Quebec Anglos Prove We Are Pigs as Well

Two stories last week demonstrated  that Anglo Quebeckers and our English Quebec society are no better than our francophone counterparts when it comes to graft, greed and disdain for the public purse.

First came the news that the English Montreal School Board sent six educators on a jaunt to Hawaii, where they were supposedly boning up  on how to reduce the dropout rate in Montreal high schools.

The School board came under fire for investing $10,000 dollars to send the six to Hawaii and when called to the carpet the wagons were circled to defend the indefensible.
Read: EMSB takes heat for $10K Hawaii trip
Mike Cohen the apologist communications director for the school board assured us with a straight face that there was nothing untoward and given his unique ability to blow smoke up our keesters, might I suggest that he apply for the vacant position of Charlie Sheen's publicist.

We were assured that the educators went to Hawaii to get insight into the problem of high school drop outs.....but;
The reality is that a simple verification of the the conference program guide indicates that the four day conference offered just one brief seminar on the subject. In fact the one and a half hour talk included two other non-related subjects that probably reduced the discussion on the dropout problem  to just one half hour!

In fact after reviewing the entire seminar program, it is abundantly clear that the whole seminar was ill-suited to anything that would be remotely relevant to the EMSB.
See the entire seminar program and judge for yourself. HERE

Of course none of the participants are coming forward to defend themselves and the EMSB isn't offering names. Shame on all involved for conspiring to defraud taxpayers on fair use of our money!

This comes on the heels of another dubious training exercise last year, wherein EMSB educators were sent to the Dominican Republic in the dead of winter to ostensibly study how the locals cope with reduced educational resources. No doubt our teachers learned how to cope with educating a class of sixty in a straw hut with just two pencils allotted for the whole class! Excellent work!
How's that tan?

Read: Stupidity and Greed Cross Language Divide

It didn't bother the school commission then and it certainly doesn't bother them now. Spending money on vacations instead of on the children, seems par for the course.
It goes hand in hand with the general incompetence of the EMSB who last year blew their entire year's security budget in under two months because of their inability to manage the simplest of files.
Read about the sad affair.


Shame on the EMSB!

Next comes the continuing sorry saga of Concordia University where the powers that be have been on an ongoing campaign to sack all those that stand in the way of the 'plan' as designated by the all-powerful board of directors.
These millionaire gentlemen run the school as a private fiefdom and are not averse to ordering the dismissal of anyone that displeases them to the tune of millions of dollars in wrongful termination compensations.
The recently deposed rector, sacked in the middle of her term with a package worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, has been replaced by a more compliant yes-man. Given that the job description includes kowtowing to the whims of the real managers of the the university, one would imagine that he'd come in a bit cheaper.

That being said the University opened the wallet and gave Mr Lowy the most absurd contract, one that included buying his million dollar condo and re-renting it back to him, but not before giving him a $3,000 monthly rental allowance.
Even more absurd is paying the expenses of his better half for university related activities, which includes eating cucumber sandwiches and sipping Kir royal at the annual Christmas Holiday party.
Does it include dress shopping at Holt-Renfrew?

The new rector miscalculated badly when he put his contract online in the interests of transparency.
Not many students or faculty were impressed with his civic call to service, considering the golden conditions.
Read a story on the contract conditions. HERE
If you'd like to be ill see a PDF of the entire contract. 

The questions remains for our community. Will we tolerate these excesses or will we bitch and moan for a while and then get back to our television programs.

I think you know the answer......