Segacs’s World I Know

There’s a busker in the Place-des-Arts metro station almost every afternoon at rush hour, playing Moonlight Sonata on his keyboard. Three notes, over and over again, echoing off the walls. Beautiful. Haunting.

The melody stays in my head as I walk home, setting the tone for the rest of the evening. It is already dark, long ago. The days are so short now.

Outside, a few snowflakes fall lazily, trying only halfheartedly to amount to something, but succeeding only in lightly dusting the ground and the shining pavement. There’s no more ambiguity now about the season. The trees are bare now, autumn leaves replaced with Christmas lights.

Hardly anyone is on the streets. Even in the middle of downtown on a Thursday evening, it’s quiet. They’ve all hibernated. Gone underground for the winter.

The headlines today are all from Mumbai, and they’re all horrifying. Nobody reacts much. The rest of the news is about the economy. People worry but they don’t panic. They can’t quite work up the energy to panic. They exchange platitudes at the water cooler before heading back to their desks to cough and sneeze. They work hard, but they’ve slowed down since everything was new. The shorter days make everyone tired.

South of the border, it’s Thanksgiving. Here it’s just another day, like all the others. Maybe with a little less life than yesterday. And tomorrow with a little less life than today. They say it’s supposed to be the festive season, but aside from last night’s hockey win, people can’t seem to find much to be festive about.

November is a month of endings. Cold rains and early snowfalls, without the joy. The knowledge that winter has set in and will be here for the next five months. A long road with no end in sight. We walk it steadily, one foot in front of the other, because it’s all we can do.

And so we draw those we love close to us, hunker down and wait for spring.

One day till election day, and as they say, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings:

That’s Sarah Palin, laughing as she digs her own grave, getting prank called by CKOI’s Les Justiciers Masqués. It’s kind of like watching a car wreck; equal parts entertaining and horrifying.

When Obama wins on Tuesday, as is expected, Montreal will have played its part.

I’ll be traveling during the election, so there won’t be any commentary on the results on this blog for a couple of weeks. That said, to all Americans out there, make sure to exercise your civic duty and vote!

There are so many things wrong with this that I hardly know where to begin. At the beginning, I suppose…

The Quebec government today announced several measures to help immigrants better integrate into Quebec society.

Immigrants will now be able to take free French courses before they leave their home country – either online or at an Alliance Française.

Well, okay, free French classes aren’t the worst idea in the world. But it doesn’t stop there.

Starting next January, all immigrants coming to Quebec will have to sign a declaration saying they will respect Quebec’s common values.

They must promise to learn French and respect the fact that Quebec is a secular society where men and women have equal rights.

The declaration will be included in the application to immigrate to Quebec and anyone who refuses to sign it will not be permitted to move here.

Right, as if forcing people to sign a declaration that is nothing but a formality, completely unenforceable, and utterly lacking in context in most of their home societies is in any way relevant. And since when did we start legislating people’s thoughts and opinions, anyway?

“Coming to Quebec is a privilege, not a right,” Immigration Minister Yolande James said yesterday at a press conference.

Apparently, now, so is freedom of expression.

The province also plans to favour immigrants who have the job skills that the Quebec labour market needs.

Except in refugee cases, most governments do this to an extent, so there’s nothing new here. But what about all those foreign-trained doctors who are currently driving taxicabs? Our problem isn’t in attracting skilled immigrants; it’s in getting rid of the yards of red tape that prevent those immigrants from actually using their skills.

Once they arrive in Quebec, the government will ask immigrants to attend seminars on adapting to life here and will increase the amount of support it gives to immigrants who are having trouble finding work.

For more on the folly that is these seminars, see Yannic’s blog.

James said the government also wants to persuade businesses to hire more minorities and said the public service must also hire more minorities.

At present, minorities make up 19 per cent of the public service. The government’s goal is to reach 25 per cent.

Yes, because quotas always work so well, don’t they? Well, it’s a chance for new immigrants to learn a few quintessentially Quebecois values, like tokenism, and hiring based on ethnicity instead of based on merit.

Many of the measures announced today were suggested by the Bouchard-Taylor commission on reasonable accommodation.

That explains a lot, actually.

Looks like we’re going back to the polls yet again… This time, for a provincial election on December 8th.

Charest seems to think that the time is ripe, given his lead in the polls, the ADQ official opposition being in shambles, the unstable minority government, and the negative economic outlook that would make this a lot tougher on him in a year or two. I would almost be inclined to agree with him if I weren’t so electioned-out.

If you’re really quiet, you can almost hear the collective groans being emitted all the way from Gatineau to Gaspésie. I predict record-low turnouts, whatever happens.

Start getting used to hearing that. With a fair lead in the polls and only a week until election day, an Obama win is looking like the most likely scenario at this point. Of course, anything can happen, and if too many Democrats get complacent and stay home next Tuesday, McCain might pull off some surprising victories. But the smart money’s on Obama at this point. And, after eight years of Dubya, it’s hard to argue against a change at this point.

The bad news from this scenario? We won’t be able to make fun of Sarah Palin anymore. Really, Joe Biden isn’t nearly as much fun to mock.

Meanwhile, the assholes are at it again. Why aren’t these investigations kept under wraps to prevent media hype and asshole copycats?

They’re calling for his head on a platter from all sides, but Stephane Dion won’t quit yet:

The Toronto Star had cited Liberal party insiders who said Dion would make the announcement on Thursday and then stay on as leader until a successor is chosen.

But a spokeswoman for Dion said the Liberal leader would make no such announcement on Thursday and that her office would inform the media when Dion is ready to speak.

[ . . . ]

The paper quoted one well-connected party member as suggesting that if Dion didn’t announce his departure promptly, the party should move the furniture out of his office.

“How do you do a putsch on a guy who doesn’t understand he’s being putsched?” the Globe quoted the unidentified Liberal as saying.

Erm… Milton?

Seriously, though, while I think that Dion knows all too well that his days as Liberal Party leader are over, I think it’s disgraceful how he’s being treated by the media and his own party. He led a bad campaign, was the victim of circumstance, and unfortunately has the charisma of a turnip, but I don’t think Dion is a bad guy.

Dion took on the party leadership at a difficult time and dared to lead an environment-based campaign in a time when people were voting with their pocketbook. I think Dion was an ineffective leader, but is overall a smart man, and deserves a lot better than what he got.

Even he knows his time is up, though. This stand is just for the media. I doubt he’ll keep it up for longer than a few days.

(Via Damian Penny).

Update 10/20: That didn’t take long. Dion has announced his resignation.

Obama? McCain? The winner is… Joe the Plumber.

Except that it seems he’s not really a plumber. And he’s not really an undecided voter. And he’s not really named Joe. (It’s his middle name). Oh yeah, and for a guy supposedly so concerned about taxes, he hasn’t quite paid his own.

So, lies, cheating and misrepresentation… Hey, sounds like a politician to me. Joe the Plumber for President in 2012? Why not? As Jon Stewart pointed out, he’s already given more interviews than Sarah Palin.

17.

That’s the number of seats where the Liberal-Green combined vote total was higher than the vote total for the winning candidate.

Of those 17 seats, 9 were won by the Conservatives. The remaining 8 went 5 to the Bloc and 3 to the NDP.

Of course, it’s illogical to assume that all or even a large portion of the Green Party’s votes would have gone to the Liberals. Despite both parties having run on “green shift” platforms, they are quite different, and many people who voted Green did so largely because they did not want to vote Liberal.

And yet… With all the discussions around vote-splitting, I can tell you that Stephane Dion is eyeing those 17 seats today and wondering whether his “friendship” with Elizabeth May was worth it.

As for May, she probably understands a bit better how Ralph Nader must have felt in 2000.

Is a Liberal-Green alliance really such an outlandish idea?

Another day, another Conservative minority. Stephen Harper can talk all he wants about it being a “strengthened” minority, but the fact is he called this election with the objective of securing a majority government. He failed. ‘

Stephane Dion led the Liberals to one of their worst results in history, and the pundits were calling for his head on a platter even before the votes were finished being counted. He, more than anyone, failed.

Gilles Duceppe set out to prevent a Conservative majority, and that worked. But the Bloc didn’t change its position much since 2006. At best, a neutral result for the Bloc.

Elizabeth May’s Party saw more popular vote breakthroughs, but failed to win a single seat – the stated objective for the Greens in this campaign. May will spin this campaign as a big success, but she, too, failed.

The big winner? Jack Layton and the NDP, who bolstered their support – not at the expense of the Conservatives, but at the expense of the Liberals. In Layton’s book, where power is everything and soundbytes run rampant, this result represents success.

The big loser? The Canadian public. This election cost taxpayers $300 million bucks. This in the midst of an economic crisis. And this, for an election in which only 59% of people voted – the lowest turnout in history.

To quote Don MacPherson in the Gazette:

This year’s campaign was the most negative ever, with the parties doing a much better job of explaining to voters why they should vote against their opponents than why they should vote for them.

So it wouldn’t be surprising if once again, the most popular choice yesterday was “none of the above.”