Quote of the week:

“I may have had a few drinks.” —Former Montreal boxer Matthew Hilton, commenting on his state of mind at the time he allegedly uttered death threats to his wife’s former husband. Hilton spent the weekend in jail and was granted bail on Monday.

Bouncer law

Doormen could soon require a special license before controlling the velvet rope. Quebec’s upcoming Bill 88, which addresses a wide variety of public security issues, would also require your unfriendly neighbourhood bar bouncer to be licensed and trained.

“We’re about 90 per cent sure that the law will pass,” says Constant Gagné, who supervises 21 doormen around the island and hosted an industry conference in Laval over the weekend. He’s all for a requirement demanding bouncers have “at least 20 hours of basic training,” partly because his Laval-based company, Action Securité Investigation, started offering 10-course training for bar muscle a year ago.

“We teach a step-by-step approach to intervention, so any client making trouble will be aware of what will happen if he doesn’t follow the rules,” he says. “It’s important to deliver the message clearly.”

Gagné says a few hotheads can damage the reputations of their brethren. “When a bouncer does something wrong, everybody talks about it, but when he does something good nobody mentions it.”

He stresses that no amount of training will speed waiting-line losers into hip clubs. “It’s the owner who decides the dress code. We have no choice but to go along with it.” —Kristian Gravenor

Manila thugs

The pickets you might’ve seen last Tuesday outside the Philippine Consulate (near the Plamondon metro) were to school you about declining human rights conditions brought by the government of President Gloria Arroyo.

“Conditions are worse there than they’ve ever been,” says Tess Tesalona of the Montreal-based Immigrant Workers’ Centre. “This effort is about letting the Canadian people know about the human rights violations that are happening over there because you see nothing about it. No news comes around here on the subject.”

The local Centre for Philippine Concerns has joined up with similar organizations in other Canadian cities to lobby the federal government to ensure that any Canadian aid sent to the multi-island Pacific country won’t get in the hands of the military, who are blamed for the recent murder of union leaders, protesters, journalists and politicians.

Social justice campaigners Jill Hanley, who returned recently from a trip to the Philippines, says, “I was surprised to learn that many of the activists I met with last time I went had since been killed.”

Those wanting to join the campaign can call 842-4047. —Kristian Gravenor

FEUQ you

Say this five times real fast: Fuck FECQ FEUQ Flic Fest. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call it the 5F. It’s gonna be a party, and it’s all about bashing the Quebec CEGEP and university student federations who, their critics say, sold them out after a series of strikes last fall, winter and spring.

Organized by Hors-d’Oeuvre, the event will be “convivial but brutal,” says François, a UQÀM Hors-d’Oeuvre member who didn’t want his last name published “due to the nature of the event.” The goal is to expose and denounce the unions for being too chummy with the powers that be and its perceived repeated incidents of shafting their constituency. The evening will consist of oral presentations by former union members and other “socio-political activities.”

“We consider these federations a nuisance, and the less there are, the better,” says François. It’s a growing sentiment: three referenda will take place this fall at Université Laval and UQÀM to decide whether to quit the unions or not.

5F goes down Thursday, Oct. 20, at Café Chaos (2031 St-Denis, 9 p.m.), free. —Patrick Lejtenyi

Wi-fiers get wasted

Montreal’s favourite band of geeks is multiplying. Ile sans fil, the community wireless Internet group, is about to sign their 10,000th user. After two years of bacteria-like growth, ISF has established a solid infrastructure of 60 free Internet hotspots that put wireless groups in other cities to shame. The next step is to get artists and community-builders to use it. Somewhat surprisingly, they intend to do this with a pub-crawl on Saturday, Oct. 22.

“Part of what we’re doing is trying to reinvigorate public space using our networks, so it kind of fits,” says group co-founder Michael Lenczner. “It’s a callout to all those people in this world who have these weird passions for and around technologies, but also people that are urban studies geeks and community hackers.”

Users and curious onlookers are welcome to come along for the crawl (see http://tournee.ilesansfil.org for locations and times). Prizes will be awarded at the end of the night, drawn from those who got there early and bought souvenir T-shirts. For more information on the group, check out www.ilesansfil.org. —Jason Gondziola

REAR-VIEW MIRROR

14 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK
Oct. 24–Oct. 31, 1991

On the cover: Keanu Reeves and River Pheonix, in director Gus Van Sant’s movie about male prostitutes, My Own Private Idaho. “The male hustler is subverted, overlooked and somewhat of an embarrassment in most movies,” says Van Sant. “Idaho may open up a side of their lives, but many films have shown undesirables as the protagonist.”

• In a photo caption of the city’s new guide to leisure services, the directory is criticized for offering tips on recycling and details on how to earn a “green award,” but, at over 350 pages of single-column type, not being exactly green itself.

• Slov is described by guitarist Dave Curran as “Fucking garbage disco, a big melting pot of shit. We’re not human.”

• NYC transplant and writer Darius James talks to Ian Stephens about living and working in Montreal, literature and growing up black and angry. “I was feeling incredible loathing for white people, incredible. I would go to sleep at night and have dreams about murdering white people en masse.”

Angel >> Nuit des sans-abri Now in its 16th year, the Nuit will get activists across the province to sleep on the streets and generate some discussion about the homeless problem on Friday, Oct. 21. The 12-hour vigil will take place in 17 Quebec cities, with the Montrealers sleeping outside a shelter at 5947 Monk, starting at 6 p.m. Passersby will be able to vote for Pompon d’or, awarded to groups or persons who have most helped the homeless, and for the Pompon minute, for those who have done the least. Nominees for the latter are federal Labour Minister Joe Fontana, Jean Charest and the city of Drummondville, which banned the event from the town’s biggest park. For more info visit www.nuitdessansabri.ca.
Insect >> Canada’s reputation Our reputation for being an eye-glazingly boring but well-governed country slumped again this week, as Transparency International dropped Canada to 14th place—down from our usual 5th—on its annual index of clean governments. The Berlin-based corruption watchdog used to rank us up among the usual squeaky clean countries like Iceland, Finland and Denmark (the top three), but for the past three years we’ve been slipping—coincidentally, just around the same time the federal Auditor General blew the lid on the sponsorship sleaze scandal. On a scale of zero to 10, with zero being totally corrupt and 10 being totally clean, Canada scored an 8.4—down from 8.7 in 2004 and 9.2 in 2000.