DANCE OF NATIONS: Ojibwa performers from the Ottawa area demonstrate a traditional dance at Berri Square last weekend as part of the Montreal First Peoples’ Festival. The festival concludes today, Thursday, June 21, which also happens to be National Aboriginal Solidarity Day PHOTO BY RACHEL GRANOFSKY

Quote of the week

“Perhaps I should have used the terms angry or unreasonable, intractable, implacable, or something like that.” —City councillor Marvin Rotrand’s non-apology for referring to West Island political foes as “ugly anglos,” on Monday

Van Doos anti-parade

With the Royal 22nd Regiment preparing to deploy for a six-month mission to Afghanistan, local anti-war groups have been gearing up their activities as well. The Van Doos, based at CFB Valcartier outside Quebec City, are planning a military parade through the streets of Quebec’s Upper City on Friday, June 22, but a coalition of anti-war activists, under the umbrella Guerre à la guerre, will stage their own counter-march.

But Joseph Bergeron, a Quebec City spokesperson for Guerre à la guerre, says the military parade may be cancelled (the final status of the parade was unclear at press time). “We consider that a victory,” he says. “We wanted to show that there is a large proportion of the population that is very clearly against this mission.” They will march regardless of whether the parade is cancelled or not.

Earlier this month, some 3,000 letters were sent to Valcartier urging soldiers not to take part in the Afghanistan mission. He says the protesters aren’t marching against the soldiers, but rather Canadian foreign policy.

The march leaves Quebec’s Musée des Beaux Arts on the Plains of Abraham at 6:30 p.m. Buses will be taking Montreal activists up to the capital for the evening. See coalition-valcartier-2007.resist.ca/ for departure details from Montreal.

by Patrick Lejtenyi

Good food hard to get

Équiterre, the Montreal-based social consumption group, released a big report this week on the state of responsible eating. Looking at three different categories—local, biological and fair trade food—the group concludes that while many Canadians look favourably on all three categories, not enough is being done to educate the public about them or make them available.

“People’s general perception is that biological food, because it’s more expensive, is for intellos and granolas,” says Équiterre’s Frédéric Paré. He says it’s up to advocacy groups like his, big food stores and governments to make eating well easier. He says governments especially have to do more to make sure people know they are buying non-genetically-modified foods or Canadian products. The report points out that, under current legislation, if 51 per cent of a product’s value is generated in Canada, it’s considered a “Canadian” product. “We need to simplify labelling, and make it more recognizable,” says Paré. “And we need to convince people that bio food is credible and accessible.”

The report based its findings on interviews with merchants in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, reviewing existing documentation and on interviews conducted with 1,700 Canadians by Léger Marketing. To view the entire 70-page report, visit www.equiterre.org.

by Patrick Lejtenyi

Stella looks ahead

Sex workers’ rights group Stella isn’t your average community group, but that doesn’t mean they’re exempt from the usual administrative demands that other organizations face. At the group’s annual general assembly tonight, Thursday, June 21, members—who are current and former sex workers—will be choosing a board of directors, planning the annual budget and going over the latest year’s report. Not exactly fascinating stuff, but necessary, says Stella’s executive director Nathalie Duhamel.

“There is a system in place for our members to get information,” says Duhamel, who took over the top job at Stella two months ago. This being her first meeting as executive director, she says she doesn’t know what kind of issues will come up.

“There may be a discussion about the new cameras that have gone up on St-Laurent between René-Lévesque and Ste-Catherine,” she says, or on the usual crackdowns on sex workers prior to festival season. “We’ll be discussing our priorities for the coming year, and other preoccupations. We can’t know for sure what will come up. But this is mainly about creating a space for people to communicate.”

In other Stella news, Chrysalide, the support group for transsexuals and transvestites, will hold their next meeting on Thursday, June 28. For more info on either, see www.chezstella.org.

by Patrick Lejtenyi

Piknic gets Earthy

Attention eco-warriors: The time has come to put your money where your mouth is, get on your dancing shoes and let yo’ feets groove to the beats for a heapin’ helping of worthy environmental organizations like the Sierra Club and the Centre d’écologie urbaine de Montréal. That’s right, this Saturday and Sunday, June 23 and 24, from 1–9 p.m. at Place de l’Homme du Parc Jean-Drapeau, as part of this year’s Piknik Électronik, a good old-fashioned dance-a-thon will be going down and organizers are still looking for participants.

The dance-a-thon, E=MC2, is now in its third year and co-organizer Sonia Fafard insists that you needn’t be a burgeoning Fred Astaire in order to participate. “Everyone is welcome to come dance for this good cause,” she says, “and we’ll be registering dancers straight up until the dance-a-thon begins on Saturday.”

Over the course of the weekend, participants can look forward to moving to the sweet sounds of, among others, DJ Frigid, Fred Everything, le Tigre, Nu Ravers on the Block and Josh Wink. To register and/or find out more information about the event and the Jour de la Terre organization, go to www.jourdelaterre.org/emc2.

by Chris Barry

Rear-view mirror

12 years ago-june 22–june 29, 1995

On the cover: Jorge Passalacqua, a McGill graduate student who was mistakenly imprisoned in Peru’s notorious Lurigancho jail on drug charges, thanks to information provided by a less-than-trustworthy DEA informant. “To say Lurigancho to a Peruvian is to say Alcatraz,” he tells Chris Sheridan.

• The second disc on Michael Jackson’s HIStory stimulates “nothing but a gag reflex,” writes Josh Bezonsky. He gives it a 5/10.

• Appearing at the Jazz Fest: Oscar Peterson, Rosemary Clooney, Femi Kuti, and B.B. King and Buddy Guy together at the Forum.

• A friend of Mark Lepage rants that “he’s not a weenie but he doesn’t have much food in his fridge.”

• Martin Amis declares that the death of the novel is “all bullshit. The novel is always sitting up in bed the next day drinking a cup of tea and feeling better.”

• Disney’s Pocahontas is called “absurdly offensive.”

• A classified: “German mistress: Experienced, strict, no limits, will teach you to become a useful slave. Lessons will be held in private dungeon.”

Angel >> Cheap city living According to a recent study, Canadian cities are cheaper to live in than a year ago, and Montreal is one of the cheapest. Out of the 143 cities surveyed, Montreal ranked 98th most expensive (Moscow was the priciest, and Asuncion, Paraguay, the cheapest). The Mercer study—which measured cost of living, clothing, transportation, household goods and housing—cited Canada’s low inflation, stable housing prices and fluctuations in the dollar among the factors contributing to our affordability. Toronto remains Canada’s most expensive city, ranked 82nd, followed by Vancouver (89th), Calgary (92nd), Montreal and Ottawa (109th—the same as Sofia, Bulgaria, Guatemala City and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia).

Insect >>Canada’s no-fly list The federal government’s new no-fly list, which took effect on Monday, now forbids air travel to up to 2,000 people deemed security risks by CSIS and the RCMP. Officially known as the Passenger Protect program, the list has been severely criticized by human rights groups for unfairly invading privacy and for arbitrarily and unfairly flagging potentially innocent people. The presumption of innocence, a cornerstone in traditional Western justice systems, is also being tossed, they say. The feds say the list is more stringent than the U.S. one, which has up to half-a-million names, but their assurances don’t always hold water, especially among certain religious and ethnic minorities.