Segacs’s World I Know

The Demerger register tallies are in.

22 of 28 former municipalities in Montreal have obtained the requisite minimum 10% signatures to force a referendum, as have 12 of 13 Quebec City region boroughs, and a number of South Shore and other former cities as well. All will get the opportunity to reclaim their cities that were stolen from them (at least somewhat) on June 20th.

The specific municipalities that will hold referendums are posted. They include virtually everywhere on the island of Montreal, 5 of 8 former municipalities in Longueil (South Shore), and in former municipalities in the Shawinigan, Sherbrooke, Gatineau, and Beauharnois regions.

Still think it’s a language issue?

Looks like my Air Canada plane ticket is safe after all. Good. One less thing to worry about.

Now that my Habs are long gone and I’m officially on the Flames bandwagon, this makes me very happy: the Flames finally managed to win one at home to secure a spot in the Stanley Cup Finals!

Go Flames!

I’ve posted my disgust on this story before. Now, finally, it seems the courts agree:

Among the tribulations facing those bidding adieu to their loved ones, the spectre of disgruntled striking union employees cheering as the departed is lifted into a hearse will no longer be among them.

In the wake of such antics acted out at Urgel Bourgie funeral homes, a judge has filed a court injunction outlawing the practice. Strikers can still congregate outside the centres, but cheering, hooting and hollering are out.

“They have the right to protest, it is on public property,” Urgel Bourgie president Denis D’Etcheverry said.

“But we obtained an injunction (from a Quebec Superior Court judge in March) showing there was a lack of respect for families, that families were third parties in the conflict and are not to be exposed to that kind of behaviour.”

The union has been on strike since December, demanding higher pay. My feeling is that anyone who would cheer at a funeral doesn’t deserve to be within 50 feet of a funeral home, let alone employed by one. Striking is one thing. But disrespecting the dead is just disgusting.

… shouldn’t run attack ads.

I was just over on the Gazette’s site and I saw a banner ad for StephenHarperSaid.ca, an attack website run by the Liberal camp against the Conservative leader. (Note that the Harper camp has lowered itself to the same level by launching TeamMartinSaid.ca against the Libs.)

Anyway, the banner ad included a sentence that reads: For the whole quote, it’s source and context, visit StephenHarperSaid.ca.

It’s.

Yes, I make lots of spelling errors too. But this is my personal site. I were funding an ad to appear on major websites, and wanted to make myself look good and my opponent look bad, I might consider using a spell check…

Just a suggestion.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Canada limited special interest spending in election campaigns by third-parties.

The blogosphere is up in arms about this. Damian Penny thinks that the decision will “come back to haunt” us. He links to Colby Cosh, who claims this law turns special interests into “second-class citizens”. David Janes says that “Freedom died today in Canada”. And so on. And so forth.

I’m going to take a flying departure from all of them and say that I think this ruling is actually a very good idea. And here’s why:

“Freedom of expression” does not mean the same thing as “freedom to buy politicians and drown out everyone else’s expression”. There may be nobody much to vote for at the polls, but at least my choices are still between the Liberals, Conservatives, NDP, or Bloc… and not between the gun lobby, the anti-abortion lobby, the union lobby, or the environmental lobby. We need only to glance towards our neighbours to the south, who are stuck between voting for the ACLU or the NRA in each and every election.

Lobbying as a political activity in itself is all very well and good. But sadly, it has the effect of so heavily mortgaging political parties to special interests, that they no longer have the freedom to govern effectively.

This law doesn’t restrict third-party spending outside of an election period. It doesn’t stop people from expressing their opinions, or from organizing to do so in a concerted fashion. If anything, this will allow a wider variety of opinions to be heard, because the ones with the most money can’t drown out the rest.

The next step, in my opinion, is rigorous campaign spending laws for candidates and parties. People should win on the strength of their ideas, not on how frequently they can plaster their face on prime-time.

But, as Dennis Miller would say, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Al-Canada The CBC continues its regularly biased coverage of Israel, in an article that paints the defencive Rafah incursions as a “massacre” (taking Arafat at his word, it seems):

Israel’s continuing assault on the Rafah refugee camp has killed another 20 Palestinians.

The operation along the Gaza-Egypt border has sparked a growing international outcry. The United Nations and the European Union have demanded an end to the incursion and Amnesty International has accused Israel of war crimes.

Israeli military vehicles in Rafah (AP photo)

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat described the attack as a “big massacre.” He’s calling for international intervention.

It gets worse from there. This is what the CBC refers to as “balanced coverage”. Yeah right.

For a little perspective, check out this Ma’ariv interview (via Meryl):

It was a combat situation, under fire. Soldiers were injured but in the end, we brought our soldiers home. I haven’t told this to anyone but in the midst of this operation, we assisted a baby being born and evacuated an elderly woman who was injured and summoned a local ambulance for her. Terrorists ran and fired from behind the ambulance. Therefore, I do not want to make any comparison between our scale of values and theirs.

“If my soldiers can assist a Palestinian woman giving birth when six of their comrades have been blown to bits in the street but, at the same time, they fire at us from behind an ambulance, you must understand that we are at opposite ends of the scales of values. They are at the very bottom”.

Yet the moral equivalency games continue.

So Knave thinks I’m wrong about the demerger issue:

Of course, I don’t think that suburbs have the right to exist in the first place, especially since they spent their time screwing over the downtown core.

Today’s Gazette contained an op-ed about the myths on demergers, including pretty much what Knave just said:

On the other hand, demerger backers need to understand that support for the new big cities is rooted in a concern for equity and social justice.

This is the “greedy suburbs don’t want to share” idea, and it is, to say the least, incomplete. It ignores the fact that old urban structures, such as the Montreal Urban Community, entailed a fair bit of “sharing.” And in the case of Montreal, it also misses the point that if it’s sharing with the suburbs we want, we need to bring the prosperous sprawl of off-island suburbs into the mix.

As a suburbanite at heart (if not by current address), it irks me a little to hear well-worn stereotypes about the “rich suburbus” screwing over the “poor city”.

It’s an easy myth to believe: blame all of downtown’s problems on the “rich, English west island” and everyone’s happy. It’s like the eternal leftist popular solution of taxing the rich more. Nobody likes the stereotypical Westmount millionaire, and most voters will warm to any idea that seems to make that guy pay more and them pay less.

However, the gripes are pretty baseless when you get down to it. Suburbanites use the roads? Sure we do. But we don’t have the advantage of wonderful public transit like you downtown folk. And off-island suburbans use the city’s facilities just as much as on-island ones. So why should the on-island suburbs foot all the bills?

If it’s financial sharing that everyone wants, fine, sharing is easy to implement without steamrolling over democracy and forcibly merging cities against the will of over 95% of populations of certain former municipalities. What next? Toronto has more prosperity than Montreal so let’s forcibly merge them? The United States has more cash than Canada so let’s forcibly merge them?

If certain municipalities were managing their local services and funds more efficiently than Montreal, that’s no reason to punish them. And creating larger levels of bureaucracy only ever creates problems. As it has here. The main one of course being that suddenly, the unions are huge and are wielding enormous amounts of power. More union power equals higher wages which leads to higher taxes. It doesn’t take an economist to figure this out.

So there’s my rant on the demergers, for anyone who was interested. And while the road ahead is still long and challenging, I hope that merger foes can pull this off and win back the cities that were stolen from them.

For more info, visit Democracite. And sign the register by Thursday!

Montreal

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How coincidental! I guess that’s good cause, well, I live here and all…

(Hat tip: Elanamatic).