Every year in Quebec, as the July 1st moving day approaches, thousands of animals are left behind, as their human parents feel obliged to move […]
Month: June 2012
Quebec court rejects emergency injunction against Bill 78
Quebec Superior Court Chief Justice François Rolland on Wednesday rejected a motion filed by Quebec’s student associations asking for an emergency injunction against certain elements of Quebec’s contentious Bill 78. In a twenty-one page decision released late Wednesday afternoon, Rolland found that the students case had the “appearance of right”, but failed to meet the two other criteria for this type of emergency injunction, namely “irreparable prejudice” and “balance of inconvenience”.
Mind the Gap
In the 1942 classic Casablanca, a scene early in the film pits Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) against Nazi Major Heinrich Strasser in a test of Blaine’s cynical neutrality. Strasser asks Blaine if he can imagine the German army in New York, to which Blaine cooly answers: “Well there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.” The same could now be said of Montreal, only instead of territorial New Yorkers, German Panzer divisions would have to navigate the Montreal’s rapidly eroding streets…
On Queers Against Israeli Apartheid & Pinkwashing
A queer group that labels itself with a contentious term—apartheid—that then can’t explain to the general public why queer people have anything to do with it, is destined to fail. And this is unfortunate, because they do have important ideas—criticizing ‘pinkwashing’ being the most important
The Wrong Shade of Green
Earth Summit 2012: World powers are too preoccupied with austerity and corporate growth to care about environmental sustainability
Bombshells left and right at hearings into political corruption in Quebec
The picture pained by Duchesneau and his colleagues this week is of municipal and provincial political parties where corruption is not the exception, but the rule. They outlined a political system driven by illegal contributions, where corruption is known about and encouraged at the highest levels
Farewell Montreal Mirror
In what surely is a peak time for Montreal culture, with festivals and marches everywhere, the city as a whole and the English-speaking progressive and artistic communities in particular suffered a major loss yesterday. After 27 years, the Montreal Mirror abruptly stopped publication. News came first from a press release by Sun Media, a division of the Mirror’s parent company Quebecor. Then the alt weekly’s site redirected to a message from the editors thanking readers and contributors and stating that…
June 22: Things are coming up Charest
With another day of action against tuition hikes planned for this afternoon – the sequel for similar actions on the 22nd of March and May – I spent the June 21 combing few some of the recent polls to try and get an idea of where all this madness has left us politically
South Africa’s transition to democracy could have served as a model for Egypt
There’s reason to believe that the fledgling democracy in the largest Arabic country in the world is in grave peril. Sadly, more than a year after the Egyptian people rose up in revolt and overthrew the kleptocratic regime of Hosni Mubarak, in a relatively peaceful revolution, the remnants of the old deeply corrupt establishment are coming back to haunt them… Why the architects of the revolution didn’t look to the South African model for making the transition democracy with a strong set of checks and balances, is beyond me
Mixed feelings at Berlin’s gay memorial
Of all the feelings I thought I’d have at a memorial to gay Holocaust victims, shame was the furthest from my mind. Yet it’s exactly what I felt