Quote of the week:

“Ever since Irving Kravitz died (in 1992) and his wife and son took over, things have steadily gone downhill.” —Ben’s Restaurant waiter Robert Mayrand, on working conditions at the famed 98-year-old smoked meat deli on de Maisonneuve and Metcalfe. Workers went on strike last weekend.

Smoking ban smoulders

Peter Sergakis isn’t letting a little thing like the law stand in his way. The president of the Union of Bar Owners of Quebec (UTBQ) held a press conference earlier this week to let the world know that, by this time next year, a quarter of the province’s bars could be closed if the new anti-smoking law isn’t altered to allow smoking in bars.

“I’ve heard of about 25 [closures] already, and about 500 lost jobs,” he says. He quotes statistics his organization culled from a questionnaire they sent out to the province’s 8,000 bar owners and extrapolated the figures from the 2,000 responses he received.

“Some of the results are devastating,” he says.

Sergakis is calling on the provincial government to review its current limits on the ban, considered among the harshest in North America. They have a court date due sometime in August or September, he says, and he accuses the government of deliberately delaying the case. He wants the ban lifted until his case is heard.

“A few months more won’t make anyone sicker,” he says. —Patrick Lejtenyi

Lebanon relief

With a humanitarian crisis unfolding in Lebanon and Gaza two weeks into Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah, Canadian relief groups are joining forces to provide assistance to the region.

“We’re providing relief for people uprooted from their homes or whose infrastructure has been destroyed,” says Oxfam Canada spokesman Mark Fried. Oxfam Canada was joined by Oxfam-Québec, CARE Canada and Save the Children to launch the Humanitarian Coalition. “The groups are already working together on the field, and we want to coordinate our efforts in Canada,” says Fried.

The best way Montrealers can help is to provide money that would be used to buy supplies in Lebanon and Gaza, says Fried. “We prefer that people make cash donations, because the cost of sending supplies is prohibitive.”

More than 500 people, including at least 350 Lebanese civilians and 37 Israelis, have been killed in Israeli air strikes and ground incursions in Lebanon and Gaza and in Hezbollah rocket strikes on Israel. More than 600,000 Lebanese have been displaced in the fighting.

To contribute to the Humanitarian Coalition, call 1-800-464-9154 or see www.thehumanitariancoalition.ca. —Samer Elatrash

Bikes across Quebec

Vélo-Quebec, the provincial authority on all pedal-powered transportation, will be unveiling its pan-Quebec “Route verte” bike path network sometime next year, if all goes well. But all isn’t going well, says the organization’s Patrick Howe. The problem, according to him, begins right here.

“It seems very difficult to get anything done in Montreal,” he says. A year and a half ago, says Howe, the city promised to seriously expand its bike path network, but only 13 per cent of the work promised has been completed.

“We keep trying to talk to the city, but we never get an answer. We’re really lagging behind other cities in the province.” The city recently announced $185,000 for bike paths, money it got from redirecting the GST rebate into its own coffers.

When completed, the $100-million Route verte will be the biggest bike network in the Americas, stretching from Ontario to New Brunswick, with links to Vermont, New York and Maine, and reaching all the way north to Abitibi-Témiscamingue and Lac St-Jean. —Patrick Lejtenyi

Outgames stiff merchants

As Montreal prepares for its gayest week ever, some Village merchants are steamed that the Outgames may be putting them out of business.

Gino Scandale, the owner of Osez, a men’s clothing boutique on Wolfe and Ste-Catherine E., is furious that the city is doing nothing while an Outgames tent sets up shop outside his store. He says he was initially told the tent would house nothing more damaging to his business than an information kiosk. But when he learned that the booth would be selling clothing, he hit the roof.

“For the past six or seven years, we’ve always struggled through the winter to wait for these great events,” he says. “This is going to ruin quite a few guys in the Village.”

He says the mushrooming Outgames-related tents are closing off access to his and other stores and taking over much-coveted nearby parking spots. “My signs are being blocked from view,” he says.

“It’s not fair,” he complains. “This was the one event we’ve been banking on for years—and now they’ve come up with this brilliant idea.” —Patrick Lejtenyi

REAR-VIEW MIRROR

20 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK
July 24–Aug. 14, 1986

On the cover: Performance artist Laurie Anderson, whose newest concert film, Home of the Brave, opens in Montreal. “I don’t think of myself as skipping from one thing to another as much as working within the same basic format, which is storytelling,” she says. “Images and sounds are there to reinforce the story, but the story is the main point.”

• The Mirror investigates “les Boubou Macoutes,” the Quebec Liberal government’s new welfare inspectors, who visit recipients and search for signs of fraud. According to one welfare rights advocate, the searches are designed to “squeeze $68-million out of people who have no money as it is.” The Mirror reports Quebec spends $2.2-billion on welfare and supports one in six Quebecers.

• Jenny Ross writes, cryptically, in Notes from Underground: “How I spent my summer vacation: at the Festivals. Weren’t you at the festivals? It’s the will of Landru! Are you of the Body? …I’m all fested out.”

• Brendan Kelly praises James Cameron’s “amazingly enjoyable” Aliens for its gender reversals, among other things.

Angel >> Compensation for Hep C victims In a shamefully overdue gesture, the federal government is finally offering restitution to victims of tainted blood tranfers who were excluded from a 1998 deal worth $1.1-billion. The 5,500 Hep C sufferers who contracted the blood-borne disease prior to 1986 weren’t considered eligible because the federal government said no reliable tests existed to check the blood, a claim later proved false. In April 2005, the federal Liberals had voted to disburse funds to previously ineligible Hep C victims, but never got around to it thanks to last year’s election. The compensation package unveiled this week, worth about $1-billion, should be approved in a year.
Insect >> Harper’s sham GST rebate News that few consumers are actually benefitting from the Harper government’s much-vaunted one per cent cut to the federal Goods and Services Tax isn’t much of a surprise, but it is annoying to hear that Montreal, among other cities, won’t be offering the rebate to residents this year at all. Instead, they’ll be keeping the one per cent difference to their fixed fees and putting the money either in reserve or towards special projects. Which may not necessarily be a bad thing in and of itself, but the reduction is being seen as an increasingly empty gesture.