NO LEPRECHAUNS HERE: Anti-war demonstrators including the Batucada Pirata Drum Troupe, took to the streets on Saturday—the day before St. Patrick’s Day—to protest the ongoing war/occupation in Iraq and Canada’s presence in Afghanistan. Similar marches took place in cities around the world. Photo by Rachel Granofsky

Quote of the week

“You’re all vermin.” —Barbara Amiel, to two reporters attending her husband Conrad Black’s trial in Chicago, on Monday.

Students on the march

If you work around Square Victoria, get ready for thousands of students to invade on the afternoon of Thursday, March 29. The Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (ASSÉ), a confederation of Quebec student groups, is organizing a massive demo to call on the province’s political parties to pay attention to their demands, namely abolishing all student fees, improving the services and resources for post-secondary education and improving daycare access for young parents. Tall orders to be sure, but ASSÉ spokesperson Jaouad Laaroussi says they want “to show the political parties that there are those of us who believe in being progressive students and in a progressive educational system.”

Groups of all stripes are expected, including a “pink bloc” of gay students. Vincent Francoeur, a graphic design student at Sherbrooke CEGEP and a gay rights activist, says these kinds of events are opportunities for members of the LGBT community to show that “not all of us are stuck in a little village, that we participate in politics on the right and on the left.”

Organizers are keeping the route secret, although the march will make its way through downtown, beginning at 2:30 p.m.

by Patrick Lejtenyi

Rights on film

From March 23–29, Cinéma du Parc (3575 Parc) will host the second annual Montreal Human Rights Film Festival, organized by Images Interculturelles as part of the Montreal Action Week Against Racism, and featuring some 115 documentary and fiction films from around the world dealing with—you guessed it—human rights! Festival-goers will definitely want to catch the opening night (Tuesday, March 27) premiere of Bamako, the uplifting and inspiring story of a family in Mali who take the IMF and World Bank to court. Director Abderrahmane Sissako will attend.

“All of the films denounce attacks against human rights,” says festival spokesperson and programmer Diya Angeli. “They address violence against women and children, genocide, racism, immigration, and democracy. People will learn about events they had never heard of. For instance, Davy Zylberfajn’s Vivre à Tazmamart tells the story of political prisoners in Morocco who were tortured and kept in the dark for 28 years.”

Other movies worth catching include the documentaries Darfur Diaries: Message From Home, Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Keep Not Silent: Ortho-Dykes and the collection of four shorts Stories From the Middle East.

All tickets cost $5. For more info, visit www.ffdpm.com.

by Steve Zylbergold

Immigrants uncovered

Manuel Vergara, a Mexican immigrant whose 13-year-old daughter was hospitalized in 2003, owes $18,645 in hospital bills. Hassan Alaoui amassed a debt of $18,670 after his three-year-old daughter was treated for appendicitis only days after their family arrived from Morocco.

Since 2001, immigrants have had to wait three months before gaining access to public health care insurance. “When immigrants come here, they start from scratch,” says Alaoui. “How are we expected to pay this?”

These cases are the tip of the iceberg of a largely ignored issue in a country that prides itself on the universality of its health care system. “In Quebec, 50,000 to 75,000 people don’t have access to health care,” says Rachel Heap-Lalonde of Project Genesis, who is involved in the Healthcare for All campaign and in a round-table discussion on immigration and health care tonight, Thursday, March 22.

“People who are forced to live underground for whatever reason have no access,” says pediatric resident Samir Shaheen-Hussain, a member of No One Is Illegal and Solidarity Across Borders and a speaker at tonight’s event.

Evelyn Calugay will also highlight the recurring health care troubles that domestic workers face. The talk takes place at Project Genesis (4735 Côte-Ste-Catherine), 6:30–8:30 p.m

by Carolyn Morris

Con U security woes

The Concordia University Support Staff Union will challenge before the Quebec Labour Commission the university’s decision to send seven unionized security guards home with pay over an alleged conflict of interest between the nature of their jobs and an ongoing support staff strike.

In the challenge on Thursday, March 22, the union will argue that the university violated the guards’ right to work and that the suspensions had a “chilling effect,” says union president André Legault.

Concordia spokeswoman Tanya Churchmuch says the guards, all shift supervisors, were asked to go home for their own good. “It’s to avoid them being put in a situation where they have to interact with the strike,” she says. “It’s not intimidation; it’s accommodation.”

The guards attended a picket last week held by the union to protest what it says is the university’s mulishness in negotiating another collective agreement. Management offered a retroactive 3.5 per cent increase in the workers’ salaries, but Concordia support staff make about 20 per cent less than workers at other universities, says Legault.

The union is also asking for guaranteed promotions for workers with seniority when jobs are on offer, says Legault. A meeting is scheduled between the management and union on Friday, March 23.

by Samer Elatrash

Rear-view mirror

13 years ago - March 24–31, 1994

On the cover: Darren McComber, a 33-year-old ironworker and member of the Warriors Society, says he’s been unjustly persecuted by law enforcement following the Oka Crisis. There is, Peter Scowen writes, a “secret and dirty little war between the police—the RCMP, the Sûreté du Québec and even the [native] Peacekeepers—and any native person they could get their hands on.”

• “I’m a member of NAMBLA myself,” says beat poet Allen Ginsberg. The North American Man Boy Love Association, he tells Matthew Hays, “is an innocent little organization about people who want to talk about their inclinations, their Eros, which happens to centre on young people.”

• Reviewing the Ripcordz’s Canadian As Fuck, Chris Yurkiw writes, “If Paul Gott wanted to help [the local punk scene], he’d pack in his own terminally local band and save us all… the gross displeasure of having to say anything about him and his group’s substandard imitation of neo-conservative, early-’80s, Oi shit.”

• An editorial: “We gagged. Did you?” after watching Whoopi Goldberg host the Oscars

Angel: James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies The top climate scientist at NASA blasted the current White House administration for instituting an atmosphere of politicized science at a House committee hearing on Monday. Hansen, who is outspoken about the dangers of global warming, compared the Bush government tactics to Nazi Germany. He complained that a government information officer listened in on his interviews with journalists, and forbade him from doing an interview with National Public Radio. Sitting next to him at the hearing was Philip Cooney, a former White House official and oil industry lobbyist who resigned in 2005 after it was revealed that he edited government climate change reports to play down the role of human activity.

Insect: Budget band-aid solutions to climate change Slapping a $4,000 tax on gas guzzlers and handing consumers a $2,000 tax credit for buying fuel-efficient cars aren’t bad ideas, but they won’t change much when it comes to climate change. SUV sales have been slipping for years, so, according to some estimates, only five per cent of new vehicles sold will be affected. The budget doesn’t offer new money to increase public transportation in Quebec (Toronto got almost $1-billion last week, while Montreal got nothing). Meanwhile, oil companies exploiting the tar sands in Alberta will get another three years of write-offs for capital costs.