aMMusing

In the wake of all the chatter over the Harperites’ elimination of the mandatory long-form from the 2011 census, I have been thinking a lot lately about how Harper’s Conservatives have seemingly been getting away with dismantling the Canada the majority of us know and love despite his minority standing in the House of Commons. This article by Frances Russell Murdoch published on The Tyee puts into words, in a way I never could have, how the census debacle is only the latest manifestation of the Harper government’s implementation of the hard-right agenda that centrists and left-leaning Canadians feared so much prior to the rise to power of the Reform/Alliance Conservatives.

Taxes are not inherently a bad thing; mismanagement of tax dollars is. Having the state dictate to me where I can or cannot smoke or who I can or cannot f*ck is a bad thing, but having a state upon which I can call upon should bad luck befall me is a good thing. Meanwhile, it slays me to see, economic recession notwithstanding since the pattern began well before the recession struck, how these Conservatives, like Mulroney’s in the 1980s and 1990s or the U.S. Bushites of the 2000s, have made a porridge of the country’s finances (i.e., mismanaged tax dollars) to the point that, like Obama in the U.S., it will take another party longer to fix than it took these asswipes to break.

It breaks my heart to see Canadians and Americans alike fall for empty populist buzz phrases without realizing the negative long-term consequences. The left is not without its fault, but looking at the last century in both countries, it is clear that progressive policies have improved the lot of the majority far more than so-called conservative policies.

How typically Canadian that two blog posts in a row should be weather-related, but here goes!

After living 20+ years in Halifax, I can safely say that I have never experienced before — or, at least, not since my childhood in Moncton — a real canicule. (I like that we have a specific word in French for “heat wave.”) However, now, after this past week, there’s no mistaking that I’ve popped my canicule cherry.

The definition of a canicule varies according to location. That makes sense, for what passes as normal in Florida or the Caribbeans may not be normal elsewhere. For most of Canada, a canicule is defined as “three or more consecutive days in which the maximum temperature is greater than or equal to 32°C (90F).” I believe the weather service in France also considers the overnight low, which mustn’t go below 20C or 21C (68F-70F). But given that the overnight lows in Montréal during the recent canicule, which officially started July 5 and ended in the early afternoon of July 9, didn’t go below 24C (75F) — it was often still 28C-30C (82F-86F) well into the early morning hours — we surpassed most definitions by a long shot.

Starting the evening of July 5, the temperature in my apartment remained in the 30C-32C (86F-90F) range. Whatever wind there was came from the south southwest and I’m facing the north northeast, so even someone’s fart would have been more breeze than I was getting. Realizing that I had a typically intense work week ahead of me and needed to both sleep at night and work at day, I found myself shopping for an air conditioner before starting work on Tuesday morning. I determined the night before that I wanted a portable device somewhat like the one pictured here, not only because I wanted to move it around easily but also because my office only has a door leading to the balcony rather than a window.

I never thought I’d ever break down and buy one of these things. I always found them too noisy, plus I never lived in a place where the heat and humidity can get so intense for so long. At the height of the heat, my new a/c only managed to bring the temperature down to 27C-28C (81F-83F), but the humidity it would take out is what made such temps feel comparatively cool. Unfortunately, it is too noisy to keep on when I’m on the phone for work unless I use the handset rather than my usual headset, and if the people I’m training happen to be on hands-free at their end, I still have to get them to repeat a few times. I’ve had to explain why — that it wasn’t them but me — and they were all very understanding.

Even now that the canicule has officially broken, we’re in for a really hot stretch.

It’s only 26C (78F) as I’m writing this, which apparently is the average high in Montréal at this time of year, but the humidex makes it feel like 34C (92F) and there’s no wind. And the dew point hasn’t gone below 20C (68F), which apparently is as important to consider as the humidex.

At the risk of sounding like I’m complaining, I hasten to add that I’ll take summer heat over winter cold any time! I’m just amazed, though, at how constant heat saps out one’s energy.

The weather here in Montréal last Monday was at once a frightening and beautiful sight to behold. This image, submitted to cbc.ca by Denis Sobolj (click on the image to go to the story at CBC News), doesn’t look real in some ways, yet it is. The best comment someone left on the CBC site, although possibly animated by anti-French sentiment, went along the lines that this cloud was looking for Kansas, but since all the signs around here are in French, it got lost.

Several funnel clouds were spotted and at least two touched ground on the West Island as F0 tornadoes — the weakest kind. And Tornwordo, who lives east in HoMa, posted another remarkable photo he took Monday afternoon (though it looks like evening). But here in Snowdon (or Uptown, or Upper Westmount, or whatever you want to call it), it wasn’t quite as dramatic in the afternoon, although it certainly rained heavily at one point.

I was working and did have to turn the light on, but clearly it was nothing like what nearby places in the area witnessed. Shortly after suppertime, however, things did take a rather dramatic turn. I was even compelled to step outside to the front of my building for a better look, and the rapidly moving whispy clouds under the solid dark blue black cloud rendered everything as surreal as on the image above. When it started to rain, I thought it best to get the heck back inside …just in case.

The Montréal area is no stranger to such wild weather we normally associate to the American tornado alley, although thankfully not as destructive. Two years ago, there was this waterspout in the St. Lawrence River, adjacent to the east end. And I remember some pretty nasty storms with tornadoes passing through and touching down in the suburbs early last summer.

After an overall cool and wet month of June here, about which I’m not complaining because we desperately needed the moisture, we’re about to start a typical continental summer hot spell in the coming days. It makes me wonder if it’ll also bring high humidity and the risk of more violent storms.

This was Montréal early this morning.

Québec has received only half its normal rainfall for May, and that’s following a winter with far lower than normal precipitation. As a result, the Saint Lawrence River is already at late-summer levels and the forests are bone dry …and burning, with the worst, out-of-control blazes raging in the upper Mauricie area, hundreds of kilometres northeast of Montréal.

Sitting watching TV around midnight last night, I started smelling the smoke. I hate to say it, but it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant smell although certainly distressing as the smell of burning anything always is. However, having seen on the news earlier that Québec City and Trois-Rivières had been veiled under smoke pushed down by strong winds from the northeast earlier in the day, I quickly realized what it was. And this morning I learned that the smoke from these fires has drifted as far south as upstate New York, Vermont, Maine, and even Massachusetts’ Cape Cod.

I went around the apartment to close all the windows and then stepped out on the balcony to stare at the moon, nearly full and orange red, pungent smoke hanging heavily in the air from those far-away burning trees. It reminded me of similar smoke cloud that drifted all the way to Halifax from Québec forest fires one summer morning in the early 1990s. The only difference that time and the above picture is that orange-coloured cloud stayed higher in the sky, but the smell and eery lighting was similar.

There’s not much rain is in the forecast in the coming days. I long wished for a warm, dry summer, but such a consequence is not what I had in mind.

I’ve never been a fan of hockey. Or of any sport, for that matter. Ever. But in Sin City North, if you don’t even pretend to be interested, especially about the Habs (i.e., the Montréal Canadiens), you’re definitely seen as an oddity.

I can’t even feign interest when clients at my day job find out I’m in Montréal and ask me what I think of the Habs’ performance. It surprises them, because everybody knows that hockey here is akin to a religion everybody follows as intensely as Europeans follow football (soccer). And with the Habs surprising everyone for coming this far in the Stanley Cup playoffs, Montréal has gone totally hockey mad. Or, should I say, more hockey mad than usual.

Whenever a game is being played, as it is right now as I’m writing this post, you don’t have to be near a TV set to know what’s going on. You just have to listen to the city. For instance, right now the young, barking neanderthals upstairs  neighbour upstairs and his testosterone-laden friends holler at every move. If the Habs score, I’ll hear about it in real time and I can just turn on the TV for a minute to see a replay of the score, then turn off the TV and wait until the next hollerfest.

Thursday, the night of the last game, Cleopatrick and I were taking advantage of the mild evening and were out eating at an outside terrace in the Village. There again, we only had to monitor the hollering coming out of the bars or the cacophony of cars honking their horn in all corners of the city or the fans walking down the street barking some incomprehensible gibberish that leaves no doubt of their approval of what had just happened at the rink just a few blocks to our west.

I don’t really understand how people can get so excited about a bunch of grown men on skates pushing a puck around with a stick. But certainly more incomprehensible to me is how, whether the Habs win or lose the current series, there will be riots in the streets downtown. If they’re happy, they’ll destroy property. If they’re upset, they’ll destroy property. It’s total madness.

Meanwhile, between noon and 3:00 pm, the temperature outside spiked from a mere 18C to 27C, which marks the beginning of a predicted week of sunshine with temps hovering near either side of the 30C mark. And yet, the interminable season of that most wintry of sports still has a few weeks to go, Habs or no Habs in the final match up.

Disclosure: Okay, I’ve been cheating. Instead of waiting for the hollering, I’ve had the TV on with the volume very, very low and just saw the Philadelphia Flyers score the first two goals of today’s game. And not a peep came from upstairs either time, not even disapproving groans or booing. But, from what I’ve observed so far in the last few weeks, I know the proverbial fat lady hasn’t sung yet, although something tells me she might in two days …for the Flyers.

Here is Québec, when a (straight) couple marries, the wife does not take her husband’s last name. I suppose she could if she really wanted to jump through many legal hoops, but even there it would be a lengthy process. This is primarily because Québec is a civil law jurisdiction, unlike the rest of Canada which relies on common law principles. But a spinoff is that “Jeanne Tremblay” ‘s file with the government will always be a variation of her name at birth and her birthdate.

Hence, many children here have compound last names (in either order — mother’s-father’s or father’s-mother’s), unless the parents decide to only give one name (the mother’s or the father’s). In a way, that’s not such a big deal. In Spanish-speaking countries, the norm is to have your father’s and mother’s last name (in that order), with the father’s name being used in day-to-day dealings.

My brother sent me this list of unfortunate last name combinations that could happen in Québec. Alas, a lot of you who don’t speak French or aren’t familiar with Québec slang won’t get the jokes, so I’m providing rough English translations. In most cases, it’s not that the combos really mean that, but they SOUND like they do.

Unfortunate Last Names

1. Labelle-Binette (the cute face)
2. Lavoie-Ferré (the railroad track)
3. Desjardins-Fleury (gardens in flower)
4. Dupont-D’Avignon (from d’Avignon bridge)
5. Buisson-Desfossés (bush from the ditches)
6. Jetté-Lapierre ([I] threw the stone)
7. Morand-Voyer ([they] sent me back/fired me)
8. Tétreault-Cauchon (you’re too piggy)
9. Lalumière-Dufour (the oven light)
10. Sanschagrin-D’Amours (without love-sickness)
11. Legros-Ratté (the big loser)
12. Laporte-Barré (the locked door)
13. Lebeau-Fyfe (the big fag)
14. Legrand-Brûlé (the big burn [victim])
15. Beausoleil-Brillant (nice bright sun)
16. Leboeuf-Haché (the ground beef)
17. Parent-D’Ostie (parent of a motherfucker)
18. Viens-Sansregrets (come with no regret)
19. Lemoyne-Allaire (dick in the air)
20. Hétu-Guay (are you gay)

Meanwhile, from the unbelievable-but-true, an old French name that’s never given anymore for a female is Victime. And yes, it means the same thing as in English. It really happened, in our lifetime, that a young girl was given that name with the second family name in Number 16 above. She obviously had grounds, pardon the pun, as a (very traumatized) adult, to legally change her first name to Vicky.

In another case, I won’t give you her actual name because she’s a real person whom I don’t know. But, when she says her full name in French really fast, it’s sounds like she’s saying, “It’s the stomach.”

And, I don’t know if it’s true or urban legend, but when I was growing up in Moncton, there apparently was a woman named Candy who married a guy with the last name of Kane and — you got it! — she took his name!

What are some people thinking, huh?!

ADDENDUM: The choice of image for this post is not meant to be a slight against Québec or parents or Québec parents. It’s just a cute mom-and-kid picture, okay?!

When the bimetallic Canadian $2 coin came out in 1996, most of us thought it was unique. There were tales at first about how the centre sometimes fell out, but you never hear such things today. Basically we just feel it’s a pretty cool coin, and a small handful of those add up really quickly.

About a month ago, I bought some windshield fluid at an Esso in Rosemont, around the corner from where Cleopatrick now lives. It came to just over $5 and I paid with a $10 bill, so I got back two toonies and some change. But when I got back home, I noticed that one of them had the number 10 on it, so I examined it more closely. Was there a special issue one year that I hadn’t seen before?

No, not at all. The clerk at the Esso handed me back an Uruguayan 10-peso coin. And although it is slightly thicker than a toonie, one wouldn’t notice because it is otherwise identical. Except it’s only worth about 50 cents Canadian. In other words, I unintentionally got short-changed $1.50.

I held on to the Uruguyan coin for a while, reflecting on how it’s more likely for something like this to happen in a larger city. Another time, I got (and only noticed when I got home) and Jamaican dollar piece instead of a 5- or 10-cent piece. Either way you slice it, I got jipped again, as a Jamaican dollar is worth a hair over one cent Canadian.

Yesterday I had enough time between client calls to step out to the bagel shop a block away from my place. I guess you could say I bought four fresh, warm bagels for only $1.30 instead of the usual $2.80. That’s quite a deal even by Montréal standards, where good bagels are relatively cheap.

I no longer have my Uruguyan 10-peso piece, however.

I ended my previous post wondering HOW the participants of the original Éloge du chiac “still identify themselves as French first and foremost.” It turns out that Part 2, which is more than three times the length of the original Éloge, doesn’t totally answer that question. Granted, there is a shocker in finding out that the proudest self-proclaimed Acadian Chiac 40 years ago, who went on to become very militant in his early adulthood, has basically given up the cause today. But as I think about it, I realize that my question was largely irrelevant and revealed more about my preconceived notions of what this documentary would be about. In fact, Part 2 goes much further in that it examines what the state of chiac is today, namely how it has morphed, how it’s perceived, and how it ties into the notion of identity.

I think it’s fair to say that, although it still has a distinct sound and still contains many so-called archaic words — like harde instead of “linge” (clothes) or éloize instead of “éclair” (lightening) — it has sadly (at least to me) become more “franglais.” But as one of today’s teenagers in Part 2 muses, perhaps the fact that a form of “chiac” still exists is enough to resist a complete abdication to English. It’s still a resistence of sorts.

A shortened version of Part 2 airs on Radio Canada in the Atlantic region on Sunday, October 18 at 7:30 pm.

My sister was not quite 14 in May 1968. She, along with other teenagers from Moncton, participated in a short NFB documentary called L’éloge du chiac about the virtues and demerits of chiac, the particular way French is spoken among Acadians in southeastern New Brunswick. Forty years later, those same participants, including the young (at the time) teacher, were brought back together for L’éloge du chiac Part 2 whose premiere is happening tonight at the NFB in Montréal and to which I’m heading in a few moments.

Just so you understand, chiac is fundamentally French, peppered with archaic French words and contemporary English words, as well as hybrids verbs from English made to sound French (as in j’ai crossé la rue for I crossed the street). No one in my immediate family ever spoke hardcore chiac, although my cousins just a few yards down the street certainly did. But, I must admit, in the original Éloge, my sister definitely had a chiac lilt that I don’t hear anymore.

I found it interesting viewing L’éloge again after so many years, in particular the way my sister at that age already affirmed herself as being Acadian, whereas it took me moving to Montréal in my 40s to finally fully assume my Acadian identity rather than thinking of myself as a French Canadian cultural mutt. But also fascinating to me was to learn that my sister, who now principally lives in French, recognized that, at 13, she spoke French only at home and in school. She declared:

My family is French; we’re from Québec. Me, though, I’m Acadian, so I’m not going to start speaking English with my parents! My mother hardly knows any English; I pretty well have to speak my French. But with others, I can admit that I always speak English.

That’s the thin edge of the wedge: trying to live in French in a town that’s predominently English-speaking, where two of the three TV stations were English and the only French radio station was Radio-Canada. It’s easy to see how assimilation could take hold back then. Moreover, back in 1968, Moncton was far from hospitable towards French. This was the era of the anti-French/anti-bilingual Mayor Jones. It was the era when French-speaking cashiers at the Eaton’s department store were strictly forbidden to speak French at work, even with customers whom they knew spoke only French (like my mother). It’s very clear in the original film that there was a sense of inferiority among these teens about the French they spoke. But without hesitation, I can say that today, whatever shred of vibrancy Moncton has is in large part because Acadians stood up and took pride in their culture and their language, thus throwing a splash of colour in an otherwise drab cultural landscape.

Is chiac “good French”? I’d have to say No in the strict sense of what that phrase implies. But it is a sign of a people’s determination to survive and to preserve much more than a symbolic link with who and where they come from. And what I look forward to seeing in Part 2 of Éloge is how, 40 years later, these Moncton teenagers of the late ’60s still identify themselves as French first and foremost despite having had to struggle to keep hold of that language and culture.

So! Canada went through another federal election — the third in about four years — and this one yielded essentially the same results as the previous: a Conservative minority government. But with 37.65% of the popular vote compared to 36.27% in the January 2006 election — a mere 1.4% increase nation-wide — the Conservatives managed to get elected in 19 more seats. In other words, having won 46.43% of the 308 seats in the House of Commons, the Conservatives’ overrepresentation this time compared to the popular vote is 8.78%, whereas, by winning only 40.26% of the seats after the 2006 race, their overrepresentation was a mere 3.99%, which made them at the time the weakest minority government in Canada’s history.

Again, if we had a form of proportional representation like most democratic countries — Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. remaining the only standouts — the Conservatives would not have advanced as they did this time. In fact:

• the Conservatives would be in the same spot, give or take a seat or two;
• the Liberals would have gone down in standing to roughly where they went (plus maybe five seats);
• the Greens, this time having well passed the generally accepted 5% threshold of the nation-wide popular vote, would have 20 seats instead of being shut out of Parliament, and
• the number of votes that would not have yielded a seat whatsoever would have gone from about 1 million of a total of 13.8 million (7.22%) to a mere 64,000 or so (0.46%).

You can study the results at equitablevote.textstyle.ca, a site I developed (but still haven’t finished), which takes actual election results and recalculates what they could have been using the d’Hondt method that has been adopted in many countries. I personally have always favoured a mixed-member proportional (MMP) system over the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system because it’s mathematically and conceptually a heck of a lot easier to grasp.

Among the caveats to keep in mind when looking at these calculations:

• it can be problematic to take results from a “First Past the Post” (FPTP) election because voters may have behaved differently at the polls in a “Mixed-Member Proportional” (MMP) election, where they could vote for different parties locally and regionally, so, as a corollary:
  • the recalculation at my website assumes no such vote splitting, and
  • it assumes there was no strategic voting (which there definitely was in this election);
• the percentage of seats that should remain FPTP could be as high as 75% or as low as 50% (the website allows you to adjust that percentage to see various scenarios);
• the percentage of minimum popular vote nation-wide to be eligible for regional seats has been set as low as 2 or 3% in some countries and as high as 10% in other countries (again, the website allows you to adjust that percentage), and
• there might be a variance of a few seats if the formula were applied by regions instead of nation-wide.

Perhaps the only possible gain of this election, for which the voter turnout was the lowest in the modern history of Canadian federal elections, is that many woke up October 15 feeling frustrated by how over 937,000 votes (or nearly 6.8%) nation-wide can lead to one party (the Greens) obtaining no seat in Parliament, while roughly 442,000 more votes (or 10%) nation-wide can lead to another party (the Bloc Québécois) winning 49 seats. Or how yet another party (the NDP) can get 1.135 million more votes than another party (the Bloc Québécois), but find itself with 12 fewer seats despite polling just over 18% of the national popular vote.

While the highly negative tone of this lacklustre election campaign was likely the main contributor to so much voter apathy, the fact many voters saw first-hand the extent to which their vote can sometimes have no impact on the final outcome has, as well, certainly generated much more talk of electoral reform on online discussion forums. Indeed, a voter like me in the riding of Westmount–Ville-Marie knew all along that it would go Liberal even if that party had nominated Jackson as its candidate, while non-Conservative voters like Matthew in a riding like Guelph had to wrestle with the notion of strategic voting in order to achieve what they perceived as a “less bad” outcome. The fact a party that draws at least two per cent of the popular vote nationally or at least five per cent in a given riding receives $1.95 per vote is often not enough encouragement to vote with one’s conscience.