Tag Archives: Parti Québécois

A modest proposal, Cultural commentary, Economic commentary, Political commentary, Québec sovereignty, Sovereign Socialist

Kyoto, not Kippahs

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Before anything else, something funny.

Rick Mercer, as per usual, nails it. The Parti Québécois is completely delusional.

I’m not completely sold on the divorce analogy, unless Confederation is a kind of political polygamy. Ours is not a nation of two solitudes. At least not anymore.

I think the proof lies in the fact that Canada is very much aware of the Québec provincial election, the key issues, the leaders etc. It’s in the papers, on the airwaves and on the nightly news.

I would argue Canada pays more attention to a Québec provincial election more than any other province, something which strikes me as odd given another referendum is unrealistic at this time and the economic and social direction of provinces like Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia are arguably far more significant on a national scale.

As long as the delusion that ‘sovereignty solves everything’ is maintained Québec cannot expect to develop in any meaningful way. We will continue treading water, expending energy and resources without going anywhere.

This is not the time for more consultations, more studies, more constitutional debates. We need action. Steps must be taken to ensure we reduce CO2 emissions and protect our environment.

We need a provincial government that is going to prioritize Kyoto, not Kippahs.

Steps must be taken to address government waste. We are the highest taxed Canadians, and yet our debt and deficit continue to grow. Austerity isn’t helping because we haven’t addressed the root cause of our inefficiencies, and cuts to social services like education and healthcare are both unpopular and ultimately unsuccessful. The imbalance between high taxation and a low return on services and ballooning costs all point to a fundamentally mismanaged state.

There are only two concerns for any government these days – the environment and the economy.

Unless we take immediate steps to address and correct environmental degradation and economic inequity at every level of government there is no hope for any of us.

Think about how Mercer opens his rant – he talks about complacence.

Civilizations fall, and when they do, the whole Earth shakes.

A NASA-funded study has made the point as clear as day – unless political action is taken the world-over to address the key environmental and economic problems of our time we’re condemning our species to extinction.

The environment and the economy is all our provincial election should be about. Successful programs to cut carbon emissions and develop well-functioning social-safety nets are already the norm in some Scandinavian nations, and if there truly is a sovereign way of thinking in our province then we ought to be free of the bondage of nationalism, so that we can address the crucial issues that effect all of humanity.

Cutting our carbon emissions to Kyoto standards (or better) and ensuring a more egalitarian distribution of wealth in our province has the potential to be copied and improved upon by other provinces. If Qu̩bec chooses to lead, the other provinces will follow Рthis is a fundamental truth about Canadian political evolution.

Québec leads.

Which is why I’m so fundamentally disappointed in our current election. There is a palpable poverty of politics in our province. We pollute our political discourse with hate and fear and become so emotionally exhausted we have no time or patience to pursue vital social interests.

It’s terrifying really. How much longer do we really have to continue beating this dead horse?

For all the PQ’s talk of the ‘future of Québec’ it seems they are ignorant of the potential future of the world.

The people know what the real issues are, but are blinded by the manufactured existential crisis of sovereignty. It prevents union, it conjures up unnecessary divisions. It holds us back – all of us, regardless of race, religion or language.

It delegitimizes us and as long as it remains the focal point of our provincial elections will only continue to delegitimize us.

We have all the potential to effect positive change Canada wide.

But in order to do so we must first recognize that those who play upon societal divisions for political gain have no one’s interest at heart but their own.

So who will be the first to enter into the political discourse, the Parti Québécois is fundamentally illegitimate.

Commentary, Cultural commentary, Let's make this an election issue, Political commentary, Québec sovereignty, Social commentary, Sovereign Socialist, What were they thinking?

Gong Show

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We all need to take a major chill pill.

After this past week, not only would I say any kind of a referendum on whether or not Québec seeks constitutional negotiations is out of the question, I’m also highly doubtful the PQ will even manage to form a minority government. Separation is nothing more than all it has been for over a decade – talk.

It’s all just a lot of noise.

The latest polls indicate anywhere between 50 and 50 per cent of Québécois (note: and by that I mean all of us, regardless of culture, race, language etc.) would vote against a referendum pursuant to constitutional negotiations seeking greater sovereignty for the province of Québec.

We need to stop worrying about Québec independence because it’s simply not in the cards. The referendum is about whether we start negotiations – there isn’t even a guarantee the other provinces or the fed would come to the table.

Based on the outcome of this election a referendum question might be off the table for as long as the next four years (assuming, somehow, Couillard manages a majority, sticks to his federalist inclinations and a Montrealer becomes Prime Minister next fall – it’s unlikely but within the realm of possibility. Think of what that might mean for our city, with francophone federalists at the three key levels of power).

All Couillard needs to do is continue talking about the economy and what brings Québécois together, and simply not get trapped by the constitutional trap set by the Parti Québécois. If he does this and continues at the pace he’s on, he might just push the Québec Liberals from their current 37% into more comfortable territory.

Much like the now infamous Pineault-Caron family shown above, all the Quebec Liberals need to do is simply let the PQ continue talking, and they’ll reveal themselves for who they are: fundamentally, inherently racist and appealing to a myopic minority of citizens who would literally step over their own mothers to achieve this twisted vision of national self-determination.

By all means, let’s give the PQ all the air time, because they’ve turned our politics into a veritable gong show and spent much of last week embarrassing themselves. Plus que ça change… Last week was one of the few in which Québec politics was legitimately enjoyable, in my opinion. Once it became glaringly apparent the Parti Québécois has a hard enough time running an election, let alone a country, the humour of our absurd situation came to the forefront.

This guy, Jean Carrière, wants to fuck Islam.
This guy, Jean Carrière, wants to fuck Islam.

In the last week we’ve witnessed a PQ candidate get unceremoniously ejected from the party for Islamophobic (and just plain dumb) posts on his facebook page. Jean Carrière was forced out and rightfully so, but it makes you wonder about the PQ candidate vetting process. This is politics 101 – nothing offensive on your most public medium.

You’d think a guy with a head this big would know the really obvious stuff.

And then a PQ candidate came out and compared the ritual of baptism and the medical practice of circumcision to rape.

Yeah, you read that right.

Gouin-riding candidate Louise Mailloux was also busted for – get this – propagating a well-known conspiracy theory originated by the KKK that Rabbis collect a tax from goods certified as Kosher and then use those funds to support the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.

Louise Mailloux holding up a photocopied image of sheiks to prove a point about something...
Louise Mailloux holding up a photocopied image of sheiks to prove a point about something…

Worse, Ms. Mailloux has issued an apology, for hurting people’s feelings.

She has not withdrawn her statements concerning baptism or circumcision. Most importantly, she says that she ‘stands by’ her belief in the well-known anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

And in turn, Pauline Marois stands by Ms. Mailloux.

Perhaps if any of these women had Jewish friends or acquaintances they might not be so public with their anti-Semitism.

It’s truly disheartening that some people in this province clearly aren’t concerned with multiple and very public displays of racism by a party ostensibly designed to protect a minority group from the apparently unrelenting assault of cultural assimilation.

If I could issue edicts I would demand our politics were racism free and didn’t involve propagating ideas dreamt up by hillbilly klansmen, but I suppose Ms. Mailloux feels some kind of kinship for the ‘oppressed whites’ of the American South…

And who can forget the spray-paint attack on Bernard Drainville’s PQ riding office in Longueuil?

graffiti-drainville-longueuil

Just a quick aside, Drainville’s office was tagged with the message above and swastikas were drawn over Pauline Marois’ face.

It immediately made me think of that time Morton Downey Jr. claimed he had been attacked by skinheads in a washroom at the San Francisco airport. The attack story was ultimately discovered to be a publicity stunt – the swastikas were drawn backwards, as if you were drawing them with a mirror…

In this case it’s the spelling that’s off. English speakers with an interest in protecting Judaism and Quebec politics likely would not have written “dont” in lieu of the far more common (and correct) spelling of “don’t”. Also, another word for yarmulke is kippah – with an ‘h’.

As much as some people would love a race war, I have a feeling this might actually be the work of an over-zealous PQ envelope-licker inspired by the likes of Pierre Poutine.

But I saved the best for last. The grand prix of political cognitive dissonance and selling out your base goes to the Parti Québécois by signing the reigning king of yellow journalism and Ford Brother enablement, the doyen of Québec Inc, Monsieur Pierre-Karl Péladeau.

The well-known union-buster.

Brian Mulroney’s prodigal son.

The man who owns Quebecor, Videotron, Sun News Network and the Sun Newspaper Corporation, arguably the single greatest sources of hysterical Francophobia, Anglophobia and general Islamophobia (not to mention piss poor journalism) in the entire country, is running with the party that once branded itself as a working class social grassroots movement to protect and preserve French Canadian culture from the perceived threat of Anglo-American monoculture.

A man who peddles in filth, a pimp of exploitation, a carnival barker – this is who the Parti Québécois has chosen as their economic guru. This is the man whom the PQ expects us to trust with the construction of a ‘national economy’.

So am I worried about Quebec becoming an independent country?

No.

The repercussions to the PKP announcement were swift. The major provincial unions, already siding up against the proposed secularism charter, have now indicated they won’t be supporting the PQ at all, marking a historic break between the Parti Quebecois and its traditional voter base.

What politicians consistently fail to realize – and this really is a national phenomenon – is that you can only be overtly contradictory, hypocritical, full of shit (however you want to say it) up to a certain point before people get fed up and reject a party en masse. Consider the Tories in 1993. Nine years of Mulroney’s bullshit and Canadians *destroyed* the political entity known as the Progressive Conservatives. What little remained quickly succumbed to the influence of the Reform Party, giving us the unholy amalgam of perverted Western ‘nationalism’, the oil lobby and social conservatives who hate gays and love war. Consider the Liberals under Ignatieff.

In Quebec, think Duplessis.

Commentary, Cultural commentary, Let's make this an election issue, Political commentary, Québec sovereignty, Social commentary

Question Traditional Thinking

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Pierre-Karl Péladeau with the crack-smoking Mayor of Toronto Fatass McCrackington III
Pierre-Karl Péladeau with the crack-smoking Mayor of Toronto Fatass McCrackington III

Here are some basic questions all Québécois (Anglos and Allos included) need to ask themselves prior to voting in this year’s provincial election:

1. Why does Québec need to become an independent country?

2. Is there any actual empirical evidence either the French language or French culture of our province and/or country is in any way threatened?

3. Given that there is no official effort to assimilate Francophones in this country, why are separatist parties so concerned with the spectre of assimilation?

4. How would ten million ethnic French Canadians, almost all of whom speak and work in French on a daily basis, lose their language and/or cultural identity anyways? (without some kind of external compelling force)

5. Are Québécois specifically and French Canadians in general incapable of preserving and promoting the use of French on an individual basis? Why does the state need to be involved?

6. If we’re to have yet another referendum, what will it be on? Independence? Sovereignty? Sovereignty-Association? Another round of constitutional negotiations? Why isn’t this clear?

7. Is it right to destroy one country in order to build another?

8. When was the last time an ethno-nationalist movement created an ideal society anyways?

9. Is Québec a colony of the British Empire? Are we a colony of Canada? And if we’re not a colony, why do we need to be ‘free’? If we are held in bondage, who holds us down? And can any of this be verified, proven?

10. Are we not already free, given the protections, rights and responsibilities afforded by our national constitution and charter?

11. René Lévesque did not sign the constitution document; does this mean he spoke for all Québécois at the time? Does he continue to speak for us today? Have we, alone, been administered by the British North America Act since 1982? Are we not protected by both it and the charter regardless?

12. How can we continue to justify spending $25 million per year on the OQLF when the only good thing to come out of the organization was a report that stated, unequivocally, that French is not threatened and that Bill 101 doesn’t need beefing up?

13. If Québec were to become an independent country, how would it justify its actions to the international community? What is the basis for our desire to become independent? Is it based on 2014 conditions, or based on a laundry list of real and imagined aggressions dating back to the mid-18th century?

14. How can a political movement designed to protect minority rights (the PQ, as it was originally conceived) turn around and infringe upon minority rights (the PQ, today) and claim any kind of political legitimacy? Bill 60 is institutionalized racism: it specifically singles-out religious minorities working in the public sector and demands they choose between their jobs or wearing religious garments or symbols.

15. We speak often of perceived Francophobia and Québec-bashing on the part of the Anglophone media, yet the single largest source of anti-Québec sentiment in Canadian English-language media is arguably the Sun News Network and the associated Sun newspaper chain, both of which are owned by Pierre-Karl Péladeau, a PQ ‘all-star’ candidate who also happens to own Quebecor, the largest media conglomerate in the province. Given this concentration of power, money and media in the hands of a single political party, should we be so readily accepting of their negative portrayal of competing media? Is this not an immense conflict of public interest?

Commentary, Cultural commentary, History and Culture, Kondiaronk - My Montréal Experience, Let's make this an election issue, Montréal Architecture, Montréal Landmarks, Political commentary, Québec sovereignty, Social commentary, Unrealized development projects, Urban Redevelopment, Worth reconsidering

The Ironic Demise of the Redpath Mansion

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The Redpath House in better times...
The Redpath House in better times…

In the infinite wisdom of the Parti Québécois’ Cameroonian-born culture minister, the Redpath House is officially lacking in any historical or architectural merit worthy of its protection. The temporary injunction preventing the Sochaczevski family’s planned demolition of the house has been lifted and the structure will likely be demolished just as soon as possible. I can understand why they’d want to, given how they’ve been jerked around in the past.

That said, I’d prefer the owners of the defiantly anti-péquiste Suburban newspaper turn around – just for shits and giggles – and excoriate Maka Kotto for not recognizing the heritage value of the last remaining home of the family of the guy who financed the construction of the Lachine Canal.

Now wouldn’t that be grand?

Of course it’s not going to happen. There’s profit to be made.

And let’s not forget it’s in the long-term political interest of the PQ to gently erase the trace of Québec’s Anglophone community, and the Square Mile is as good a place as any to start not giving a shit.

The belief that Anglophone capitalists were recklessly redeveloping the city and destroying an element of our cultural aesthetic was somewhat prevalent among the early urban preservation movement and sovereignist movement, and indeed there was a lot of overlap in terms of public demonstrations of the time. Sovereignists, favouring a more socially-conscious method of urban redevelopment that encouraged public repossession and conversion of heritage properties by the state, were quick to join demonstrations against the destruction of entire neighbourhoods and iconic mansions. It was somewhat ironic, given that the people of the Square Mile during it’s golden era (from 1880 to 1930) were often thought of as those who oppressed working class French Canadians. In many ways the excess of the Square Mile and its people (who controlled 70% of the nation’s wealth for a time) played a role in the development of the Quebec independence movement.

In his judgement as culture minister, Maka Kotto believes the Redpath House is of no *ahem* national heritage value.

Really?

I’ll grant that the home isn’t the actual house of John Redpath (but I’m fairly certain is the last of the Redpath family’s Square Mile homes), and I agree with the minister for deploring that nothing was done back when the house was in better shape.

But the minister simply asked that the owner do something to remind passers-by that the home once stood there and should be recognized.

Like a plaque. Or maybe the Sochaczevski’s will call their new condo building ‘Le Redpath’.

Oooh! Sounds historical!

I just don’t understand why the province wouldn’t mandate that the new building incorporate part of the old. I’m not keen on this generally speaking but when it’s the only option in lieu of total demolition I’d go for it. Clearly the walls aren’t in that bad a shape – they’re still standing after thirty years of abandonment. At least if the few remaining Queen Anne style architectural details were preserved it wouldn’t be a total loss.

Either way, very disappointing. Pretty much everyone loses with the exception of the family who was jerked around for a generation by an incompetent heritage preservation bureaucracy.

And they’ve been on the losing end for thirty years. It’s hard to feel bad for rich people who find themselves unable to make more money, or feel good for them when they finally get some justice and can proceed to tear down some history to put up another god forsaken condominium in a high-density neighbourhood.

So I’m all kinds of conflicted on this one.

Ultimately I can agree with the minister – something should have been done long ago and shame on those responsible thirty years ago for not reacting as people today would have preferred.

You can understand why this really doesn’t make me feel any better. Blaming people from long ago for making poor decisions does nothing to protect the past from future development.

Commentary, Cultural commentary, Montréal Landmarks, Political commentary, Québec sovereignty, Social commentary, Sovereign Socialist, Sovereign Socialist featured article, What were they thinking?, Worth reconsidering

How to Beat Bill 60

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Excellent retro shot of the Jewish General Hospital before it began it's multi-phase expansion - I'm guessing 1984
Excellent retro shot of the Jewish General Hospital before it began it’s multi-phase expansion – I’m guessing 1984

Defy it.

With extreme prejudice…

A tip of the hat is owed to Dr. Lawrence Rosenberg, head of the prestigious Montreal Jewish General Hospital, for firing the opening salvo in the people’s defiance of Bill 60, the proposed charter on state secularism in Québec.

Among other things the bill stipulates all public-sector employees would be banned from ‘ostentatious displays of religion’ including wearing a yarmulke, hijab or turban while on the job. The ubiquitous displays of Catholicism in every conceivable aspect of daily life in Québec gets to stay as these are deemed to be of ‘historical and cultural value’, though apparently, the historical and cultural value of our ethno-cultural minorities constitute some kind of threat to middle-class, mainstream Québécois society. This means the large glow-in-the-dark cross atop Mount Royal, inasmuch as the crucifix behind the speaker’s chair in the National Assembly, will not be removed, but some Sikh surgeon will have to remove his turban if he wants to keep his job.

I’m an atheist, a socialist and a progressive. But I’m also a libertarian, though not in any contemporary American sense. I believe an individual ought to be free from religious persecution, insofar as their religious practice neither harms themselves, their relations or their community, nor places an inconvenience on the society at large. This thought is not my own – from my understanding this is the law of the land. Freedom from religious persecution is in the Charter of Rights and Responsibilities.

The Canadian Charter of Values.

I’m with Tom Mulcair on this one, the proposed Bill-60 is nothing but politically-motivated, state-sponsored discrimination.

I believe an argument can be made in which it is in the state’s interest to propose a dress code in the public service, especially in the domains of health and education. Certain religious garments, such as the niqab or burqa, would present an inconvenience to the public interest – the face is covered, and it’s as simple as that. These kinds of face coverings present an unnecessary communication barrier; it’s completely impractical throughout the entirety of the public service.

But let’s put this aside for a moment and ask ourselves a question – is it even worth formalizing such an objection of these particular garments? How many Muslim Québécoises who wear these particular garments are actually applying to the provincial civil service each year? Do we have to make fundamental alterations to our province’s legal and political foundations or can this simply be an edit to some kind of internal HR manual?

It reminds me of Herouxville passing laws against women being stoned to death or burned with acid. It was an amazingly insane instance of unencumbered small-town ‘multi-culturalism panic’.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but is this not already covered by the Criminal Code? Do we not have laws against murder and assault? And do we not already have a secular judiciary, one that is blind to religious consideration so as to liberate the state from such an incumbrance?

pauline-marois

This kind of panicky, irrational fear was unfortunately poorly articulated by none other than Québec uber-vedette Celine Dion. As Jack Jedwab of the Association for Canadian Studies points out, her concerns that she thinks justifies the charter’s implementation are ludicrous – no one’s taking down any goddam Christmas trees. Ms. Dion’s comments are a perfect representation of the kind of misguided thinking that has become troublingly prevalent amongst an a swath of the Québécois middle-class (though it’s by no means a Québec phenomenon; you could make the argument that Québec is following France’s example too closely, and that both share similarities with a host of xenophobic laws passed throughout the United States in the past decade).

The bill is hypocritical to the core and is, in essence, a method by which the PQ can sew its values into the provincial political fabric at a moment when a referendum is out of the question and the grip on power tenuous at best. The PQ knows it has an election somewhere on the horizon and as long as its economic record remains what it is – which is shitty – the Québec Liberals have a real shot at regaining power at some point in the next six months. Since the Marois government can’t do much else it is going into a perpetual campaign mode, and Bill 60 is their attempt to shore up their political base. They’ve spun it every which way – it’s pro-women, it’s modernizing – but it’s also, fundamentally, unfair and its unnecessary, punitive implications are too large to ignore.

The grim reality is that if this bill goes into law, a great many people, almost all of whom live and work in the Greater Montreal region, are suddenly going to find themselves in a position in which they have to choose between their jobs and their faith; religious minorities will be officially persecuted in the province of Québec. And who will bare the brunt of this new legislation? Why women of course; thousands of working moms who live in Montreal. Here’s a fantastic argument by Anne-France Goldwater as to why this so-called charter of values is a blatant attack on working first-generation Québécoises, a state-sponsored attempt to deny recent-immigrants access to the lucrative pool of civil service and public sector jobs.

In Québec’s political context Montreal is a prize and power base for one party and a liability, an inconvenience for another. Multiculturalism works in Montreal, and I would argue it evolves into a special kind of interculturalism all on its own, without government interference. But this flies in the face of the PQ stands for, and their vision of Québec. The PQ views itself as Québec incarnate, in much the same way that Tea Party Republicans view themselves as ‘real Americans’, and both are using the same fundamental tactic to achieve diverse goals – they define terms and tone first. The PQ has been doing this for years; Bill 101 established that there was a threat to the French language and culture in Québec and the bill was the response to it. Today it’s a fundamental component of our laws and most accept that this is the case, regardless that current statistical and demographic information is telling us the complete opposite.

This is Bill 101 2.0

Much like its linguistic forebear, Bill 60 places economic and socio-political limitations on minority populations. It is a ghettoization measure, and may result, much like the ‘Anglo Exodus’ of a generation ago, in a minority exodus of a kind.

So how do we, the free-thinking, address such Draconian laws?

We must defy them.

Director General of the hospital, Dr. Lawrence Rosenberg put it best “Since the bill is inherently prejudicial, there is no point in taking advantage of any clause that would grant us temporary, short-term relief” when referring to five-year implementation delays specifically designed for institutions such as the Jewish.

He went on to say that if the bill ever becomes law, the hospital will simply ignore it outright.

Right on.

Commentary, Cultural commentary, Kondiaronk - My Montréal Experience, Political commentary, Québec sovereignty, Social commentary, Sovereign Socialist

A few things since I’ve been gone…

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Boxes - Taylor C. Noakes, Spring 2013

So I should start off by saying that yes, there has been a flu bug going around, and I caught it and have been bed-bound since Friday night. The most walking around I’ve done since then was to walk from my GP’s office to the Queen Elizabeth Health Centre, a walk which I’d normally thoroughly enjoy, though today it damn near almost killed me.

Turns out I caught some kind of a bronchial infection along with the flu, and thus have been coughing like a TB case. The unintended consequence was that I’ve stopped smoking, and can now smell much, much better than I have in many, many years.

As to the Queen E, it’s an excellent facility. Though it used to be a nearly full service community hospital, it got the ax (along with the Reddy Memorial – today’s YMCA hostel near Cabot Square – and another hospital that escapes me at the moment) back in the 1990s when the government was dealing with major budget cuts to health and education (sound familiar?) Today it’s rundown and in dire need of some reno work, but basically serves as an enhanced CLSC with a wide variety of diagnostic and community health services offered. I wish them luck. I can imagine Westmount-adjacent former hospitals named after an old Brit are in the crosshairs of some PQ gov’t hack.

That said, there was one lady in the radiology dept. who clearly did not like her job and wanted you to know it. The kind of person who doesn’t say hi or even make eye contact with people, but who sternly says ‘read the sign’ before you have a chance to say hello yourself. This same person is also the kind of individual who casually ignores a person standing in front of her for five minutes. Was it not obvious I had a simple question to ask?

Perhaps she was having a bad day, but I don’t really give a shit. There are days when we all hate our jobs – it doesn’t give anyone the right to be a grade-A prick.

And for the record, this woman was a WASP.

Every single other person I encountered, from the lady at the info desk to the guys in the canteen, the various radiologists and X-ray technicians – all were delightful, warm, open, sincerely nice, comforting people. Many of them would be described as ‘visible minorities’. The Indian guy in the lab coat brought me the funnies after I had jokingly enquired about the quality of magazines in the waiting room. By contrast, the other white person I encountered got nervous when he heard me coughing, strolled over and tossed me a face mask without saying a word. Rude. I’m not contagious; least he could have done is asked if I was okay.

Fucking white people – always bringing me down.

And on that note – the one group of blancs I despise the most, PQ sympathizers and separatists, are going above and beyond to make immigrants feel as unwelcome as possible these days.

I hate the PQ with every fibre of my being, and here’s why:

At the top it’s all philosophical, academic, serene discussions and musings about the complexities of cultural integration and Québec’s future in North America. But at the bottom, the foundation that props up the PQ elite is composed of some of the most backwards buck-toothed hillbilly scum this province has ever produced. They are the 49% of adult Québécois who lack basic literacy skills. These are the people who take it upon themselves to fight the PQ’s battles ‘on the front lines’.

Whether it’s STM employees: example 1, example 2, example 3

Or just your average schmuck riding the bus…

Or some schmuck at the mall…

Or the thousands of primary and secondary teachers in the CSDM system who teach in immigrant-heavy public schools on the island of Montreal, and who half-ass it because they know they can get away with it. Just about every single immigrant I’ve ever known or ever met who attended a French language public school has at least one story of a teacher who did nothing to hide their absolute disdain for the people he or she was teaching. This point was echoed rather masterfully by local comedic super star Sugar Sammy, who recounted how his high school history teacher was little more than a PQ propaganda machine, and promptly gave up on his students the day after the 95 Referendum.

It’s not just sad, it’s tragic this is what we’ve allowed our province to become.

The news today is that violence against Muslim women in this province has risen considerably since the institutionalized racism charter was first proposed.

The violence, as always, is being committed by the little people down at the bottom. The PQ can claim they only intend for reasonable discussion, and can appeal to the public for calm, but they know goddam well this happens every time. Their rhetoric primes people, stupid, stupid people, for hate, and they win elections because of it.

As an aside, the pharmacist who helped me out with my prescription wore a hijab. She spoke both English and French fluently and was friendly, helpful, warm – exactly the kind of person you want to deal with when you feel like you’re on death’s door. She didn’t try to convert me, we didn’t discuss religion and she seemed pretty damn well integrated into our society from my vantage point (and brief exchange of words).

As a pur-laine Québécois (which I am and have the documents to prove) I can tell you first hand I didn’t feel socio-culturally threatened in the least.

I felt cared for.

I have never felt cared for by the PQ.

The sooner we erase this clown college from our collective memory the better. The single greatest threat to Québec is the Parti Québécois. Whatever good that may have come from the premiership of René Lévesque (and I would argue strongly that he did good things for our province and our people), has now been completely undone by the ruthlessly regressive, fundamentally racist party that now idolizes him as patron saint.

Frankly, if mon oncle René were alive to see this, he’d disavow the party entirely.

End of rant…