Month: July 2005

After his failure last week to unseat Paul Martin’s minority Liberal government, Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper had a few words for Québec, mostly about a purported disappointment that of all Québec MPs only the separatists voted against the government. None of this was much of a surprise, even though his attempt to topple Martin was quite obviously the result of much collusion between his Conservatives and Gilles Duceppe’s Bloc Québécois.

After that however, Harper went on to practically apologize for his party not having a strong base in Québec and assure us that he would make greater efforts to grow the PC brand in La Belle Province.

I guffawed a little when I heard this — spoken, incidentally, in surprisingly flawless French. It did serve to tell me and others something tangible, and that’s the fact that Mr. Harper just doesn’t get it. He hasn’t got a clue about Québec politics. It’s not a question of making an effort; he can try as much as he likes, but like it or not Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are very unlikely to ever make much headway here.

We know he’s tried. Earlier this year the Conservative Party held its first policy convention in Montréal, but as surprised no one the French bits of the conference were few and far between. That’s not even the problem, though. The trouble with Harper is that this province doesn’t like his party, and it doesn’t like him. Additionally we “Quebs” (as we are often known in the rest of Canada) have a history of only backing parties led by one of us.

This series of articles will examine those three aspects of the question in more detail.

1 – It’s your party

Québec’s national slogan is “Je me souviens.” “I remember.” While it’s a very small bit taken out of a much larger quote — we seem to have inherited at least part of the legendary verbosity of the French — it’s also an indicator of our long national memory. As such it’s hardly surprising that we just don’t buy into the “Conservative” image of the party. To us, the CP is and has always been the Reform Party, a Western Canadian, anti-multiculturalist, anti-francophone and anti-Québec party. They are well aware of this, and have twice in the past 10 years attempted to shed their rather negative party image, once by just renaming themselves to “Canadian Alliance”, and then less than two years ago by absorbing the smaller Progressive Conservative party, mostly to acquire the “Conservative” label. The decision to ditch “Progressive” astonished no one. They’re not fooling anyone, or in any case they’re not fooling us.

Since its latest inception the CP has struggled to become the Canadian counterpart to the American Republican party. The party’s policies seem to have aligned themselves nicely with the GOP’s, as has its message to the populace. Its public appeals have increasingly been about “moral” issues of concern to the party’s fundamentalist Protestant base. They’re a well-known enemy of legalizing same-sex marriage, and were they to come to power when it has already been legalized they would invoke the infamous “notwithstanding” clause of the Canadian constitution to make it illegal again. And surely we can forget about the decriminalization of marijuana under a Harper government, and instead see the implementation of the ruinous and disastrous policies of the American “War on (some) Drugs”, just as we are sure to see a strong realignment of Canada’s policies on firearms to closely reflect American feelings on the matter — now that we have paid for the horrendously-expensive national firearms registry the Conservative party would just scrap it. That’s actually the first item they list in the “Safe Communities” section of their web site. Incidentally, am I the only one to find this ironic?

There is also a palpable sense that Harper wants to bring Canada back to the old days of subservience to American interests. Harper himself is on record as recommending that Canadian troops be sent to Iraq — he has voted in Parliament against NOT recommending it — and there is a not-unreasonable idea that if he were to come to power our boys in uniform could consider themselves signed up for any future American military adventure overseas. There is also a certainty here that a Harper government would hand George Bush carte blanche over Canadian territory when it comes to testing space-based weapons, something else Quebec voters are strongly against. Harper and the Conservatives have been trying to deny this, but as the saying goes “the proof’s in the pudding” — and they are on record as supporting those two things.

All this adds up to a situation where the Conservative Party’s hopes of progress in Québec are quixotic at best.

For a start, we’re the most liberal people in Canada (and I mean small-l liberal). As a province we’re comfortably to the left of everyone else in the country; while British Columbia might have a reputation as fairly “out there”, the impression stems from the behaviour of a vocal few in the city of Vancouver; the Conservative party has quite a few MPs from BC’s non-urban areas. By contrast, Reform and Conservative strongholds Manitoba and Alberta are the most staunchly morally conservative areas in Canada.

Maybe it’s because we’re overwhelmingly Catholic here, but we’re big into the “love your neighbor” and not so crazy about the more Protestant “thou shalt not”‘s. When the issue of same-sex marriage came up we were the first to say “why not?” I didn’t say were weren’t lapsed Catholics. Our tolerance of marijuana is also pretty legendary, and it’s not uncommon to nose a burning joint while taking a stroll down Saint-Denis street.

So, in retrospect, we’re not the types who’ll go for a socially conservative party.

Now if there’s something we dislike even more than Western moral conservatism, it’s America’s imperial and imperious policies. We don’t want any part of Iraq, Iran, or whatever other militaristic folly has crossed George Bush’s mind, nor are we interested in their “star wars” weapons program. We also don’t care about whatever objections Americans can have over same-sex marriage and the decriminalization of marijuana (and by and large we think Paul Cellucci can f*ck off). In all these areas the Conservatives have allied themselves with Americans, and in all these areas Québec disagrees.

In that sense one could say that we only think there are two things wrong with the Conservative party — their domestic policies and their foreign policies.

That, grosso modo, is why we don’t like the Conservative party. In the next installment of this series we will see how the people of the Conservative Party — including, but not limited to, Mr. Harper himself — present yet another obstacle to their making political gains in Québec.

Understanding Joshua. This is the creepiest art project I’ve ever seen. Have a look and see if you don’t agree with me on that.

Hitler drawings, Xmas wishes to be put on the auction block. Just the thing for the person in your life who has everything except a sense of history.

Rove’s lawyer admits his client was one the one leaked the identity of CIA agent Plame. The perjury rap would seem to be a pretty ‘open-and-close’ case then (the article states he denied having any such conversation), but what about the main charge of disclosing the identity of an undercover CIA agent?

Faced with actual complaints from customers, Dell shuts down its customer service forum. This reminds me of an old joke by Monty Python — “I hate to see a grown man cry, so shove off would you?”

Stephen Harper just isn’t a very likeable guy.

It’s true. Much as he would rework his image into that of a personable and in-charge statesman, Stephen Harper comes across to the general population as a conniving, shake-your-hand-with-his-right-hand-while-stabbing-you-with-his-left kind of politician. The guy has a charisma deficit, and in that he seems to have inherited some sort of Reform curse. The closest the party has ever come to having a charismatic leader was when Preston Manning was leader, and even then it was said that his voice was much too shrill — and his much-publicized attempts at “remaking his image” (which apparently consisted mostly of wearing all denim all the time) was the object of much derision. To be honest, Preston Manning’s tenure as head of the Reform Party was also marked by the humiliating 1993 elections which resulted in the Block Québécois becoming “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.”

That being said, Harper is somewhat symptomatic of the ongoing efforts by the Conservative Party to “de-Reformify” its image. The previous attempt to do this, known to this day as the “Stockwell Day disaster”, worked no better. In both cases those efforts culminated in a party leader who just wasn’t a good fit for the party. In Day’s case — he became the first leader of the Canadian Alliance shortly after the party changed names — the man ended up being dogged by very silly rumors about his sexuality (he was often derisively referred to as “Doris Day”) which were based, as far as I can tell, on the man’s slight build, close-cropped hair, and on a few uproariously badly-planned PR appearances (in one of those he was wearing a wetsuit, and that provided Canadian political satirists with material which remained in use long past Day’s party leadership was over and done with).

In Stephen Harper the part has again erred, but in a markedly different direction. It now has a leader who is a strong neo-conservative and is quite aggressive about it. The problem is that the Conservatives have failed to do what the American Republicans have had the good sense to do, which is to keep the doctrinaire intellectuals — like Harper — behind the scenes, and offer up a benign, intellectually-nebulous but sincere-seeming figurehead from the outside to put up as someone that “soft” conservative voters can get behind.

It’s a bit of a “Prince Myshkin” theory of neoconservative politics. Just as Dostoievsky’s protagonist was necessary because everyone knew him as an idiot, George W. Bush is needed to the GOP precisely *because* he can’t pronounce — or, sometimes, even understand — many of the words he is called upon to say frequently (“disassemble” is not a synonym of “dissemble”, Mr. President). He is desperately needed as the guy who never apologizes for anything because it’s actually quite conceivable that he has little or no understanding of the things he should be sorry for. He’s needed as the example of the simple person, the “straight shooter”, largely on the basis that he could, in the public’s eye, conceivably be unable to be so imaginative as to think up a lie or fudge the truth.

Basically the GOP has been fantastically successful in putting up the all-image, no-substance candidate everyone could at least feel equal (if not superior) to. Taking someone who is, intellectually, an “empty vessel” and making him the front man for intellectuals and industrialists who really run the show behind the scenes — Wolfowitz, Perle, and the energy industry — was the perfect strategy. None of the people running the show (e.g. Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) were even remotely electable, so in order for them to hold sway in Washington they had to dredge up a guy who couldn’t be attacked on any issue of substance (having nothing of substance) but seemed like a forced-into-honesty, straightforward kind of guy.

The success of the strategy makes one wonder why the Conservatives made Harper their leader in the first place. He’s a rather cold intellectual with just enough charisma to play to his party’s base, but not enough to bring in new blood. He’s also reportedly quite autocratic and quick to dismiss criticism — something quoted by MP Belinda Stronach as the main reason she crossed the floor to become a Liberal MP. Harper has also been known to sacrifice known assets for reasons of pure doctrine, a tendency which has led to his downfall in the May vote as scorned ex-Reformer Independent MP Chuck Cadman (who passed away on Saturday July 9th) cast the deciding vote in favor of the Liberals and against the Conservatives. Cadman was hung out to dry by Harper when the Conservative association in his riding stripped him of the candidacy (although he was a sitting MP) in favor of a more right-wing candidate. Harper’s refusal to intervene was a callous, short-sighted move which cost him dearly.

It’s all about chickens coming home to roost for the politically-tone-deaf Harper, who should actually be glad to have lost the vote — for all the revelations of “Adscam” Harper and the Conseratives made zero gains outside the West in opinion polls, which is remarkable. It’s also a proof that for all the resentment about Liberals and their sponsorship shenanigans, the four scariest words in the Canadian vocabulary remain “Prime Minister Stephen Harper”.

Of course it’s not only Harper that scares Québec. While the party has tried of late to present a multicultural image — largely by thrusting into the national spotlight their MPs which come from non-WASP background — it continues to be the party most directly associated with two of its most famous and long-standing members: Art Hanger and Myron Thompson.

The unfortunately-named Hanger, whose Commons seat dates back to the beginnings of Reform, is most famous for what must be Reform’s most damaging public gaffe. In 1994 an American teenager named Michael Fay made the news for all the wrong reasons. As a result of a conviction for vandalism Fay was sentenced to be punished by caning with a bamboo cane. This is a savage, brutal practice which breaks the skin and leaves lacerations and scars on the convict’s buttocks, arguably so the pain can keep reminding the person of the consequences of his actions. This was the subject of much condemnation at the time. But, apparently, not to Reform Party Art Hanger, who organized a “fact-finding expedition” to Singapore in order to study that particular form of punishment and see how it could be applied to Canada.

So enthusiastic was Hanger for whipping men’s behinds that he hardly needed to actually go over and conduct his investigations; he was quite firmly on the record as approving of the savage practice: “I suspect flogging straightens up behaviour by jolting a criminal into reality … Compare it to our system, which provides no deterrence and is little more than a revolving door … Is corporal punishment extreme? … I don’t think so” (Art Hanger, in Alberta Report, April 1996). After the outrage that followed the disclosure of the Reform Caucus’s plans to send a delegation of six, not to mention many a whispered rumor that — for all the righteous posturing — Reform had become a haven for twisted BSDM freaks looking to get their kicks on the Canadian taxpayer’s tab, Preston Manning put his foot down and shelved the plan.

As an aside, as many Canadians know, when Preston Manning is the reasonable one in your party, you’re in trouble.

Hanger’s rather unsual taste for blood (or is it taste for unusual prurient practices?) doesn’t appear to have cost him any support in his constituency (almost 10 years later, he is still a sitting MP)… nor, apparently, have the outrageously intolerant off-the-cuff comments he has made in the past (like asking a Toronto shop owner “Do you notice that in Toronto there has been increased crime from certain groups, like Jamaicans?”, for instance). Apparently Reform’s strongholds in WASPy neighborhoods are more “thou shalt not”‘s than “love thy neighbor” indeed.

Myron Thompson is a different beast altogether. The man is the embodiment of the term “country bumpkin”, intellectually and physically (quite possibly a case of nature exercising some truth in advertizing).

The man is from a small country seat and has so far been quoted as saying exactly the sort of thing you’d expect someone of his standing to say. He denies being anti-gay, but his speech is infected with all the stereotypes that the loony right has been belching forward for years, for instance: “I’m not opposed to gays, but if you bring one of those suckers into my school and they try to push their crap on my students, I have a problem with that.” (1994). He also can’t keep going on about how it is “wrong”, “unnatural”, “immoral”, and how homosexuality is something he will object to forever. One of his most famous quotes on record is a bizarre Santorum-like rant about how homosexuality is the same as a host of sex crimes: “We have said all along, and I have said all along, that this (topic of same-sex marriage) is a door to slippery slope. What’s next? Polygamist? What about child rights? Where is this going to end?” (2005). Oddly enough on the subject of child rights, he proposes lowering the age at which a minor may be tried as an adult to ten. It wasn’t even a one-shot thing: less than a month previously Myron blessed us with this “gem”: “I’m saying with this a door opening to a slippery slope. What’s next? Shall we say it’s okay to have six or seven wives, even if some of them are 13-years-old? Where does it end?”.

Perhaps all this pettiness and paranoia does not stem from inner meanness. It may in fact be better to understand that Myron’s small-mindedness and stunted intellect isn’t something he’s capable of doing much about.

Now lest you should think that it’s only the older members of the party that seem somewhat unsavory, it should also be noted that the more recent arrivals to the Conservative lineup also raise interesting questions. I’m thinking in particular of Surrey, BC MP Gurmant Grewal, who announced just before the May’s confidence vote that he had taped evidence of the Liberals attempting to buy his parliamentary vote. Now, that story was extremely fishy from the start. Things aren’t getting much better with time either. An expert is already on record as having determined that the tape had been altered, and since the official investigation began Mr. Grewal has been dogged with rumors of strange behaviour. He has been “put on stress leave” in June. It’s already clear that Grewal initiated the whole thing as a so-called “sting operation”, and given the questionable aspects of it one may well guess that Grewall feels his gig is up. Since the affair is still under investigation one can only speculate, but right now the idea that Grewal is “damaged goods” is the understatement of the millenium. His wife, also an MP, has so far not broken her complete silence about the controversy, which isn’t helping his increasing image problem.

Adding to his problems are Grewal’s own boasts of being an advisor to Liberian dictator Samuel Doe, and of having been “Honorary vice-consul of Liberia in Canada”, which he is now very quiet about for some reason.

With all this, one gets the feeling that Mr. Grewal will not be a part of the Canadian political landscape for much longer. With the Parliamentary system being what it is, it’s hard to imagine that all that many people would vote for someone whose trustworthiness is, at best, shaky.

So, who best represents the Conservatives? Is it the cold intellectual neo-conservative who’ll drop proven assets to achieve a red-state, evangelical vision of Canada like Mr. Harper? Is it a closet sadist who thought that bamboo-caning people for minor offenses was a nifty idea, like Mr. Hanger? Is it the political neanderthal who is incapable of seeing that sexual relations between consenting adults is different from pedophilia, bigamy and bestiality, like Mr. Thompson? Or is it an overly ambitious but muddle-headed MP with big ideas but little notion of how quickly creative audio editing can be spotted, like Mr. Grewal?

On this question Québec chooses E — “none of the above”.

Here’s your chance to preview the next version of the clevershark.com web site. I’ll try and keep the content reasonably synchronized (it’s on different databases). This is in testing until I work out the backward-compatibility aspect of it.

A French bus operator is taking a bunch of cleaning ladies to court for carpooling. Evidently “Transports Schiocchet Excursions” specializes in bullying the little guy. According to the Guardian article their service is pretty shite as well. Those arses deserve a right kicking — if you live in an area served by Transports Schiocchet Excursions (apparently those parts of France that neighbor Luxembourg), why not carpool this week? Let the company know where you stand by hitting them in the wallet.

Up until today I was running this site on MySQL 5.0.4, but it suddenly and unexplainedly stopped working at some point today without my making any changes. This is very strange. Clearly my application isn’t the problem, since I was able to just drop in the latest beta and get things going again right away.

Since I got settled here I’ve gotten used to one channel I could never get with Cablevision in Hoboken: Fox Sportsworld. That channel, I could swear, was started and run by Englishmen for Englishmen abroad, because the “sport” in “sportsworld” is inevitably football. Yup, you heard me correctly, football. As in, the game where you move the ball with your feet. Personally, I can’t get enough of it, and it’s been particularly exciting in the past few weeks, which have (as usual) marked the tail end of the European football seasons. There is still a hotly-contested race in Italy where Juventus is currently giving AC Milan a run for their money in Serie A, but generally it’s been settled already.

In England, everything was settled about a week and a half ago as Chelsea beat their host Bolton 2-nil to clinch the Premiership title (their first in 50 years). And, as a Chelsea fan, I say “well done!”. It’s nice to see loyalty finally pay off after following the team’s travails for the past 14 years. Arsenal’s strong-but-not-quite-so-strong-as-last-year’s record had them clinch the 2nd spot this past weekend, with powerhouse Manchester United finishing 3rd and relative top-ranks newcomer Everton rounding up the Champions’ League final (so far) spot in 4th place, no mean achievement for a team which traded away their star player (Rooney) to Man U at the beginning of the season.

With the top four places already settled this week’s Tuesday and Wednesday Premiership matches were, place-wise, meaningless, but in the end it wasn’t quite so. First, the Tuesday match between Chelsea and Manchester United. As previously mentioned, there was practically no chance of any rank change as a result of that match; that doesn’t mean nothing was at stake though. There you had the last two Premiership sides undefeated at home, meeting at Old Trafford with Man U hungry for a score against the Blues; and score first they did, on a Van Nistelrooy tip-in from a Rooney pass. That was brilliantly played. The crowd went wild… for 10 minutes, until Tiago took a seemingly-benign shot from 30 yards out which United keeper Carroll just incredulously stared at until it had hit the back of the net. Even Jose Mourinho, captured on camera from the sidelines, looked at that shot with a “WTF?” expression on his face. It was just priceless.

The second half started off on the same fevered pitch until the 60th minute when Tiago made a brilliant pass to Gudjohnsen which seemed to go right through United star Rio Ferdinand, and which the Icelander gently chipped over a sliding Roy Carroll for the go-ahead goal which seemed to knock most of the steam out of the United fans. Chelsea then became a veritable blue defensive wall that Manchester United just couldn’t cut through, even as Scholes was granted a penalty kick right on the edge of the Blues’ penalty area. Roman’s Army, as they are known, didn’t rest on their laurels and managed to score a lucky third goal at 82 minutes — lucky because Cole (the scorer) was pretty obviously offside. Still, it didn’t matter in the end, and Man U was forced to swallow the bitter pill of their first home defeat of the season. Overall it was a brilliant game, although the yellow cards were flying in the second half.

The same really can’t be said of Arsenal’s 7-nil shellacking of Everton at Highbury, which, to be honest, had to be the least interesting football match I’ve ever seen. The story of the match was really how Everton never quite showed up for this one. I’m no expert in Premiership football — in fact I’m a fairly late-comer to it, at least compared to my former British co-workers in New Jersey who were reared on the game from the cradle — but this was the most one-sided game I’ve ever heard of, much less seen. Dennis Bergkamp was clearly the man of the match there with an amazing three assists to top his 77th-minute goal. Frankly the game ceased to be interesting 6 minutes into the second half when Pires scored Arsenal’s fourth goal. I remember thinking “now, this is just cruel” when Edu scored on the penalty. I just had to laugh when the sixth and seventh goals were scored. Even the most ardent Gunners fan had to feel at least a little sorry for Toffee keeper Richard Wright who evidently had no backup whatsoever from his defenders. Hey, at least Arsenal players had an unprecedented chance to top up their goal records for the season.

Still, the point is that it was dull. Deadly dull… which brings me to the point of all this (finally!): high scoring doesn’t make things interesting, far from it. The Americans who complain about “soccer”‘s low scores just don’t get it; to them a nil-nil draw must mean that nothing interesting happened on the field, when that’s rarely the case. Case in point — the two Chelsea games against Liverpool in the Champions’ League semi-final. Two games, a single goal (Liverpool won the second game 1-0), but nonetheless it was 180 minutes of extremely interesting football. Same goes for the nil-nil draw between Chelsea and Arsenal at Stamford Bridge: fans saw a solid game of constant attacking-and-defending which, though it was a bit frustrating — I would have expected more Chelsea late-season goals, especially when they had a whopping 9 four-goal games in the 2004-2005 campaign — was nonetheless a brilliant display of athleticism from both sides.

The message here is really that scoring in football is naturally low, and that it’s just plain stupid to try and divorce low scoring from the game in a futile attempt to “jazz it up”. A result like 7-nothing — or indeed, any game where the score of one side exceeds 4 — isn’t something that’ll keep anyone’s interest for very long. An obscenely high result like 7-nil doesn’t tell me that the Arsenal attackers were playing brilliantly, it tell me that the Everton defense sucked hard in a game which was admittedly meaningless and completely unrepresentative of the team’s performance in this past season. Let the Americans have their basketball and its triple-digit scores; when people say that you can tune into a basketball game in the fourth quarter and miss nothing significant, they’re not kidding. As for myself I’ll stick with football, and I cross my fingers in the hope that I’ll never have to make do without Fox Sportsworld in my cable lineup again.