Who's to blame for tragic Quebec fire?
I want to express my condolences and those of the general community of this blog to the families of those who perished in the tragic fire in a seniors home in the small town of L'ISLE-VERTE, situated on the Gaspe peninsula, between Rivere du Loup and Trois-Pistoles. I've often driven past the town, but never stopped in, it is really just a slip of a town, and even when driving down the coast road (Hwy 132) it's easy to miss. I don't think I'm being presumptuous in saying that everyone on this blog is saddened by the horrific tragedy. Most of the victims were in their eighties and too feeble to flee.
There is a story of a man rushing to save his mother who was screaming on a third floor balcony, only to perish before his eyes as his ladder reached only two stories. Read a BBC story on the tragedy
Sadly, it seems that every public issue in Quebec has a federalist or sovereigntist bent to it, no matter how trivial or ridiculous it all seems. If the ceiling fell down in a conference room where Quebec politicians were meeting with their federal counterparts, there's no doubt that the two groups would start blaming each other for the debacle. Such was the case in the Lac Megantic train disaster where separatists railed against Ottawa for its lack of regulation and enforcement of rules, using the tragedy for crass political bashing.
While there's no doubt that the federal Department of Transport was remiss in a number of critical areas, accidents do happen and blaming federalism for the disaster, somehow a little sad and disrespectful to victims.
For months after the train disaster the pages of sovereigntist websites bashed Ottawa and federalism mercilessly, somehow alluding that the disaster is proof that federalism doesn't work.
Now we are faced with another sad disaster, a simple but deadly fire in a senior's residence in a small Quebec town that took the lives of over 30 retirees.
Unlike the Lac Megantic disaster, which was completely out of the ordinary, fire is something that is a recognized danger, something that we can and should plan for.
This doesn't seem to be the case in this fire, where an old wooden building wasn't equipped with sprinklers, a tragic occurrence, considering the lack of mobility of the occupants, most of whom were over 85 years old.
The residence wasn't obliged by law to have these sprinklers, an egregious regulatory omission. How older buildings that house large numbers of elderly seniors aren't required to be retrofitted with sprinklers is beyond comprehension.
I'm not jumping to conclusions, but as I said, a fire is something that can be planned for and a large body count is almost always attributed to lack of preparedness.
Sadly (or happily), the newer section of the building that was built later on as an addition, did have sprinklers and those within survived.
A clear case of ownership only living up to the letter of the law and a testament to failure in government regulation, if ever there was.
Poor regulations, a dangerously vulnerable building, and seemingly poor preparedness.
Is this the fault of sovereigntists and a clear signal that the Quebec government doesn't serve the interests of Quebecers?
Nonsense.
Clearly both Ottawa and Quebec have been remiss in both these tragedies.
Ottawa needs to address the very real problem of rail transport of dangerous and highly flammable hydrocarbons.
And clearly, Quebec needs new rules which would impose the retrofitting of seniors homes with sprinklers, as well as creating rules and regulating for the creation of meaningful and effective evacuation and disaster plans for each seniors' home.
If you've ever taken a cruise, the very first thing that is done is life boat drill, where passengers must don their flotation device and muster to their designated rescue stations for a brief safety talk.
We've all sat through the safety drill on the airplane (although how many of us listen) and as students, we've all taken part in random fire drills.
According to the newspapers, the home hadn't conducted a fire drill since last Spring.
So why are senior residences, which are much, much more vulnerable to fire deaths because to the lack of mobility of the residents, given such a wide path in consideration of safety.
Both Ottawa and Quebec City failed miserably in these cases, both levels of government guilty of a very real dereliction of regulatory oversight.
But please, let's not make it a spitting match over federalism or Quebec nationalism, safety is too important an issue to bog down in petty politics.
Bixi bites the Dust.
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| "Bixi is Montreal....Yup a perfect metaphor! |
Despite our desire to see the bike-riding program survive, we all new what was to come, it's was only a matter of time, but notwithstanding, the drama sad to watch and painful to endure.
Bixi was actually doomed from the beginning, a bad business plan with no hope of success, foisted upon taxpayers with the seducing caché of being avant-garde.
What can you say about a program that is wildly successful, yet fails on a financial basis. Had the Bixi proponents just written a business plan before undertaking the project, they'd have realized that in Montreal, the project just couldn't sustain itself.
Here's what I wrote last year.
"The vaunted BIXI bike rental program, a Montreal invention that is sweeping North America turns out to be a giant money-losing fraud with the Mayor now telling us that he expected the service, like public transport, to lose money. Of course he never told us that before the service was installed. And so taxpayers are on the hook for another 30 million dollar loan to keep the program alive and cyclists continue to get a free ride at the taxpayer's expense.
By the way, if you don't have a sense of what 30 million dollars is, consider that it's enough money to pay cash for a $300 bicycle for 100,000 children! BIXI has 40,000 members."
The granolas who vandalized Montreal bixi bikes because they believed that advertising somehow was diminishing the experience, should note that it is advertising that is the key to success as in the citibike program in New York City, where between Citi Bank and Mastercard, the 11 million in annual advertising fees pumped in, makes the program a success before any user gets on the bike.
Give credit to Montreal for inventing something useful, but failing grades once again for making things work.
Montreal Hotels....another one bites the dust
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| Hotel Renaissance |
Montreal has lost a bunch of hotels as the tourist industry in Quebec is receding badly.
The latest victim is the Holiday Inn in downtown Montreal, which follows the Delta Hotel which closed last October.
Both will be turned into student residences.
Just recently another hotel, the Quality Inn, closed on Park Avenue in Montreal.
Here's an article written before these closings.
Delta University St Nine major Montreal hotels that have closed in last few years
Boutique hotels have been on the rise for some time here in Montreal and have taken an increasingly large bite out of the local temporary-lodgings pie, as have other innovations such as AirBnB.
But they don't meet the needs of conventions and other big ticket tourist draws, so the ongoing failure of hotels here could be problematic. Read the article at Coolopolis
Amir Khadir...Who loves you, baby?
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| Yalda...A Chip off the old block! |
First he's had to deal with the fact that his daughter is in for a rough ride for her participation in the mayhem that was the student strike. She's already been convicted of one charge and has numerous offences pending. She'll be sentenced in a couple of months, after she faces the other charges in court.
To top it off, She's also being sued for $100,000 in relation to her alleged participation in the vandalization of the Université de Montreal.
Like father, like daughter, Amir Khadir is himself being sued by Marcel Mélançon, this time for defamation.
Last Fall, Khadir accused the Tony Accurso cohort of being the chief bag man for the Liberal party, a charge that Mélançon vehemently denied.
Khadir retracted the accusation, but then repeated it again last month on the radio.
It was then that the $300,000 lawsuit dropped and since it is a private matter, the government won't be paying any of the legal bills.
Regular readers of this blog know my advice about suing or getting sued, especially when your opponent is rich.
Good luck with that Mr. Khadir.
I suggest a little grovelling and humble pie and failing that, better get your wealthy Commie father Jafar, to pony up the dough for legal bills.. Link{fr}
But that's not all, no siree.Amir has fallen out of favour with his sovereigntist friends who are pro-Charter of Values, who are furious at Khadir, Francois David and Quebec Solidaire for their official opposition to the Charter.
And so various smear campaigns have been undertaken against Khadir, the latest effort one where he's being attacked for attending a conference where Muslim women who attended were veiled and separated from the men.
The radical (SPQ-Libre) wing of the PQ launched the accusations against Khadir in order to undermine his position and much as I am no fan of Khadir, the attacks are politically motivated and mean-spirited. Link{fr}
Sophie Durocher, another fundamentalist secularist did a fine hatchet job on Khadir in the Journal de Montreal. Link{fr}
As you can imagine, Khadir is furious at the low blows being heaved and is howling in protest.
But no matter, to this author, the brawl between the ultra-sovereigntists and Khadir is quite entertaining and satisfying, and reminds me of my sentiments in watching the Iran/Iraq war pitting Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini.
Fight on gentlemen!
Further Reading
From: Atlantic Magazine
Read: "The Danger of Banning Religious Garb
"The Canadian province of Quebec is debating whether to prohibit public employees from wearing clothing with "overt" spiritual symbolism.
From: The Link
Read: Is Quebec’s Language Divide Played Up By the Media?"The idea of a language divide in Quebec is nothing new, but it doesn’t have the same momentum as in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when approximately 130,000 of the province’s English-speakers left for fear of not being served in their language after Bill 101 passed in 1977."
From: (IX) Daily
Read: Montreal Sucks and Everyone Knows It
"Everyone from this once glorious, waste of a cosmopolitan metropolis likes to boast about how there's so much culture here and so many interesting things to do –– but it's all a lie. The only seeming reason why there are unending festivals all year is because people are miserably bored and all they can afford to do is party on weekends to drown their sorrows in booze and drugs. Meanwhile, they're coping with the fact that if they moved to Toronto, they'd make twice as much money and enjoy the same overall cultural joys. Montreal used to be the centre of Canada long ago, but compared to its Western neighbour (which has slowly been luring away multi-national corporation HQs since the 1990s), it has seen little growth in the past fifty years –– save for the golden heydays of 1960 - 1974, when the city was a shining North American jewel and a top destination for worldly travellers."
From: The Link
Read: Quebec’s culture must be preserved—but I don’t mean the one Pauline Marois has in mind when she says the same.
"Since the days of the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, the Quebec government has worked tirelessly to ensure the vitality of the French language and Québécois—or pure laine— culture in the province. And that’s certainly admirable.
But the way the province has undertaken that task has been to repress its own minority linguistic and cultural communities.
And that’s absolutely wrong."
From: The Economist
Read: Canadian multiculturalism. The more the merrier
"WHEN the government of the French-speaking province of Quebec introduced a bill in November to stop public servants from wearing religious symbols, it gave a community hospital in neighbouring Ontario a chance to grab some new recruits. Lakeridge Health ran an advertisement in a Quebec medical-school newspaper showing a woman wearing a hijab and stethoscope over the caption: “We don’t care what’s on your head, we care what’s in it.” Applications doubled, says Kevin Empey, the hospital’s boss.
The Quebec government’s proposed ban and the Ontario hospital’s welcome illustrate the poles in the Canadian debate on multiculturalism. Public hearings on the law began on January 14th. Supporters say that the ban is needed to enshrine state secularism; opponents that it is a cynical appeal to xenophobia by the minority provincial government of the Parti Québécois (PQ). Either way, the prediction of Jean-François Lisée, a PQ minister, that the Quebec battle could be the last stand in Canada’s multicultural experiment does not stand up to close scrutiny.
Immigration itself is not in question. Canadians, even in Quebec, overwhelmingly back mass immigration, which adds an average of 250,000 newcomers (roughly 0.8% of the population) each year. First-generation immigrants make up a bigger share of Toronto’s and Vancouver’s populations than in many of the world’s great cosmopolitan cities (see chart). Unlike many Europeans, Canadians believe that immigrants create jobs rather than steal them, says Jeffrey Reitz, a sociologist who has surveyed attitudes in Europe and Canada. This view is partly based on history. Modern Canada was built by successive waves of immigrants, first from Europe and more recently from Asia.
It is also a result of policies that since the 1970s have focused on admitting the most employable people. The government constantly tweaks its system of awarding points to prospective immigrants for languages, education and skills, in order to match them with labour-market gaps. Younger applicants currently have an edge. An array of programmes, many of them focused on the ability to speak languages, help immigrants to settle in.
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It shows the relative position of each province as pertaining to disposable income by family.
Quebec went from 4th place to 9th place in just four years.
For other depressing charts describing the Quebec model follow this link to "L'Antagoniste
For those who missed the latest video I put up on YouTube, here's a family of rednecks giving testimony before the Parliamentary committee looking into the Charter of Values.
It's a bit sad, but altogether funny
With Hard English subtitles.
Journal de Montreal Comment of the Week
I must say that of all the mainstream newspapers, the comments section in the Journal de Montreal is the most entertaining, with readers displaying that certain wry sarcasm which is the hallmark Francophone Quebec humour.So I'd like to share my favourite comment of the week and perhaps it will be regular feature.
Today's comment is in regard to testimony by ex-FTQ union leader Jean Lavallée at the Charbonneau Commission, where he got a rough ride, accused of taking bribes and giving preference to the infamous Tony Accurso in relation to loans provided by the union's investment fund.
During the testimony it was revealed that the FTQ bought out an investor because he had alleged links to organized crime, which was a potential embarrassment. The union paid out $2 million dollars to buy out the position of that certain investor who had invested just $500,000.
