introduce the party’s Montreal team, Mr. Trudeau announcing each arrival as if introducing the starting line-up of the ’76 Habs.

On defence, the bespectacled one, Francisss Scarrr-pa-leggia! At left wing, in the tweed coat, Irwinnnn Cot-ler! Each descended the stairs from the top of the crowd. Each of the men wore the same look: suit jacket, no tie, top button of dress shirt undone. The lone candidate in a tie promptly removed his upon arriving on stage.

Finally, the captain, Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal leader appearing in a pink shirt, his wife by his side. Continue…

The Commons: Good morning Montreal

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, March 27, 2011 at 10:44 AM - 17 Comments

At 9 o’clock this morning, Mr. Ignatieff’s bus stopped in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood. The Liberal leader disembarked and he and Martin Cauchon, the former Liberal cabinet minister and current candidate in Outremont, proceeded to go for a not-quite-spontaneous stroll down Saint-Viateur, a small horde of humanity and technology clamouring around them as they went. On an even colder morning than the one before, Mr. Ignatieff wore his bright scarf and his long black coat. He recklessly went without gloves.

A woman stepped out of a rotisserie to say hi and cheer him on. “Bravo! Bravo!” she clapped. Another half block and then across the street to Cafe Olimpico, where football banners hung on the wall and women’s curling played on the TVs. After sufficiently working the room, it was off to a cafe back up the road, pausing along the way to greet a small boy with a small puppy. Once at the second cafe, he ordered an espresso and chatted up the barista. As cameras clicked away, the barista outlined his concerns about recently installed parking meters on the street.

After sitting to chat with some of the customers, he was off again. Crossing back over the street, he and the horde headed for St-Viateur Bagel. There he posed for the cameras—lightly tossing a hot bagel in the air at one point—and bagged an opportunistic coalition of poppy seed, sesame seed and blueberry.

Fighting crime? There's an App for that

By Michael Barclay - Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 10:32 AM - 0 Comments

British Columbia: Stealing someone’s iPhone doesn’t work out so well if it’s equipped with GPS, as a Surrey man now charged with robbery discovered. The accused met the alleged victim online and offered to buy his laptop; when the two met in downtown Vancouver, the accused allegedly pulled out a gun and left with both the laptop and an iPhone. Police caught the suspect shortly after by using the phone to track his whereabouts. He is charged with using an imitation firearm, robbery, and possession of a dangerous weapon.

Alberta: A man surrendered to the RCMP in Whitecourt after firing a shotgun in his apartment 15 times in two hours in the hopes a neighbour would call the police so that he could “go to war” with them, say the RCMP. The man was bleeding at the time of the arrest. He has been charged with careless use of a firearm and mischief.

Ontario: A Toronto Transit Commission worker has been charged with assaulting a passenger. It is alleged the on-duty worker—on his way to his own route—boarded a crowded suburban bus and demanded a man and his son move further back before proceeding to shove the man into a pole. The worker surrendered to police the next day.

Quebec: A man called 911 in the early morning while driving on Montreal’s Autoroute Décarie, sounding angry and incoherent, according to police. When police cruisers arrived at the scene, the suspect rammed his car into one of them and charged toward others before speeding off. Police fired shots, wounding the man in his upper body. He faces a dangerous driving charge.

Newfoundland: The streets of St. John’s are a bit safer after police caught two drivers with a total of $32,000 in outstanding traffic fines between them. Neither had a valid licence or insurance, and both were charged with breach of probation. They were discovered during routine traffic stops.

You call that a masala chai?

By Joanne Latimer - Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 9:56 AM - 7 Comments

Photograph by Roger Lemoyne

“I’ve waited 45 minutes for a seat,” said 33-year-old eldercare provider Marie-Anik Boulay, as she slipped into a booth at Camellia Sinensis, a tea house in Montreal that serves masala chai only once a week, on Mondays between 5 and 7 p.m. The owners have been known to drag heat lamps outside to warm clients lining up in -18° C weather. Once inside, there are house rules: no cellphones, no laptops, no iPad-type readers of any stripe. A gong is sounded when the noise level would displease a vigilant librarian.

“It’s very popular, but we don’t offer the masala chai every day because of its overpowering aroma. We must maintain a neutral tea-tasting environment for clients who drink other teas,” explained co-owner Kevin Gascoyne, thumbing through his 16-page tea menu. Masala chai is buried on the last page. “People are demanding a more authentic chai experience than they get at a coffee shop. They have standards.”

“They” are the growing minority of masala chai snobs. “The demand for better masala chai can be explained by what happened to yoga,” noted Venk Prabhu, owner of Shanti Tea, a tea importer and distributor that opened its first retail location in Ottawa in December. “People realized that yoga was more than just exercise. They realized, ‘Hey, we’re only doing part of the practice. We want to be purists.’ Same goes for chai.”

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A Michel Tremblay classic gets an Anglo touch

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Cole Garside; John Mahoney/Montreal Gazette

Michel Tremblay’s Sainte Carmen de la Main, even more than his other plays, is rooted in time, place and language. So you’d think that changing any of the three would rob the play of its meaning. The time could only be Quebec in the mid-’70s, when the preponderance of big (and necessarily English) business had long dulled premier Jean Lesage’s rallying cry of “Maîtres chez nous.” Place: Montreal’s St-Laurent Street, the Main, particularly the scuffed and dirty stretch between Dorchester Boulevard and Sainte-Catherine Street. Language: French, more spat than spoken, as scuffed and dirty as the Main itself.

A bit odd, then, that the National Arts Centre has translated the play and plunked it onto a stage in downtown Toronto, complete with a Pakistani-Canadian lead and Icelandic throat singing. Re-baptized Saint Carmen of the Main, the play will show in Toronto from Feb. 7 to March 5, then move to Ottawa between March 16 and 31. It tells the story of Carmen, a country and western singer, and her return to the Main, where she dreams of singing her own songs instead of yodelling old country standards. She convinces the marginal types who populate her life that they, like her, are beautiful and have every right to be heard. Carmen’s cri de coeur is as dangerous as it is empowering, and she is beaten down mentally—and ultimately physically—by the powers that be. The allegory is as easy as it is prescient: Quebecers elected the Parti Québécois with a flourish mere months after Carmen opened. The win marked René Lévesque’s biggest triumph before his ultimate failure: the 1980 referendum.

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What Belhassen Trabelsi was doing in Canada

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, February 4, 2011 at 2:00 PM - 3 Comments

Until his sister married into power and plundered wealth, Belhassen Trabelsi was a businessman of middling success whose life revolved around the modest cement company he started in 1986. Six years later, when his sister Leila married Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Trabelsi’s name became synonymous with power, absurd luxury and a bulletproof sense of impunity. He owned a radio station and a newspaper chain, as well as a luxury hotel. At one point he started a discount airline, availing himself of the facilities of Tunisair, the government-run airline, to service and run his airplane. His high-flying lifestyle apparently included travel to Canada, where, sometime in the mid-1990s, he acquired permanent residency.

This last bit would come in handy when his life took another turn. With the recent spectacular collapse of Ben Ali’s government, following a mass revolt of the Tunisian people, Trabelsi and his family fled to Montreal via private jet last week, and promptly checked in to a $325-a-night hotel in the Montreal suburb of Vaudreuil. Montreal’s sizable Tunisian community was almost instantly up in arms; many descended on the hotel after a local TV station reported that Trabelsi and his family had holed up there.

His welcome from the government hasn’t been any warmer. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made a statement saying Trabelsi isn’t welcome here; Trabelsi reportedly had his permanent residency stripped shortly after. (According to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, permanent residents must live in Canada for at least two years of the five-year period after being granted status.) Trabelsi is now seeking refugee status—a strange twist of events, given the thousands of Tunisians who have turned up in Canada fleeing his family’s brutal regime in the past.

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Goodbye, retro Métro

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, January 31, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 31 Comments

Photograph by Roger Lemoyne

Collectively, Montreal’s fleet of Métro trains resembles a giant, rolling anachronism, the long-ago vision of the future conceived and built smack in the middle of the sixties. The trains slow to a stop with the sound of rushing air, then leave the station with an ascending three-note arpeggio (F sharp, B, F sharp–do, do, doooo) that is as quaintly Montreal as steak frites and bière en fut. So is the colour scheme: sky blue with a white stripe—a streaking Fleurdelisé that efficiently ushers some 400,000 people through the city’s innards every day. And soon enough, most of the fleet will disappear.

Starting in 2014, the city’s transport authority will begin mothballing the old trains, replacing them with sleek, silvery, bullet-like carriages. Bombardier and French conglomerate Alstom have partnered to build the new trains, which will be “more spacious, open and inviting,” according to a promotional video, “with well-positioned support poles and bars.”

But whatever the new trains will offer—air suspension, high-definition television screens, a PA system that doesn’t make the conductor sound like he or she is in the throes of death—they will undeniably spell the end of a glorious chapter in the city’s history. Put into service in the mid-1960s, a time of giddy optimism, the Métro trains have been a comfortable constant as the city above shone—and as it went through various stages of hell.

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Sick of waiting

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 3:15 PM - 1 Comment

John Kenney/THE GAZETTE

Late last March, Quebec Premier Jean Charest went to the site where the Université de Montréal’s new teaching and research hospital will eventually be built. Mugging for the cameras, he dug a shovel into a pile of dirt. Finally, a groundbreaking to kick off construction of what has become the province’s most elusive medical facility? Of course not. That ceremony simply marked the start of the research-centre portion of the CHUM, as the project is known to Quebecers. And although officials boasted that it represented “a turning point” in the planned hospital’s tortured history—and while it may have been a relief for the provincial Liberals to see something resembling construction get under way—it’s unlikely many in the province will soon forget the countless delays and cost overruns that have marred the project over the years.

The Charest government promised in 2004 that 2010 would mark the end of the CHUM’s construction, not its beginning. Since then, nearly $1 billion has been tacked onto the original $1.1-billion price tag. And yet, more than 15 years after it was first proposed by Jacques Parizeau’s PQ government, the hospital is nowhere in sight. Revised estimates now put the end of construction at 2019, though the CHUM’s Annie-Carole Martel says the bulk of the work will be done by 2015, when 486 of the hospital’s 772 beds will be operational.

Robert Lacroix, the rector of the Université de Montréal from 1998 to 2005, blames the protracted debate over the hospital’s location for the delays that have turned it into a provincial laughingstock. “It’s inconceivable,” says Lacroix, the co-author of Le CHUM : une tragédie québécoise, published last fall, “that it would take 25 years to build a 700-bed hospital.” Until the Liberals came to power in 2003, the CHUM was destined for a lot in the Rosemont neighbourhood of Montreal, northeast of downtown, and was expected to be completed by 2007. The decision to put it there was made by the Parti Québécois government in 2000. According to Lacroix, there was pressure inside the new Liberal government to put the hospital elsewhere.

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What the pluck????

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 12:01 PM - 3 Comments

(Shaw Media Inc.)

Recent news that Gordon Ramsay had become a “partner” in a fabled Montreal chicken joint should have elicited one and only one response: the guy who helped put British cuisine on the map is now doing takeout in the colonies? What the @#$%^!?

True, the famously profane chef had promised to expand his embattled empire to Canadian soil: on the CBC’s The Hour in 2009 he said “definitely Toronto first,” and that he’d scouted locations. Still, “the most unexpected foodie news of 2010,” as the Montreal Gazette put it when the paper broke the story in November—that Ramsay had joined forces to remake Rôtisserie Laurier BBQ, a family-style restaurant in Outremont—was a head-scratcher.

Was the move part of a shrewd diversification into casual dining now that the fine-dining market is under siege? Or was the 44-year-old’s 25th restaurant venture a symptom of early onset “Wolfgang Puck syndrome,” wherein a talented chef stops cooking and starts shilling, thereby diluting his identity to the point he’s best known in the frozen-food aisle? For an example, one need only look at Ramsay’s own mentor, Marco Pierre White, the original bad-boy chef who’s now a pitchman for Knorr bouillon cubes and processed “Turkey Twizzlers.”

Ramsay’s surprising association with Rôtisserie Laurier BBQ grew out of his licensing deal with Danny Lavy, CEO of Elite Group Inc., the Montreal-based company that distributes Gordon Ramsay-branded goods—toasters, pots, blenders and such. Last year, Lavy bought the ochre building housing the restaurant, Quebec’s first roasted-chicken outlet when the Laporte family opened it in 1936, and seized the opportunity to revitalize a faded Montreal landmark. Over the years, clientele thinned as more fashionable restaurants popped up (the third Laporte generation closed the upstairs). Today, it’s a charming anachronism on an affluent stretch of Laurier, drawing diners of all ages, evident by the crayons at the front desk. The menu is displayed on paper placemats. The food—chicken, coleslaw, ribs, mac ‘n’ cheese—is hearty, if unmemorable. No one is photographing their plate. Desserts—sugar pie, “Hello Dolly” cookies, carrot cake—are unironically retro, as is the wait staff of older women. More than half of the business is takeout and delivery.

Lavy, a restaurant newbie, teamed up with Danielle Lord and Marie-Christine Couture, veterans of the Montreal hospitality scene, to run the day-to-day. He turned to Ramsay, for his input—and name. “It’s a real estate investment and it made sense to go with comfort food,” Lavy says.

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Oscar buzz for a Canadian director

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 14, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

eOne Films

In a Denis Villeneuve movie, you can count on a savage act of fate changing someone’s life. In his first feature, August 32nd on Earth (1998), a woman vows to get pregnant after surviving a near-fatal car crash. The heroine of Maelstrom (2000) drives over a pedestrian after having an abortion. Polytechnique (2009) re-enacts the arbitrary murder of female engineering students in the Montreal Massacre. Villeneuve’s latest film, Incendies, tracks a mother and daughter through a maze of horrific coincidence in the Middle East. All these movies succeed against wild odds. Stories that could easily tip over into melodrama acquire uncanny power and grace. Dramatizing the Montreal Massacre sounds like an adventure in bad taste, but Polytechnique avoided the pitfalls of exploitation, wowed critics and swept the Genie Awards. Now with Incendies, Villeneuve is emerging as the most acclaimed Quebec director since Denys Arcand—and the most exciting Canadian filmmaker of his generation. Continue…

Phantom of the Deli? Smoke-lahoma?

By Joanne Latimer - Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 1:40 PM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Lauren Catermole

Let’s get this straight: a newspaper article begat a book that begat a $200,000 musical . . . about smoked meat? This turn of events seems less hare-brained when the smoked meat in question comes from Schwartz’s, the Montreal deli with shrine-like status. Newspaper columnist and author Bill Brownstein turned his Montreal Gazette article about Schwartz’s franchising dilemma into a book on the history of the famed eatery. Then he turned his book over to musical-comedy duo Bowser and Blue to write the musical. Schwartz’s: The Musical debuts in March at the Centaur Theatre.

“That’s wild! As a fan, it works for me!” exclaimed Peter Lenkov, an executive producer who just left CSI: NY to make Hawaii Five-O. Lenkov grew up in a Montreal suburb and visits Schwartz’s every time he’s home from Los Angeles. “Today, we’re getting lunch from Langer’s, L.A’s big deli, where the pastrami is good, but it’s not Schwartz’s.”

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The 'warm and funny' terror suspect

By Martin Patriquin with Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

CTV

As alleged terrorists go, Khurram Syed Sher is something of an oddity. Born in Canada, the 28-year-old Montrealer completed a five-year pathology residency at McGill University in 2009, and was known as much for his outgoing sense of humour as he was for his work. “He was the glue that kept the residents together,” one of his professors said, “and a major figure who got involved within the department.”

“He had a very kind disposition,” said the professor, who spoke to Maclean’s on condition of anonymity. “He was a little quiet but very warm and he had this sense of humour.”

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The famous soothsayer is where?

By Joanne Latimer - Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments

Long before Twitter, there was Jenny Holzer, the soothsayer and conceptual artist who plastered New York with biting aphorisms in the late 1970s. Money creates taste. Lack of charisma may be fatal. Much was decided before you were born. These are just three of her 250-odd “truisms”—deadpan zingers displayed on LED screens around the world, projected onto buildings and carved into marble benches.

Holzer was the first woman chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale (1990), where she won a prize for the best pavilion installation. Since then, her star has continued to rise. Starting this summer, Canada is lucky enough to host a comprehensive retrospective of her work and, curiously, it will be held in a little-known exhibition space in Old Montreal.

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One Montreal borough's war on the car

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 5:27 PM - 28 Comments

The Montreal borough of Plateau Mont-Royal is many things to many people: a formerly bohemian yuppie respite; a congenial melting pot of English, French and many other backgrounds; a trendy, boozy hotspot for tourists and university students. However, the eight square kilometers of this central Montreal burg is fast becoming known as something else: the scourge of the suburban driver.

Starting this fall, the Plateau will be home to what its administration calls “traffic calming initiatives” that will make driving through the neighbourhood a wee bit trickier. They include reversing the direction of certain streets, narrowing others, widening sidewalks, and installing a bevy of bicycle paths throughout.

The changes will make room for what Plateau mayor Luc Ferrandez describes as “secure, pleasant and user-friendly streets,” though these will come at the expense of convenience for commuters. That’s because the Plateau is a major thoroughfare for the vast (and ever-growing) suburbs on the north shore of Montreal—something Ferrandez, an avid cyclist, has watched for years with pursed lips.

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Guess who's shaking up Montreal?

By Joanne Latimer - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 8 Comments

Photograph by Roger Lemoyne

An infamous new citizen has single-handedly revamped the Montreal art scene. Georges Marciano, co-founder of the Guess? Inc. denim empire, decamped to the Old Port from L.A. this year after losing a high-profile defamation lawsuit and dropping out of the 2010 gubernatorial race for California. With him came his priceless collection of postwar American art—along with wads of cash, his 84-carat diamond, and four Ferraris.

Marciano couldn’t be happier about the move. He bought the grand L’Hôtel XIXe Siècle and renamed it Lhotel last month. Outside the front door is one of Robert Indiana’s iconic Love sculptures. Five of Marciano’s sculptures are installed outdoors throughout the Old Port for public viewing.

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Why does Montreal rank so poorly?

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 5:00 AM - 51 Comments

THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Graham Hughes

It’s hard to imagine that cosmopolitan Montreal, with its feted music scene, mountains of arts funding, work-to-live inclination and literary sensibility, would place anywhere but at the very top of a list of Canada’s Most Cultured Cities. An even bigger surprise is to find it near the bottom.

True, cultural opportunities abound in Montreal. There’s the world-class Montreal Symphony Orchestra, L’Orchestre Métropolitain, L’Opéra de Montréal, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, a half-dozen music festivals, including the Montreal International Jazz Festival and Pop Montreal, and no fewer than a dozen museums.

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The francophones are coming!

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 at 6:02 PM - 13 Comments

You can hardly blame the Montreal Gazette‘s editorial board for riffing on this study that found francophone Quebecers earn more than anglophone Quebecers:

“It’s part of popular culture among francophones to hearken back to the era when there was a class system in Quebec that was partly based on language,” Bourque said. “The image of the English boss maintains a powerful hold on the popular imagination.”

But lower wages for English-speakers are the norm across the province – even though anglophones are better educated on average than francophones, Jedwab said.

Anglophones earned a median wage of $24,617 in 2006 compared to $26,388 for francophones.

The kicker, as Léger’s Christian Bourque puts it above, is that francophones overwhelmingly think the opposite is true. Continue…

Outremont’s unholy mess

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 12:34 PM - 61 Comments

Photograph by Benoit Aquin

Pierre Lacerte rarely leaves his house without a sense of righteous indignation, and never without his point-and-shoot camera holstered on his belt. When he walks through his neighbourhood of Outremont in Montreal, he may take a picture, or seven, of garbage-strewn yards, illegal construction, parking infractions, oversized buses, unlicensed gatherings and any other infraction allegedly committed by the area’s Hasidic Jewish community.

The pictures are fodder for his blog, a mean-spirited take on his Hasidic neighbours and the politicians he says “are on all fours in front of the Hasidim.” Liberal politician Martin Cauchon becomes “Martin Kosher”; Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay is blasted for courting the Hasidic vote during the last election, or “electorah.” Lacerte also attends municipal council meetings with near-religious fervour out of a sense of “exasperation” with the Hasidim, who he believes are making Outremont unbearable for the goyim. “I’m determined, not obsessed,” he said recently from a croissanterie near his home. “They’re a small minority, and already it’s a mess. What’s it going to be like in 15 years when they have doubled in size?”

Lacerte’s diatribes are indicative of the mood in Outremont. The arrondissement of choice for Quebec’s cultural and political elite is synonymous with sidewalk cafés and quiet power. Yet it has in recent years been the scene of a debate over how much leeway should be given to its religious minorities. Many residents think they know the answer: not much. Not any, actually. “Some people just want to make life miserable for the Jews,” says Alex Werzberger, the Hasidic leader frequently parodied on Lacerte’s site.

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About Face

By Martin Patriquin and Charlie Gillis - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 at 8:30 AM - 174 Comments

Photograph by Peter Mccabe

Shama Naz, a mother of two young girls who lives in the Montreal suburb of Kirkland, visited the emergency room of the Lakeshore General Hospital last Sunday after her eldest daughter accidentally poked her left eye with a pencil. A native of Pakistan, Naz wears a niqab, a garment worn by some Islamic women that covers the entire face save for the eyes. A few days before, the Quebec government had announced legislation that would force her to remove her niqab to receive any government service; though it isn’t yet law, she wondered half-jokingly whether she would be turned away at the hospital.

She wasn’t. Her niqab stayed in place until she was able to see a doctor; then, as she has done countless times while writing exams, taking passport pictures and going across international borders, she took it off—without the prompting of the doctor, who happened to be a man. “Law or no law, it’s just about common sense,” Naz says. “For me, it’s never been an issue.”

Soon enough, Naz will be compelled by law, not only common sense, to doff her niqab whenever she visits the hospital, goes to school, has her licence renewed, or avails herself of any other service provided or funded by the provincial government. Introduced last week, Bill 94 is the first legislation in North America to place a de facto ban on any religious face coverings in any government building—including within the walls of every government-subsidized high school, CEGEP and university in Quebec.

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Three days in Montreal

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 5, 2010 at 11:12 AM - 43 Comments

Michael Ignatieff writes about his weekend bender in Montreal.

Everything I heard at Canada at 150 suggested that addressing these challenges will require a new kind of federal leadership. Federal leadership should be about convening, not command and control. Ottawa needs to bring the country together in common purpose, and build networks of responsibilities that are focused on outcomes. Instead, all the current government offers is cuts and reduced expectations, because they have no other plan to address the $54 billion deficit they created.

It remains to be seen

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 29, 2010 at 1:53 PM - 18 Comments

Glen Pearson considers the weekend.

I’ve already spoken to some of my MP colleagues who were there in Montreal and I detect a bit more authenticity in their voice. The speeches galvanized them; the public participation alerted them; and Michael Ignatieff’s speech at the conclusion called on them to put the trite and political things aside and fight for issues that truly matter.  But that was in Montreal, not Ottawa, and it remains to be seen if the Liberal party can enact what they discovered about themselves this weekend and keep it alive in that most partisan and skeptical of all political spaces. Yet for one brief three-day period we witnessed the enemy, and it was us. Perhaps the true genius of it all was that we accepted all that criticism in good spirit, looked inward at our own shortcomings, and came out of it a little wiser as to our faults as public servants. The truth set us free in Montreal; now we’ll see how it does in Parliament.

Searching for the Liberal Party. Day 2.

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 8:30 AM - 58 Comments

Greetings from Montreal, where, for the next three days, we’ll be hanging around the Liberal party’s Canada 150 conference. Herein a running diary of the proceedings. Day 1′s diary is here.

8:29am. Good morning. Montreal is chilly and quiet. In a few moments we will be roused by the dulcet tones of David “The Dodge” Dodge, former governor of the Bank of Canada.

8:36am. For those of you scoring at home, the colour of the lights today is orange. And the subject is Families.

8:45am. This conference was apparently the most tweeted subject in Canada yesterday. The Liberals are immensely proud of this. Continue…