In praise of the pimp and other columns and articles I wrote

 Countless articles and columns I wrote about Montreal between 1999 and 2011 have disappeared into online ether.

    So here in no particular order, or theme, or quality are a few that I found on an old hard drive. 

    Most of them appeared in the now-defunct Montreal Mirror weekly newspaper. 

**

1-18-2005

The economy of insults

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

   Francine Lamarre dropped the N bomb and now she’s going to pay three grand to her arch enemies for the mistake.

   Last month Quebec’s Human Rights Tribunal ordered her to pony up for mouthing the ultimate racist insult in an outburst against her upstairs neighbours.

 

 Think of the fine as a tax on her inept insulting skills.   

    Racist, sexist, ageist putdowns and acts of discrimination are policed in Quebec by at the cost of $13 million a year by the Human Rights Commission, which receives about 800 complaints and chooses about 40 to bring to the Human Rights Tribunal, a court that force transgressors to pay up for discriminating based on gender, ethnicity or age, stuff in section 10 of the Charter of Rights.

Lamarre had excuses. She was on medication when she said the regretted words; she was overwhelmed and unprepared by the hearings, conducted largely in English. 

   She was frustrated by her belligerent tenants who she claims used to reply to her efforts to collect rent with a “fuck you.” It was a perpetual quarrel,” she says, complaining that the noisy boy upstairs would wake at 7 a.m. and “run around like a chicken with his head cut off.” All these couldn’t rationalize saying the word-that-must-never-be-uttered. She must pay.

    Last year a good number of the cases the Commission took before judges took aim at landlords on behalf of apartment seekers. If a landlord is stupid enough to be outspoken – for example saying out loud in front of the applicant and a witness that he doesn’t want a family or young adults - he’ll be a few thousand dollars lighter.

    But sometimes a landlord gets sued even when he doesn’t say anything discriminatory. Last year one of the 20 Tribunal decisions dealt involved an Arab refused an apartment in Brossard. The commission sought $9,000 from the landlord who never said a prejudicial word. He simply rented to someone else.

The plaintiff got nothing, but Commission rep Robert Sylvestre says cases of perceived discrimination have ended up in fines for landlords. And yet in this new rental world landlords often choose randomly between a heap of candidates, undoubtedly leading to a lot of hurt feelings and suspicions of discrimination.

You know that I’m waiting for the day the Commission fines a would-be tenant for turning his nose up at an apartment when seeing it’s owned by an immigrant landlord. Alas the Commission’s last annual report includes a tribute to FRAPRU, the rabidly-anti landlord social group on its site, so gives you an idea of the chances of that happening.

Of course discrimination and prejudice are all around and only an infinitesimally tiny sliver of the total number of racist utterances will ever get in front of a Tribunal judge.

So how much can you score for having your pristine dignity assailed? Last year Martin Sacksner got $2,500 from a woman who sent him crazy anti-Semitic mail. A Sorel car dealership guy had to pay up $1,000 after describing somebody as a “fifi” behind his back. Jacqueline Drouin-Pelletier had to dole out $2,000 to Farroudja Yekene for dishing out the ‘what’s-that-towel-on-your-head style banter at a garage sale in Sherbrooke three years earlier.

So if you feel like shooting your mouth off, don’t. Ask yourself – as always – what would Steve McQueen do? Stay cool. Say nothing. Show no expression. Just walk back to your ’68 Mustang and drive away.

But if you’ve got the Tourretian impulse, where you really can’t keep your mouth shut or resist a trashtalking duel, be aware of the line. Never insult somebody in front of witnesses because you’ll have to find and kill him afterwards (don’t sue, I’m kidding!) Stay creative, choose your words, extreme-condescension, and derision or terms like “pickle nosed airhead” or “vegan waffle eater” or some other such meaningless but cryptic-sounding nonsequitors can be devastating.

Your quarrel buddy could still technically hit you with a civil harassment suit, but the Commission won’t be there at his side helping him out.

***

8-29-1999

In praise of the pimp

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

    A pretty young hooker, her pimp and me are standing around the corner of Charles Mayer Park, which isn’t a park. There is no grass, no trees, just lots of bricks. It looks like a house got tired standing in such a wretched spot and simply collapsed into the earth. 

    This spot at Montcalm and Ontario was named after the journalist who invented the hockey tradition of the three star selection.        

   Tonight’s Molson three stars: la premiere etoile, da first star, is the hooker. The second star is the columnist, only because the pimp has to come in last. We can’t glorify pimps, no way.

   “I’m not a pimp, you know. I’m don’t even get paid for doing this.” He says, his dark eyes shifting and evaluating the men in cars trying to catch the hooker’s eye. “There were a lot of beatings of the girls that were working from this corner,” he says, interrupting his sentence for one of his frequent conferences with his female friend, “but it has stopped since me and this another guy came around to protect them.” The pimp-who-says-he’s-not-a-pimp is bald on top with straggly dreads coming down from the sides and says he wasn’t present when a street-walker recently went into labour while working the corner. Nor would he tolerate his girl shooting up in public, a practice that has pissed off locals to no end.

He’s mad at the media. “The Journal de Montreal put her picture in, they blurred out her face, but you could see her tattoos clearly, what if her mother sees that?” Yet as he speaks, at least three cars full of men – perhaps thousands over the night – ogle his pretty, pouty-lipped friend.

While do-gooders and government-funded groups have fought to help street-hookers in the last few years, the fate of her traditional organizer has flown in an opposite direction. There are no movies about the pimp with a heart of gold. Official-looking reports often blame these guys for the problem, without acknowledging their potential for good.

     If, as the new thinking has it, street prostitutes need support and help, then a person who theoretically helps, defends and supports that worker must be of value. But according to federal legislation passed a few years back, judges can sentence a boyfriend, or assistant, or anybody “living off the avails of prostitution” to six months in prison. 

    So, gone are the wild guys with the fur hats and jackets that hung out at Harvey’s and apparently gone is the protection they offered. According to local prostitutes’ rights lobby group Stella, only 20 percent of hookers admit to having a pimp, which mean that only 200 or so procurers our streets. It’s possibly why hookers get killed all over. Seventy have disappeared from the Vancouver-Tacoma strip. Seventeen were killed in New York by a psycho who never encountered an irate pimp with a switch-blade. And here, south-central residents complained of the frequent noisy fights with clients.

    Next month cops and social workers meet to continue to develop solutions to the problems of our south-central skin trade. 

   Claire Thiboutot from Stella, admits that pimps offer “a certain protection and they bail the girls out of jail.” And though she says the group doesn’t have “a miracle cure” don’t expect their suggestions to include the return of the mack. MUC Police Chief Inspector Serge Gascon says that the cops won’t be sub-contracting the protection to playas anytime soon, “We are against pimps, we will keep fighting against them because they abuse the women. It’s the police who have the role of protecting all citizens.”

Area residents have told city councilor Sammy Forcillo that the hooker bedlam is worse than ever and he’s hoping cops start targeting clients, redirecting the women to non-residential areas and increasing their access to social resources. I hope it helps, but for my two cents, if I needed protection on the streets and had to choose between a bad-ass playa with a piece or a do-gooder grad student with a bunch of pamphlets? I’d even settle for a pimp-who-says-he’s-not-a-pimp.

***

2-10-2004

Quebec is a woman

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Why is Quebec so seductive, mysterious and so fickle? It’s because Quebec is a chick.

Proof: a Leger and Leger survey from a few years back had Quebecers choose their favourite words. The most popular words reflected feminine values: “harmony,” “human relations,” “tenderness,” “culture”, “spirituality” were the overall winners. Men under 35 chose words that ranked low overall: “risk,” “danger,” “speed.”

Plus there’s the money factor. Women have it. The number that keeps getting repeated – a statistic apparently so authoritative and that nobody even knows where it comes from – asserts that women in North America control 85 percent of household spending. Mathematically, this means that a man with a job making $35 grand, after divvying up half to the taxman, then to his woman, is left with $2,600 a year – that’s $200 bucks a month to live on. Welfare recipients make more. Stores shouldn’t even be letting us men in.

But back in old Europe men were phenomenal shoppers. When their women sent them to fetch spices and beaver coats, men came here from across the world in leaky boats and killed Indians just to fill out the shopping list.

Nowadays women keep stores going, even electronics stores where they buy over half the junk. Yet a new study shows that women are routinely ignored by gizmo store clerks. I asked a clerk in Nerds’r’Us what he’d do if a woman wanted to buy, say, a remote control. He replied: “Men should really be shopping for that particular item.”

He makes a good point. Women aren’t great with remotes. They don’t even change channels for commercials, maybe because they’re studying products they might be buying with their 85 percent. But I can assure you that TV commercials should not be watched except those featuring drunk housewives like the Devo-inspired “Swiff-It mop” and the hammered Aunt Lorelei dancing at Disneyland.

Retailers generally know that women have cash, which is why they charge them double for haircuts and shoes. This policy should also be extended to music stores because women need a disincentive to buying Sarah McLaughlin, Cheryl Crow and Brian Adams CDs, which really stink up radio.

Women are also less likely than men to read this column because statistically they read for pleasure, whereas men read to acquire knowledge. Women rely on school for their education, something that men are increasingly giving up on. A cool trick: walk past the graduating class photos in the hallways at McGill law school – the grads slowly morph genders - all men 40 years ago to all women today.

Anyway, degrees are overrated. They lead to jobs, but newspapers are where you’ll find a true education. Unfortunately you’ll never get a job by writing “I read newspapers a lot” on the “Education” section of your resume.

Another problem is that women professionals seek to marry male professionals. They do this – according to yet another study - because women consider men more attractive when told the man has a good job (men didn’t care either way about the woman’s job). But there won’t be any rich hunks left. That’s ok because lawyers marrying lawyers is not only anti-wealth distribution – it’s just icky. Professional class-incest should be taboo.

Women used to court powerful men to gain their status but the new trend is to do this by spurning them. Famous guys might get groupies but they also get shot down famously.

For example an Ottawatian I once met told me before our handshake was complete about how she had once turned down hockey legend Steve Yzerman’s marriage proposal. A single Haitian mama I know casually bragged to about how she refused Pedro Martinez’s request for her phone number and I’ve heard chicks do oneupwomanship duels over their biggest celebrity slam – a game that involved such local notables as Brian Hayward, Brian Barnes, Roy Dupuis, Jean Leloup, as well as a particularly messy tale about Robbie Alomar in the room he lived in at SkyDome.

So anyway, Quebec is an alluring but hard-to-understand temptress, with a couple of flaws, she nonetheless deserves a big Valentine’s Day smooch. 

**

9-11-2000

Urban hounds in bondage

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

In the dog-friendly confines of elegant Percy Walters Park, bitches and studs frolic freely, as they scratch themselves, establish territory and check out potential mates. Meanwhile their dogs do largely the same things.

For decades, dog lovers have convened on this picturesque, sloping Pennefield Avenue field tucked inside the low redbrick walls that once fenced off a millionaire’s estate. Unlike my part of NDG where snarling, predatory hounds devour 10 pounds of raw beef and get their teeth sharpened daily, this seems a laid-back, successfully self-governing community of dog fanciers.

So naturally somebody had to try to put an end to it. That somebody was an unnamed middle-aged woman – rumoured to inhabit a condo behind the Trudeau mansion - who has slapped the city with a cease and desist order to force dogs to wear leashes. The complainant accurately points out that Percy Walters Park was never meant to be Poochy Walkers Park because the donor, a cigarette company official and member of the Royal Automobile Club, gave his land to the city in 1944 as a place for kids to play.

Walters decreed that there never be any playgrounds on the spot, that it be named be named after him for all eternity and so forth. If we violate Percy’s commandments, he will get cryogenically unfrozen and kick some ass. Failing that, the land would revert to a nearby hospital.

Typically, such deed clauses are easily changed with a simple provincial legal amendment. And traditionally the city has diplomatically smoothed out periodic disagreements over the illicit dog run. But this time, rather than let sleeping dogs lie, the city has cried havoc and let slip the dogs of the canine patrol. First they handed out tickets and pamphlets. Next, public works staffers welded-open the wrought iron gates that make the park safe for the hounds. After somebody un-welded them, city workers – complete with police escort - removed the gates entirely.

“I’ve been coming here for seven years and never seen a problem. We’re forced to buy a dog license, so we get the financial responsibilities of dog ownership without receiving benefits of it,” says leashless dog owner Martin Hasler who claims that he once unsuccessfully tried to write his dog off on his taxes as a legal dependent.

“Dog owners move to apartments nearby just so they can live close to this place,” says fellow illicit dog walker Genevieve Larocque. She asks, “where else can we go to let our dogs run?”

When asked that question, a city official reads an address from a list of 20 city-approved dog runs. “I’m not sure where that is. I think it might be in Pointe Ste-Charles.” When reminded that the Pointe is miles away, the official replies, “yes, but don’t forget, a lot of these dog owners bring their cars to walk their dogs.”

**

More stuff to feel outraged about:

A big Canadian-owned boutique at Peel and Ste-Catherine pays its workers bare minimum while forcing them to pay for and wear company clothing. Yet when well- paid rock stars Dave Grohl and Melissa “Chuckles” Auf der Maur recently strolled in, the star-struck manager loaded them up with free clothes.

A black woman in a rich neighbourhood is steamed because people assume she’s the maid when she answers her door. Unfortunately, dark skinned people still clean mansions and too-rarely own them. Forget social manners, let’s quibble over wealth distribution.

Jaggi Singh, the infectiously angry radical TV darling, said a few weeks ago on a CBC TV panel that “welfare cuts are violence.” Not bad, eh? Personally, I consider overheated coffee, Billy Joel songs and rainy weather to be violence too.

The McGill Daily has brilliantly presented their not-very-interesting office space squabble as a right wing conspiracy to quash the paper’s dangerously mind-blowing agenda of political enlightenment. In fact, the paper has been offered a similar office on the same floor only about 17% smaller than their current digs, which were very spacious last time I looked.  

***

9-19-1999

How our sky got scraped

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

      Forty years ago the city as we know it was born after city hall agreed to play ball with some Yankee developers. It was the fall of ’59 when William Zeckendorf would find the final investor in a project that would turn a huge downtown crater into the city’s gleaming core. The steel and concrete goliath, to be the first to scrape our island’s virgin sky, nipped urban sprawl before it started and gave us the option to work in the clouds or shop beneath the snow. And a lesson to those who oppose government funding for the proposed baseball stadium: Zeckendorf’s amazing building, a tax cash cow for the city, would never have been built had the city not pitched millions to the developers.

     Here’s the tale: long ago, much of today’s downtown was a grassy slant called Burnside, the name James McGill gave his farm. McGill built his university in the northern part and sold off the lower portions to tycoons like Harrison Stephens whose elegant stone mansion long graced the site. Stephens persuaded his blue-blooded buddies to build the St. James Club, a snooty drinking club, next door in 1864. Other neighbours were to include Dr. David Macbean’s Turkish Bath Hotel, which promised to cure “gout, catarrh, dropsy and dyspepsia.”

In 1911 the Canadian Northern Railroad secretly bought much of the Town of Mount Royal in order to build a three mile underground train tunnel to the city center. Speculators gambled that the other end would wind up where Montreal High is now, or where St. James United Church now sits on Ste. Catherine, but the train folks dug right through to the land just south of the St. James Club.

In 1943 Central Station was built, in 1956 Dorchester was widened, and in ‘58 the Queen Elizabeth Hotel opened its doors. The land around the St. James Club was a huge pit, sad and lonely as the bed abandoned by your lover.

Enter the American developer William Zeckendorf who was already famous for selling the United Nations on his New York property rather than locating in Philadelphia. Zeckendorf persuaded the CN to let him build a city-within-the-city, a “Rockefeller Plaza but better” on Dorchester and University.

The Mayor jumped on board, as did the Royal Bank, but locals were resentful and suspicious. One city councillor complained that the west, ie: english, side of town would get the tallest building in the Commonwealth, while the east got the unwelcome Jeanne Mance housing projects. Another councillor demanded that Zeckendorf’s company be fined $200 for putting the city crest on his pamphlets. And all hell broke loose when Mayor Fournier agreed to spend $7.5 million on street widenings around the project.

Unfortunately, the historic St. James Club got the wrecking ball and if you believe Zeckendorf, city hall encouraged him to knock it down, as a French gentlemen’s club had been demolished a year earlier. The city built a traffic tunnel on Berri as an olive branch to jealous east enders and city council wisely rejected Zeckendorf’s proposed 20 foot high sloping concrete ramp from his Cathcart Street plaza to Ste. Catherine, along McGill College.

Construction fever swept town: Zeckendorf-in his own confession-was knocking down on-site buildings his company didn’t even own. The CIBC attempted to usurp the Zeckendorf/Royal Bank project by quickly erecting their own, even-taller tower at Peel and Dorchester. CIL tossed up a quickie skyscraper on Dorchester just east of University.

In the first 19 years after construction worker Victor Cloutier bolted the last girder on the 42 nd floor of Zeckendorf’s Place Ville Marie on July 12, 1961, the city collected an astounding $100 million in taxes from the project. The cross-shaped building gave the city the cash flow to finance the metro while Torontonians, whose city core was controlled by the unimaginative John David Eaton, stood back in awe.

Now that a glorious downtown baseball stadium needs cash, the city should dream again and remember the great things that can happen when they agree to play a little pitch and catch on a good project.

**

Nov 7 2001 

Celine Dion and the not-so free press

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

At first we thought it was just another inexplicable phenomenon, as impossible to understand as the local popularity of prog rock bands like Gentle Giant and Genesis and foods like poutine, an unappetizing concoction of French fries soaked in cheese and gravy. There was no reason to imagine that Celine Dion would make a mark outside of her native Quebec, much less dictate her own press to a media happy march in lockstep to her commands.

Previously no French Canadian star had ever shown much determination to break out of the local ghetto, although those who might have had the best shot include 60’s era queen sized shouter Ginette Reno. She now lives in the countryside, married to a character in the ongoing biker war, a conflict war that has killed 150 to date. Other more recent candidates vowed that they’d never betray their people by singing in English, including the cute-as-a-button buxom, blonde Mitsou who now spends her days attending mall openings and accompanying geriatrics on travel tours.

But there’s no turning back now, the fourteenth and last child of a poor family raised in a village south of Montreal, the same girl who’d sing Mamie Blue at local bars at age 5, is the reigning princess of pop.

I couldn’t be more embarrassed because of it.

For the sake of disclosure, I tend to agree with my brother’s quip that Celine Dion sounds like what her name suggests: a sea-lion dyin’. Her every note, to me, evokes soap operas and soggy suburban emotional pornography and it's endlessly frustrating that she has come to represent my geographic area.

Musical tastes aside, Dion’s lesser-known side contains a far more sinister trend as she routinely uses legal threats to terrorize – ok, ok, bully – the free press into becoming little more than a forum for her own press releases. To understand the long and dark history of Dion’s relationship with the press, one might first flip through any Quebec entertainment magazine where one might get the scoop on how a minor local TV star changed his hairstyle or how an aging singer has redone her living room. In their implicit mission to promote French language culture, such publications appear to have banned criticism in favour of actively promote the stars.

But this summer Allo Vedettes, one of those very fluff-bearing publications, reprinted a report originally printed in the Star tabloid maintaining that Celine and husband-manager Rene Angelil had rented a large chunk of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas in order to sunbathe nude in privacy. The report was repeated around the world but Dion was particularly displeased at it appearing in the small Quebec paper. The couple demanded $5 million for damaging her reputation, although in the earthy values of post-Catholic Quebec, charges of nudism could barely elicit a yawn.

“I never thought it was serious,” Michel Girouard, the gossip columnist named in the suit, told me this week. “I thought it was hysterical.” Girouard, known for his golden tan that virtually lights up the coldest days of Montreal’s infamous winters, had his own victim card to counter the warbling diva’s claims of damage. Dion, he noted, was targeting an openly gay man, locally famous for a gimmick marriage to another man in the mid-70s. Allo Vedettes boasted that they wouldn’t back down. Yet the publication dutifully printed Dion-Angelil’s letter of complaint and Angelil eventually dropped his threats with a murky explanation that it was no longer inappropriate after September 11. According to legal custom, those who drop threatened libel suits have to pay one percent of the sum they had accused, plus legal costs. Angelil balked at paying the $50,000 or the legal costs of the Allo Vedettes.

Girouard considers the affair a desperate publicity grab. “The problem is that Celine hasn’t been singing for two years and now she wants to be in the news just the same. If you want to be in the news,” says Girouard, “you have to provoke things.”

Dion’s attempt to punish the French language media for its intolerable disobedience was far from an isolated case. Indeed her steadily growing reputation as a serial victim of press freedom includes an incredible tale from last year when Angelil asked the popular entertainment weekly Sept Jours to destroyed 200,000 ($62,000 US worth) of magazines. The Dion-Angelil team, which agreed to the interview only if a personal friend was to conduct it, objected to a headline “My Son Already Has a Twin” in reference to Dion having frozen her eggs for the purposes of fertility. Angelil demanded all copies of the magazine be destroyed and the brass obliged and reprinted the magazine to his specifications, apparently without a peep from the shareholders.

And the duo’s libel chill has also blown in the sunny south. Not long ago, while Dion and Angelil were on a media blitz to let the world know that they were trying to have a baby, the National Enquirer announced (February 1, 1999) that Dion was indeed pregnant with twins. Within a couple of months Dion actually became pregnant but didn’t forget what she considered to be a huge insult, which she deemed worthy of $20 million, which she demanded for invasion of privacy.

The Enquirer, noting that there are worse things to call someone than pregnant, demanded to see her gynecological reports. A year ago the Enquirer printed a retraction and donated money to the American Cancer Foundation in her name for having said that Dion, by then a mother of a 9-month-old child, had been pregnant with twins.

To employ a description usually directed by Canadians against unmanly hockey players, one might postulate that Dion can dish it out by can’t take it. A rarely-discussed incident suggests that Dion herself was once guilty of a slander far more serious than anything tossed her way and she’s made sure the compliant media rarely makes mention of it. One who tried to bring it up in 1997 was a journalist for Canadian TV Guide who, in the course of an exclusive interview, asked about the incident. Before the article came out, the TV Guide brass received a subsequent request from Dion’s reps not to publish the interview.

No explanation for the request to nix the story was provided (Dion apparently following the royal dictum, never apologize, never explain). But according to the well-respected interviewer, Rosa Harris-Adler, Dion was likely offended by a question pertaining to a reference to Dion’s behaviour at the a Quebec French-language music awards ceremony in 1990. Following her debut English album, awards organizers had decided to honour Dion with a nomination in the category of best English singer alongside such Montrealers as Corey Hart and Men Without Hats. But rather than simply withdraw her nomination in advance, Dion chose to wait until she won to refuse the award. She explained that she couldn’t accept the award because she is not an anglophone, rather, she is a Quebecker.

The insinuation was clear that Dion didn’t consider Quebec’s English-speaking community – which forms about 15 percent of the population – real citizens of the province of Quebec. To fully grasp this egregious bit of redneckery, imagine, say Madonna winning an award for best Spanish language song only to purposefully take the podium and reject the prize, saying “I’m not a Latina, I’m an American.”

Some reports say that the little-discussed affront almost led to Dion being booted off the Sony label and her elderly husband made sure she didn’t make any more misguided political statements from that day on.

All the same, Dion’s Quebec fan base was never much bothered by her contentious statement and the Premier of the moment, Jacques Parizeau, who later resigned in shame after making a racist remark of his own, sent her an effusive thumbs up for her puzzling statement. Celine’s Quebec fans also appear indifferent to her subsequent anglicization, which has seen her champion Canadian patriotism, American patriotism, shed the accent on her first “e” and give birth to a child in Florida, far from her homeland.

This is perhaps because Dion had started disciplining her hometown reporters, curbing anything that looks like criticism in 1994 when they demanded $20 million from the Photo Police crime tabloid which printed the unspeakable rumour that Angelil had umm… relations with Dion while she was still his underage protegee. The crime rag settled out of court. Others who have received lawyers’ letters from the duo include France’s Voici magazine, which they sued for taking unauthorized photos of the then-pregnant diva. Then there was the obligatory URL web site suit against somebody cybersquatting her name, which they won earlier this year. Somewhere out there is an angry drummer who complains of having his songs stolen. As well, a Montreal businessman who was sued for producing a line of Celine lingerie ended up locking horns with Angelil who said he never gave permission to do so. It soon came out in an interrogation that Angelil had indeed signed the rights and the issue was settled in private.

Indeed for a such a stickler to detail, Angelil’s management decisions are not unsloppy. Indeed a few weeks ago I was sitting in the kitchen of a guy who works for a food company that does charity work with Muhammad Ali. Angelil, in gratitude for a chance to meet his idol, happily inked a waiver that allows the company to use Dion’s image for whatever purposes they see fit, any time. But when the food company came under some criticism, Dion instantly disavowed herself of any connection to it.

In fact local scandals frequently find a way to tie the Dion name into stories, pointing out that news editors are aware of the insatiable appetite for all things Celine that turns any story into journalistic alchemy. Dion and Angelil once helped found a restaurant chain called Nickels (the “s” in Nickels represents plural, not possessive, as the apostrophe is illegal for smaller chains under Quebec’s French-first language laws). Soon the chain was fingered in a massive tax fraud. While other restaurants rounded up in the sting were quickly relegated to the back pages, Dion’s association with the restaurant made it hot news. Dion rapidly sold her interests under the condition that her name be erased from all mentions of even the history of the eatery.

Even crime stories will thrust Celine into their headlines if given the slightest opportunity to do so, in 1998, newspapers told the tale of Christian-Dominique Ethier, who was convicted of 19 charges of extortion. He’d hang around mall bathrooms pretending to be a police officer and accuse old timers of peeking at his wiener over the urinal wall, for which he’d demand instant payment in recompense for the offence. Rather than standing on its own bizarre-ness, the story was spun as a tale of Celine story because it turned out that the offender once received money from Dion for the funeral of his daughter who had died of cancer.

The ubiquity of Celine in the media and her finger trigger for litigation might seem less scandalous than the various sins of the divas that have gone before. We can shake our heads at Diana Ross’s conceit, Madonna’s perversions, Whitney’s Bobby and blow and Mariah Carey’s obvious struggles. But let’s save our gravest head shaking for what Dion stands for, which is more than just bad music, but the attempt to control the very press that created her.

Judging that which is or isn’t true doesn’t seem to require anything but her blessings. Once when she was asked in an interview what she thought of the many biogrphies out there dealing with her. “I don’t know what you’re trying to say,” she answered, a bit prickly, “I only know of one biography and it’s written by Georges-Hébert Germain, it’s the only one I respect because it’s true.”

***

4-7-2003

Taxman threatens charity restaurant

Every day 120 cheap meals are brought to diners while another 40 meals brought to needy homes from the Chez Mes Amis restaurant on Sherbrooke in NDG, but Tracy Dorion’s seven year old restaurant could close its doors thanks to complicated new provincial tax rules. “We are in a lot of trouble,” says founder Dorion, “and it has to do with Bill 150 and the reallocation of taxes. We’ve always been exempt but for some reason things have changed around this year and the result is we received a tax bill in the amount of over $8,000.” The restaurant is a registered charity for which donors can receive tax receipts, but it is not associated with the powerful Centraide fund, which can often help charities out in such binds. Bill 150, passed in 2000, forced municipalities to rearrange tax rates, leading to tax problems at such non-profit groups as the province’s Legion Halls, and more recently led bailiffs to seize the contents of Reverend Bagot’s food bank in Villeray. “When they seized that food bank I called to see if there was something we could do. I was made aware to be careful because we’re going to get it too, and sure enough we got our own bill in the mail a few days later,” says Dorion. “I can’t imagine how many charities are going to be closing down over this.” Bureaucrats have advised Dorion to reapply for charitable status, an effort that will require a nine-month wait and won’t exempt her from her current bill. Chez mes Amis welcomes support at 482-2210.

***

11-9-1999

Kill the chill

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

     Just when I suspected that my history degree couldn’t get any more useless, Premier Lucien Bouchard is trying to prove that yes indeed it can. That’s because Bouchard, along with ex-Premier Jacques Parizeau has charged investment councilor Richard Lafferty with libel and is suing him $300,000 for making one of those historical comparisons that us history scholars were trained to make. Lafferty’s apparently “absolutely unacceptable” statement – made in a newsletter to his clients – is that our big business is scared of the nationalist movement in the same way that German industrialists bowed down to the Nazis.

   Personally, I would never compare the PQ to the Nazis. Bouchard has nothing in common with Adolf Hitler, other than a haircut. Nor would I ever suggest that Bernard Landry has the panache of Luftwaffe chief Herman Goring. I’d never say that Francois Legault is about as qualified to run the Education Ministry as Heinrich Himmler, the chicken farmer was to head the SS. My heart and soul, thankfully, are clear of such impure thoughts!

   The problem with debating the Nazi movement is that white collar pencil necks have written so much about the straight-armed saluters that one could literally plow through the material 24 hours a day for an entire lifetime without getting through it all. And it’s not all inoffensive, for example, according to Pierre Ayconberry’s authoritative historiography The Nazi Question, most historians agree that Hitler would have been considered a German hero had he been assassinated in 1938. But when Bobby Hull said something similar to a Russian newspaper, it became a front-page scandal.

And what any European café sprocket worth his expresso could tell you – like Lafferty suggests – is that nationalism has historically been a suspected puppet movement of big capitalism. As a result, our Premier’s game of libel-threat chicken looks to leading him to a winter hemming and hawing about European politics rather than dealing with his part-time job of heading the government. Naturally, newspapers will drone on every day about this irrelevant question that Bouchard really didn’t want to discuss at all.

My advice to the thin-skinned Bouchard is to ignore his critics, who are best left unacknowledged or pityinglingly treated as unfortunate victims of intellectual deficiencies. Who, for example, would ever heard of Ernst Zundel had he not been given a national stage to expose his views?

Repression is like one of those pretty pendulum toys, with those shiny metal balls swinging on strings. And thanks to Bouchard’s reaction, I find my thoughts bouncing the other way, wondering if he’s lunching today with Alcan’s CEO or spending the weekend in the country with Jean Monty, Bell’s shiny-headed CEO.

But Bouchard couldn’t resist Lafferty’s provocation because the PQ react to being called Nazis about the same way as anglos like being labeled “the best treated minority in Canada.” Indeed, the first words out of Réné Levesque’s mouth when the PQ was elected for the first time was “we are not Nazis.”

So I decided to use my history training to devote the last two inches here to the question, is Quebec nationalism fascist? The answer is that nobody knows because there is no consensual definition for the term, particularly since hippies corrupted it by using it as invective. Like when your uncle tells you to take your feet off the table, you say, “hey stop being a fascist, man.”

One leading definition of the term fascist is that supplied by Zeev Sternhell, an Isreali scholar, who is the son of Polish Holocaust victims. His simple formula, nationalism + socialism = fascism, is worrisome because the PQ embraces both nationalism and socialism. The good news is that Sternhell doesn’t think that fascism has to be a bad thing.

So forget the nurses, civil servant negotiations and trade delegations, this winter Bouchard will be discussing the historical equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. He’ll also look bad if he loses the case, although it’s hard to feel sorry for him or anybody else who blows the cold winds of libel chill.

**
3-21-2001
Crouching Dragon

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

James Wing was 10 years old when he left his mother and blind, older brother behind in a Chinese village to join his father in Montreal. He moved in with a half dozen waiters and cooks, his father’s colleagues. They all lived above a Chinese restaurant on St. Catherine across from Ogilvy’s. It was 1923.

“Nobody really took care of me, my father was too busy with work,” says Wing. He attended Belmont Elementary School near Beaver Hall Hill. Had classmates at Belmont Elementary asked Wing why his mother could not live with him, he might have explained that his father already had to pay a $500 head tax for himself – about the price of a house in those days – and another $500 for young James. Dad couldn’t afford to pay the tax – applicable only on Chinese immigrants – for anybody else.

As other communities gathered capital to advance their status in society, the tax kept Canada’s Chinese community divided and indebted and forced them to work extra hard to pay off the discriminatory charge.

But other kids rarely asked young James anything. “They weren’t friendly to me, they saw us as the yellow race, I guess because our culture and customs are so different.”

After 1923 no amount of money would have persuaded Canadian authorities to allow James’ mother to join him in Montreal because Canada abolished the head tax and slammed the door shut with the Chinese Exclusion Act.

James moved back to China for a five years, married and had two children but he was not permitted to bring them when he returned in 1936. “I was sad. For 19 years I passed as a single man, even though I had a wife and kids in China and I was here living alone on Dorchester where Complexes Desjardins is now.” He would also never see his mother again.

During those years, few politicians opposed the blatant discrimination against the Chinese and the only white faces of support came from a few members of the Montreal’s Protestant clergy. “Chinese just minded their own business and tried to make more money so they could keep their families fed, they had no political objectives or power. We just lived honest lives, working and earning our living,” he says.

Wing worked as an electrical technician at Canadian Marconi for 34-year career, doing top secret work helping develop radar and radio equipment for the war effort. In 1947, Canada finally repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act allowing Wing to finally be with his wife and children, who moved here in 1952.

In spite of the forced divisions, Wing’s children flourished: Mao handpicked two for a Chinese state-paid education. One now practices medicine and another is an engineer in China. Another son practices and teaches medicine in Montreal. But Wing still regrets having missed their childhoods. “I wish I had been a better father.”

The Chinese head tax netted Canada $23 million, coincidentally about the same cost of our national railway built largely by Chinese immigrants. Canada has compensated other communities for historical damages, for example, the Japanese were given cash and an apology in 1988 for being interned during World War II but they refuse to return the head tax.

After years of failed lobbying, the Chinese Canadian National Council has recently launched a new legal challenge to have the money returned with interest. An Ontario judge will decide whether to hear the class action suit in late April. The federal government has sought to have the case tossed out, possibly in hopes that in delaying, potential recipients would have died off.

Returning the head tax would be the final step to accepting Chinese as true Canadians. “We accepted discrimination as a reality, as a clash of civilizations, but it came from the fact that Canadians didn’t know much about the Chinese,” says Wing, “now they do and so naturally Canadians now admire Chinese culture,” says Wing.

A petition to support the return of fund collected in the head tax is present in Chinatown’s better restaurants.

**
9-25-2000

Westmount wannabes are revolting

We can’t all move in the same circles as the pinkie-out tea drinkers of Westmount. But we might be inspired by the bold initiative of the Circle Road Association which figures that if you can’t move to Westmount, then move Westmount to you. A recent petition to join Westmount was circulated on the road that lies west of Victoria between the Boulevard and Queen Mary and received 450 signatures, around 98 percent of the road’s residents. A Mirror phone survey confirms that the Circle folks squarely support the municipal migration. Better snow clearance, lower taxes, a cuter library, more English services and increased home values are roundly cited as the advantages of the plan.

As the province, city of Montreal and various municipalities now jockey for a new regional structure, residents consider this a good time to circle the wagons, says councilor Marvin Rotrand. He sympathizes with the Circle folks even though residents are attempting to flee his Montreal riding. “Suburban municipalities have more democratic rights. They can hold referendums, challenge bylaws and the nearnesss of the local council ensures much more public awareness,” says Rotrand. But the Circle Road annexation, which Westmount Mayor Peter Trent tentatively supports, could be short-circuited because the area is not geographically connected to Westmount. The proposal would create an unprecedented, separate island of Westmountness, a sort of Beemer-driving municipal equivalent of cold war West Berlin. Rotrand says new rounds of similar initiatives to redraw island boundaries are undoubtedly forthcoming.

-George Maddux (a pseudonym I occasionally used)

**

11-18-2003
Citywide hostage taking

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Imagine you could legally take a whole city for ransom. In this scenario you’re a diabolical Dr. Evil where you – in the understandable aim of personal enrichment - stop people from getting to work, separate friends and lovers and keep the cash till precariously empty for small shopkeepers. Best of all, you don’t even need a laser beam satellite gizmo aimed down from space, all you need is to be a Montreal Transit Corporation card carrying unionized employee.

Now for those of us who remember the bad old days, bus strikes seem a throwback pain-in-the-ass anachronism that we assumed went the way of banks that made your cash unavailable after three and grocery stores shut on Sundays.

But we were wrong to assume that the bus strike plague had been put down. There hasn’t been a bus strike since ’89 but in the 25 years prior we endured 40 such irritants, only 10 of which were of the legal variety.

So now the downtrodden proletariat of the 20 bucks + per hour variety are on the picket line asking you to honk your horn and wave. But why on earth would we want the MTC employees to earn more money? Heck they almost surely make more than you. It’s not like they have nine kids to support as we know Quebecers don’t have children. And half of any raise they get will go to taxes anyway. So is it legitimate for a few hundred well paid workers to strand millions just so can earn a few extra bucks to pay the Seadoo off?

And hey… you want more money too, but has the MTC union chief has never called your boss and demanded bigger paycheques for you?

There are two worlds of labour in Quebec, the non-unionized dregs and the 40 percent of workers (compared to 28 percent in Ontario) who have their union cards. They’re both radically different cosmologies.

As unionized Bell Canada employees, my gang was paid heaps more than those doing an equivalent non-unionized work, yet in one of those pervasive paradoxical peccadilloes, we were generally miserable, unknowingly wallowing in a self-pitying culture of entitlement and resentment. We’d spend half our days trying to imagine some management slight that we could file a union grievance about.

Economically speaking, unless somebody is making scandalously little pay, there’s no burning reason to hope a union wins a strike. If too many local workers start earning higher wages, inflation goes up. Thus you’ve also got to get a payhike just to keep up. And when wages get too high investors plant their cash elsewhere, so the whole economy sags.

It’s no fun to strike either. As an activity, picketing is akin to standing hands in pockets outside the Old Brewery Mission all day although you might have to occasionally holler “So-li-dar-itay,” which seems embarrassingly dumb as far as slogans go. Plus it’s hard to generate much self-righteous adrenaline. After all, hardballing for more long weekends ain’t exactly as exciting as rioting in the “three shillings or blood” Beauharnois canal diggers strike of 1843.

And money doesn’t buy happiness, if you believe The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser which details the Deci experiment. In that study two groups were asked to fiddle with a Rubik’s cube. The unpaid group kept gleefully twiddling away after the experiment was officially over. The paid group grumbled, reported less enjoyment from the affair and knocked off at immediately at quitting time.

So my advice to the MTC strikers: life’s too short to make enemies with everybody on the island. Take the money and get the buses rolling.

-

A remembrance for a good friend and bright guy once mentioned in this column – L.M.D. was a witty intellectual with a love for cold beer and hot women. The soft spoken bon vivant and author of a novel espousing the violent separatist overthrow of Quebec leapt to his death off the Jacques Cartier Bridge Monday last. The faster they put up suicide barriers around that span the better. 

**
9-12-1999

A moveable beast

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

One of life’s great ironies is that those who hang a place with the clichés that form its identity- in our case, as poutine-eating North American Parisians- usually just got here on the last Voyageur from Hogansville. Blessed with a gift for getting things wrong, these come-from-away know-nothings generate much local head-shaking yet somehow still get taken seriously. And worst of all, they make much more money than me.

Want to know about the Italian province of Tuscany? Ignore the Italians, look instead to the American Frances Mayles, whose Under the Tuscan Sun sold several truckloads by droning on about architecture and wine. A sample: “As we hoe weeds around the vines, naturally, we begin to think of a year 2000 Bramasole Gamay or Chianti.” Somehow, pitchfork-wielding locals have so far resisted the urge to smash her word processor.

Equally best-selling and annoying was Peter Mayes’ A Year in Provence, a trite little story of an extreme bore who condescends to locals while blabbing endlessly about what he ate on which day. These, as far as I can tell, are all cookie-cutter knock-offs of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast which set the tone for wistful descriptions of Parisian vistas and torturous descriptions of waiters and bars.

I don’t give a rat’s ass about bagels and smoked meat and all of the other irritating images that our city automatically evokes, but I’m less indifferent to big piles of cash, so I thought I’d have a whack at the formula. Besides, my manuscript Stripper Cop was stalled after the shoot-out scene.

So I shut my eyes and imagined I was from Burnaby or Scarberia, just opening my virgin eyes to this city. The following is an excerpt of my attempt at a formulaic heartfelt, cliché-ridden, hopefully profitable salute to the city through newbie eyes called A More Than Adequate Poutine.

-----

“THE DAY STARTS at the Orange Julep, a great orange orb perched atop the exciting Decarie, a wondrous site of thunderous vehicles which sounds like a pulsating waterfall. The big orange once symbolized the fruitful dominance of the west-end English oppressors. Today, the bright round circle can only be seen as burning west-end sunset of anglo control. I’m lovingly handed un carton de patates frites, potatoes cut in strips thick like thumbs, apples of the earth lovingly plucked by pious farmers named Jean-Guy and Marie on the outskirts of the city. As a tribute to them and their 18 children, the city fathers built an airport in a the countryside to allow international tourists to witness the loving harvest as they flew over, but alas travelers were too insensitive to local beauty and Mirabel airport was heartlessly abandoned.

Towards the raw throbbing heartbeat of la ville Marie I caught a locally manufactured Novabus, a great improvement over the former imported model as it reflects the sensitivities of a unique culture. The limited floor space forces people into intimate contact and the ineffective defrost mechanism reflects the steaminess of the popular mood, not to mention the jerky acceleration, another indication of the mercurial temperament of this lovable city.

After that it was onto the wondrous Metro, where the euphonious rubber friction rang through the concrete tubeway, I looked for happy collectivist smiles but instead the distinct society expressed itself by seriously staring downwards. Surely they were pondering the wonders of their local culture. Later in a brasserie the locals expressed their passions by turning their backs and lovingly caressing video lottery terminals. As a local custom, the waitress kindly saved me the trouble of arranging her tip by simply pocketing her gratuity.

My evening ended with gentlemen of the east, who appeared to be on their way to a masquerade in which they’ve decided to go as women. Although Montreal is known for its many taxis, these men in dresses seemed to be waiting endlessly on street corners. So as I shared a cab into town with one of them, while admiring the cross to the north and the sun rising to the east, I learnt how friendly Montreal could be.”

**
6-12-2002

Conference room blitz

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

“I got to this deserted hallway. It was empty except for a guy walking back and forth with a cell phone. Suddenly I could hear the roar at the end of the hall,” says Rod Vienneau, “Then I came to this conference room full of cameras, with a big table and Quebec flags in the back. I said to myself, ‘well Rod it’s now or never.’”

The not-so-rich, not-so-young Vienneau marched to the front of the conference and stood face-to-face with the PQ government bigwigs holding the conference.

“Monsieur Legault!,” Vienneau shouted to the Justice Minister, “I represent the Duplessis Orphans and we want to know: when we will get justice?” he asked.

The Health Minister squirmed in his seat as by-election hopefuls David Levine and Michel Belhumeur looked on. An uncomfortable looking Legault finally replied, “Well, Landry took a little step to doing that.”

Legault’s response might not have seemed like much of a triumph but it was to become ammunition for Vienneau, a master tactician in the battle to persuade the government to revise the paltry settlement given the one-time orphans forced to grew up in insane asylums.

A few days later Vienneau stood outside a Joliette hotel with his wife Clarina Duguay and Paul Aubin – both victims of the government-sponsored child abuse. The trio toted specially designed flags to represent their struggle. The flag depicts a child crucified on a fleur-de-lys encircled in thorns.

When Landry emerged, Vienneau pounced. “I went right up to him and starting yelling at him, I got three shots in the ribs from his bodyguard but I kept going, calling him a fucking liar.” Vienneau informed the Premier that even his own minister dismissed Landry’s settlement as “little steps.”

Vienneau’s bating provoked a you-can’t-HANDLE-the-truth! moment. Landry replied in front of cameras, “I’ve accorded $50 million to that dossier.” In fact Landry had only ponied up $25 million. An offer accepted by the victims in a show of hands in a closed-door session at an east end church last year. The compensation works out to a $10,000 payoff per victim – about one tenth of that offered to comparable victims elsewhere - plus $1,000 per year spent inside the insane asylums.

So where’s the other $25 million of our tax dollars supposedly devoted to these people forced to grow up in monstrously cruel circumstances? Here’s a possibility: their lawyer Yves Lauzon, assuming he’ll get a15 percent cut of the settlement - a standard established by lawyers during the Saguenay flood – will receive $5.6 million of the cash. The Orphans former PR. guy Carlo Torini, based on similar precedents, could be scoring a cool $2.3 million from the deal. Orphans Committee President Bruno Roy will get $100,000 a year for frais professionels, plus whatever other funds might have been accorded him. “The whole gang are all in cahoots, the whole bunch of them,” says Vienneau, “and now we’re catching on to them.”

Vienneau has no plans to end his tireless one-man Blitzkrieg. “I’m going to keep going. They’re going to have to shoot me or something,” says Vienneau, who was recently nominated for a humanitarian award in California. “Landry will be afraid to come back to Joliette now. Just like Bouchard never came here because he knew how I confronted Guy Chevrette when he was talking to (then-Premier) Parizeau about ‘l’avenir du Quebec,’ of all things.” Vienneau invites sympathizers to come Friday morning to protest the situation in front of the Hydro Quebec building downtown at 11 a.m.

-

Pop culture hasn’t been kind to stepfathers, as they routinely get portrayed as psychotic interlopers intent on abusing their stepkids at every possible opportunity. Undoubtedly the occasional stepdad lives up to his bad press but others put on daily displays of gentleness, patience and tolerance in delicate circumstances that many – myself included – would no doubt find overwhelming. To salute those stepdads (and perhaps remind the less good ones of their potential to do good) I propose that the upcoming paternal celebrations be renamed Fathers and Stepfathers Day. 

**
2-11-2003

Tyrannical tax gods

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

It’s time to bust the warm fuzzy myth that the compassionate state confiscates half what you earn and then tax you again when you spend what’s left.

Quebec’s tax system – as has been pointed out elsewhere – punishes the poor worse than any other province. Our taxman has the gall to demand money from those earning as little as $6,213 a year. No other province taxes people making as little as that, indeed in Alberta you can make twice that and still not pay a cent in income tax. If you make six grand in a year - about what a Canadiens’ goaltender makes in six minutes by the way - you’re not just being charged a token cut either. Little rollers making sixty-two hundred per annum are forced to fork over 16 percent their earnings, once again, the most shamefully high introduction tax rate in the country. And if you can ever overcome the odds and move into the middle class, Quebec’s government vampires want even more of your blood: here in la belle province you jump into the highest tax bracket at a lower level than anywhere else in Canada.

But for some reason questioning taxation isn’t on high on the agenda of the social activist crowd, but its time we all examined this obscene cash rape of the less well off. Presumably this government extortion of the poor chez nous is deemed okay because that the tax dollars are thought to be spent on good things.

But unless you have a magic red phone that connects top the Premier and Prime Minister you have no direct say in how your money gets spent. When I was a kid, a rather naïve one in retrospect, I assumed that somewhere in the packet of tax forms was a checklist of government expenditures that we could tick off to ensure that our money doesn’t get spent on the things to which we are ethically opposed. Not only does such an option it not exist, I’ve never even seen it suggested.

For example I don’t want to pay any money to farm subsidies because I don’t like milk and also because the cash is used to undercut third world farmers hoping to grab a share of the world market, thus ensuring that those nations stay poor. I highly object to paying to service the debt, too. As far as I’m concerned the whole darn government should shut down until the debt goes to zilch. The concept of having parts of my wages deducted at source to help pay for a squad of bureaucrats that cruises around threatening people for speaking English almost sends me into vomiting convulsions. And would somebody else please pay my share of the upcoming $250 million concert hall? I’m not a big classical music fan. Thanks.

Allow me to change the subject briefly, as this topic has me hyperventilating. I realized that what this city really needs is a Valentine’s Day parade. Indoors. It would be unlike any other because it would travel through the downtown indoor malls of the underground city. Okay, the floats might have to be small to fit through some of those tunnels, but hey, think intimate.

Okay.. taxes. I’d prefer not to pay the feds to have Sheila Copps give millions to MacLean’s and other such pap, for some bogus notion of keeping them Canadian.

I’d prefer politicians not touch my wages to pay for the Senate or the Ottawa Senators for that matter. The gun registry is very nice but it works out to $30 per Canadian and I’ve got seven under my charge, so no thanks, I’m trying to cut down.

Though we assume tax reduction advocates are right wing loons, the Canadian Taxpayers Association is lobbying to make sure the 2.1 million Canadians that earn under $15,000 pay no income tax. They want all sorts of corporate welfare abolished as well. It’s time activists, conservatives and everybody else start making noise about the casual and careless confiscation of our cash.

**
10-3-2000
Celebrity sightings

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Sometimes I read a book and immediately forget every word. I can leave a movie with only the vaguest recollection of what I just saw. But put a celebrity in front of me, no matter how obscure and my brain turns into a rabid paparazzi creating a memory of a thousand details that gets played like a video endlessly in my mind forever.

I couldn’t tell you five things about the history of Japan, although I passed a year long university course on the subject, yet I can describe in minute detail a single three second episode seeing Gil Heredia, an obscure ball player, walking out of downtown Provigo.

On my deathbed, as I see my life flash before my eyes, I’ll undoubtedly remember the brief moment in which Mitsou smiled at my daughter Livia and myself on Stanley. I’ll recall walking by Peter Gabriel at a party. I’ll remember meeting Rex Murphy. And absurd as it may seem, some bizarre neurological function has permanently etched a memory of local TV newsreader Mutsumi Takahashi walking past me in the most urgent part of my brain.

Like Fitzgerald’s curiosity about the rich, my appetite rages for brushes with greatness. I’ve even started appropriating friends’ experiences. I can recall Pedro Martinez asking for my phone number, even though it’s an event that happened to my friend Reginalde. I can see James Woods gassing up his SUV, although it’s a false memory based on a story recounted by my friend Bernie. And I can recall Jane Fonda jogging past even though the thrill of that experience belongs exclusively to my friend Barry.

I’m certainly not alone with my fascination with the stars. Last year an old man in Westmount Park spoke to me about his life and quickly zeroed in on a ten second encounter that was the highlight of his 80 years: having given Winston Churchill directions as a boy.

The only thing I can conclude about this inexplicable desire to venerate the famous is that humans aren’t meant to be monotheistic. We want our gods to near and be human and we want them to sign autographs for us.

Naturally, I’m warming up for a Trudeau anecdote. The first time I saw Trudeau we shared an elevator in the pink granite building kitty corner to Ben’s Deli. The ex-PM stood in the corner grinning while a couple of secretaries deferentially cooed in his direction. He was impressive.

I saw him again five years ago. While standing on Ste. Catherine on a mild winter evening, I intuitively recognized the most famous Canadian from an impossible distance. Trudeau seemed suited to Montreal’s main drag, a high-energy place that fuses dignified, old time architecture with the flashy bombast of neon lights.

As he approached Drummond in an expensive-looking, black fur coat, carrying the aura of an Apollonian sky god, he again wore the same crooked grin. We made brief eye contact. It seemed extremely significant that the man who had filled TV and newspapers for a generation, whose name was always spoken with awe by both millionaires and taxi drivers, friends and foe alike, had looked my way.

Trudeau was truly the antithesis of his arch-nemesis, who I once saw downtown at a booze shop across from what’s now the Faubourg. I reached down for a bottle of gin and saw a skinny hand of Réné Lévesque next to mine, plucking the same stuff. When I looked up, the scrawny premier and his towering bodyguard stood looking distinctly unstatesmanlike. His unpretentious demeanor still managed to cause the cashier to gush and wilt in a puddle of awe.

Another sunny spring day I saw the great separatist premier looking exhausted in the back seat of a limousine near the museum on Sherbrooke. The sight of my outlandish red ’63 Vespa scooter seemed to perk him up. Our eyes met awkwardly. We waved. As a fitting contrast to the overwhelming electricity emitted by Trudeau, Lévesque seemed exceptional for his disarming ordinariness.

**
3-6-2002
Island of exclusion

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

I’m increasingly alarmed and disenchanted with our elected officials who have been treating us average citizens with mind-numbing arrogance and contempt one would expect to be reserved for a guy who loses his NAMBLA membership card at the daycare.

Firstly there’s the Dorval Island shocker, revolving around the summer home to 74 wealthy cottage owners. Pre-merger the island was an official MUC municipality with four full time employees and a budget of $260,000. But the town was rather unwelcoming. In fact, last summer, according to island gossip, residents went into panic mode when a non-resident came to the island. I’d like to describe this part of our city but I – along with all over non-residents – is forbidden to go. I spent six weeks last summer trying to negotiate a visit to the island with an administrator who refused my request.

Anyway, the Dorval Islanders clearly feel that the St. Lawrence isn’t a big enough moat to keep us commoners out, so the landowners bought the island from Dorval, whose mayor (and current Dorval councillor) Peter Yoemans happens to have a place on the island. They paid $25,000 for property evaluated at $664,491. It’s a questionable deal that’ll forever ban us from this historic piece of turf.

In another instance of suburban exclusion, Westmount has been demanding fees for its recreation facilities even though we’re now all part of the same city. Now if psychologists use the term integrated to mean healthy and alienated to signal mental problems, then I worry about Westmount’s state of mind. Over a thousand non-Westmounters hold Westmount Library cards (mine was the 62 nd) and there’s still no proof of the damage that former Mayor Peter Trent warned would come with the influx of outta-towners. Yet Victoria Avenue resident Jean Charest, likely the next premier, has confirmed that he’ll let Westmount leave the city of Montreal if they vote to do so. That return to urban exclusion would deprive the less well off of city services and possibly make Westmount a separate island-within an island, an elitist Salo on the St. Lawrence.

And you’ve doubtlessly heard that the province will be pouring over a quarter billion into a new place for snobs in cummerbunds to play classical music. Where’s the money for the music that people actually like? If this massive tax grab for music by dead European men and listened to rich white folk doesn’t shock and depress you, then I’d suggest you put a mirror under your nose and check yourself for a pulse.

In a related injustice, a reader who’s a great music lover that goes to concerts (not classical ones, thanks) complains that he can’t get good seats to concerts because he’s working poor who can’t get approved for a credit card and best seats go to credit card holders. As a result he’s punished with lousy seats for shows. This policy of excluding music fans from good seats has been around for purt-near 20 years but governments continue to do nothing to outlaw this discrimination against non credit card holders.

And this week Quebec’s new Education Minister proudly announced that he’s plugging a loophole that allows kids to go to public school in English after one year in a private school. It’s another policy of exclusion and which means that the big-eyed Tamil boy who rides a mean tricycle in my alleyway won’t be allowed to go to school with his big brothers and sisters. It’s against international law to discriminate against a child based on his parents’ status but it’s justified, according to the minister because if the loophole isn’t closed, “French in Quebec will be wiped out in two or three generations,” as he said on TV. I half expected him to further explain that French are rapidly being eaten by mountain bears while anglos are spontaneously generating at alarming rates in dirty piles of laundry.

Feel free to complain to our various levels of government about these shocking and depressing examples of poor judgment.

**

10-5-2004

Getting Scrooged

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Old money, new money, dirty money, counterfeit money, drug money, you got it – I’ll take it.

There’s a thinking that encircles each of those types of cash. Our megarich, for example, have an entire culture that include such habits as talking condescendingly to waiters, as scribe-to-the-megarich Peter C. Newman once noted.

But there’s a more noble philosophy meant to surround great wealth, as exemplified by the thinking of Scottish born coal baron Andrew Carnegie, once the richest man in America. He had such guilt seeing his fast-dying, soot-covered working bees that he vowed that his money would be devoted to the less fortunate.

Thus 90 percent of his fortune went to good causes like libraries, and Carnegie shamed his ruling-classmates by announcing in his Gospel of Wealth “The man who dies rich dies disgraced.”

They should teach that book in elementary school. And yes I am aware that in the past I’ve demanded that schools teach everything from contract law to lawnmower repair, but I mean it this time.

Carnegie’s message is embraced by big rollers ranging from Warren Buffet to Bill Gates. But up here it’s not so big, and particularly small in Quebec.

But it’s important to guilt our rich into spending to fight deprivation rather than seeking solace in conspicuous consumption. They must be convinced into giving their cash up for the good of society (hey - one study shows that the altruistic live longer!) and the alternative is passing it onto families and how much greed is rationalized through the ol’ “family security” excuse?

If money just stays in the family the ruling elite gets further empowered and inheritors like David Frum and Conrad Black stroll around with entitlement complexes.

So while materialism runs rampant – you can’t turn a TV on without hearing Jay Leno bragging about his fleet of cars or see starlets show off million dollar necklaces - a lesser-known disdain for gaudy spending zooms under the radar just like billionaire Sam Walton motored around in his beat up old Ford pickup.

In Quebec the rich have come put particularly wanting in the ol’ wealth-distribution test.

Five years ago Hilary Pearson chose to locate her Philanthropic Foundations Canada here because we’re Canada’s soft-underbelly of the wealth-sharing. “The reason we’re here in Montreal is that we want to reach the francophone market, we have a few francophone foundations but there’s not many.”

Some of the largest Canadian private sources for cash for the needy are here in Montreal, like the McConnell Foundation, Canada’s second largest. And there’s been further improvement; she notes the largesse of a certain former cable baron. “We have the Chagnon Foundation, it started three years ago, and has a billion and a half of assets, it’s a phenomenally impressive foundation.”

Pearson laments federal tax laws that discourage people from launching such private foundations. Seven years ago, while Finance Minister, Paul Martin reduced capital gains taxes on shares for those giving to public foundations. Charitable giving shot up but restrictions have been maintained on private foundations. The fear is that the rich will manipulate their books for their own financial advantage, but Pearson says we should do in the States, simply allow it and then police against abuse

Another problem: our current common law definition of philanthropy is based on Elizabethan-era alms-for-the-poor that exclude the possibility of setting up, for example, a foundation for the rights of abused prisoners. “It’s a hot topic, it’s a big can of worms, a number of voluntary sectors say this is archaic and must be changed.”

Canada is home to about 8,000 philanthropic foundations that give to all sorts of causes, the most common of which is to education. It’s a disproportionately small total compared to what the rich give to the needy in the US, although in Quebec, coops, rountables and paragovernmental organizations, assume part of the role that philanthropic efforts achieve elsewhere. But as long as our wealthy residents don’t consider Carnegie’s notion of having a duty to the poor, our less well-off will continue to be Scrooged in the end. Comments? kgravy@openface.ca

**
4-6-2004

Here’s to the little guy

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Lefties are neurotic sissies. Anarchists are smug hippies. Conservatives are greedy. Libertarians are pornmongers.

My negative notions of the political spectrum left me in a wasteland. Not knowing which team to cheer for left me in constant crisis mode at dinner parties. I’d ask to pass the wine whenever it was time to comment on the Mideast, or farm subsidies.

What’s a girl to do?

Luckily I grabbed an unlikely political lifeboat. I’ve found a point of view by becoming a petty bourgeois egalitarian. It’s a creed so obscure it almost appears that I’ve invented it myself, although there have been echoes of it in every generation. I haven’t written the manifesto yet, but it demands a fair chance for the little guy

Here’s the logic: unionized employees are protected by big labour, big business looks after their management personnel quite handsomely but nobody’s watching out for the rest of the world - depanneur owners, the cab drivers, the kid pushing the mop at Burger King.
The embattled little guy is the underpaid, underecognized muscle of the system, the progenitor of steel-willed self-sacrifice and initiative and16 hour work days, often earning annually what the governor general’s spends on a week’s dry cleaning.

My egalitarian political utopia is not one where everybody’s equally miserable but one in which everybody feels that they’ve got a fair chance to succeed.

Sadly, in our current reality, a poor kid would have to bust his ass and still wouldn’t be anywhere near where a rich kid starts off at.

It’s a betrayal of the New World escape from Old Europe’s class structures, but there’s no pretending that Montrealers aren’t born into a social class.

The lack of hope for a dignified life leads many to despair. Check out the alarming drop out rates, the increasing romanticization of outlaw gangster cults or the preposterously high percentage of youth who vegetate into a marijuana deep brain freeze.

It doesn’t help that the one person many petty bourgeois could identify with, that populist mascot, cynical quip-making PM Jean “Da Little Guy” Chretien, has been replaced by a humourless corporate amoeba.

Prioritizing opportunity for this clientele seems well down anybody’s agenda indeed the government’s strategy to favour proletarian emancipation doesn’t go far beyond selling lotto ticket.

And the media infotainment smokescreen has sabotaged aspirations. I mean, it’s sad that a kid got killed in Toronto, but it’s not going to impact your life like a story about the amount of time it takes you to get to work every day. Reports about natural disasters might be interesting but the unrecognized real news is that our tax system zaps low-income earners and that banks that refuse commercial loans to the less-wealthy.

The lefties, self-proclaimed heroes of the less-well off, don’t consider fostering social mobility as part of their mandate. I’ve heard more discussion about whether institutions should install separate transgender bathrooms than I have about helping the poor escape the crushing monotony of poverty.

Lefties will go on all day about Enron’s connection to Condoleeze Rice; Columbian coffee growers and the Mideast question but when it comes to local questions, some of their darling policies actually hurt the poor, for example, some advocate the right of prostitutes to operate on sidewalks in front of the homes of working class people, which has – of course – proved massively unpopular with the poor themselves. (You’ll note that local every politician who has embraced that position has seen their career quickly levelled: Sammy Forcillo, Sam Boskey, Louise O’Sullivan, etc).

Sadly, I’m thinking that many are no longer buying into the system anymore or hold any hopes of conquering their degradation, or even dream of a world in which they can achieve and attain prosperity.

If you’re a hustler with energy and ambition and hopes to escape the grinding dullness of deprivation, get a plan, and hope to get lucky because I’m not sure anybody’s going to stand up for you except for a small number – indeed very very small number - of us petty bourgeois egalitarians.

**
8-22-2001

I ♥ the megacity

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

I was described as an “indignant progressive” this week in the op-ed page of a local English language daily. It could have been worse, I suppose. I could have been called a “toothless village idiot with a wobbly bum.” Or I could have been accused of sun bathing naked in Vegas with Rene Angellil.

In fact it’s my very lack of indignation that had me concerned. I don’t feel very up-in-arms about the megacity. Perhaps you’ve noticed that Gazette bigwig Henry Aubin has written around 3,578 columns warning us about this issue. He’s pulled out every argument in his sock drawer but I figure he’d be just as convincing if he simply replaced his regular efforts with a large note reading, “I’M GONNA HOLD MY BREATH TILL THEY CANCEL THIS THING.”

The one-island-one-city deal is good. It will kill irritating rules, borders and restrictions. For example, I’m a Westmount boy. I grew up there, my family has paid taxes there for decades, I was employed by the city, wrote for the town paper and still live a couple of blocks away. But when I go, I hit an invisible border that prevents me from using the swimming pool. Meanwhile Westmounters are similarly deprived of swimming ops as their burg has no indoor pool. After a few legal signatures put the sledgehammer to the invisible border, I’ll be able use their pool and they’ll be free to float all day in Montreal’s gorgeous, newly built indoor pool in Little Burgundy. That’s good, no?

Want something flashier? Suburbs could now force you to kill your fluffy cat. Today, if you move elsewhere on the island, you could be subject to a whole new set of regulations on numbers of pets and force you to kill a pet. With the megamerger, silly rule variations like this could be forever zapped and your happy critters can sleep soundly.

Although the ‘burbs get good press, when scrutinized, it emerges that along with the obvious fear, paranoia and xenophobia, many burbs have a lesser-known history of amazing corruption (detailed in the Mirror February 22, 2001). This is largely ignored, for while our dailies happily snap photos of Montreal workers sleeping on the job, I can personally assure you that many suburban manual workers also do their share of snoozing instead of working.

It’s also implied that the suburbs have achieved some higher form of enlightenment. Is it because they hire battered, handicapped, ethnic singe mothers with cleft lips? Nah. As far as I could tell, the boast comes from the fact that they pay their workers less. So a suburban chief street cleaner can’t afford a new bike for his kid. There’s cause for civic pride, eh?

And while doubtlessly serving their own interests, suburban towns often disserve those beyond their tiny borders. For example Cote St-Luc has fucked this city’s transportation system for decades by blocking the extension of Cavendish to the T-Can highway, forcing drivers to make a huge, time wasting detour. (In one of his more psychedelic moments, Aubin argued against extending Cavendish, as it would contribute to global pollution by making more people want to drive).

And in spite of the strident protestations, the merger won’t hurt Montreal anglos, quite the opposite. Rather than cowering off in their insignificant little towns, anglos will now be politically mobilized partners in their island. Defragmented West Island grannies will be down at city hall putting the fear of Jesus into the mayor. The new city could even elect an English mayor, which would be pretty mind-blowing.

Funny that Mr. Aubin and myself don’t agree on more, considering that I grew up about a block away from where he and his neighbour Jean Charest reside. But I sympathize with his panic. Suburbanites pay more taxes in the future to rectify the fact that us Montrealers are now taxed at twice the rate of many suburban residents. But it’s never the money, is it? It’s always the principle.

**
1-17-2001
Get the lead out

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

My problems started over Christmas when I bought my wife a cute little imported-from-China tea set at a store that sells handicrafts made by dirt-poor Third Worlders too poor to buy farms. It’s a sexy little number with a dull glaze and almost impossibly greasy texture. I felt pretty pleased with myself until I started feeling dizzy and unable to concentrate after admiring it. I could almost feel my precious few IQ points diminishing every time I held the cup to admire its shape and texture.

Ever since I got the damn set I can’t remember where I put the toothbrush and sit looking for Benny Hill on the TV. I’m ever dumber than usual. I’ve sent the teacup into a lab to check for lead content because I suspect lead poisoning.

Now lead poisoning might be the world’s biggest problem that you don’t give a shit about. It turns out that imported ceramics and crystals often expose Canadians to lead, a substance that leads to reduces intelligence and damages hearing damage, central nervous system and stunts growth and is particularly devastating to children.

Unlike other toxins, the body can’t tolerate even the smallest amount of this metal. One of a whole lot of studies I found on the Internet suggests that 5 percent of American kids suffer lead poisoning. 80 percent of homes built before 1978 have lead paint according to the Centre for Disease Control. And needless to say we’re still making sure the poor people in developing countries still get hit with lead poisoning through leaded gasoline.

You might have seen the headlines in tiny articles stuck between classified ads of the dangers of lead, or perhaps you heard the warnings on the radio down the hallway when you’re not really listening. But recently Health Canada recently warned us about lead in candles and children’s jewelry. Before that it was Grecian formula and before that it was vinyl blinds that turn into toxic lead dust in the sunlight. And of course there’s paint.

Just a couple of years ago I bought a can of paint in a small paint shop on the Plateau. Wink wink, the guy told me, I’ll give you an extra good price on this can because it has lead in it. I went for it and a few months later I moved out and a woman with a child moved in. Her kid is undoubtedly zapping whatever brains he might have developed by munching away on the sweet-flavour of chipping lead paint at this moment.

Now as I later found out from a Health Canada official, who confessed to me that he played with lead soldiers as a child, there are few rules on what non-controlled substances we can import. There are no officials down at the docks sniffing through crates for lead flavoured bubblegum. The government doesn’t conduct tests for health hazards either, according to the spokesman. Instead, they wait for complaints to come in or hold off until they find out about it from some ambitious academic.

As a result, the feds tend to brush off the dangers of lead poisoning, for example when such products made of rigid vinyl like backpacks and rain ponchos were exposed by Greenpeace for high levels of lead, Health Canada told us not to worry because kids probably won’t…uhh… sorry, what was I was talking about?

Anyway, what I’m getting at in my newly-diminished way is that the Germans, who have more people than land, are happily sitting back while Canadians poison ourselves and future generations with lead. We wouldn’t be the first to knowingly doom ourselves by turning a blind eye to this problem. The ancient Romans, like us, knew that lead was toxic, but figured that some amount was acceptable. So they put it lead in their wine and sprinkled it on their food, used lead pipes and cooking pots. Eventually it lead to a society gone mad and sterile. And then the Germans took over.

**
4-24-2002
Maria Monk’s ghost

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Imagine getting diagnosed with cancer. In your darkest moment of devastation, shock and distress you’re brought to the hospital and put on a cot in a crowded hallway full of other ailing Montrealers. People walk within inches of you day and night. Staffers bang into your bed every time they roll a cot down the hallway. Can’t sleep. Privacy zero. The air reeks with the stench of other people’s sickness. Your most intimate conversations are fodder for strangers’ ears. Visitors to your space in the hall have to move whenever get up whenever somebody passes.

A reader named Phil tells me his mother endured such hell for four days last week after being diagnosed with cancer. Among the other 15 lining the hallways, waiting for rooms included, in Phil’s words, “a whacked-out junkie, a very sick 90 year old woman – imagine the poor lady’s been paying taxes for 70 years! - and some guy who looked like he’d been shot.” Ironically, the bullet-riddled victim, apparently a bad guy, was immediately assigned his own room with two guards at his door.

Phil’s mother finally has a room, yet a week after her arrival, the docs still haven’t had time to analyze her biopsy results. Whether the news turns out good or bad, she’ll have to wait until a Tuesday or Thursday for action because those are the days that surgeons operate on cancer patients at Hôtel-Dieu.

In fairness, the Hôtel-Dieu is likely no worse than others and put me down with those who figure the PQ should be spend more on hospitals and less on concert halls. And it’s said that Hôtel-Dieu will be folded into a new superhospital in Rosemont, which will have fewer total beds than the hospitals being closed, so hopefully it will have superhallways.

Yet when the Hôtel-Dieu closes, we’ll lose a major source of jaw-dropping and often spooky tales as this hospital, founded in 1642 and moved to its current location in 1861 has generated some amazing stories. And I’m not talking about the urban legend of the woman who falls sick only to have ambulance attendants notice her bracelet that reads: “In case of illness please bring me anywhere but Hôtel-Dieu.”

Last September 15 evening-shift janitors were fired for chronically getting high at work. In ’92 a 25 year a lunatic yelling, “you will go to hell” attacked at 25 year old paralyzed patient who had won the right to die before the courts. The hospital’s union has pointed out a high suicide rate among staffers. And there was the nasty feud from a decade back over whether this place should be moved to RdP, a war that ended in accusations of land speculation and fraud.

But the biggest-ever Hôtel-Dieu scandal was detailed in the 1836 book, "The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings During a Residence of Five Years as a Novice and Two Years as a Black Nun, in the Hôtel-Dieu Nunnery in Montreal.” Maria Monk’s purportedly true story details her being a young nun forced into being a sex-slave to priests, where she witnessed all measure of cardboard collar crime. “…one of my great duties was to obey the priests in all things; and this I soon learnt, to my utter astonishment and horror, was to live in the practice of criminal intercourse with them,” she writes.

The book of pious porn that reads like a gothic novel was wildly popular, reportedly selling 26,000 copies right away and 300,000 more in the years that followed. Catholics to this day energetically refute her tales, which were likely false, although judging from some of the subsequent excesses of the local Catholic authorities, there might have been some grain of truth in her story.

Maria Monk moved to Philadelphia the next year and died after being arrested as a pickpocket in 1849 at age 33. Nod to her ghost if you ever get stuck in the hallways of this place.

**
4-15-2003
Regime change time

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Hey what happened? I mean, what the friggin’ frick happened? One minute you’re calling for a pizza and by the time the box is at your door, Quebecers have hopped beds from the ADQ to the PQ to the Liberals.

Now the separatists are out and Captain Canada is in. Language police are gingerly discarding unis and swimming across the St. Lawrence. Instead of a hopping in a cortege of limos, the PQ’s 372 cabinet ministers will fill their pension papers as son as they get their Tercels tuned at Speedy.

Just a few hours ago the PQ was even with the Liberals and it looked they’d win thanks to the solid advantage the system offers the rural woodchopper vote.

But overnight the Liberals had a serious lead.

Why? How? Why?

Most figure the debate changed everything. For those who missed it, the decisive moment occurred when Charest blasted Landry by saying – and I translate this from the original French: “So I hear you’ve got that blame-the-niggers guy campaigning for you… I mean what’s up with that?”

But the debate pulled Charest even, it was the phenomenon-to-be-named-later launched Charest’s team into the big lead.

SARS did it. When you turn on the TV and see dozens dying just down the road in a rapidly-worsening epidemic, Quebecers started wondering if our hospitals are up to snuff.

The Liberals owned health care while the PQ addressed this issue with the ol’ Gallic shrug technique. In one ad, a soft-focused Premier Landry repressed his usual bulging forehead vein long enough to tell us that “We believe that eating well, and living right and exercising are also keys to health care,” to paraphrase the nonsense. Hey, when the plague hits, you don’t need a doctor tsk-tsking you for firing up the BBQ every night for the last three weeks. No sir, you want the scalpels and dope.

Frankly the PQ government left me tense. They were perpetually one youth conference away from passing lousy new restrictions on our civil liberties. The way the party is rigged, it encourages grassroots meddling, meaning that a fast-talking cegep student could sell the rest of the crowd on a nutty policy, which the brass would be obliged to follow, a set-up that deeply discouraged the PQ’s two great leaders, Levesque and Bouchard.

This time the PQ, rather admirably, appealed to Quebecers’ laziness, promising to make every weekend a three-day affair. Tell your boss you’re just not showing up one day this week and see how fast your career motors up that greasy pole. Then Landry tried to rope that all-important just-graduated-parent demographic by promising tax breaks for those who have kids right after university. Then we heard something about tax credits to holiday in Quebec. Hey isn’t the entire point of a vacation to go away?

And course women and immigrants don’t vote for the PQ, so Landry obsessed over them. Women, anyway. He wants more female candidates. Talk about your who-gives-a-shit issues. Does it matter what the gender is of the person nodding their head to the leader? Is it important to know whether your MNA has an innie or outie?

And Landry – apparently too cheap to buy a ring – hauled his fading vedette sack buddy – (can you describe 60 year old as a “girlfriend”?) everywhere. She looked a little too anxious to redecorate the palace in her framed ye-ye records.

Thank god for Mario “Mr. Puniverse” Dumont, who makes up for his scrawny pecs by calling his gang an “action” rather than a “party.” Cool. Maybe he call them the “X-Treme Action Democratikz” next time. And who said there’s no black candidates? Dumont makes Vladi Guerrero look like Tom Mesner. Check your email baby, you heard it here first, Dumont’s our ebony surprise, even has the thick wife. But I’d never vote for a candidate under 70 because they could quit young and collect pensions for decades.

The church bells rang loud Tuesday. Birds sang and streets were awash in the warm spring rain. A new era started this week.

**
12-12-2000

Bidding on misfortune

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Haddad looked like a well-dressed Anthony Quinn with his tan cashmere coat draped elegantly over his broad shoulders. He lingered around his twelfth floor downtown office with an assistant who looked a lot like Omar Sharif and a pair female staffers with good hair.

They were trying to look dignified in the face of the invasion of a dozen cash-carrying men clad in sweatpants, old sweaters and giveaway vinyl jackets. Haddad’s trading company owed money to the city and the bums had descended, vulture-like to bid on his goods. A nice-looking blonde with an impressive air of authority was the auctioneer. “Next item is a red wooden desk, any bids on this?”

Within a few seconds Haddad’s desk, from which he made the big decisions - probably not great ones considering he couldn’t cough up the $3,000 he owed in taxes - was gone for just $65. A big photocopier went for $120. A bony-faced neurotic-looking guy inexplicably bid the microwave up to $35. A three-sided reception desk that goes for at least $400 new was snapped up for so little that I forgot to write it down.

Throughout all this, the secretary answered calls as if the medieval-like ritual of public humiliation and tax retribution was business as usual. Haddad played it cool, acting like being stripped of his filing cabinet, conference table and wall clock was part of a secret plan he’d hatched up. But he sorta blew it when told that the purchasers would have to take their stuff right away. “Right away?” he asked, as if the reality of his government-forced liquidation suddenly hit him.

Such tax auctions go on all the time, they’re advertised in the newspaper and mounted on a bulletin board at city hall and bargains can be had. But around 90 percent of these sales get called off before minutes before they actually take place as the presence of the sassy blonde auctioneer seems to inspire deadbeats to suddenly and miraculously find the cash they owe.

The next auction was slated for the Basement Boutique, a few doors down from Magnan’s Tavern. The address proved to be a defunct café full of white plastic lawn chairs. I waited along with a friendly Egyptian guy, who’d snapped up most of Haddad’s office stuff for $1,700. His plan is to rent a space in the same building and resell it all over the next few days.

There would be no last minute saving of the Basement Boutique as a tiny, smiling, bearded city-hired locksmith with a tuque and a voice like Melanie Griffiths unlocked the door. Soon the blonde auctioneer was escorting the Egyptian and myself to the Basement Boutique, which was a cellar lit by a bare bulb full of old board games, a desk, a Quebec flag. “Anything you want to bid on here?” she asked. We chose to leave the treasures intact.

The Egyptian and I became fast friends and decided to follow the auctioneer to the next big sale. Our three cars cruised purposefully through Ville Emard, Verdun and the Point, past a sign that said Surplus de Pain, past a few slutty cigarette mamas and at least one used hubcap store.

Eventually we found the next public auction, but the Egyptian doesn’t do apartment sales. “It’s always just one TV and one VCR. The smart ones replace them with cheaper ones they buy before the auctions begin,” he warned.

I knocked on the door of the impending victim, showing him the written proof fact that I’d soon be bidding on his worldly possessions. As he studied the document, I struggled to size up his TV. It looked good. His cigarette smoke drifted into my face. “No, no,” said the dude with a Vietnamese accent. Eventually the blonde auctioneer showed up and went into a long private discussion with the man. They talked. And talked. The delaying tactics succeeded; the only other would-be bidder and myself left empty handed. I have a TV anyway.

**

4-18-2001

Pigsty Cemetery

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Not long ago the sloping fields just east of the Radisson Metro contained no Place Versailles Mall, no Loblaw’s, no liquor store, no tunnel entrance and no SAQ warehouse where you can fill your own bottles of wine. Pretty much all that used to sit between Sherbrooke and the St. Lawrence were the massive greystones that now house the Louis-H. LaFontaine Hospital, Montreal’s largest psychiatric facility since 1874.

The hospital, formerly known as St-Jean-de-Dieu, was not only home to up to 6,000 psychiatric patients, it was also a separate island municipality complete with its own police force until the 70s. Although many towns were annexed after 1910, Gamelin, as it was known, remained separate until 1982. Gamelin had no elections or democracy, as the Sisters of Providence ran it. And no public archives offer any significant information about the mysteries of the town’s past.

Louis Riel was once interned there, as was poet Emile Nelligan. Dr. Ewen Cameron sometimes sent zombified patients to live out their days in Gamelin after unsuccessful experimental treatment he did on locals for the CIA. And according to one medical journal, “In the days before effective therapy they housed many young schizophrenic patients who were there for life. Indeed, their parents were encouraged to consider them deceased and to put a death notice in the newspaper.”

In a l’Actualité inteview, the hospital’s final Mother Superior denies all misdeeds except for defrauding the federal government. The scam was in convincing Ottawa that parentless children were insane. Ottawa would give more money for mental patients than orphans from the 40’s to the 60s, a practice that scarred many normal children now in their dotage. They include author Bruno Roy, who spent his childhood wiping the backsides of adult psyche patients.

In another anecdote from that time, current U of M psyche professor Dr. Jean Gaudreau describes an episode at Mont Providence - a similar institution in RDP - where a normal five-year-old child was straitjacketed and attached by the neck to a pipe. The nuns had deemed the child a physical threat.

In controlling a major facility in a town they themselves policed, in paying no tax and receiving many free services from neighbouring municipalities, the sisters had a good thing going in Gamelin. In the early 60s they fetched over $2 million for what became the Place Versailles mall. In 1974, they got $4.9 million from the liquor board for land closer to the river. And they profited again in 1973 in selling the hospital to the province.

But others did less well. Jean-Guy Labrosse, who wrote a local bestseller detailing his 24 years in torturous confinement as a Duplessis orphan, told me details of the hospital in where he suffered electroshock and massive drug treatments. “There were 44 cells par department, each had a metal door, when you disobeyed, they’d send you to the backrooms among the dangerous patients where there were no toilets, so you had to shit in cement bowls. The guards would rape you and if you couldn’t get erect, they squeezed your balls. On my file I was at four different (asylums) at the same time, so the nuns could get four separate payments.”

Labrosse accuses a Dr. Bernard Piché of signing documents that transferred normal children to the insane asylums from 1954 on. When I visited Piché at his Laval home last Friday afternoon, the unshaven, pajama-clad 84-year old resisted an old lady’s insistent background appeals to close the door on me, as he assured me that he saw nothing amiss in his 38 years at the hospital.

But questions need answers. In the fields closer to the river 2,000 bodies were buried between without explanation between 1877-1958. Provincial bureaucrats refuse to discuss the pigsty cemetery as it’s known, although a Journal de Montréal report from May, 1999 documents that between 1956-58 alone, 55 children died at St-Jean-de-Dieu between of “suicides and accidents” while dozens of others died as a result of “surgical intervention.” When confronted, Cardinal Turcotte promised to “look into” the mysteries of the graveyard. Many await his findings.

**

10-14-2004

Expos to smash gay Washington

Heartbroken local baseball fans have an unlikely gay bedfellow in their sufferings. Plans to ship the Montreal Expos to the American capitol have Washington DC’s gays crying foul balls because the new ball park would require the demolition of the city’s fabled O Street gay scene. “It’s a kind of unofficial red light district but it’s all perfectly legal and they’ve been paying taxes for decades,” says Richard Rosendall, VP for Political Affairs at The Gay and Lesbian Activist Alliance of Washington D.C. “Washington is a tourist destination and there ought to be room for these kinds of businesses here, if the plan goes through the city has a responsibility of finding another place for those businesses..” In the early 70s DC police authorities suggested they’d leave gay bars alone if they moved to the warehouse district, and the clubs have been thriving there ever since. But the return of the Grand Old Game would wipe out two male strip clubs, a gay film theatre, a peep show and a drag queen showbar. The controversy offers a glimmer of hope to beleaguered Montreal baseball fans who pray DC residents will derail the proposed move. Among the DC city councillors who opposes the plan is the openly gay David Catania whose director of communications Ross Weber says, “David Catania opposes - 100 percent – the public financing of the stadium and if it goes forward, he wants the businesses relocated elsewhere. But it’s somewhat farfetched, no neighbourhood is going to want that in their district.”

-Kristian Gravenor

**
4-7-2005
Fundraising fatigue

Donors face cash call as public loses taste for giving

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

When it comes to giving to charity, Quebec wallets have long been like the jaws of a crocodile, fast to snap closed and painfully slow to open.

Now fresh after an uncharacteristic display of generosity during the tsunami disaster, Canada’s least charitable people are soon to be faced with an unprecedented demand for donations, including a $300 million fund-raising campaign for a new McGill superhospital.

At least one expert believes that fundraisers might have a big challenge. “With the daily appeal for funds it becomes overwhelming for everybody,” says Soma Hewa, a Chateauguay-based academic researcher and author specializing in the politics of philanthropy. “Charities have become a profession in itself. People hear from fundraisers and feel tired of it. There’s a growing antipathy to giving. When they get asked for money, people feel ‘what the hell, you’re asking me again?’ It’s at the point of a saturation of benevolence.”

Hewa, who consults with many local fund-raising efforts, says that the tsunami experience proves that we’re ready to give, but just not to the same old institutions.

“There was clear evidence people weren’t giving money to charitable organizations, compared to how they showed their support for tsunami victims.”

But philanthropic fundraising isn’t an entirely democratic practice. Charities have learned long ago that about 80 percent of what they raise is collected from about 20 percent of the population. So they save their most seductive pitch for those with money to give.

Indeed a campaign to raise $300 million for the $1.2 billion superhospital slated to be ready by 2011 has already began but unless you’re a member of the deep-pocketed elite, you’ve almost certainly not heard their appeal quite yet.

One MUHC fundraiser official acknowledges that we’re in the first “quiet stage” in which past donors and wealthier people are already asked to contribute. “We’re working around leadership donors to make sure they’re properly informed, cultivated and solicted,” says Don Taddeo.

“In campaigns of this size you identify your dearest and closest supporters, people who have support the hospital and you bring them around the table,” he says Don Taddeo, president of the MUHC Foundation. “You have to do your homework, you have to identify as scientifically as possible who the top donors would be.”

The MUHC hopes to have $120 million dollars pledged from the well-heeled set by the time they started publicizing their fund raising campaign at the end of September. The bgig givers are asked to give upwards of half a million each. Seven percent of which will go towards funding the administration of the fundraising campaign.

But Hewa says even the rich can get tired of giving. “Sometimes the big philanthropists get tired of giving, JD Rockefeller Senior felt their lives are overwhelmed by the everyday appeals for money, he totally stopped giving at hte peak of his wealth”

Hewa says McGill could face some scepticism from would-be donors about how much the project will end up costing. “Quebec has a culture of underbudgeting for public projects and then halfway through increasing the budget, it justifies the government’s overtaxing of the people, these budgets are based on appealing to public opinion rather than a real financial estimate.”

***

9-9-2008

Invention by design

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

   Inventing a sellable item can be as simple as painting a broomstick. Proof: Daniel Paquette got some orange paint, dabbed it on a wooden rod and sold the concept to Canadian Tire, which now sells thousands every winter. Paquette’s sticks demarcate lawns and helps jam his pockets with healthy wads of cash.

   Paquettes eureka came when he saw his neighbours jamming old hockey sticks into snow banks to keep snow clearing devices off lawns. He reckoned that suburbanites would purchase a highly visible lawn marking device. And they did. He has no patent on the painted stick but he owns the market. “My stick sells because it’s cheap to make and cheap to buy,” he says.

   Paquette believes he can help you with your own little eureka device with his Inventarium, located inside the 22^nd floor of an east side penthouse tower. His dayglo lumber is one of countless locally-conceived and produced contraptions and gizmos - ranging from the sublime to the suspect – that he and other local tinkerers have put on the market.

   The retired cop and longtime inventor counsels would-be inventors, along with his wife Jeanne Morin and partner Gary Nolan. For around $3,000 the team takes your idea or prototype, gets a provisional patent and a market study to see if your idea sits on the right side of that fine line between brilliance and stupidity.

   The Inventarium initially had its own storefront but was quickly overrun by curious rubberneckers hoping for a tour of the unique items placed throughout the office. That’s because Paquette’s tour of local inventions is like a scene from a James Bond film with fewer laser watches. There’s an ingenious leash-like harness that fits atop a child’s head to stabilize it when the kids dozes off in the car seat. There’s a plate with a protruding ring that allows you to secure your bagel while you slice it. A loofa attached to your shower wall allows you to scratch your back without the help of a shower mate.

   The Inventarium’s most successful concepts include the Tutti-Frutti scented modelling clay that sells in 57 countries as well as the Fondue 2000 pot that combines a fondue and a grill.

   But not all are concepts merit the over-exuberant treatment that inventors too often provide their concepts. “We constantly have people coming here who already spent $10,000 in the States trying to get a patent or perfecting a prototype. It doesn’t have to cost that much,” says Paquette.

   Equally the inventor has to lower expectations of quick and massive profits. “Everybody who conceives of an invention has a friend who says ‘that’s brilliant you’ll be a millionaire!’ Very few inventions make that kind of money,” says Paquette.

   If your brilliant idea stinks, they’ll break it to you swiftly but tactfully at no cost. “There’s a way of telling people gently,” says Paquette.

   The first step to trying to evaluate an invention is to see if it has already been patented elsewhere or if it’s even legal. Then they tackle big question, would anybody in their right mind would pop it in their shopping cart?

   The Inventarium’s Gary Nolan, a longtime invention industry vet, helps weed out the flawed concepts. “We had a fisherman come in here who had a light on the end of his line that attracted fish to the lure. It worked great. They hopped onto the hook but we found out pretty fast that lights on a lure are illegal,” says Nolan.

   Some hot ideas fall short for other reasons. A back-friendly shovel with an ergonomic extra grip was flying off shelves. Until, that is, consumers found that the plastic attachment broke easily. Retailers banished it from the shelves floors. The inventor rushed the product, thinks Nolan. “Nobody bothered doing a test on this thing, they should have test marketed it at a flea market first.”

   But even the biggest manufacturers reject hot ideas, including the Cabbage Patch Doll and those ubiquitous car windshield shades, concepts that were passed over everywhere before going on to massive sales. “You’ve got to keep a really open mind to everything because sometimes what seems like a lousy idea can sell,” says Nolan.

   Bad timing can also kill an invention. Long ago Nolan presided over a can’t-miss concept, a plastic grocery divider that allowed shoppers to store their paper grocery bags upright in their trunks. “Provigo was crazy about them and we had hundreds of orders. But then we got word from the top that they were no longer interested. It turned out that they were about to switch over from paper to plastic bags.”

   It’s difficult to tell how many Montrealers are tinkering around with their killer concepts. Stats show that Montrealers patented 531 inventions in the USA in 2006, almost double the amount from the early 90s. The total is higher than that of Vancouver, but Toronto patents about twice as many items than Montreal. Many of those patents are snagged by industrial labs, so it’s difficult to tell how many independent hobbyists are developing their ideas in the shed.

   Efforts to invent are, Paquette believes, mothered by the headlines. “A few years ago there a story of hunters lost in the forest and within a week we had about nine people here proposing concepts for devices that could find hunters lost in the woods,” says Paquette.

   When an inventor ever gets to that hallowed point where their product is considered marketable, the creator faces a choice of selling out. Four out of five inventors choose to sell their concept, according to Paquette. The Inventarium will handle the negotiations upon request. “When we negotiate a deal for an inventor we make sure he gets an advance on royalties and minimum sales requirement so the manufacturer can’t just put it on a shelf and mothball it.”

   Paquette quit inventing in 2001 because he felt that representing inventors while inventing things on his own would amount to a conflict of interest. Yet he hopes to infect others with the inventing bug, not only for the cash. Indeed Paquette’s proudest inventing moment remains one that didn’t make him a dime. A few years ago he learned that many children were being hit by cars after exiting school buses. So he created the now-familiar arm that whips out a large stop signs from the side of the bus. “It didn’t make any money for it and never sought a patent for it, but I think it saved a lot of lives.”

  Some of the Inventariums hot new products:

The T-Rack Luce Belle stroke of genius came eight years ago when flummoxed by her small garage. “I couldn’t figure out where to put my winter tires,” says Luce Belle, 81 of Lasalle. “I was going to stack the tires on top of each other but I heard that this damages the rubber.” Belle figured a compact rack that could hold hold two tires below and two on top would be useful. The Inventarium agreed and so did Wal Mart which has sold around 5,000 of the pre-assembled T-Racks for about $30 each. “We wanted to manufacture them in Quebec,” says Belle. “But nobody could make them here for less than $30 per unit, so we ended up getting them made in China for under $13 each.” Belle thinks a new law requiring Quebec motorists to have a set of winter tires can only help sales. But she’s not doing cartwheels. “I’ve put so much time into it that the excitement is gone. I’m tired now.”

C Mon Ange Christine Tremblay’s work with children stricken with cancer led her to dream up a concept where every sick kid on earth would get a soft cuddly blue doll to comfort them. Proceeds of the doll, meanwhile, would go to fight cancer. She recently designed and ordered 1,000 dolls, 400 of which were quickly sold through her sitecmonange.com. Tremblay donates $2 per doll to Lucan to support a cure but now faces some decisions on how to market the doll. “The toy manufacturer said it’s one of the best concepts he’s ever seen. I want the doll to sell but I also want to make sure it remains clear that the idea is to raise money and awareness for children with cancer.”

We Care Step In his 38 years driving a local taxi on the South Shore, Harold Ware has seen an increasing number of aging clientele having more trouble getting into vans. So he invented an easily transportable step that can be placed in front of the door to allow passengers to get in and out with a lot more ease. “It’s portable, foldable, fits under the seat and really helps people with reduced mobility,” says Ware. It’s still early days but the device has found takers among those who transport people with special needs. Ware has also designed a swivel seat and a handle to allow the elderly to travel easier inside vans.

Fruit-o-Gume Back in high school two years ago 16 year old Virginie Kelly was given a class assignment to somehow help the world. She figured that kids should be eating a lot more fruits and veggies so she created a poster with images of the edibles. Parents put the poster on the wall and a kid gets the right to slap a special magnet on the good eats they’d consumed that day. It has been a hit everywhere she’s taken it. Kelly has a patent pending and will have a product shipping from China. She also has some small scale inventorial notoriety. “They’ve written about me in the neighbourhood newspaper and all my friends think that I’m a big deal, I get congratulated all the time.”

**

2-28-2000

Suffrage the children

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

    Corrupt governments all around the world, including those in Ottawa, Quebec City and Montreal deny basic human rights to a large portion of their citizens. 

   Like slaves from generations past, today’s victims of discrimination, sometimes characterized by short arms, high voices and nasty acne, have been told that their oppressors are their protectors. People whose only crime is to have not experienced an eighteenth birthday are denied the right to vote, smoke, drink quality alcohol, gamble and stay up late. As well they’re strongly discouraged from getting jobs and having children.

   So when I heard there was a youth summit, I imagined Quebec’s two million underagers swarming the capital like Power Rangers, but instead, it seems there were no kids anywhere. The summit was a grotesque perpetuation of the socially accepted political exclusion of youngsters as college-aged adults dominated the proceedings with their post adolescent angst. When many twenty-somethings – who polls suggest are entirely hostile to politics – chose to firebomb the event rather than participate in it, the politicians looked confused. But it’s simple: the young adults are hostile to politicians because they’ve been disenfranchised most of their lives.

   The Canadian Charter of Human Rights theoretically bans age discrimination but in practice the protection only applies to the geriatrics with the cash to control government. In fact, if anything, there’s a crackdown on the few remaining rights of underagers. The government’s newest crusade is to string up any lotto salesman who sells 6/49 tickets to a kid. Nowadays, kids can score marijuana more easily than cigarettes. Underagers who work are also strongly frowned upon, kids no longer drive depanneur beer bikes, nor do they deliver newspapers. And I’m pretty sure that nowadays, if a 14-year old worked as a parking lot attendant, as I did, some do-gooder would be bitching to the authorities about it. As a result of this condescending coddling and the outlawing of child responsibility, young adults know only how to party-down and sadly their idea of a worthy project is to pour beer suds down tank tops on spring break.

   What’s worse is that we’re exporting these bad politics of youth infantilization. Take the crusade of Oshawa teen Craig Kielberger who traveled to India to attack child labour. Paradoxically, an underaged Kielberger got an early start on his career in politics by going to India to denounce young craftsmen getting an early start on their careers. Rather than learning to manipulate a loom to learn to weave dazzling works of traditional art, us Westerners would have them vegging on the Playstation and getting to the ninth round of Street Fighter II.

    The exclusion of young people from adult affairs is undoubtedly based on unspeakably negative and inaccurate assumptions adults have of their youngsters’ capabilities. What would happen if children were allowed to vote? Probably not much. For kids, the vote would be, as it is for adults: a feel-good, meaningless placebo. There are few political alternatives and parents could threaten their kids with “time outs” for voting for Mario Dumont. If combined with proportional representation, true universal suffrage could open politics to an exciting array of genuinely new voices. Besides, underagers aren’t exempt from income tax, therefore denying them political emancipation violates the principle of “no taxation without representation.”

Granting the franchise to any child old enough to read the ballot would not only address their subsequent political alienation, it would give them a voice to deal with stuff. Little kids, in case you forgot, have big problems. For example, an NDG woman told my wife that daycare attendants flick her kid’s hand and squeeze his ear as punishment, but she’s leaving him in there because it’s near her house. Another mother mentioned that her kid’s teacher called him an idiot in front of the class and soon all the kids were calling him that. Who are we to mute these young citizens with real problems? Politicians should be made accountable for such genuine suffering; indeed it’s because they’re vulnerable and powerless that children should have the vote.  

**
11-6-2000

Legendary cop recommends muscle

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

It was a cold twilight that fell over Lasalle on March 28, 1985 as Bob Menard emerged from a car cradling a shotgun in his familiar black leather gloves. He and his partner on the MUC Police Holdup Squad had spent the day following a pair of bank robbers through the city. “We were waiting for them to do something, it became like ‘hurry up and choose a place,’” says the 66-year-old.

The bandits were members of the brutal East End Bouchard clan, “It was run by their mom, she was a real bitch,” says Menard. “Most crooks try to get in an out as fast as possible but this gang took pleasure in beating on innocent people.” After the armed thieves entered a bank on Shevchenko, Menard lowered his sights and raised his aim.

“I had them lined up but there was an old man sitting in a car blocking my angle. I went around back and waited.” Soon Menard was face to face with the robbers and guns were drawn. “I could hear the bullets whizzing by my ears. From ten, fifteen away I was shooting this guy repeatedly but he’s not going down. Next thing I know I feel something like a baseball bat on my back and I see blood spurting out of my chest, I looked down and thought, ‘what the hell is that?’”

Soon Menard’s partner settled the score by blasting the Bouchards with a machine gun. But the day that Bob Menard got shot three times in the back by a bandit wearing body armour was the day policing in the city changed forever. Menard recovered from his injuries but his days as one the city’s leading take-no-prisoners officer was over.

Black and White and Blue

Menard’s days in blue brought him regularly face to face with some of the most brutal and armed criminals of the 60s and 70s, the decades when bad-egg boomers wrought the highest toll of violent crime the city has seen. His souvenirs from the battle include nine disabilities, including one lost lung, hearing damaged by the blast of his gun, a metal plate in his hip and both knees are equipped with braces.

In light of the Quebec government’s recent proposal to ban biker gangs, Menard bristles. “When I hear (provincial Public Security Minister) Serge Menard saying that the justice system is ‘helpless to fight crime,’ I have to wonder what the hell’s going on? How would I feel if I was a little old lady and I heard the top guy who’s supposed to be protecting citizens talking like that?”

In conversation, the boisterous ex-cop makes references to the Toopes, the elderly couple sadistically murdered by teens in their west island home, the murderous Karla Homolka “living in a setting better than most could afford,” and “that 12 year old boy killed by a biker bomb.” He suggests a return to a system in which criminals think twice and innocent citizens can feel safe. But if the clues to Menard’s prescription lie in his policing career, then it’s not a plan for the squeamish.

The phony mobster

As a child growing up in the Eastern Townships, Menard had an appetite for action. “I was a real bad little shit,” he says. Menard was sent to a Montreal reform school and reaching adulthood he served in the Korean War. But his return civilian life was rocky, “I worked for the CNR, but it wasn’t steady, they kept laying me off.”

In 1959 Menard was accepted into the Montreal Police and joined the Social Security Squad, “a quasi-intelligence squad, we were called the SS.” He was sent undercover into the dens of iniquity that made the city famous. “You have to be a real good actor to enter a room full of people who don’t trust you and want nothing to do with you and gain their confidence.”

Menard became an important secret agent in Drapeau’s war against the Mafia-controlled gaming dens and all those other places where cold-blooded killers battled for control of the city’s dark underbelly. In the nightclub age mobsters were big news as people would gossip in the street about whether Louis Greco put mob rival Frank Petrula through the meat grinder at his Decarie restaurant before himself being burnt alive. “Violence, threats, intimidation, murder, coercion, breaking bones, it’s their business and these are their tools,” says Menard of the people he infiltrated. “They don’t take it personally, they’re predators that use the system against us.”

In spite of an unusually long undercover career in which he assumed 17 undercover identities, including a seaman, a priest and a taxi driver during Expo ’67, Menard never had his cover blown. “It almost happened once when cops raided a gambling den and one started saying ‘Hey Bob’ but he caught himself and stopped halfway through. He slugged me in the face to make sure nobody suspected.”

In 1973, Menard infiltrated the top brass of the local mob, controlled together by the ponderous Vic Cotroni and the fearless Paolo Violi. “We were trying to figure a way in and noticed a ‘For Rent’ sign in the window of Violi’s Café Reggio near Lacordaire. I posed as Wilson, an electrician and took the room upstairs.”

For three years Menard lived a careful life, “I used to put a hair on the door so I’d know whenever they entered my place.” He had scant dealings with his family as he collected wiretaps and took notes of the comings and goings of Violi’s visitors. “There were always details, like I couldn’t sneak out to visit my wife during a snowstorm because they’d see that there was less snow on my car and they’d have known I had been out.”

One day Violi asked his ersatz electrician-tenant to repair a faulty light. “I knew nothing about electrical work so I went to see my brother, who’s a master electrician, and got him to teach me as much as he could in one day. I remember the last thing he said was ‘check the bulb.’ So with Violi watching my every move, I was trying to fix the light and nothing was working. I was getting worried until I remembered what my brother had said. It was just a burnt-out bulb after all.”

The two would sip cappuccinos together on weekends. “We both hated the PQ, we talked about that a lot.” But eventually Menard’s information put Violi behind bars. “One of Violi’s men, Jimmy-Rent-a-Gun wanted to whack me but Violi wouldn’t authorize it,” says Menard. Eventually Violi was shot by two gunmen at his restaurant. “He knew they were coming. He just sat there at a table in the back, he didn’t even move.”

Graveyard shifts

In the mid 70s Menard joined the Night Patrol, a roving team of about ten cops that dealt with nighttime crime all over the island. “My approach to the job was that all of the respectable people were in bed at 3:00 in the morning. If I see you in the streets, my question is: what the hell are you doing out in the city when all of the law abiding citizens are in bed sleeping?”

Many have spoken fondly of the Night Patrol, including former columnist Nick Auf Der Maur. Menard says it’s because, “We had a solution rate of about 90 percent, it’s the highest of any force that I ever heard of.”

But another veteran police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, says “These guys would put metal garbage pails on the heads of suspects and hit it so hard the guy would pass out. And those stories about the cops putting a phone book on a suspect’s head and hitting it with a big flashlight were true.”

“People would confess to crimes they didn’t even commit, just to stop what can only be called the brutal torture,” says the police source. He also describes the following Night Patrol interrogation: “An officer’s talking to the suspect. He shows him a starter’s pistol and says, ‘here take a look.’ The guy picks it up and looks at it and hands it back. The cop says, ‘Thanks, now I’ve got your fingerprints on the gun, if you don’t confess, I’ll blow your head off and say you came at me with it.’”

Menard hasn’t been directly linked to such acts but he concedes that, “I did a lot of fighting in my day as a cop.” He points to a scar in his palm. “We were responding to a domestic dispute between a gay couple. I was trying to calm one of them down and he put a meat cleaver right through my hand. That’ll teach me to be a nice guy.”

The unit was disbanded in June 1979 after members of the St. Henri-based Dubois gang - one of the city’s most brutal crime groups in the 70s - complained of a beating laid on them by the Night Patrol. Menard says that the Dubois brothers initiated the conflict. “They had come to the station and roughed up one of the desk officers pretty bad.”

Armed and ready

Menard then joined the Holdup Squad and became a constant fixture at armed robberies throughout the city as he earned the nickname “Shotgun” for his talent in putting permanent end to the careers of armed robbers. “It costs $75,000 a year to house a prisoner. A bullet costs only 65 cents,” he explains.

But he refuses reveal how many armed bandits he shot down. “I’m no butcher,” he says. “But I empathize with the victim,” he says, adding that since he retiring he has helped and personally supported victims of crime in the west island.

The MUC police’s approach to armed conflicts changed after Menard was felled by bandits and he concedes that, “I might have had something to do with it.” Pierre Gauthier Chairman of the Police Tech Program for John Abbot says of the old-style approach, “If I had any hair left, it would stand up just thinking about that way of doing things. If police wait for a robbery occur, it’s almost criminal, the officer could be charged with risking people’s lives,” says Gauthier.

Today, police officers are instructed to arrest armed robbers, when possible, before committing a crime. SWAT teams, huge cordoned-off expanses and negotiations for a peaceful resolution have also become standard tools in the police response to armed robberies.

But Menard says that circumstances often dictated swift and daring action. “One time we were at Metcalfe and Ste. Catherine around lunch hour, thousands of are people walking by and these guys are robbing a bank. So we went out back and blocked the alley with the car and I shot from the inside the car.” The bullet went through two windshields and injured the robber. “We made the arrest,” says Menard, “but me and my partner lost a lot of our hearing from the blast of the shotgun.”

The age in which criminals lived in terror of a police force that equated brute force with gritty determination is gone forever, according to officer Pablo Palacios, who himself faced considerable flack after vigorously fighting the drug trade in Little Burgundy a decade ago.

“Today there are more independent agencies, there are more lawyers involved, judges are more savvy and there are so many commissions of inquiry. The rules have changed,” says Palacios. “The Charter (of Rights and Freedoms) became law in 1982, it took about ten years to really seep into policing but it has been the number one factor for change.

“Back in those days the Police Commission would recommend suspensions and the chiefs would toss the report straight into the garbage. They can’t do that anymore. Plus, kids today are more educated and officers are better paid than they were back then, nobody wants to jeopardize a job where they make $60,000 working four days a week,” says Palacios. “Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t duplicate that era.”

Palacios also notes that the scarier policing never succeeded in wiping out organized crime. But he can’t resist speculating on how the old-style officers would fare in the biker war. “They might,” he says, “be able to end it in a few days.”

And if he could, Menard would be happy to join the battle. “I miss policing a lot.” But it’s not the status or the community role that he misses. “No. It’s more primal than that. It’s the hunt.”

**
12-14-2004

The ethical glutton

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Now that ’tis the season to be blowing your cash, the Flintstone shoulder-angel descends on many shoulders burdened with neurotic inclinations otherwise known as a conscience.

The guilt factor can be a major psychological obstacle when whipping out that Mastercard. Now that just about every item on every shelf store is assembled mysteriously behind the walls of distant factories in exotic lands, it becomes more difficult than ever to know what sort of labour conditions our dollars are supporting.

We’re smack dab in the middle of the age of information, and yet there’s little way of knowing if any given consumer product we toss in our cart isn’t supporting inhumane cruelty.

For all we know, the assembly line workers who make these doodads in those far off places are tiny children kidnapped at knifepoint from their villages and chained to machines and feed them every 12 hours until they perish from exhaustion.

There’s a whole secret unsavoury world of cruelty behind every consumer product that I’m not sure we should even probe. Oblivion to the dark side of your purchase is probably the safest strategy to enjoying your consumer purchase. For when you commit yourself to considering the moral consequences of every nickel you spend, it could suck the joy right out of that bargain that you snapped up.

For example, it might totally bum out your buzz if you knew that your friendly dealer mercilessly pistol-whipped a competitor to gain the privilege of selling you the pot in your area. .

Coffee, running shoes, clothing and automobiles are the purchases most often scrutinized by those wishing to spend ethically. But once you become a conscientious consumer, you’re taking on a huge, possibly unworkable task.

When you’re in aisle six pondering bottles of mustard, how are you supposed to weigh whether the Grey Poupon bosses are nicer or meaner than the French’s mustard overlords? To make any purchase, you’ve got to compute and analyze massive reams of trivial interactions to weigh the cruelty – both perceived and intended – that went into its creation. Did the assembly-workers get a raise last year? Is one bottle more environmentally friendly? The label tells you nothing.

Then there’s the massive issue of whether boycotting products made under inhumane conditions ads to the poverty in that place, it’s an issue way too complex to ponder in such a short paragraph as this.

Plus, when it comes to ethical spending, how many generations of spending are we responsible for? If you give your money to a saintly shopkeeper who then spends it at a place that uses it to build a date rape drug lab, are you still indirectly responsible for the nastiness?

And even if you spend more on a certifiably ethical product, could you be accused of being morally abusive to your dependants or charities that would otherwise have received the extra money you blew on being morally superior? And is it even ethical to consistently deprive oneself the occasional episode of consumer gratification?

I’m not even sure that it’s ethical to become a conscientious consumer if it means you’ll be punishing others by droning on condescendingly about your moral superiority and holier-than-thou ethical consumerist crusades.

I know, I know. Just typing these questions out is giving me a head-pounding headache too.

This is one instance when being poor is better. Boycotting the diamond industry, SUVs and Nikes is a no-brainer when you have $16.04 in your bank account.

Perhaps we should look to our government as the moral beacon to light up these foggy questions of personal economic morality. Unfortuantely taxes are probably the hardest place to boycott. Even if you have major objections to the way they spend your tax dollars, you’re not offered the choice of boycotting.

My own personal irritation of the week is that Quebec funds private schools more generously than other provinces, thereby using public money to perpetuate the dominance of the elite over the poor. I’d like to not be spending my money supporting rich kids. But try applying your ethical spending ways to your tax bill and they’ll toss you in the slammer