Pauline Marois' Losing Conditions and Other Nonsense

So it's Friday and perhaps time to wrap up the week with a couple of mini-stories that don't have enough girth to merit a separate post. 

Pauline Marois Declares negotiating strategy

One of the most basic rules of negotiating is not to let your opponent know your strategy beforehand. It's something Pauline Marois apparently never learned, but perhaps should have, considering that her strategy to win support for sovereignty is so ridiculous.
Madame Marois has told a PQ meeting that since 'winning conditions' don't seem to be in the offing any time soon, she'll boost support for sovereignty by entering into bad faith negotiations with Ottawa, the purpose of which is to end up in protracted arguments that will somehow fuel support for sovereignty.

"....she intends to make demands for new powers within Canadian federalism in such fields as culture in the hope they will be refused, provoking crises in Quebec-Ottawa relations that will boost support for secession.
"We're finished with the winning conditions," she told a PQ regional convention," LINK

Pauline Marois: "Mr. Harper, I demand that we enter into negotiations to return more power to Quebec and I'm telling you right now that I won't agree to anything, no matter what!"

Stephen Harper: "Hmm...."

Anybody else see any problem with this plan?

Language cops get new Boss

The Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) got a new boss Louise Marchand who is promising renewed vigor and more transparency in protecting the French language.
What's interesting about this?....nothing at all.

But I wanted to publish her picture because she looks like a corpse and has a smile worthy of the WAX museum...... eeeks..

Amir Khadir gets a taste of his own medicine

For someone who has tried to  have a myriad of anti-Israel motions passed in Quebec's Parliament, the  Assemblee nationale, Amir Khadir felt the sting of being the object of just such a motion himself.

A motion put forward by all three of the other political parties representing all the members of the House except for Mr. Khadir, condemned the boycott of the shoe store by the left wing organization PAJU.

To add insult to injury the motion reiterated the Parliament's support for the cooperation agreement with Israel signed by the government of Israel several years ago. LINK

"Although blocked by the sole member of Québec solidaire, "said Director General of Quebec/Israel Committee, Luciano G. Del Negro, "this motion is not only a stinging disavowal and consensus of the campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel promoted by Mr. Amir Khadir and his political party (Quebec solidaire), but a rejection of the Zionist ideological war that Mr. Khadir has brought to the National Assembly and into the street. ""

Mr. Khadir was forced to deny the unanimous consent required to debate the motion, the only member to do so. It was a humiliating comeuppance.

In a statement released on the Quebec solidaire website, Khadir complained that the motion was flawed;

"The motion by the member for Shefford in support of Le Marcheur shop was misleading in consideration that the boycott of the store by a group of citizens ended two weeks ago."

But alas, Amir couldn't even get that right!

PAJU, the group organizing the protest is back outside Le Marcheur once again, after taking a two week break.

Separatist online petition's ignominious end

The over-hyped online petition demanding Premier Charest's resignation came to an ignominious end when the government refused to table the printout. Pierre Moreau, the brand new  Minister of intergovernmental Affairs refused to accept the petition because according to him, 'it contained a fatal flaw' in that it demanded that the parliamentarians do what they could not legally do, that is, fire  Premier Charest. The opposition parties were furious to see the petition dumped so frivolously and lashed out angrily. LINK

Asked to comment on the petition Premier Charest shrugged it off, remarking; "Didn't Rick Mercer get 600,000 names for Stockwell Day to change his name to Doris?"  LINK

The PQ and the Bloc solidaire were all agog over the 250,000 signatures, but considering that over a million people voted for the PQ in the last election, getting a quarter of them to sign a partisan petition online was not much of an achievement.
The petition was, so to speak, not worth the paper it wasn't written on!

Steve Brosseau, the organizer of the petition promised to also organize a demonstration in front of Parliament. After testing the waters to gauge how many people would actually show up, he backed off when he realized very few would actually attend. LINK

Earl Jones likely to sit in jail....

Passage of the government's crime law Bill-C59, which I've affectionately dubbed as "Earl's Law" has raised a level of controversy between legalists as to whether the elimination of the 1/6 provision for parole can be applied retroactively to Earl Jones.
According to a bar expert, Stephen Sineberg, the law's retroactive nature may be anti-constitutional in that it modifies an already existing sentence. Prisoners who accepted a plea 'deal' in exchange for an expectation of early parlole are now seeing the government modifying that possibility after the fact. LINK{FR}

But a criminal lawyer aware of the Earl Jones case has told me that he is pretty sure that the law will hold up and poor Earl will be incarcerated in the big house for at least 44 months.
His interpretation of the effect of 'Earl's law' is somewhat different from Mr. Sineberg's. Here's what I've been told.

A prisoner's sentence cannot be modified once handed down. That means, should the law change and the amount of jail time for a certain crime be modified, it cannot affect the previously convicted.

That being said, how a prisoner serves his sentence is flexible and to some extent up to the parole board. A prisoner who has been given a 10 year sentence may serve 5 years in prison and 5 on parole. Another may serve 3 in prison and 7 on parole. In both cases the criminals will be deemed to have served their entire sentence.
If Earl Jones serves 1/6 of his sentence in jail and the rest on parole or if he serves 2/3 of his sentence behind bars and the rest on parole, he will he have been deemed to have fulfilled his sentence, as well.

Many criminals that go into jail don't know exactly when their parole will start, or if they will be getting parole at all, and Earl Jones is no exception.
The key is, that he'll serve his full original sentence, but how many years on parole or in jail, is up to authorities.
And so the new provisions of the law do not modify his actual sentence. They modify parole conditions which are at any rate flexible to begin with.

This week, The Truth in Sentencing Act, which came into effect last year survived its first judicial challenge. An Ontario judge ruled that abolishing the 2-for-1 sentencing credit that offenders received for time served before their sentence was constitutional. LINK

Montreal City councillors vote in favour of boycott

In reaction to a motion put forward by the Montreal mayor opposing the boycott of the Montreal shoe store LE MARCHEUR, for selling Israeli shoes, Louise Harel and her gang voted in favour of those persecuting the small Montreal merchant. She repeated the hackneyed leftist position that Israel is comparable to apartheid South Africa. Her opposition to the motion was supported by her entire Vision Montreal team as well as about half the councillors on Projet Montreal team..
The motion passed 38-16, but not before some heated debates in council.
In supporting a stupid and meaningless assault on a small merchant, Madame Harel has validated Montrealers view that she remains a dangerous leftist ideologue bitch politician.  LINK

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Let me end the week on a bit of a humorous note.
Failqc.com is a relatively new website that you should click on at least once a week to get a nice laugh.

Inspired by the FAIL genre that features the less than successful achievements, it focuses on the dubious  aspects of Quebec life. I've pulled out a few examples that are somehow related to language and the French/English thing. Enjoy.

By the way, for those who don't speak French I've provided an explanation when necessary.

Seen in Ottawa. Sorry, if you don't actually speak French, I can't help you with this one. Ha ha!!!!

Translation FAILS are more common than you'd think, especially when the manufacturer uses GOOGLE to translate or some other online translation software. Hey, don't laugh the RCMP is no better... LINK

This last video is just plain devastatingly funny. For late-nighters, Call-TV is a mind-numbing time-wasting television show that is best watched under the influence. The presenters try anything to get people to participate in the moronic games meant to suck you in to making a toll 1-900 call.

Here, the hostess pretends that she is pissed-off that nobody is calling in and exhorts the audience to call-in to express displeasure with the producer, who she purportedly wants to have fired for coming up with such lame games.

It's a great example of why Quebec French is as expressive as any language in the world.

This piece is appropriately called;

"On peut-tu crisser le fucking producteur dewors?!"

Have a very good weekend!