Quote of the week:

"This is Quebec. As long as I don't get hit, I cross." - Montrealer Derek Cairndruff, on the futility of busting jaywalkers, in Tuesday's Gazette. Montreal police are beginning a two-week crackdown on jaywalkers and red-burning drivers.

Art of the Holocaust

The Terezin concentration camp, an hour north of Prague, was called a "model ghetto" during the Second World War. The Nazis showed it off to the Red Cross to prove that conditions weren't as horrific was thought, and that child inmates were in fact being educated by other imprisoned artists, writers and intellectuals. The reality, of course, was different, only some 10 per cent of the 15,000 children sent there between 1942 and 1944 survived the war. What did survive, however, were over 4,000 drawings and paintings they left behind, 49 of which are coming to Montreal as part of the Holocaust Memorial Centre's (HMC) seventh annual education series.

"What's interesting about the pictures is that they not only show images of trains, railways and deportations, but also of butterflies and flowers," says HMC assistant director Kim Smiley. "They were taught by their teachers to picture a better place."

Of the 49 pictures on display - a permanent collection touring from Prague's Jewish Museum - 35 are from children who died in the camp. "The collection is very emotional, poignant and powerful," Smiley says. "The images seem so ordinary, as if they weren't done in a concentration camp. But when you think of the context, it's very sobering."

Despair & Hope: Life in Terezin Through Children's Eyes is on display at the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre (5151 Côte-Ste-Catherine), from Oct. 15 to Oct. 28, free. It then moves to the McCord Museum (690 Sherbrooke W.) from Nov. 2 to Nov. 7. » Patrick Lejtenyi

Libraries are for girls

This edition of Quebec's annual Public Library Week is aiming to get women aged 25 to 55 province-wide to come in and enjoy a cuppa while curling up with a book, magazine or chatting with some friends. In a new pilot project, 12 libraries - including the Beaconsfield, Anjou and L'Octogone in LaSalle - will borrow a successful concept by their retail cousins and introduce Van Houtte coffee nooks to make libraries more inviting. The idea, says Public Library Association of Quebec president Suzanne Payette, is to get citizens to claim their local library as a primary destination for information and exchange.

"Women visit libraries more often than men, and often they bring their kids with them," Payette says. "So we want them to be comfortable, to install themselves with a newspaper and spend a few hours or an afternoon there."

Hundreds of activities are planned for the week of Oct. 17 to Oct. 23 at local libraries near you. For more info visit www.bpq.org/semaine. » Patrick Lejtenyi

Flyer permission, please?

A tenants' group is questioning a new Verdun bylaw that requires them and others to first get permission from borough authorities before distributing flyers. According to the new bylaw, anybody who plans to distribute pamphlets - whether it be advertising or non-commercial information - must first submit the document to borough authorities and then get a permit to distribute the papers.

Mélanie Morin, a social worker with the Verdun Citizens' Action Committee (CACV), showed up at borough hall to ask about the new requirement and left wondering what impact it could have on their efforts to inform tenants of their rights. "We usually do handouts on a street corner - we go to a place where there's lots of traffic and we can distribute 300 or 400 in an hour. It's a cheap and efficient way to get the word out."

The new licence is free for non-profit groups but will cost businesses $50 for two weeks. Councillor Laurent Dugas says Verdun bureaucrats won't be rejecting material based on content; they simply want to keep track of who's delivering what so they can track down anybody leaving a paper mess in the borough. "We want to control the distribution, not the contents of such deliveries," he says. In other city boroughs, only the downtown Ville-Marie borough was able to confirm that it denies permission to distribute pamphlets, although door-to-door deliveries are unrestricted. » Kristian Gravenor

REAR-VIEW MIRROR

18 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK
Oct. 16–Nov. 5, 1986

On the cover: Montreal Citizen Movement's Jean Doré and Civic Party leader Claude Dupras, two men vying for the mayoralty in the upcoming municipal elections. The MCM, and Doré in particular, are portrayed by their opponents as "socialists," while renters who vote for the Civic Party are "like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders," MCM councillor Arnold Bennett tells Julien Feldman.

• "I defy anyone not to feel an instant nausea with chewed up bits of Big Mac falling on their head. But it's fascinating to see flashes of the real Kevin the performer peek through the noxious fumes, gore and black noise; almost cracking up at times, looking askance at disobedient equipment, attending to props between grimaces," Jenny Ross writes of a Skinny Puppy show.

• "[Serge] Losique told me, ‘Je suis le grand festival.' To which I replied, ‘Tu es peut-être le plus gros, mais nous, on est le meilleur,'" New Cinema Fest co-director Claude Chamberlan tells Brendan Kelly, on how the bad blood grew between him and World Film Fest director Losique.

Angel >> The Canadian Guild for Erotic Labour It's been a long time coming, and Canadian sex workers will probably have to wait some more for it to become reality, but two Canadian activists are currently writing a sex workers' guild constitution to define industry working conditions. Supported by the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the Guild will advocate for the rights of all sex workers, from phone sex operators to escorts, and demand codes of conduct, grievance procedures and push for full decriminalization. Other sex worker unions include the London-based International Union of Sex Workers, and local ones in Finland, Holland, San Francisco and Argentina. Whether escort agency and massage parlour owners go for the idea, however, remains to be seen.
Insect >> Idle Hepatitis C funds When the tainted-blood scandal splashed onto the Canadian health scene over a decade ago, the federal government promised over $1-billion in assistance funds for victims infected between 1986 and 1990. Another $300-million was earmarked for those infected outside that time. But victim advocates say the money has been sitting in government coffers earning interest, while patients die without access to experimental treatment or at least in the comfort of their own home. Furthermore, the advocates charge that the $300-million fund was put into the provinces' general revenues money and not directed to the victims. The advocates blame the feds for signing a lousy deal with the provinces, believing they either misinformed the public about it or were simply incompetent.