The Pellan Petition, submitted to the Office of the Governor General, protests the removal of paintings by Quebec artist Alfred Pellan from the lobby of the Foreign Affairs building in Ottawa.

The order to remove the paintings came from Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird last June, when they were replaced with a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.

Although the petition managed to gather over 200 signatures, including those of some prominent members of Parliament – such as Thomas Mulcair – Corbeil has little hope that it will succeed.

“If something actually happened – well, that would be a miracle,” Corbeil said.

“The petition really aims at showing them that we do not all agree. I’m sure they’re aware of that, but I thought it was important that it was in writing, that people are not necessarily agreeing with this,” she said.

“So many people say, ‘Well, we want to keep our history alive.’ I have nothing against that,” she added.

“The history is part of our past, and we should not deny it. But at the same time, I believe we should look toward the future also. Modern Canada, for most Canadians, is not the Queen. She’s not part of our laws, she’s not part of our Parliament. She does not decide things with us or for us. She’s just a figure.”

The replacement of the Pellan paintings is one of a number of recent moves by the Harper administration to increase the presence of the monarchy in Canadian government.

In early September 2011, all Canadian embassies and missions abroad were ordered to have a portrait of the Queen on prominent display by September 15, 2011. The demand came shortly after the restoration of the word “Royal” to the names of the Canadian Air Force and Navy in August.

According to Joseph Lavoie, press secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the decision to swap the pictures was spurred by the approach of the Queen’s diamond jubilee, the sixty-year anniversary of her coronation.

“The Sovereign’s Wall is a tribute that befits our head of state, Queen Elizabeth II,” wrote Lavoie in an email to The Daily. “It was also established as a recognition of the visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to the Pearson Building on July 1.”

However, Gilles Lapointe, director of the Art History Undergraduate Program at Université de Québec à Montréal, expressed concerns that the removal of the Pellan paintings compromises an important part of Canadian culture.

“I can absolutely not agree with it,” Lapointe said. “We don’t have that many great painters in Canada. Pellan is one of them for sure. It’s like we are trying to erase a part of our cultural history… Putting him in a closet is not doing Canada and Quebec a favour.”

“We know that the Harper government still sees Canada as a dominion. They still see Canada as bowing to the Queen. We’re supposed to be in a post-colonial era, but Harper is bringing us back into a colonial era. I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he added.

The post Montreal politician petitions against monarch’s portrait appeared first on The McGill Daily.

This label was issued as part of the EU’s Fuel Quality Directive, a plan to reduce transportation-related carbon emissions. On October 23, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver released an open letter addressed to the EU.

In the letter, Oliver states that “Any proposed implementing measure that provides separate, more onerous treatment for oil sands derived crude oil  relative to other crude oils with similar or higher GHG emissions intensities is discriminatory, and potentially violates the European Union’s international trade obligations.”

Despite Oliver’s letter, EU Climate Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard maintains that the label is based on scientific fact, not political motivations.

“We have the knowledge and the fact that the oil sands are more CO2-polluting than other kinds of fuel,” Hedegaard said in a press conference last Thursday in Brussels. “It’s nothing targeted against this particular fuel. We are doing that with all our different biofuels. It’s the same methodology that we are applying for different things in the same directive.”

Although Canada has been supported in its opposition to the label by both the United Kingdom and Estonia, there are some Canadians who disagree with Oliver.

Gillian McEachern, Climate and Energy program manager for Environmental Defence, a Toronto-based environmental action organization, spoke to The Daily over the phone.

“Time and again scientific studies have shown the tar sands to be more polluting than other forms of crude oil extraction,” she said. “It’s really just calling a spade a spade… Minister Oliver’s letter won’t hold water.”

In his letter, Oliver wrote that the label appears to punish Canada for promoting greater transparency in its carbon emissions records.

“We object to being treated less favourably than other crude oil sources simply because Canadian industry provides more detailed data on oil sands emissions. It is not sufficient for the European Union to fail to address these data issues and base its directive on incomplete information,” he wrote.

“Holding the third largest proven reserves in the world, Canada is a stable, reliable, democratic, and an environmentally responsible supplier of oil in a global market that is otherwise subject to a range of risks and uncertainties. Any policies that impede the free flow of global oil supplies are detrimental to our collective energy security,” he continued in the letter.

According to McEachern, any political acceptance of the tar sands would defeat Canada’s aim to reduce carbon emissions.

“It’s a bit alarming to see the federal government flying around Europe, trying to bully member states into backing down,” she said.

“Emissions from the tar sands are set to triple over the next decade and the government hasn’t stepped in to make rules to stop that,” she continued.

McEachern added that provinces like Quebec and Ontario are doing better at reducing their emissions, but she still worried that Quebec will soon lose its edge on reducing carbon emissions because of the tar sands.

“Quebec has been a leader in climate, and now, because of the federal government’s actions, we are really not stepping up to the plate,” she said. “As tar sands exports have risen, our currency has become linked to the price of oil. This is causing something called Dutch Disease – a boom in one area meaning job loss in others – and Quebec is being affected by that.”

The post Canada opposes EU’s labelling of tar sands appeared first on The McGill Daily.

In a symbolic act of civil disobedience, protesters crossed the security perimeter set up by the RCMP and sat down, holding hands. Although 117 protesters were arrested, witnesses from both sides said that the demonstration was calm and well-organized.

Maude Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, was one of the first to be arrested for trespassing and obstruction of a police officer. However, charges for every person arrested were later changed to a $65 provincial trespassing fine.

“It was very moving, very peaceful, very joyful,” said Barlow, “but very clearly deliberate about why we were there, what we hoped to get from the day and…the determination that this was maybe a new phase in the struggle against the tar sands and against Canada’s terrible energy policy.”

Proposed by TransCanada Corporation in 2005, the Keystone XL pipeline would transport 700,000 barrels of bitumen per day from northern Alberta to refineries in America. Bitumen is a dense form of petroleum found in a mixture of sand an clay known colloquially as tar sands. The tar sands extraction process has been heavily criticized in recent years for damaging the environment and the health of local communities.

The project was approved in Canada on March 11, 2010 by the National Energy Board, and is currently undergoing hearings in the United States regarding whether or not it would be in the best interest of Americans.

According to the CBC, the Canadian portion of the project will extend for 529 kilometres and cost $1.7 billion.

Canadian supporters of the pipeline, which include the Canadian government and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, claim the project would create more jobs in Canada.

It’s opponents have a different view, however. “It’s exactly the opposite… It’s taking jobs away,” said Barlow. “It’s leaving the pollution, but exporting the jobs.”

Daniel Kessler,  communications manager for the Rainforest Action Network, helped plan the protest.

“People have been saying that the tar sands are an absolute blight to the country and that we’re becoming a sort of extraction colony that is only exporting natural resources,” he said.

According to participants, the protesters placed a strong emphasis on the symbolic nature of the demonstration.

Stephen McMurtry, a Sustainable Energy Engineering Masters student at Carleton University, told The Daily that, “When it came time for me to go across, I linked arms with the people beside me…and we just kind of walked towards the fence. It was a really low fence – it was a very symbolic thing. There were even a couple step-ladders over it so that people could cross more easily. It was all very pre-planned and not some sort of antagonistic thing.”

“We hadn’t gone for big numbers,” said Barlow. “We wanted a direct action and a particular kind of action and therefore we wanted people who would cross the line…we were very pleased with the number who came out.”

In a press release the same day, Superintendent Luc Lemire, Officer in Charge of General Duty Protective Policing and Incident Director for the event, said he was pleased with the level of cooperation between the RCMP and protest organizers.

“From the start we were able to work together, which allowed the RCMP to fulfill its mandate and keep everyone safe on Parliament Hill while allowing the protestors an opportunity to express themselves in a safe and secure manner,” he said.

Kessler said another protest is being planned for November 6 in Washington, D.C.,  and that he expects between five and ten thousand people to attend.

“We’re going to be holding hands around the White House to show our solidarity with Americans who are saying one last time to [President Barack] Obama, ‘Take the right position here, do not allow this pipeline,’” said Barlow. “This will just continue and we’ll get more and more people…until people start to ask, ‘Why are these people doing this?’ When we can explain to them, ‘Well, we’re doing it for your health, and for your children’s health, and for the environmental sanity of our planet.’ More and more people will come on board.”

The post Tar sands demonstrators arrested in peaceful protest on Parliament Hill appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The McGill Daily: What have your experiences been lately? Have you noticed any kind of crack-down?

Graffiti Artist: I haven’t had the impression that there’s really been a crack-down in Montreal recently. The media and the city often say that they’re going to do a clean-up, but in reality, those clean-ups only constitute buffing walls. For our part, we haven’t experienced any extra pressures, even though the city has ordered and carried out several events encouraging graffiti such as “Under Pressure” and “Can You Rock?” I believe they’re only using this technique to reassure people and in reality the areas that are really affected by graffiti aren’t the ones that are getting cleaned up. The budget for the crack-down is all going to go to areas like Ville Marie or the Old Port – areas where property owners are capable of buffing graffiti. But if you look at areas like Verdun and Pointe St. Charles, the main thing is that the budget is going into buffing graffiti and they don’t do that as much in those areas, so they won’t benefit from a crack-down.

MD: What would the effects of such a crack-down be?

GA: For a graffiti artist, the effects of a crack-down like this will only serve to open up new spots to paint again. They’ll go clean all the places that we’ve already tagged, so that graffiti artists will pass by and reclaim that newly-freed spot. If the graffiti that’s erased has been there for over a year, for example, and that spot suddenly becomes available, it’s certain that someone’s going to go repaint that spot in the hopes that their graffiti will also last for such a long time.

MD: Would something like this actually deter people from doing graffiti?

GA: Absolutely not. And, as I explained earlier, it could even encourage graffiti artists to paint more. A crack-down is just a way for the authorities to give the impression that they’re dealing with the problem, but I sincerely doubt that there will be any real improvement over the past few years, especially since graffiti has become more and more common on both the north and south shores. I don’t think the approaches they’re taking can actually help to solve the problem.

MD: Why do you think graffiti is an important form of expression?

GA: Graffiti is a form of expression, yes, but it is, above all, an artistic movement. For most young people who have some skill with a pencil, graffiti is the “cool” thing to do. It’s much more interesting for them to paint big, fat, colourful letters on their school than to do canvasses in their basement where no one will ever see them. Most emerging artists under the age of thirty will have been active in the graffiti world at some point. I think it’s going to become the most important art movement of our generation.
MD: Why do you think graffiti is such a big issue in Montreal right now?

GA: It’s not just now that graffiti’s a big deal in Montreal – it’s been like this since the late nineties. Montreal has one of the most important graffiti scenes around, after New York, where graffiti was born. Also, we have a lot of well-known artists here, as much for the artistic side as for the vandalism side. Lots of artists come here from the United States and are surprised by how this city doesn’t really take the problem seriously. In Montreal we have two stores that specialize in graffiti, the city provides legal walls, Montreal organizes two of the largest graffiti events in North America…all these elements create a scene that maintains the popularity of graffiti in Montreal.
MD: How would you get around a possible crack-down?

GA: For me, it doesn’t change anything. It’s an urban legend, a headline in the newspaper to reassure the public that everything is under control, but graffiti is impossible to control.

The post Spray it, don’t say it appeared first on The McGill Daily.

This system has some members of the community upset, claiming that to fine the property owner is a misdirection of punishment away from the lawbreaker.

“People don’t like the fact that they didn’t ask to have graffiti on their building and now they’re going to get a fine because they have graffiti on their house or their garage,” said Sebastien Pitre, owner of a graffiti removal company called Solutions Graffiti in an interview with The Daily.

Pitre, who receives about 70 percent of his business from the City of Montreal and its boroughs, said that to prevent graffiti, the issue needs to be taken seriously.  “Right now some people think [graffiti] is very, very bad, but some people think it’s just a little painting on the wall,” he said.

Pitre spoke about how to unify the perception of graffiti and make changes. “First of all they need to make a real law, make people respect that law and be very strict… Put more police officers on the graffiti problem and really take care of it. Everybody’s talking about graffiti, but nobody’s taking real action about it.”

The fines are the latest effort in a city-wide battle which has been raging since the 1990s. In 2007, Montreal spent $1.3 million removing graffiti.

In other boroughs, such as Verdun, police have begun to send bills covering clean-up costs to adult offenders and to the parents of youth offenders. While this solution has been met with less opposition than the fines introduced in CDN-NDG and Saint-Léonard, it has met with some opposition. According to a Montreal graffiti artist who goes by the name Sohoe, “They’ll charge a few hundred dollars to buff a wall that would take about thirty dollars to do with latex paint.”

Some also remain sceptical that the threat of serious fines will be effective in reducing graffiti.

“A crackdown is just a way for the authorities to give the impression that they’re addressing the problem, but I sincerely doubt that it would do anything,” an anonymous graffiti artist told The Daily. “For me, it doesn’t change anything. It’s an urban legend, a news headline to reassure the public that everything’s under control, but graffiti is impossible to control.”

While the City’s crackdown on graffiti has prompted property owners and graffiti artists to enter into debate over which party owns the graffiti and should therefore be held responsible for fines, a second long-standing debate around graffiti has been reopened concerning the intellectual property rights of graffiti artists. A panel addressing this issue was hosted by McGill’s Faculty of Law in 2009.

“They assume [the artists] are ignorant people with no means to legal representation,” Sterling Downey, a street artist and publisher of Under Pressure magazine, told the McGill Reporter in 2009.

“The problem is they don’t have any authorization to put graffiti on the building,” said Pitre. “How can they come after me saying that I’m not allowed to remove their graffiti if they were not allowed to put the graffiti there in the first place? If that ever happens to me, I’m going to call my lawyer and have fun with that.”

“Sometimes it may look like art,” said Francine Morin, a spokesperson for Verdun borough mayor Claude Trudel, in an interview with The Daily, “but they don’t have permission to put it there, so it’s not art.”

Some artists, such as Sohoe, remain unconvinced that anything can be done to preserve their intellectual property rights.

“I probably should say that I feel like my art’s being stolen or something…” Sohoe told The Daily, “but I think in all reality, unless you have permission to do that, then you’ve sort of given up your right to take ownership of that work… How’s someone supposed to come and ask you? Even if they had to get permission, there’d be no way of getting it without proving that you did this illegal thing.”

Attempts to reconcile the city’s wish to reduce vandalism and the rights of the artists to self-expression have been made in the past; Montreal is home to five legal graffiti walls. However, as one artist who preferred to remain anonymous pointed out, “[Graffiti]’s in the streets and that’s where it has to be. Legal walls don’t work. They ruin the point of it.”

Sohoe is optimistic about the future of graffiti in Montreal.

“There’s always going to be graffiti,” he said. He noted the exclusivity of graffiti but said that he thinks there will always be people willing to do it.

“The graffiti writer, his thing is that he’s putting graffiti out there and yeah, the public may see it, but it’s also more for the graffiti community and the notoriety that he’s going to receive from the community for putting tags out there,” Sohoe added.

The post Montreal cracks down on graffiti appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Groupe MAMAN (Mouvement pour l’Autonomie dans la Maternité et pour l’Accouchement Naturel) is an organization which supports the interests of practising midwives and women who choose to make use of their services.

In 2008, Quebec Minister of Health Yves Bolduc promised to open 13 new birthing centres across the province by 2018. As of now, no new birthing centres have been opened, angering midwives across the province.

Lysane Grégoire, President of Groupe MAMAN, identified two major obstacles to opening new birthing centres: insufficient provincial funding, and opposition from doctors.

“They have no confidence in us, they think it’s unsafe for women to give birth outside of the hospital with a midwife,” said Grégoire. “There’s not enough money for birthing centres and we think it’s because he doesn’t want to upset the doctors. He says, ‘Yes, we want to have 13 new birth centres in the next ten years,’ but he never says he will put in the money. We can’t make miracles.”

A press attache for Yves Bolduc said the Ministry of Health was working on opening birthing centres in collaboration with midwife agencies, whom they are asking to pay half of the cost of the new centres.

“It’s important to us that there be midwives throughout the province,” said the attache.

Members of Groupe MAMAN doubt that the province will follow through on these promises. Adding to their concern is the fact that students graduate from the midwifery programs will have difficulty finding jobs. According to Groupe MAMAN, only one in five applicants in Montreal are given work each year.

“The others are put on waiting lists and may never get placed,” said Grégoire. “It’s kind of crazy. There’s an enormous demand for jobs in Montreal.”

A petition to Bolduc from midwives across Quebec is currently circulating, and will be submitted May 5.

“We’re going to demand a meeting with [Bolduc],” said Grégoire. “We want to meet with him so that he can see the citizens impacted by these projects in Quebec.”

The post Quebec midwives demand more facilities appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The lockout began January 24, 2009, making it the longest media labour dispute in Canadian history. Many have blamed the length of the conflict on Quebec’s anti-strike-breaker law.

The conditions of the negotiations state that 62 jobs will be restored, 42 of which will be in the newsroom. Those whose jobs are not restored will receive a severance package worth a collective total of $20 million. It is expected that the final details of the back-to-work policy will take several weeks to sort out.

In the final stages of negotiation, Quebecor agreed to withdraw a demand prohibiting employees from working for competing publications for six months following the closure of the deal. A demand for the discontinuation of Rue Frontenac, the newspaper started by the locked-out journalists, was also withdrawn.

Many union members, like Filotto, remain unimpressed with the negotiation process. Further anger was sparked when news that the deal had been accepted appeared on Twitter before it was officially announced to union members.

“I think it’s a horrible deal,” said Filotto. “I voted against it. I’m really sorry we had to cave like this at the end. I thought we were finally putting a dent in Quebecor’s resolve and I thought there were still things we could do before we gave up. But I also understand the despair and how hard it was for a lot of people.”

Filotto spoke to the variety of people who were involved in the lockout besides reporters. “A lot of these people were close to retirement, so they were never going back to the Journal. They supported us because there were some principals involved.” He added, “It was a lot to ask of people close to retirement to postpone it to protect certain things that we thought we needed to protect.”

Filotto continued by saying he “respected the decision” of those who voted for the deal.

“I can understand both sides,” said Rue Frontenac coordinator, Jean-François Codère. “We’ve been fighting for a long time and we’re tired.”

Others such as André Forté, an adviser at the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN), the parent union of STIJM, feel that while the settlement is disappointing, there was simply no other way.

“We’ve been to trying to fight them for two years and trying to have more force towards the negotiations, but it was never going to happen,” said Forté.

Quebecor, a media conglomerate that owns Vidéotron and Sun Media Corporation, is one of the largest newspaper publishers in Canada.

Despite their credentials, the corporation cited financial concerns as the motivation for their decision to lay off 75 office workers at the Journal, the decision that initially sparked the conflict leading to the lockout.

“As far as I know, Quebecor initially wanted to fire 75 people. Now about 190 have lost their jobs,” said Codère.

Filotto described how Quebecor wanted to cut costs and began to target office workers since “you can’t just get rid of entire departments” in which other employees worked. He explained how reporters supported their colleagues and Quebecor management took advantage of that.

“They were never having financial problems. They foresaw possible problems in the future and they overplayed that to try to get us to cooperate.”

“Quebecor got what they wanted. It’s a huge loss for us,” said Filotto.

Obstacles to lockout solidarity

“Even during the boycott campaign, the readership didn’t go down. They never lost any money; they actually made even more money,” said Forté. “We had no hope against such an adversary. They could have continued in a conflict like this for years.”

“Quebecor is a huge machine,” said Filotto. “The habit of reading that paper was so strong.”

J.Serge Sasseville, Quebecor’s Vice-President of Corporate and Institutional Affairs commented on the agreement via email.

“We do not intend to give interviews following last Saturday night’s vote,” wrote Sasseville. “We limit our comments to the following declarations: We are pleased with the results of the vote by the members of the union STIJM; we accept the recommendation made by the mediator Jean Poirier; we will be sitting down with the union soon to discuss the terms and conditions of the back-to-work protocol. We do not wish to make further comments at the present time.”

Quebecor has become known for its model of convergence, where content from QMI Agency, their newswire service, is available to all of their publications. By using wire content from QMI, Quebecor was able to continue the publication of the Journal during the lockout. QMI was created shortly before the lockout began.

“The anti-scab law…allows the publication of content which comes from other sources and allows newspapers to be filled with articles that come from all over the place,” Forté explained. “[Quebecor] were able to fill the newspaper with articles that came from all kinds of other papers.”

Union members also expressed concerns with Quebecor’s business model, and claimed that its corporate interests were compromising their professional morals. “There were some principals we did not agree with, such as the convergence of media sources and the increased corporate presence in the newsroom,” said Filotto. He described how reporters had begun to feel “more and more like mercenaries.”

Editor-in-chief of the Journal, Lyne Robitaille, is also the executive Vice-President of Operations Eastern Canada and Sun Media Corporation – both owned by Quebecor. During the lockout, Robitaille spoke on radio saying, “We no longer talk about journalists now. We are talking about producers of multimedia content.”

Filotto disagreed. “Nobody really knows what the media landscape is going to be,” he said. “A bunch of models have been coming up…but I’m sure that reporters running around with video cameras trying to make bad TV is not the way. The solution is to showcase what journalists do best – writing and taking pictures – in the best possible way. That’s what we hope to do with Rue Frontenac.”

Rue Frontenac moving forward

Although attempts by the STIJM to boycott the Journal during the lockout were largely unsuccessful, both Codère and Filotto have high hopes for the future of Rue Frontenac.

With ninety days to dissociate itself from the STIJM and the Journal, Rue Frontenac is currently seeking investors willing to support the paper as a workers’ co-op.

“There are a lot of people who seem interested,” Filotto said. “During the lockout,  Rue Frontenac eventually stopped being seen by the public as ‘the newspaper of the locked out journalists’ and began to be seen as simply another news source. … They appreciate that Rue Frontenac is offering a newer, fresher voice.”

“I have enormous hopes that it will work,” said Forté. “We’ve already had such a good response from many people. It would be phenomenal to have a media source that could continue independently like that with quality workers.”

The post Journal de Montréal lockout ends appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Received proposals will be evaluated by a committee of Transgesco, a wholly owned yet independent subsidiary of the STM that manages its commercial revenue. Since announcing the strategy, STM has since faced heavy criticism from Projet Montréal, a municipal party committed to sustainable urban development as outlined on their website.

In a statement released last November Richard Bergeron, leader of Projet and Jeanne-Mance councillor, equated STM’s new advertising strategy to “selling the metro’s soul” with advertisements that “defaced” metro stations. “The STM has reached a new low in its commercialization of public space by pursuing corporate sponsorship of metro lines,” Bergeron said in the statement.

The STM claimed that the ads would be controlled and tasteful, with specific sizes and areas designated for advertising. Dominic Perri, Transgesco president, member of the STM’s Board of Directors and councillor of Saint-Léonard borough, told The Daily. “We know how much advertising there will be and where it will be,” he said. “Projet Montreal wants to lower taxes, build tramways… they want to do this and they want to spend… Look, we’re not in Disneyland. Let’s face it; you cannot give more services with less money. It is impossible.”

According to STM regulations, prospective companies must display an interest in environmental sustainability and support public transportation in order to qualify to sponsor a metro line. Perri said selection will depend on the “quality of the partner,” not just money.

“We don’t want to deal with a company that has no environmental policy or doesn’t care about public transportation,” said Perri. “We’re forming a partnership. We’re not selling it. We’re not asking them to post ads there and that’s the end of the story – no! We work together.”

Advertising amounts to only 2 per cent of STM’s total annual revenue. According to Marianne Rouette, a spokesperson for the STM, to increase its revenue the STM aims to raise the percentage of funding it recieves from advertising. With this new plan a company would be required to pay a fixed annual fee, with rights to the highly coveted orange line costing a minimum of $6 million per year.
“We have to increase our commercial revenue,” Rouette said. “We are very low compared to the other transit societies in the world.”

Perri said revenues from the partnerships between the STM and private companies will go toward improving public transportation. He pointed to the announcement of bus stops as an example of the types of services the STM would be able to provide with more revenue.

“We want to facilitate the lives of the citizens so they say ‘I’m going to take the bus or the metro to go to work.’ In doing so, we have less pollution. That’s the whole objective,” Perri said.
Projet Montréal remains sceptical of Transgesco’s motives and voiced concerns about the secrecy surrounding their financial records.

“Transgesco was created to get around the bidding process and hide projects from the public eye,” Bergeron said in Projet’s press release. “If the STM goes ahead with its plan, most of the profits will never even reach public coffers.”

“The money will not get back to the passengers. It will be returned in terms of the service,” Perri said. He explained that profits generated by Transgesco are transferred to the STM at the end of the year.

To Bergeron, the issue is beyond services provided. For him the issue signifies a larger tendency: “We must stop sacrificing Montreal’s heritage for money.”

The post Private Quebec companies apply to sponsor metro line appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“We’re unhappy because there’s a pay scale that hasn’t really changed in a long time in spite of promises to fix it over the last ten years,” said APCPP spokesperson, J.D. Jerols.

“We’re in a position where we’re losing competent attorneys… They’re going…to Alberta and Ontario and…taking early retirement. … It’s impossible to hire new attorneys with experience,” he added.

The APCPP claims that without an additional 150 to 200 prosecutors, they are unable to devote sufficient time to each case, creating significant ethical issues. “If it’s your daughter that was sexually assaulted or your wife that was beaten and robbed or your son who was the victim of fraud then you want to expect the prosecutor to be top quality,” said Jerols.

A group representing Quebec jurors, the Association of Government Jurors, voiced similar concerns and has formed an allegiance with the APCPP. Jerols said the two groups have agreed that neither will settle for a lower salary than the other.

There is also a possibility that the two will strike together, which will cause significant delays in the Quebec legal system.
In the event of a strike, all cases not involving a detained individual or a jury will be postponed.

While the Association of Government Jurors has voted in favour of a strike, the APCPP feels differently.

“We would like to avoid a strike,” said Jerols,

Unlike jurors, prosecutors are not granted the right to binding arbitration, a process that allows the conflict to be resolved by a neutral party.

The post Quebec prosecutors vote for a strike mandate appeared first on The McGill Daily.

A long-time supporter of the Palestinian political party Fatah, Galloway became the subject of media scrutiny in 2009 when he sent an aid convoy to the Gaza Strip, which is governed by Fatah rival Hamas. Galloway also sent a personal donation of £25,000 and several cars to prime minister Ismail Haniyeh.

When he tried to visit Canada for a lecture tour in March of that year, he was denied entry to the country by the Canadian Border Service Agency. The Ministry of Immigration later contested that by dealing with Hamas, Galloway had aided a terrorist organization.

Galloway was notified of the decision by letter and was advised that, should he attempt to come to Canada, he would be detained. As a result, he was forced to deliver his talks via satellite from New York. Only one other – Egypt – has banned Galloway.

“The letter that was written to Galloway said they believed he was a member of a terrorist organization because he had given money to Hamas,” said Galloway’s Canadian lawyer, Barbara Jackman. “The purpose [of the aid] was that the money be used to aid the Gazans. And that’s what the [Hamas] minister used. It’s really a perversion of what Parliament intended. … Aid wasn’t being passed to Hamas as Hamas; it was being passed to Hamas as the government of Gaza.”

On September 27, Justice Richard Mosley ruled that Galloway had been denied entry for illegitimate political reasons, and the ban was lifted.

“What makes George Galloway’s case entirely different is that it wasn’t even initiated by a civil servant,” said Jackman. “It came from the minister’s office. They wanted to keep the man out. … This was a misuse of the legislation, a misuse of the ministerial power to induce him [Galloway] not to come to Canada to speak.”

Galloway now intends to sue the Canadian government. “I believe in freedom of speech, but with some limitations. There must be laws of libel and denigration,” he told the audience at UQAM. “And Mr. [Jason] Kenney [Minister of Immigration], you’re going to find out all about those laws in the legal system in Canada.”

Galloway was also harshly critical of McGill’s recent partnership with Tony Blair in his talk. During his time as a British MP, Galloway was renowned for his opposition to the Iraq War, famously calling the British government “Tony Blair’s lie machine.” These opinions eventually got him thrown out of the Labour Party in 2003.

Galloway’s ban from Canada, and subsequent return, has stirred up media coverage, and seems to have increased public interest in his situation. What was to be a five-city tour has become a ten-city tour and, according to Galloway, lecture halls are selling out.

“I am not afraid of you,” said Galloway of his opponents. “You can’t intimidate me because I am not afraid. I am afraid only of God and as long as God gives me breath, I will continue to say the same thing.”

Galloway’s saga has sparked a debate in the Canadian press about the role of freedom of speech.

“George Bush and Harper’s governments are very similar in their sort of neo-right-wing Christian approach to things,” said Jackman. “The United States has Obama. We still have Jason Kenney and Stephen Harper, who are intolerant to the political views of others.”

Michael Taube, a columnist for the Toronto Star and former speech writer for prime minister Stephen Harper, argued in a November 15 article that the decision to keep Galloway out restricted his freedom of speech, “with questionable intent.”

However, Mosley ruled that, since Galloway had been allowed to deliver his talks via satellite in 2009, there had been no serious infringement of the latter’s right to free speech.

Ehab Lotayef, a member of Canadian Boat to Gaza, told The Daily, “I applaud that decision [to allow Galloway into Canada]. … I have seen over the past seven or eight years how the misuse of the issue of terrorism brings down our freedoms and limits our ability to debate issues that are much better being debated than just swept under the carpet.”

Others are less pleased with Galloway’s return, however. This group includes conservative pundit Ezra Levant, who has been an outspoken opponent of letting Galloway into the country, calling the former MP “pro-terrorist” in a March 20, 2009 blog post.

“George Galloway should be legally inadmissible to Canada because he has given money to a terrorist organization, contrary to section 37 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act,” Levant told The Daily. “It’s got nothing to do with the fact that he’s an offensive bigot. It’s got everything to do with the fact that he gives money to murderers, and that’s against the law.”

The Daily was unable to reach Kenney for comment.

Despite the opposition to Galloway’s presence in Canada, Jackman said it is unlikely that any concrete action will be taken to have him banned again. In his talk at UQAM, Galloway said, “I’m here to stay as a political factor in Canadian politics.”

The post Galloway finally allowed to speak in Canada appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Liberal MP John McKay for Scarborough-Guildwood first presented the bill to the House of Commons in 2009, aided by professors from McGill, the University of Ottawa, and the University of Toronto. It has since met with opposition from Canadian mining companies as well as from the Conservative Party who have argued that such a bill would hurt the Canadian economy and the federal Canada Pension Plan, which is heavily invested in the mining industry.

Although it is rare for the Prime Minister to take part in votes on private member’s bills, Stephen Harper was not only present for the vote, but also whipped his caucus into voting against the bill. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, along with other members of his party, were absent for the vote.

“The mining companies have the ear of every political leader,” McKay told The Daily. “They spent massive amounts of money telling MPs that the bill was the end of Western civilization as we know it.”

McKay called the failure of the bill a “tragedy.”

“There are a lot of people who are very disadvantaged…very impoverished…very vulnerable…who just got the pointy end of a legislative stick,” he said.

Supporters of Bill C-300 are not the first to have questioned the integrity of Canadian mining companies. In 2008, the Norwegian national pension plan withdrew its investments from Canadian company Barrick Gold, because of a negative review of the company’s environmental performance in Papua New Guinea, where arsenic was being dumped in a river beside one of the mines.

Roughly three-quarters of the world’s mining companies are based in Canada. Thirty-three per cent of the companies that have, since 1999, allegedly violated Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) – the current international method of self-regulation for the mining industry – are Canadian-owned.

According to McGill Law professor Richard Janda, who helped craft the bill, Canadian mining companies have been known to employ “paramilitary security forces [which] have been involved in murders and rapes in and around mine sites, and there have been a number of documented human rights violations.”

McKay said he thought failure to act on mining regulation now would deal a blow to the country’s global image. “Canada suffers a huge loss of prestige and leadership around the world. We are the number one industry in the world in mining and we showed absolutely no leadership at all,” he said. “Other countries who also mine are going to say, ‘if Canada’s not doing anything, why should we?’”

Asked what the next step in the struggle to increase regulation of the mining industry would be, Janda said regulation advocates should hold mining companies to the claims they have made in recent weeks. “We should hold these companies accountable for what they were claiming over the course of this debate – namely that we have adequate regulations for evaluating [ecological and human rights] performance,” Janda said. “If we do then let’s have a report card now.”

The post Conservatives kill mining accountability bill appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Talisman Energy Inc. and Questerre Energy Corporation announced the decision last Thursday, only a week after the provincial government held public hearings on shale gas exploration. The hearings sparked a petition calling for a moratorium on the industry, to be discussed at further hearings in November. Quebec’s Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE) is due to report on the companies’ practices in February.

Shale gas extraction uses a method called “fracking,” which involves blasting a mix of water, chemicals and sand into wells. Environmentalists and residents have expressed concern that long-term effects on drinking water and wildlife are poorly researched.

Kim Cornelissen, VP of l’Association québécoise de lutte contre la pollution atmospherique (AQPLA), is one critic who remains skeptical of the six-month delay.

“It’s hard to know what’s behind the decision to postpone it because the companies don’t like it when the citizens begin to do stuff,” said Cornelissen. “It’s maybe not the best time to do it. It might be temporary.”

Company spokespeople say the cost of the project informed the decision to postpone. Originally expected to rise in 2010, natural gas prices have dropped from nearly $16 (USD) in 2006 to $3.77 per million British thermal units. Prices are expected to continue to drop, causing financial difficulty for companies in the industry.

Since declaring its interest in shale gas, Talisman has suffered significant drops in profit (including a 98 per cent plummet in 2009) and has sacrificed both properties and employees in Calgary, most notably cutting 202 jobs in December 2009.

Questerre’s stocks dropped 14 per cent following their decision to postpone fracking. “I think the investors were disappointed,” said Karen Carle, Questerre’s Public and Governement Relations Coordinator, “but we’re not worried about commercial extraction yet. That will come later.”

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