Bizarre…
Someone I know well (if you’re reading this, you know who you are) often likes to say that to illustrate that democracy is flawed, all you’d have to do is call a vote in Quebec asking people if they believed that the Jews should pay twice the amount of tax as everyone else.
That vote, he claims, would pass in a landslide… and therein lies the problem with democracy: The people, quite often, are stupid.
Well, this isn’t quite the same thing… but it’s close:
Marois’s proposed Quebec Identity Act, with its loyalty oaths and French tests for office seekers, is cynically demagogic as well as discriminatory and demeaning. It has little chance of being adopted, and would probably be found unconstitutional if it were.
[. . . ]
And as with Bill 101 30 years ago, it seems everybody opposes the identity bill but the people.
Results of the latest monthly CROP-La Presse poll, published last week, suggest that the PQ has pulled into first place in popularity among the parties, with the ADQ slipping farther back into third.
And another poll commissioned by the strategist behind Marois’s bill, Jean-François Lisée, indicates overwhelming support for the bill.
In fact, it seems that most Quebecers would be willing to go even farther. Lisée tested the idea of requiring a “minimal knowledge” of French not only to run for office, but even to vote.
Seventy-two per cent of Quebecers were in favour of the requirement for future immigrants, and 65 per cent for people from other Canadian provinces moving to Quebec.
Yes, and in a lifeboat, two drowning people may vote to throw the third one overboard. That doesn’t make it right.
If the reasonable accommodation debate has only served to expose the deep-rooted xenophobia and racism of the vast majority of Quebec’s population, the proper response isn’t to cater to it, or to pass laws to enshrine it.
No, the proper response is to start working to change those attitudes. It won’t happen overnight. But at least it would be going in the right direction – something we don’t seem to be doing much of, lately.
What do you get when you mix two of my pet peeves: Quebec unions, and the “healthy” reasonable accommodation hearings? Plenty of religious intolerance to go around:
No public servant – including Muslim teachers and judges – should be allowed to wear anything at work that shows what religion they belong to, leaders of Quebec’s two biggest trade union federations and a civil-servants union told the Bouchard-Taylor commission yesterday.
“We think that teachers shouldn’t wear any religious symbols – same thing for a judge in court, or a minister in the
National Assembly, or a policeman – certainly not,” said René Roy, secretary-general of the 500,000-member Quebec Federation of Labour.
“The wearing of any religious symbol should be forbidden in the workplace of the civil service … in order to ensure the secular character of the state,” said Lucie Grandmont, vice-president of the 40,000-member Syndicat de la fonction publique du Québec.
Dress codes that ban religious expression should be part of a new “charter of secularism” – akin to the Charter of the French Language – that the Quebec government should adopt, said Claudette Carbonneau, president of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux.
Such a charter is needed “to avoid anarchy, to avoid treating (reasonable-accommodation) cases one by one,” Carbonneau said yesterday, presenting a brief on behalf of the federation’s 300,000 members at the commission’s hearing at the Palais des congrès.
Same point of view at the 150,000-member Centrale des syndicats du Québec, which includes 100,000 who work in the school system, the commission heard.
Quebec needs a “fundamental law” akin to the Charter of Rights that sets out clearly that public institutions, laws and the state are all neutral when it comes to religion, said Centrale president Réjean Parent. The new law would also “define (people’s) rights and duties … in other words, the rules of living together.”
Nobody should be too surprised that our unions would like to see us turn into… well, France. And by dressing it up as an anti-Muslim initiative, playing into people’s hatreds and stereotypes, they may just succeed in drumming up enough support for this asinine idea.
The “reasonable accommodation” hearings really ought to have been renamed long ago. My vote is for “Forum to allow all pissed-off, intolerant, inbred and otherwise racist idiots to vent their stereotypes and prejudices in public”. Okay, maybe it doesn’t quite have that nice ring to it. But it’s a lot more accurate.
Hugo Chavez’s referendum on his bid to become a sweeping dictator was narrowly defeated, 51% No to 49% Yes. (Hmmm, what other referendum do those results remind you of?)
The defeat was astonishing, particularly because Chavez had pulled pretty much every trick in the book to stack the deck, from bribing people with promises of a shorter workday and more pensions, to shooting protestors, to shutting down all non-state-run media. Didn’t he read the chapter in the megalomaniac how-to book on how to stuff the ballot boxes?
People are breathing easier today. But Chavez isn’t one to be graceful in defeat. What will happen next is anyone’s guess.
Longtime radio host and Montreal institution Terry DiMonte is moving to Calgary.
Terry DiMonte has been on Montreal’s airwaves for 23 years. Usually accompanied by longtime friend and sidekick Ted Bird, he’s hopped around, but is best known for his long-standing morning show on CHOM. Terry and Ted helped launch the station which started back when the music they currently play was current… and they returned nearly two decades later when CHOM was flailing, and brought it back to life.
Always classy, generous and involved in the community, and a veritable Montreal institution, Terry DiMonte will be missed. But in a way, his move west is as much a part of Montreal as DiMonte faves Cosmos and Ziggy’s; in this city, losing our best and brightest to the lure of oil money is all too common.
Bye, Terry. Phone in once in a while.
The U.N. took a break from its usual Israel-bashing agenda today to call out some actual human rights violators:
A United Nations panel rebuked Myanmar, Iran and North Korea on Tuesday for human rights abuses, overcoming objections by developing nations that the move amounted to “demonization” of some states.
The resolution on North Korea expressing concern about systematic and widespread rights violations won the strongest support in the U.N. General Assembly’s human rights committee, passing by 97-23, with 60 abstentions.
Another resolution strongly condemning the use of violence against peaceful demonstrators in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, was passed by 88-24, with 66 abstentions, in what Britain said was “a declaration of support for the Burmese people’s desire for change.”
A third vote expressing deep concern at rights violations in Iran was passed by 72-50, with 55 abstentions.
The non-binding resolutions will be sent to the 192-member General Assembly, which generally votes in the same way as the committee.
The representative from Uganda was among several members of the Non-Aligned Movement, which groups 115 mostly developing nations, who argued against singling out some states.
He said such issues were best left to the U.N.’s Human Rights Council and should be addressed through dialogue rather than what he called the “demonization” of some countries.
Demonization, eh? You mean, what is usually done to Israel in a typical U.N.’s day’s work?
No more being told that I’m lazy for my night-owl tendencies. Turns out, I’ve got a good excuse: It’s genetic:
After struggling her whole working life to adapt to the dawn alarm that went with Denmark’s 8-to-4 workday, Dr. Kring, whose PhD was on work-life balance, began researching what was so different between her and morning people. She soon latched on to a University of Surrey study showing that early risers are more likely to have the long form of a gene called Period 3, while late risers are more likely to have a short form.
Dr. Kring has labelled the larks A-people and the owls B-people.
“B-people are not lazy,” she says. “It’s genetic.”
This year, Ms. Kring launched B-Society, a group devoted to lobbying companies to stagger start times and better accommodate those whose circadian rhythms are a little delayed. In just six months, the group attracted 5,500 members and sprouted offshoots throughout Europe. The group’s website is adding a job board on which B-friendly openings throughout the world will be posted.
“B-people are just as productive as anyone else,” she says, “but they are productive at different times of day.”
[ . . . ]
Researchers have found that about one in four people carry the short version of the Period 3 gene, a physiological difference that delays their natural wake-up time by a couple of hours. By contrast, little more than one in 10 carry the early-bird form of the gene (the rest of the population falls somewhere in the middle).
I’ve known for years that mornings and I do not get along. I used to write my best university papers at 3am, and schedule all my classes in the afternoons or evenings in my student days.
Since joining the “real world”, though, it’s become blazingly obvious that business is geared to morning people. I drag myself bleary-eyed out of bed in the mornings, oh-so-reluctantly, and usually do my best to stumble through the morning without doing anything too blazingly dumb. After spending my days feeling tired, my energy level finally kicks in around 10pm… right around the time I ought to be going to sleep. Feeling sharp and productive, I tend to stay up far too late, only to smack the alarm clock in anger the next morning, much too soon.
The simple answer that people keep telling me – go to bed earlier – just doesn’t work for someone who’s always tired except between 9pm and 3am, my self-identified productivity window.
For me, being a night owl is somewhat like being left-handed. I can cope just fine as a lefty in a world of righties, just as I manage to cope as a night owl trapped in a day-job world. But sometimes it’s nice to imagine if everyone were forced to accommodate me for a change.
If Gore, Dion et al. are right and we really are about 10 seconds away from totally fucking up our planet beyond repair… well, maybe we’ll all have someplace to go:
A new world has been discovered nestled in the largest planetary system ever seen outside our solar system, fuelling speculation there are many other habitable Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.
Astronomers doubt the new-found planet – one of five circling a nearby star, which is visible with binoculars – can support life.
But they told a teleconference Tuesday the discovery fuels their conviction that many Earth-like planets are just waiting to be discovered.
Traveling at the speed of light, it would only take about 41 years to get there. In other words, a short, pleasant journey. (Advance tickets on sale on ebay shortly… stay tuned!)
As we all know (or ought to, by now), the clocks “fell back” an hour on Saturday night, at least in DST-observing parts of North America.
These guys want to abolish Daylight Saving time and stick to standard time year-round.
I maintain that we should do the opposite.
Daylight Saving doesn’t actually save any daylight, of course, but it does shift an hour later every day. So, darker mornings, lighter evenings.
Of course, there’s not much we can do to alleviate the darkness during the worst months of December/January, when we’re going work in the pitch black and leaving work in the pitch black no matter which way you slice things.
But the rest of the year, we do have the option of extending daylight by an hour more in the mornings or in the evenings. Now, morning people and evening people may disagree. But it seems like it’s a no-brainer that most people would rather have some degree of light after work, when they get things done, go out, see people, stroll around in the evenings, go out for dinner, take their kids to after-school activities… than before work, when all they have to do is get up and go to the office.
There is really no reason why we should change the clocks by an hour twice a year, causing hassles and headaches, when there’s such a simple solution available: Stick to DST all the time. Then, we can have our afternoon daylight for most of the year.
So, all of you out there who are depressed at the 5pm darkness, join me in my campaign. Let’s abolish Standard Time and adopt DST year-round! Who’s with me?
(Meanwhile, it’ll be a while till we see proper amounts of sunlight again, so let’s stock up on those Vitamin D supplements.)
Can I just state for the record that I strongly believe that Ehud Olmert is swimming with sharks… without a life preserver?
US elections do not create legitimate Palestinian peace partners. Olmert might do well to remember that.
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