KYOTO BIRTHDAY PARTY: A group consisting largely of environmentalists and students marched from Berri Square to city hall on Saturday to celebrate the second anniversary of the Kyoto Accord’s entry into force. Despite Canada’s membership in the Accord, which calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by six per cent below 1990 levels, emissions are 27 per cent higher than 1990’s. Photo by Will Lew

Quote of the week

“Within a year, his numbers have very much turned around…. It looks like it’s going to be a very tight race in Quebec.” —Antonia Maioni, director of McGill’s Institute for the Study of Canada, on Jean Charest, who called a provincial election Wednesday

Raelians on the move

UFOland is closing up shop. The 110-hectare Eastern Townships estate, the global headquarters for the Raelian movement, which embraces cloning, free love, extra-terrestrial ancestors and media controversy, is up for sale, asking price $2.95-million. Quebec membership, a Raelian priest told the Globe and Mail last week, was “saturated. Our future is in the United States.”

“What did he mean by ‘saturated?’” says long-time Montreal cult watcher Mike Kropveld. “Media-wise?” According to Kropveld, Quebec had long been fertile recruiting territory for the Raelians thanks in part to the eagerness with which local media would cover the cult. But interest declined over the past few years as numerous stunts, including the “creation” of a cloned baby (that was never produced) and anti-Catholic cross-burnings—not to mention a humiliating TV appearance in 2004—impacted their image negatively.

Whatever the case, Kropveld suspects that the group is pursuing its own American dream. (Rael himself was recently denied residence in Switzerland.) “I think there has always been an attempt for the movement to make it big in the United States,” he says. “There will be bigger announcements down the road… Staying in the spotlight is appealing to the movement’s membership as well.”

—Patrick Lejtenyi

Dig for bikes

Are you despondent because you missed out on the pioneering days when workers broke their backs hammering railways across the Great White North? If yes, grab a shovel and join a group of cycling enthusiasts to chart a winter trail through Parc Lafontaine on Sunday, Feb. 25, to spur the city into keeping bike paths open in the winter.

“In Quebec, there are 50,000 people who bike, and I’m sure the majority are in Montreal,” says Claudine Gascon, an organizer with Collectif de vélorutionaires inspirés de Montréal. The group is helping organize the shovel-in on Sunday.

Most bike paths close between Nov. 15 and April 1, but Gascon says more people are biking in winter time, despite the awful weather and slippery streets. “I bike everywhere, and I’m always meeting bikers,” she says.

The municipality is looking into keeping more bike paths open in the winter, says city spokesman Darren Becker.

“There are 12 kilometres of bike paths open in the winter, a lot of them in the Plateau. In May, the city will unveil its transportation plan, and there’s a huge component for cyclists and winter bike paths,” he says.

Cyclists will gather at the park’s bike path at 1 p.m.

—Samer Elatrash

Saving biodiversity

Next Thursday, March 1, at 5:30 p.m., the Montreal chapter of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs will be inviting the public to attend a discussion on the subject of “Achieving the 2010 Biodiversity Target” at the McGill University Faculty Club (3450 McTavish) with guest speaker Dr. Ahmed Djoghlaf. Dr. Djoghlaf is currently the executive secretary for the UN Convention on Biodiversity and widely considered to be one of the world’s foremost authorities on environmental policy and international law.

“The Convention on Biological Diversity is about life on Earth,” says Djoghlaf. “The achievement of the 2010 Biodiversity Target is of a crucial importance for everyone alive today, and for generations yet to be born. To attain that target will require an unprecedented effort by all sections of society—a global alliance bringing governments, business, industry, non-governmental organizations and the men, women and youth of this world together in a common endeavour.”

That endeavour? To achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national levels as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth.

For more information, see www.ciia.org.

—Chris Barry

Teen-vangelicals

“I want to see young people radically laying down their lives for the Gospel,” says evangelical camp pastor Becky Fischer in the Academy Award nominated documentary Jesus Camp. Concordia’s Cinema Politica screens the film on Monday, Feb. 26, 7:30 p.m. (1455 de Maisonneuve W., H-110), and programmer Ezra Winton champions it for “skillfully unpacking religious fundamentalism in the U.S.”

Released last September, Jesus Camp profiles a North Dakota evangelical summer camp where children are taught to embrace creationism and pro-life politics, bless cardboard cut-outs of Dubya and believe that global warming is “not a problem.”

Critics argue that its leaders-in-the-making are being indoctrinated before they reach intellectual and emotional maturity. After responding to countless media accusations of conflating warmongering with religious practices, Fischer shut down the camp indefinitely in November.

Although Winton had planned to roll out his holy red carpet for directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, the duo were compelled to cancel to attend a certain awards ceremony. “I figure going to the Oscars is probably the best excuse not to attend a CP screening,” says Winton.

See www.cinemapolitica.org for more info.

-Michael-Oliver Harding

Rear-view mirror

On the cover: Jim Morrison, for Oliver Stone’s The Doors. Quoted are Doors drummer John Densmore, keyboardist Ray Manzarek (“[The filmmakers] are only interested in exploiting the sex and alcohol”), biographer Jerry Hopkins (“He could produce a lot of great work when he was stoned out of his mind”), Val Kilmer (“The only way to tell Morrison’s story in the film was to show the excessive aspects of his character”) and Stone (“Morrison had a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality. His intelligence gave him the verbal and psychic weaponry to rip people apart”).

• Recent reforms to the Quebec health system may open doors for “alternative medicine,” although the president of the Professional Corporation of Physicians of Quebec dismisses treatments like naturopathy, homeopathy, polarity osteopathy and acupuncture as “religion, and science and religion can’t live together.”

• The Centaur’s production of David Fennario’s The Death of René Lévesque is “a play of such sublime banality as to seem from a bygone era; one that was exciting but is dreadfully hazed by dogmatic revisionism.”

Angel: Car-sharing Communauto, the car-sharing initiative that allows members access to a shared car, says it needs more help to expand its membership and thus get more cars off Quebec’s roads. They called on the municipal and provincial governments to give them a hand by creating reserved parking spaces for Communauto members and by enacting laws declaring car-sharing a public service. If we believe Communauto’s figures, its 11,000 members got 4,000 privately owned cars off the roads and reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 1.2 tonnes per member per year. Expanding the program, the group says, could eliminate 168,000 tonnes of emissions a year.

insect: Bill C-31, the “Big Brother Bill” Federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart strongly criticized Bill C-31, now making its way through Parliament, which would provide the dates of birth of voters to politicians. Stoddart says the bill could be used by politicians for their own ends, allowing them to target voters for fundraising schemes based on their age. In a letter to NDP MP Paul Dewar, who called C-31 the “Big Brother Bill,” she blasted the amendment, which was proposed by the Bloc Québécois (a similar policy already exists in this province) and supported by the Grits and Tories as being inconsistent with the integrity of the electoral system. It also discriminates against the poor and homeless by requiring every voter to have photo ID.