Possum sighted, do I flee or investigate?

"Take us to Olman Feelyus, pion"

Those of you who know me well know that I have a long and complex history with the Possum empire.  I won't go into details now but let's just say that may or may not be the reason I moved north so many years ago.  All has been going well here and I've come to quite love my new life.

Then this news showed up today in my twitter feed.

Global warming?  Escaped illegal pet?  

I think not. 

Emissary or enemy agent, I am not sure which.  This is either a message being sent or a terrible blunder.  Highly unlikely that the Possum empire would send an agent that would allow himself to get caught.  Especially downtown like that.

So do I just pack up and flee (probably the smarter move) or do I head over to the Berger Blanc and see if I can effectuate a meeting with this critter?

Going to go see if the squirrels know anything.

"I WILL fuck your shit up!"

The Redneck Solution

I see the video below as a metaphor for the language issues in Canada.  The trailer is the "two solitudes" the gulf of communication and culture between two people who speak a different language.  The car represents the base culture that we all actually share (thriftiness, appreciation of semi-rural suburban living, desire to smash things in creative ways) but aren't aware of because of our different languages.  The drivers are the people like you and me who want to live in a culturally diverse Canada that respects all of its traditions.  Now watch what happens to the two solitudes when we finally get in the driver's seat:

Don't every change, people of the Regions.  I love the dude at the end going "CIBWAAAAAA!"

Hyperlocal

This looks kind of fun.  CBC, under the auspices of Canada Writes, is doing a month-long project this April on neighbourhood change called Hyperlocal.  They are putting together, via their regular writers, guest-star bloggers  and a contest open to the public, a collection of map-connected blog posts on change in various neighbourhoods across Canada.  I'll be throwing a piece in, but still need to decide which of the many instances of change going on here, I should write about.  Our own Kate McDonnell, producer of the Montreal City Weblog (far and away the best source of Montreal news and discussion on said news in english) is one of the guest bloggers.  You can read her piece about an establishment in her Villeray neighbourhood here.

The Face of Fascism

The offending instagram post in question

The relationship between the police and society in Canada is an interesting one.  In many ways, we are seen as a progressive country in terms of liberty and the law.  In reality, there is a constant threat of minor fascism here in Canada.  I say "minor" because fascism gets thrown around a lot and often ends up either undermining an argument (by the overzealous progressive) or being used to undermine an argument (by the tactical conservative).  We inherit some of our laws around national security from Britain, most infamously the Official Secrets Act and in theory that makes us in some ways a less free country than the U.S.

There is also a long history of police services behaving far beyond the bounds or their legal role.  At the federal level, the RCMP is often up to privacy-invading shenanigans.  At the local level, there are many incidents of police abuse and murder (the victims often being First Nations people).  I won't go into them all here, but these incidents demonstrate how easily it is for authority in a society to abuse its power.

The recent change in strategy by the SPVM, the Montreal police force, against the student protests here in Montreal is a good example of this.  It's complicated, because there is also an annual anti-police brutality march here that always turns violent and the two groups, while distinct, are also intermingled.  During the height of the protests last year, Jean Charest's liberals (never a friend to freedom) passed Bill 78, which was a major attack on the right of freedom of expression and gave the cops all kinds of license to shut down any protest.  The PQ repealed it (think about that freaked out anglophone liberals), but within that bill was a municipal by-law (P-6) that gives the executive committee of Montreal (basically a gang of fucking criminals who should be pilloried for a month and then exiled to Labrador, and I'm really not exaggerating here) the power to refuse any protest or demonstration.  There is a bunch of other sneaky shit in there as well, that basically lets the police say yes or no to a protest. 

So P-6 is still in effect. Meanwhile, the PQ reversed the tuition hikes and then brought them back, though at a much more reasonable level.  This deflated a lot of the energy of the protests and the cops have clearly taken this as an excuse to amp up their repression.  They have been using "kettling", which was declared unconstitutional to round up protestors and then to take pictures of them and get all their info for future intelligence work.

All that is already pretty disturbing, but where their intel work "paid off" is even more disturbing.  Earlier this week, they arrested a 20-year old protest hipster chick for harrassment.  What had she done?  She had taken a picture of a piece of graffitti art (seen here) that showed the SPVM spokesperson with a bullet through his head and then disemminated it to the internet via instagram.  The law they used to arrest her with is the one that was designed to prevent stalking and to catch potentially violent criminals when they make threats.

The tactic of making the oppressor the victim has been around for decades.

There are three things here that push this move into the realm of fascism.  The first is, as mentioned above, the perversion of the law that was designed to protect an individual to use it to go after an individual who was critiquing a political body.  The second is that it's pretty obvious that they have got someone going through their database and then tracking down individuals online and looking for reasons to go after them.  Finally, the real nasty technique here is the co-opting of the victim status.  This is a classic neo-con and corporate bullying technique.  It serves many purposes. One of the bigger ones is to elicit sympathy from centrist citizens.  In this case, I suspect, it will blow up in their faces.  As we've seen time and time again, if there is one thing that the people are generally united on it is their right to use the internet freely.  There is already a backlash online against this move and I suspect we will see the SPVM back off.  Though you never know.  Organizations like these do tend to "double-down on stupid" so they may amp up this strategy.  We will be watching.

Awaken from winter slumber, blog!

Arise gentle mountain.

I've been neglecting Briques du Neige the last year or so.  I have many excuses and explanations.  The big concrete one is that my wife gave birth in October and the child's fierce intelligence and cutting wit suggest that I am indeed the father.  So that's been keeping me busy.  The vaguer explanation for the lack of prooduction here is perhaps more interesting.  It's taken me a while to wrestle with it.  It's not really laziness or lack of motivation. It's just that nothing seems special enough any more to merit a blog post (meta aside: is anything ever?  Probably not, so point taken and let's just move on).  I think what is happening is that after nine years, I have integrated into my life here in Montreal to the point where I have lost that outsider, observer perspective.  I am living my life and everything just seems normal.  When people from outside Montreal ask me about the corruption scandal going on, I am a bit surprised that they don't already know everything about it.  I mean isn't everybody following Monique Muise's awesome twitter feed?  The snow is melting and Clark street was not a total garbage fest for once, but that's just spring time and I might as well be talking about the weather. I still don't feel like I am truly from here, but I have never felt like I am truly from anywhere in my life.  I think for me this is about as "home" as it gets, when I don't feel like blogging about my city anymore.

That being said, there still is a lot going on here.  The gradual evolution of Mile End towards true, awful gentrification marches on relentlessly.  The cops in Montreal are demonstrating a culture of fascism and oppression that is rivalling the RCMP.  The Charbonneau commission is on fucking fire.  And finally, finally, wonderful springtime is here (or was for a couple days, then got skittish and backed off, but now appears to be well and truly here).

So with the buds and the dogshit and the birds living in the power line housing outside our apartment, this blog will also finally poke its head out from the cold and the snow.

Briques du Neige has been pretty focused on Montreal life, culture and politics, with a few diversions here and there.  I am going to widen the scope going forward, for the reasons stated above, and hope to share a broader range of my spazzy ramblings and inane observations.  There is a much greater potential for angry rants, so be warned.

Re-organize your bookmarks, put me back in your blogroll, release the paparazzi.  Briques du Neige is back motherfuckers!

How to be a successful journalist in Canada today

Lie and make shit up.  Well to be precise, lie and make shit up that fits in with the existing conventional wisdom that you've already lied about and made up.

So here is the phrase that is ringing in my ears right now and making me want to drive down to the CBC building and mash my cat's droppings into the keyboard of everyone who had any editorial influence on it being written:

"Language tensions are as common in Montreal as warm bagels."

Excuse me for a moment while I go attend my primal scream therapy class.

YEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, aside from the super-lame and cliched reference to bagels, this statement is just flat out wrong. Language tensions are extremely rare in Montreal.  We pride ourselves on being a mixed-up bunch of polyglots.  There is tension about traffic on the bridges.  There is tension between cars and bikes.  There is tension about parking and snow removal.  When I think about it, Montreal is just not a very tense city.  That's one of the reasons I like it here.  Sure there are little conflicts here and there over language and culture, but no more than in any other Canadian city.  I've seen way more acts of overt racism in Vancouver than I've seen here.

So first of all, this statement is wrong.  It's just made up because it's what the CBC wants the rest of Canada to believe.  But that's not even what makes it so bad.  What makes it so bad is that some nutcase killed a person last night and yelled out "Les anglos se reveillent" (in a québécois accent by the way).  His statement than ties his horrible, insane act to the issue of relations between anglophones and francophones in Quebec.

We still don't know what was going on in this guy's brain, but it is conceivable that he wants to exacerbate these relations.

We don't want this.  We want to get along and exist peacefully with all the different cultures and languages around us.

Don't we?

Well judging by the conversations I have had with my workmates, my basketball buddies and a bunch of people on Twitter, the answer is yes.  The hundreds of people, anglophones, francophones and allophones marching in a candlelight vigil in front of the Metropolis tonight seem to further confirm the desire for us all to live in a peaceful society.

The media doesn't seem to have this same desire.  No, they seem quite excited to take the words of this nutcase and amplify them by making up a version of Montreal where language tensions are a common part of the daily existence.  A teacher friend of mine that I play basketball told me that many students of his 4th grade class asked him if Quebec was going to separate now.  This is what you are doing, Canadian media.  You are freaking out little children by making shit up, sending that message to their parents and then freaking them out.

That is one phrase that I heard while making the mistake of listening to the CBC for 5 minutes.  I can only imagine the bullshit I could have heard on the even more stupid anglo news stations here and god only knows what the rest of the country's shit media is saying.  I already saw an editorial in the Globe and Mail that suggested that it was now Harper's move to counteract the PQ in order to get ahead of them in this big new conflict that was for sure going to happen (at least in this case the majority of commenters called bullshit on that).

So if anyone is reading this out there, please, please, please stop listening to the mainstream media.  CBC, Global, CTV.  All purveyors of lies.

We're doing just fine here.

The Language of Fear is the language of losers

Again, a lot of my impressions may be because much of my information on the candidates' positions is coming through the english media (and even that is basically about 45 minutes a day of CBC radio one), but I am noticing a real trend with the sovereignist and francophone stances coming from the the candidates and especially the PQ.  They are coming from a place of fear.  They talk about the french language being in jeopardy on the island.  All their proposals are negative ones.  Don't let people do this, fine people for doing that.

This kind of thinking is the thinking of losers.  A loser is someone who has already lost, has a tendency to lose and spends most of his energy worrying about the repercussions of losing and how to avoid them.  The winner is thinking about the next victory, enjoying life and planning for future challenges.  We all walk between those two extremes to some degree.

It's very odd that these politicians have such a loser mentality.  They are the ones who have already won.  They succeeded in throwing off the oppressive yoke of the old english and catholic establishment and turning Quebec into a unique society, dynamic and independent and deeply culturally different from everyone else around it.  They have created an entire generation of francophones who are deeply connected to their cultural roots, history and language.

Instead of pride and confidence, they react with contempt and insecurity.  They ignore their idealistic students and they put laws in place to suppress the minorities who come here to participate in their rich society.  They treat immigrants who want to come and be a part of this rich society with suspicion and disdain.  And then they wonder why they all want to move to Ontario.

How about some positive laws?  How about expanded french language programs?  How about government assistance for immigrants who want to work in the civil service to help them learn french?  How about a corp of translators to help immigrants navigate the provincial and municipal bureaucracies (which makes for great jobs for fully bilingual members of those ethnic communities, thus further embedding them in Quebec society)?  How about scholarships for francophones to go to english CEGEPs and universities so they can then increase the opportunities for english-speaking service companies to install themselves in Quebec (like the thriving videogame industry here)?

This province has so much potential.  We have an incredibly motivated and integrated youth who are more deeply connected to their polity than any other province in the country.  We are a creative powerhouse (Cirque de Soleil is the tip of the iceberg of cultural exports we could be selling).  We have skills in agriculture, industrial development and resource extraction.  We breed great soldiers.  We have the urban jewel of North America in Montreal (probably the second-most fun city to visit in North America after New Orleans).

Bref, Quebec is a kick-ass place that should be kicking more ass and stop cowering in a corner worrying about who is or isn't speaking french.