Quebec Premier Channels Donald Trump in Pedalling the Big Lie about Language

Premier Legault Pedals the Big Lie

It's one thing when dedicated sovereigntists and language nationalists peddle the big lie that in Quebec the French language is in mortal danger, it is to be expected.

But when the Premier of the province embraces the populist trope it crosses into risky territory where reality is divorced from fact and where dangerous and out-of-control consequences result.

Everybody expects dedicated nationalists to scream bloody murder over language, it is the only issue, albeit manufactured, that they have remaining.
When the only tool in the belt is a hammer, everything looks like a nail and so we are bombarded with fantastical stories of language gloom and doom, spun by con artists extraordinaire, bullshitters and flimflam artists who would make Donald Trump blush with envy at their inventiveness.

Speaking of Trump, over these last months we've watched in stunning incredulity at the dismal saga of his cynical and dishonest campaign to overturn the results of the election over manufactured and nonsensical claims of voter fraud.
We sit in our armchairs and ask ourselves how stupid his followers must be to believe such utter tripe,  without ever making the connection that the exact same situation is occurring here in Quebec, where another manufactured and phony controversy has been cooked up by devious sovereigntists and language militants and now, sadly adopted by our Premier in a naked and cynical attempt to wrest more power for Quebec from Ottawa and more specifically to consolidate his hold on power as Premier. 

Mr. Legault executes to a tee the propaganda strategy invented by the Nazis and perfected in the modern era by Mr. Trump.

That is to tell the big lie, blame a certain identifiable minority, use the complicit media to whip up anger and dissent in the faithful.
So the comparison to the Nazis is not so outrageous as our Premier would pretend when he admonished a prominent hitherto media darling lawyer Anne-France Goldwater'who made such a reference.

Another chapter from this populist playbook is to portray the Quebec nation as a poor victim of the evil Canadian media, painted as merciless Quebec-bashers ad nauseam by the sovereigntist media. The pseudo-intellectual Mathieu Bock-Coté is a typical example of the pot calling the kettle black where he somehow misses the irony when he describes in an article these Canadian bashers as 'White Rhodesians.'
This phoney hypersensitivity to criticism is particularly galling considering the insults and mud flung at Canadians and Quebec's minorities on a daily basis by these Quebec's nationalist media thugs.

And so we in Quebec are living a political fantasy no different than the "Stop the Steal" nonsense that continues to grip America. While it may be easy for us to dismiss the American movement and its adherents as ignorant fools, it isn't so easy to admit we are gripped by the same type of political fantasy woven by cynics with similar ulterior motives. 

Here in Quebec, we have our own version of this big lie fantasy which I will dub... "Stop the Language Steal," a fantasy unsupported by statistics and facts.

While we are bombarded with cries of impending language extinction a la Chicken Little, there is nobody of credibility that can point to statistics that actually support the claim.

There is however one fantastic scholarly rebuttal of this language nonsense, an article written in French by Etienne Cardin-Trudeau, a doctoral student of political science at the University of Toronto.
If you have French, please read the fascinating account HERE{fr}.  

"The media bubble linked to the decline of French in Quebec is almost artificially created by a whirlwind of rehashed news and columns written by people with an interest in fanning the flames of identity nationalism. "

"This entire media fracas and political fuss is focussed mainly on the back of two trends: the decline of French as a mother tongue and as a language spoken at home. For mother tongue, the decline predicted by Statistics Canada is 78.9 to 70.1% by 2036. For language spoken at home, the decline is expected from 81.6 to 74.4%. The federal body released these projections in 2017.

What we are rarely presented with is the background to these numbers. Notably, the similar decline predicted for English in the rest of Canada.

Thus, English as a mother tongue in the rest of Canada would drop from 74% to 66% by 2036. If we take the language most often spoken at home, the expected drop is from 85.2 to 80 , 1%.

Two things, therefore, appear obvious: first, the proportion in the rest of Canada of people speaking English most often at home is similar to the proportion of Quebecers speaking French most often at home. In 2036, there would even be a greater proportion of people with French as their mother tongue in Quebec than of people with English as their mother tongue in the rest of Canada.What we are rarely presented with is the background to these numbers. Notably, the similar decline predicted for English in the rest of Canada.

In other words, if French is in danger of disappearing in Quebec because of the decline of French as the first language spoken at home in Quebec, a similar fate must await the English language in Canada where the decline of English as a first spoken language at home is more precipitous.
Ha! What utter nonsense!

Mr. Cardin-Trudeau's devastating take-down of the 'French is in danger' fantasy, is replete with data, context and analysis that is hard to refute.

So how have the language conspiracy peddlers reacted to the article?
To date, I've read no rebuttal to this scholarly work, nor have I seen any interviews on television or radio with the author. I dare say that the article is so toxic to the language fanatics that like a Chernobyl three-head fish, nobody dares touch it.

Like those media types in America who push the discredited theory of an election steal, when faced with tangible evidence of contradictory facts, they choose to ignore it, hoping that those they are attempting to deceive will remain oblivious to the truth. 

Every time you hear a Quebec politician or a media type complain about the decline of the French language understand that it is merely a device.

For the Premier, it is an attempt to sow fear amongst voters that they are in mortal language danger and that only he can deliver them from evil.

The nationalist media pedalling the nonsense of language doom is nothing more than a jaded attempt to drum up hatred of Canada, anglos, ethnics and immigrants to drum up support for sovereignty.

Here in Quebec, we actually face a bigger challenge over the big lie of the decline of the French language than the danger faced by Americans over the fraudulent claims of an election steal.

For every lie spun on FOX, Newsmax, OneAmerica New and conspiracy-based talk radio there are countervailing voices on CNN, MSNBC, NPR and mainstream news sources.

Here in Quebec, there is sadly nobody in our political class, either federal or provincial or in the media willing to oppose the big lie.

It is important for all of us to openly and vociferously deny that French is in Danger fantasy because to ignore it is to give it credence and oxygen and provides our political opponents with a victory based on fraud and deceit.

Liberal MP Anthony Housefather's Dirty Little Secret

 Liberal MP Anthony Housefather  is taking full advantage of the sympathy and publicity generated by a campaign poster that was defaced with a failed version of the Nazi swastika.

The incident says more to the intelligence author of the graffiti vandalizer who is either dyslexic or otherwise unable to correctly draw the hated symbol which today has morphed from a symbol of a bygone Nazi regime to an antisemitic symbol,  

We all condemn the hateful graffiti, there isn't a politician in Canada who would offer a free speech defence.

But that being said I cannot help but that Mr. Housefather's condemnation is hollow, a case of "do as I say, not as I do."

Mr. Housefather's dirty little secret is that he was a campaign poster vandalizer himself back as a youth and that in his last campaign, his own volunteer was caught removing opposition campaign signs.

"A volunteer helping out with the re-election campaign of Quebec Liberal Anthony Housefather was caught disposing of Conservative literature out on the campaign trail.
The incident was witnessed by a Conservative volunteer who happened to be canvassing the same apartment building in Côte Saint-Luc, Que., on Sept. 25. 
Documents shared with CBC News show that the witness claims Housefather was campaigning with several volunteers at the time of the incident.

But worse than that,  Housefather's own past behaviour makes his condemnation look like the pot calling the kettle back.

Here is the story as I've been reliably told and have verified as likely true

"Did you know that, in a strange but very possible way, the only reason Anthony Housefather is an MP today is because of the kindness of one {redacted} (yes, THAT {redacted}; we used to be best friends)? Let me explain.{redacted} and I worked on the "No" side in the 1992 Charlottetown Referendum campaign. We were putting up posters around NDG/Cote St. Luc for several hours and an MUCTC bus driver came along in his bus, saw us, and informed us that he saw a young male taking down our posters. He said that if we liked, he would act as a witness to identify the young man if we wanted to press charges. Well, you guessed it: that young man -- whom we then searched out and came upon -- was none other than one Anthony Housefather, then attending undergraduate McGill. We not only confronted him but saw him engaged in the dastardly deed as well. I then discussed with {redacted} whether he wanted to press charges (I, like the bus driver, was willing to) and he declined. I daresay that if {redacted} wanted to proceed with the charges, it is very possible that (1) Housefather would have been convicted; and (2) because of the conviction, he wouldn't have been accepted into McGill Law School; and (3) he never would have become mayor or MP. So in a very weird way, Housefather may have {redacted} to thank for his political career."

READ THE ENTIRE POST HERE

Next time Housefather complains about defaced posters, I dare any reporter to ask him to react to the above story.
Although this incident happened years ago, it is Housefather's claim of victimization by the latest poster defacement that opens him up to a discussion of his same prior bad acts.

I wonder if anyone has the guts to put the question to him......

We Need More Covid-19 cases....Not Less!

I don't often write about issues other than the Anglo and Ethnic experience in Quebec, but the fear and misinformation spread by the media and our government over the threat of a supposedly deadly fourth wave of Covid-19 has me seeing red once again because it defies the most basic scientific and statistical analysis.

A fourth wave will be statistically mild compared to what we've been through and the faster it comes and goes, the better.

That's right, I'll repeat that.
We need more Covid cases right now so that we can largely be done with the pandemic.

Let us remember and consider that sanitary measures including lock-downs, mask-wearing and social distancing were put in place to 'flatten the curve,' not to eliminate the virus which was an impossibility.
Those measures successfully ensured that our health system wasn't overloaded whilst we were waiting on the vaccine.
But now our situation has evolved and is vastly different. Our hospitals are empty of Covid patients and most of us are vaccinated. In another month we'll be at a point where everyone who intends to be fully vaccinated will be and new vaccinations will stagnate.
Waiting will serve no useful purpose and in fact, continuing sanitary measures will be counter-productive.
It will be time to let the virus loose on the vaccine 'refusenicks' in order that they acquire their immunity through exposure even if it means suffering through the disease. A modern and updated  "Chicken Pox Party" for the un-vaccinated will help speed us through the pandemic.

“Before the chickenpox vaccine, parents held these pox parties for their children as catching the virus was almost inevitable.

“So if your cousin or neighbour had it, you went to their house to catch it and get it over with”.

Admit it.
How many of us who took the socially-responsible decision to vaccinate are secretly hoping that the idiot refusenicks get Covid quickly, if not for anything else but just desserts. 

And perhaps a quick spike in Covid cases among the unvaccinated will convince some that they should get the vaccine.
It's a route we need to take because protecting the un-vaccinated through continuing wide sanitary measures will just prolong our agony. The highly transmissible 'Delta" variant will get the refusniks sooner or later, so better for us all if it is sooner. A quick month or two spike in cases will allow us to achieve a very high level of resistance allowing us to return to normal.
Yes, there will be some cases of breakthrough cases in those fully vaccinated but it will happen no matter what, sooner or later.
There will be pain no matter so it's better to get it over with.

At any rate......

How is it that a mere civilian like myself has the audacity to make a claim with confidence that my solution is better than what the government and its panel of experts recommend?
Well, I pride myself on statistical analysis. I possess no special insight except a keen and inquisitive mind, unshackled by a political agenda willing to go where the science and statistics take me.
And by the way, I've been right before where Health Canada was dead wrong.
Really!
I wrote a blog piece on Covid-19 way back at the beginning of the pandemic which in retrospect was nothing less than prescient, based only on data collated from widely available information coming out of China.

Yup, 16 months ago on March 13, 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote this piece.

The Government is Handling Covid-19 All Wrong...

The gist of which is summarized in this passage;

“But there is another path, one that would allow us to manage the outbreak and preserve our  hospitals to reasonably cope with the outbreak.

We must immediately impose a self-quarantine on everybody over 65 years old and those in vulnerable health categories.

Seniors would be obliged to go into home self-quarantine where they would be forced to ride out the storm. Senior residences would be put on lock down with no visitors and employees would be restricted to working in just one senior residence, reducing contamination from one home to another”.

By all means, read the whole article and tell me I wasn't right then and Health Canada wrong.
How many thousands of lives would have been saved had the government listened to me and not Health Canada?

 Bravado aside, I guess I deserve the right to say 'I told you so" and am now telling you once again that our pandemic measures are fatally flawed.

I understand that political considerations were at play, but the prevailing opinion at the time based on the convenient canard of "evolving science" pedalled by Health Canada, could not have been wronger.

" In January, (2020) for example, leading Canadian federal politicians and health officials told us cases of coronavirus would be rare in Canada, that border closures were wrong-headed and unnecessary, and that there was generally no need for private citizens to wear face masks in public." Edmonton Journal

\

To this day Dr. Theresa Tam refuses to take responsibility for the horrific advice that cost thousands of lives. In fact, she has doubled down on her stupidity. It is a catastrophic case of hubris over reality that Canadians paid for dearly in lost lives. It's clear Dr. Tam was resorting to the old device of 'Fake it 'til you make it"
Instead of telling Canadians the truth, that is that Health Canada didn't have any real answers, she made up a response that was tragically disastrous.
It is an amazing thing that she hasn't lost her job and continues to offer Canadians gratuitous advice after being so criminally wrong.
Fool me once.....

And so we come to the fourth wave of covid which is now running rampant in the USA, a situation which we are warned will happen here if we are not super diligent.

But we are not in America and our situation is different. Canadians will soon achieve a rate of vaccination that dwarfs that of America. We have suffered fewer cases and fatalities during the pre-vaccine period because we as a nation embraced the sensible sanitary measure when they were vital in keeping cases low when it counted.
The only failure was that of our government and Health Canada which failed to keep covid out of the retirement homes with disastrous effect.

So to paraphrase Prince Harry who put it so succinctly....
"We are on a different path than our American brothers"

Let us consider the evolving situation;
There will be no 'herd immunity,"  the concept that tells us that if enough of us are vaccinated, the disease will peter out.
Unfortunately, the new and emerging variants have put paid to that idea.
The Covid virus has proven resilient and resourceful through its many new iterations especially like the current "Delta" variant which is running amok, more virulent and easier to spread. Scientists reluctantly agree that this makes the idea of herd immunity unlikely because the percentage of those who need to be vaccinated is at a threshold higher than we can hope to achieve, largely thanks to the idiot vaccine 'refusniks' who number about 15% of us.
Read this article in New York Times.

Reaching ‘Herd Immunity Is Unlikely

The sooner the un-vaccinated refuseniks get sick, the faster we'll be over the pandemic. In fact, the failure of these people to vaccinate is effectively holding us hostage to the virus. 
Those in Canada over sixty years old have a vaccine rate of something like 90+ percent and so letting the virus loose on the un-vaccinated will make many sick but will result in few deaths and hospitalizations because refusenicks are mostly young and healthy.  

The last argument for maintaining sanitary measures is the fact that children under twelve haven't been vaccinated but again the statistics tell us it isn't really necessary.

For these children, Covid represents a negligible risk.
There have been 7,888 cases of COVID-19 in patients under the age of 20 in Canada, according to Public Health Agency of Canada data last updated Monday night. Of those thousands of young infected patients, only one has died. CTV NEWS

A child involved in a car accident has a 1 in 100 chance of dying.
A child who contracts Covid-19 has a 1 in 10,000 chance of dying. (In fact, the number is vastly higher because most infected children are asymptomatic and don't even know they had the virus.)

At any rate, extrapolating data from Health Canada, during that same 18 months period of the Covid-19 pandemic, tells us that somewhere in the neighbourhood of 50 children under 12 years old died in road accidents. Transport Canada.

Should we ban children from driving in cars?

Those who argue that children can be a vector for transmission are correct, but so, I maintain that that is a good thing because we need to encourage the fourth and hopefully final wave.

Those who are immuno-compromised will be able to hide out during this wave which should not last more than a month or two after which we will largely be done.

It isn't a perfect solution but the best option we have.

Takeaway.... Bring on the fourth wave now,

Did Quebec's Language Obsession Cost Habs the Stanley Cup?

I've been itching to write a blog post such as this for many years, ever since Francophone journalists and sports commentators started exorcising the Montreal Canadiens for having so few Quebec francophones on the team.

Diving into the realm of 'what if' is a risky endeavour at best and foolish at worst, but it might serve to counter the hysterical rhetoric of language fanatics who demand that the Canadiens operate under a handicap that no other NHL team would entertain.

I'm referring to the impossible and ridiculous "Savard Doctrine" which dictates that the Montreal Canadiens should always opt for the francophone when a choice is to be made between players of equal value.

It was nonsense when Serge Savard, the general manager of the time, first enunciated the policy and it is nonsense today because, in the real world, those choices don't ever present.
In fact, Savard never gave us an example of a choice that he made based on the policy.

The Savard Doctrine, in and of itself, is harmless enough because even in the most implausible of circumstances where the team could choose a francophone instead of another player of equal talent, there would be no discernible harm.
But it did establish language as a hiring criterion, opening the door for fanatics to push even harder for the team to consider French as an important element in the hiring process, even when the choice of a francophone player isn't the best hockey decision.

You might well remember the sacking of interim coach Randy Cunneyworth a few years back, over his lack of French. The furor was ugly and nasty, including a demonstration by language fanatics in front of the arena. I'm pretty sure it frightened the bejesus out of its lightweight managing owner Geoff Molson who caved into the pressure throwing the lame-duck coach under the bus. 
It was a powerful portent of things to come and established firmly that language would indeed become an enduring handicap.
Nationalists will defend to the death the notion that making French an important criterion in player selection won't impact quality but it cannot help but do so.
If the team was saddled with the rule that left-handed players be hired in preference to right-handed players, who would argue that quality would not suffer?

The gran-daddy of Habs French/first lobby is the nasty Anglophobic doyon of Quebec's sports commentator Rejean Tremblay who is a legend for his sarcastic and sour missives targeting anglophones and ethnics. His racist bent is not a phenomenon of a bygone era, he continues to spout his nasty and racist screeds, published in the mainstream media by the likewise racially insensitive Journal du Montreal.

"Everything is going well because we are winning ..
The Habs could field 20 Chinese players and it would be okay.
If the KHL convinced the Chinese to embrace hockey,
we'd find ourselves with 20 Fang Wongs in 20 years. 

Incidentally, that article insulted the Canadiens organizations as well as its fans for putting hockey before language, an unpardonable sin.

And the argument for the Habs to make language a part of the hiring process is repeated ad nauseam, including the mayor of Montreal and Premier Legault advocating for more "Quebecois" (read: 'francophone' ) who are able to communicate with fans in French be given preference.  The Premier opined that perhaps the return of the Nordiques would spur a competition with the Habs to hire more "Quebecois." Truthfully, the return of the Nordiques is a goal for like-minded nationalists who dream of a team that better represents their ideal of Quebec.

At any rate, I come to the gist of this article, the fact that the Canadiens may just have lost the Stanley Cup because of the disastrous player trade that brought the now sidelined Jonathan Drouin to the Habs for first-round draft choice Mikhail Sergachev. Tampa Bay general manager Steve Yzerman must have rubbed his hand in glee when he dumped problem-child Drouin on the Habs for a coveted first-round draft pick. It will go down as one of the worst trades in Canadiens history, perhaps on a par with the Scott Gomez acquisition for Ryan McDonough.

Drouin was already a big problem in Tampa Bay, at loggerheads with the team, going on a mini strike and demanding a trade.
As damaged goods, you'd think Drouin would be a bargain, but not for the desperate Habs eager to sign a francophone.
And so Tampa Bay Lightning got a young defenceman with a bright and long future and the Habs got sad sack Drouin. The Habs media was giddy with joy, with nobody willing to say the truth out loud or in print... that is,  that the desperate Habs were hoodwinked.
By the way, don't blame Montreal GM Marc Bergevinfor the trade, language pressure was the key element for making the trade thanks to pressure from the public and from team ownership desperate for more francophone players.

And so we come to the recent and surprising meeting of the Habs and Lightning in the Stanley Cup final, which like any playoff series can turn of the smallest of edges.

Drouin was gone, absent, on leave from the team for what we can only assume is a serious mental condition, while Sergachev played significant minutes, contributing big-time to the Lightening defence.

Imagine Sergachev playing for the Habs and Drouin not playing for the Lightning during the series.
It might have been the difference between being a runner-up and winning the Stanley Cup.

While we'll never know, it remains that nobody in the French media will dare speculate on the issue because they all supported the idiotic trade.

And so the chickens have come home to roost.
The broken Savard Doctrine is a fantasy that the entire Quebec hockey scene continues to embrace and so admitting that it might just have cost the city a Stanley Cup is an idea too frightening and horrific to entertain, one that cannot be mentioned out loud by the media on pain of excommunication.

Governor-General Choice a Tragic Mistake and Horrific Precedent

I cannot say that I'm stunned by Trudeau's woke appointment of Mary Simon as the next Governor-General. We've come to expect form over content and a Prime Minister who makes decisions not on what is best for the country, but is best for his image.

I am however stunned at the muted opposition and the unacceptable silence by the cowering media and political class who remain too afraid to say out loud what they really think.

That is that the choice of a Governor-General who doesn't speak one of the two official languages is unacceptable on any level.

It a sickening pandering to wokeness that clearly proves that diversity hires are almost always less competent than the alternatives, more competent candidates that are downgraded because they don't have the right skin colour, religion or ancestry.
It is sickening.

Choosing a candidate who doesn't speak French breaks the essence of what Canada has evolved into, or more to the truth, the ideal that Canada has set for itself, a country dedicated and respectful to the founding nations, the French and the English.

I have no problem recognizing that Canada's founding mosaic was flawed in that it excluded Canada's aboriginals and steps being taken to right this historical wrong are to be applauded..
But for Trudeau and the Liberals promoting the aboriginal's right to be included as respected partners seems to be a zero-sum game, where in order to accommodate them, someone has to give up their place.

And make no mistake, the position as a founding nation for French Canada is being downgraded and disrespected in order to fulfill the rush to be 'inclusive.'

The position of Governor-General may constitutionally important but let us be honest, the job is largely ceremonial and meant to foster unity and pride. The GG gives out awards and prizes, cuts ribbons and visits hospitals, she is a poor colony's stand-in for the Queen who towers by comparison.

You would think that the number one occupational requirement for the job is excellent communication skills followed by personability, both skills that will be absent when communicating with 25% of Canada's population who speak French.

A great deal is made that she is indeed bilingual, but not with French, rather English and her native Inuktitut, a language that is so exotic here in Canada that less than 35,000 people speak it, which places just above Swahili (30,000) in importance of languages spoken in Canada

In Canada bilingual means French and English, not Punjabi, Italian, Spanish or Cantonese. 

98% of Canadians speak English or French and so a job that entails communicating with these citizens would make bilingualism an iron-clad requirement.

And the notion that she will become proficient in French in her seventies is a laughable lie. 

I live in an affluent majority-English town in Quebec which boasts a unilingual English mayor who also promised to learn French when first he knocked on my door seeking my vote 15 years ago
We are still waiting.

I shudder in morbid anticipation of a throne speech given partly in pigeon French, written out for her phonetically and delivered without a clue to its content.

I can only imagine a medal presentation or a meet and greet.....
BONE-JEWR, KOH MAH SAW VAH, MOAN SEWER MAR TEEN OH
PHILLY-SET-ASS -IONES

Argghhhhhh!!!!!!

 There are those who are already clamouring that being bilingual be dropped for important political, bureaucratic and diplomatic positions in Canada. Any relaxation in the requirement reduces the impetus for those seeking public life to learn French.
Can you imagine a choice for governor-general who only spoke French?

For those of us in Quebec preaching for more bilingualism, it is incumbent on us to defend it in our federal institutions.

I am utterly disappointed in all of us. We are so afraid of defending what is right out of fear of seeming insensitive and un-inclusive.

The appointment of the utterly unqualified Mary Simon is poisonous and destructive because, in Canada, inclusiveness doesn't mean downgrading one to boost another. 

Shame on Trudeau, the Liberal party and everyone who supports this hire.

Shame on Canadians who are too afraid to stand up for what is right out of fear.