The Tories gave the bum’s rush to Erin O’Toole on Wednesday. I won’t miss him, but I have mixed feelings. I prefer the Conservatives to have a weak and bumbling nebbish at the top. It’s when they get mean barracudas like Mulroney or Harper that we have to attache nos tuques.
Updates from February, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Media are nodding to Black History Month: Radio-Canada profiles Frantz Saintellemy of the Université de Montréal, the first Black university chancellor in Quebec. CBC is going big on the Black Changemakers theme all across Canada. Locally they interview sports coach Jamil Springer and Anglo rights leader and onetime politician Marlene Jennings as well as a kids’ feature about a girl championing natural Black hair. CBC promises more pieces on Black people of influence throughout the month.
Metro looks briefly at the programming for Black History Month and at several notable Black historical figures and the paucity of Black figures in the city’s toponymy.
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Kate
The milder weather is more pleasant but it’s going to mean snow starting Thursday evening into Friday. Not sure “up to” 15 cm is fairly called a heavy snowfall, not in these parts. That’s six inches, or – as we’d say in my trade – 36 picas. Un cocktail météo, the mayor calls it.
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Kate
Longueuil folks, enjoy the company of your deer friends in Michel-Chartrand park this summer, because your city is going to slaughter 60 of the 70 animals there this fall.
Blork
Sad, but necessary. The park is a wreck (due to overpopulation of deer and huge swaths of tree death from Asian Ash Borer).
Ten years ago, there was about a 75% chance of seeing a deer or two when I’d walk through the park. Now there is a 100% chance of seeing deer, and about a 75% chance of seeing about 20 so close you can just about touch them. One day last week I saw three pods in three different spots, and each pod had 10-15 deer in it.
They eat all the young tree growth, so there’s no regeneration happening at all. The forest looks dead.
SMD
The venison will be given to local food banks.
Kate
I wondered about that, SMD. Would the meat from animals like this be considered safe to eat?
Anyway, Longueuil still has to get past Anne-France Goldwater.
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Kate
Tuesday night a regular commenter made an offensive remark, then doubled down and reiterated that they had meant to offend. I’ve removed this person’s two comments and pruned the thread to remove or edit a few responses which would otherwise now be missing context, and hope that’s OK with the writers.
I’m grateful to those who alerted me to the comment, which I hadn’t noticed immediately because it was posted just after I’d shut down for the night.
I haven’t invoked the actual banhammer but have asked the commenter to take a break.
Bruno
Great job.
MetaTalk alumni.walkerp
Thanks for the vigilance, Kate. Crappy part of the job. I also appreciate the transparency. Happy to have missed the entire thing but also builds confidence that you share what goes on in the background.
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Kate
Police are reminding the populace to be careful about online purchases after a man was stabbed while trying to sell an iPad. The item is vague on safe places to do such exchanges, but Tuesday’s Global piece on this incident names only police station 20, on Ste‑Catherine near Bishop, and station 46 in Anjou. The pages for these stations on the SPVM site say nothing about this option, though.
It wasn’t so long ago that there were a couple of incidents in my neighbourhood where guys trying to sell phones via online platforms, and taking measures to do the exchange in public, were nonetheless stabbed in the neck by a guy who was later arrested.
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Kate
The city is adding a line to tax accounts this year but it’s not going to change the total. The “taxe relative aux dettes ancienne ville” is simply the part of the total that goes to servicing old debts lingering from before the city merger of 2002.
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Kate
Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce mayor Gracia Kasoki Katahwa, a nurse by profession, pitched in and helped vaccinate people this week.
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Kate
Residents of Tétreaultville are concerned about the effects of the REM on their buildings, already plagued by cracks and fissures. La Presse’s Henri Ouellette-Vézina reveals the emptiness of REM promises here without explicit editorializing. One of only two CAQ MNAs on the island, Richard Campeau, is quoted: “Je vous assure que CDPQ Infra est bien au fait des enjeux de sol que l’on a dans Tétreaultville et y portera une attention particulière” and the CDPQ-Infra spokeswoman says blandly, “en cas de besoin, des mécanismes de dédommagement seront appliqués auprès des citoyens touchés.”
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Kate
Shots were heard Tuesday evening in an alley in Little Italy, but no victims have turned up.
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Kate
An anonymous reader sent me three links: Tuesday’s story about the eviction of 200 elderly people in downtown Montreal, which I wasn’t sure I’d post till seeing this other story of renoviction by the same guy from 2019. It’s offset by a CultMTL story about the guy distributing toys, which now strikes me as on the order of Mike Ward getting into the media for distributing little wooden boxes to the homeless, just as news breaks that Jérémie Gabriel is about to sue him in civil court in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling that Ward did not breach the limits of free speech.
Meezly
Are you deliberately withholding the name of “the guy” to make readers click on link to find out?
Cuz it worked!So you’re saying this Z***v guy was likely trying to offset his guilt from derailing tenants’ lives by donating toys to kiddos?
“What he doesn’t know is that to a columnist who has been writing for the better part of this year about politics, language tension and COVID failures, interviewing him for such a feel-good story feels like a breath of much-needed fresh air.”
I’ve been totally on board with Toula Drimonis’ political pieces, so quite surprised she didn’t do her due diligence in making the connection that he happens to be a big time renovicter. Or she knew but chose not to taint the Z***v feel good piece, which would be hard to believe.
Kate
I suppose over the years I’ve tended to be careful not to include certain people’s names so’s to avoid turning up on Google searches. And yes, I think someone like that will occasionally try to offset assholishness with a gesture. Note the point in Toula’s story that he “found” a lot of toys in a basement, you know?
Yes, I was surprised Toula was so uncritical in that piece too.
MarcG
@Kate: Why do you try to avoid showing up in search results?
Kate
MarcG, there are a few known litigious people around whose names I will not mention, by habit, but it has stretched to being wary of the names of anyone who’s proven themselves to be notably predatory. For example, this guy, and the guy who organized that Sunwing debacle, to hint at two recent people in the news. They do not need to find my blog when ego-googling (as I’m sure they do – or have their people do).
Unlike the media, I haven’t got deep pockets for lawyers if anything were to hit the fan.
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Kate
The car used in her work by Mayor Plante was stolen last week in Ahuntsic. The model, a hybrid 2018 Toyota Highlander, is prized by car thieves in Quebec: this report says it’s unlikely that they even knew it was the mayor’s ride.
Ian
The Highlander isn’t just a car, it’s an SUV. Seems a bit hypocritical of Plante to own an SUV… or to have owned, I should say.
Kate
It’s a hybrid, and I don’t know whether she would technically even own it. Wouldn’t the package offered to the mayor include a vehicle and driver?
I suppose ideally the mayor would walk everywhere, or at least take the metro, but I would imagine that there are at least some days when she needs to get from one engagement to another within a relatively short time. (Or there would have been, pre‑pandemically.) Note that the car was stolen from where her driver lives, which means it wasn’t even in her possession at the time.
I don’t know enough about cars to surmise whether an SUV like that might be more adaptable to whatever security measures a big city mayor needs.
dhomas
It would be difficult for the mayor to get a vehicle that won’t piss someone off. People in her position generally need large-ish vehicles, like an SUV. We unfortunately still live in a very car-centric society, with infrastructure to match. So, she needs a vehicle. If she chose something completely “green” but stayed in the SUV genre, she would be looking at a Tesla Model X or Model Y. At which point she would get criticised for spending too much taxpayer money on luxury vehicles. It’s lose-lose.
Christopher
The mayor doesn’t own the car, the city does, and I’d be curious how much of a say she had in what was actually procured. One of the big lessons from reading Daniel Sanger’s book is how strict bureaucratic protocols are within the government and how much effort it takes for politicians to change them. The car was outfitted with police lights so there are probably other requirements that prevented the city from buying an electric Kia Soul (for example).
dhomas
I own the Kia Soul EV. The backseat is very small. It’s fine for my three kids, but would be quite cramped for adults. The Highlander is a 7-passenger vehicle. The only EVs capable of 7 passengers right now are the Tesla Model X and Y. A hybrid vehicle seems like the only sensible compromise.
Orr
The fact is there are very few full-size cars on the market anymore.Highlander hybrid seems a good compromise between having back seat sized for adult humans and at the same time avoiding the typical US car company’s megasized SUVs.
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Kate
François Legault has backed down and cancelled the planned tax on the unvaccinated.
Update: Legault is also expected to announce further lightening of pandemic measures Tuesday including the reopening of gyms on February 14.
Another update: La Presse says the tax is being cancelled to maintain social peace.
Kevin
Backed down on the vax tax, backed down on vaccination mandates…
The only thing he doesn’t back down on is punishing the people that Quebecer is mad at.jeather
I admit that I am surprised he cancelled the tax so quickly. I was sure he would just let it die quietly instead. I wonder why.
Chris
I don’t think he “backed down”. They were both ploys, and were never actually going to be done.
It succeed in diverting attention, and caused a bump in vaccinations. A good political success really.
I for one am happy Revenue Quebec won’t be getting access to health records, and this is a win for universal health care too, avoiding a slippery slope precedent.
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Kate
Shots were fired in Ahuntsic and Bellerive overnight, at cars and houses, but no victims have turned up.
Also, a man was stabbed in Anjou Monday when meeting someone to sell “an object” off an “online selling platform.” Sometimes the cageyness of modern reporting gets tedious: if he was selling a phone via Kijiji, why not tell us? And yet you don’t tell us whether “the object” was stolen during the attack. Update: Global says it was an iPad sold over Kijiji.
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Kate
Toula Drimonis tears a strip off the Ottawa protest.
Kevin
A person named Noelle has been listening to the convoy internet CB channel, and now I just pity these protesters. They don’t understand anything about anything.
https://twitter.com/Noellenarwhal/status/1488172479721918464
MarcG
Thanks Kevin, that’s gold.
GC
Thanks for that Drimonis piece.
Thomas 17:59 on 2022-02-02 Permalink
I was going to say, we should be careful what we wish for. We’ll be crying for O’Toole to come back once we’ve come to terms with a Pierre Poilievre government based on trucker law.
John B 18:00 on 2022-02-02 Permalink
He seemed like a pretty middle-ish, almost palatable, conservative, to the point where a lot of their election promises last election were to the left of the Liberals. With him out there’s a real chance of someone much more Trumpish coming in.
walkerp 18:12 on 2022-02-02 Permalink
Yes, it is worrisome. I don’t know if Canada can generate an individual with the same media history as Trump, but the model is in place. The frightening thing about the Trump model is that the wealthy and big business will hold their nose and support a Conservative party, even with a lunatic at the helm, because they know ultimately he won’t threaten their wealth. As much as the Liberals are awful, we do have an advantage against Trump tactics here in that generally most big money is okay with them.
Orr 18:14 on 2022-02-02 Permalink
The popular fear is Trumpism, but if you’ve been paying attention the real risk at this moment in history is Orban-ism.
Dominique Anglade should pull a Reverse-Charest and take over the federal conservatives. That party needs someone to counterbalance the CPC’s current western-Canadian-Oil-Party / inmates-running-the-asylum / right-wing-dictatorship tendencies.
Thomas 18:30 on 2022-02-02 Permalink
I fear the membership of the Conservative party has too much power to cede control to a Black, Francophone Quebec woman lol…
It’s funny to think that Maxime Bernier led for 11 out of 12 ballots against Andrew Scheer and only lost the leadership because he wouldn’t give in on his libertarian opinions relative to dairy prices. Had he won, he probably would have remained a normal, run of the mill Tory; and as that rare Quebecer to be popular in the West, he might even have elected a government at some point. Now we have to pray to God that he never does
Kevin 20:50 on 2022-02-02 Permalink
At some point parties will relearn that Canadians need time to warm up to political leaders.
Dominic 22:49 on 2022-02-02 Permalink
Canadians are *generally* more liberal, if you combine the Liberals, the NDP, and the Greens, thats a pretty wide swath of the population. Far right parties in a 5 party system are going to have some trouble getting seats (see PPC) at least in the short term.
dhomas 08:00 on 2022-02-03 Permalink
I agree with Thomas that Maxime Bernier probably could have led the CPC to better results, and possibly even victory. (I disagree with the praying to God part, though. ). I ran some numbers on federal elections yesterday. It’s almost always better to run a candidate from Quebec. In modern times (the past ~54 years or so), Canada has had 4 PMs from Quebec, 2 from Ontario, and 1 from Alberta. But that’s only part of it: in those years, a Quebecer has won the federal election 12 times, an Ontarian 4 times, and an Albertan 1 time.
Time spent in office:
Quebec: 41 years
Ontario: 12 years
Alberta: 1 year
Maxime Bernier could have been next in line. I’m thankful he was not chosen to lead the CPC, even more so now that we’ve seen his true colours.
(Numbers are approximate, Wikipedia math, and exclude non-elected, appointed PMs)
Meezly 10:19 on 2022-02-03 Permalink
“Social conservative and anti-abortion activists celebrated O’Toole’s decisive defeat. O’Toole’s efforts to drag the party to the centre on social issues — the party suppressed debate on abortion during the last Conservative policy convention, for example — alienated some Conservative ground troops.”
Was he really that weak and bumbling? I haven’t paying much attention but he seemed to be trying to bring the conservative party to the 21st century, or the late 20th at best! I heard that the ones who voted to oust him were essentially from the party’s religious faction, frustrated by unanimous adoption of the ban on conversion therapy before Christmas.
Bob R 11:34 on 2022-02-03 Permalink
What I write here is not about what is right and what is wrong, but about what is going to happen. The Conservatives had the highest number of votes nationwide in the last Federal election (5.74M vs 5.56M for the Liberals). The far right CPP got 0 seats on 0.84M of the votes). Where, exactly, does a Conservative Party to the right of O’Toole think it is going to get its votes? Thin air? Forget defying politics – it defies mathematics.
So I see fertile ground for a schism on the right.
Thomas 12:58 on 2022-02-03 Permalink
It’s because O’Toole was the candidate of the hard-right against Peter MacKay, so the hardcore base of the party felt betrayed when he tried to move the party to the centre after winning the leadership. The poor dears
JaneyB 14:36 on 2022-02-03 Permalink
Quebeckers will not vote for a non-Quebecker who heads a federal party eg: Layton was from Hudson so he stood a chance. For the CPC, Mulroney had a chance. Let’s hope anti-carbon tax Pierre Poilievre is too annoying even for Quebec conservatives.
Myles 18:39 on 2022-02-03 Permalink
Poilievre is from Alberta and has never lived in Quebec.
Thomas 18:43 on 2022-02-03 Permalink
Pierre Poilievre is from Alberta and is currently occupying the Ottawa area. With a few of his pals… 😉
(in all seriousness, I believe he moved to Ottawa to work for Stockwell Day and fell in love with the place such that he never left)