CON U COSPLAY: Attendees at last weekend’s Otakuthon anime convention loiter inside Concordia’s Hall building, where hundreds of fans of Japanese animation gathered for fashion shows, display tables, panels and workshops.. PHOTO BY RACHEL GRANOFSKY

Quote of the week

“Clearly we are seeing a major increase in high-risk sexual behaviour. ... It’s
quite discouraging” —Dr. Réjean Thomas, of local AIDS clinic L’Actuel, on Montreal’s increasing rates of gonorrhea infection, in Tuesday’s Toronto Star.

Rhinos redux

True, politics in Canada, like so much else in the country, tends to be eye-glazingly boring. So avid political observers will no doubt be thrilled to know that the all-joke Rhinoceros Party, defunct since 1993, will be running in the Sept. 17 federal by-election in Outremont.

But the new Rhino Party should not be confused with the NeoRhino Party, created last year by François (Yo)Gourd, one of the original party’s oldest members, and also presumably running in the by-election. Brian Salmi, the Rhino party leader and recent arrival to Montreal from points west including Vancouver and the Yukon, says the two will meet this week to discuss strategy. Salmi was a member of the original party until it was torn asunder 14 years ago thanks, he says, to an explosive combination of federal legislation that targeted small parties, nationalism in Quebec and money issues.

Salmi announced his candidacy on Tuesday, Aug. 7, after filing a $50-million lawsuit against the Canadian government, saying the 1993 amendment to the Election Act violated Charter rights. As for policies, “I’ll be making a number of announcements as we go along,” he says. “We’re going to try to disavow dullness.”

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Protesting the SPP

On the craft of political reporting, the legendary muckraker Claud Cockburn advised that we imagine the worst a government might possibly do, and then assume it had done it. The upcoming Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) summit in Montebello, which will gather the leaders of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico later this month, is providing plenty of fertilizer for the activist’s imagination.

Activists are busy preparing to head to Montebello, a posh resort in Quebec near Ottawa, to protest the summit, a NAFTA-type pow-wow on steroids. To kick things off, there will be a demonstration on Thursday, Aug. 16, against the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the SPP, which is expected to increase Canada’s coordination with U.S. and Mexican intelligence agencies. Organizers of the protest say they expect more electronic eavesdropping and invasion of privacy, and more restrictions on immigrants and migrant workers.

“It’s always the same thing with this kind of agreement,” says Mathieu Leblanc, with the People’s Assembly Against Security Injustice. “They want more freedom in the market, and more restrictions on people.”

The demonstration will take place at noon at Dorchester Square (René-Lévesque and Peel). For more information, see www.psp-spp.com.

by SAMER ELATRASH

Meds and debts

Imagine you were born in a developing nation and decided to leave in search of a land of opportunity, where the water doesn’t give you diarrhea, political militants don’t break into your house in the middle of the night and everyone has access to essential services and resources. Then, once you finally reached your destination, you discovered that you are ineligible to receive basic health care, even in case of an emergency, for a period of at least three months. Well, that would be the case if Canada were your land of choice.

Délai de Carence: Welcome, but not for the first three months!, a new film by Carolyn Elaine Morris and Ramin Mohammadalikhani, focuses upon four recent immigrants to Canada who were forced to pay medical bills as a result of a law that makes them wait a period of three months before they can have health-care insurance. The screening takes place on Thursday, Aug. 16, 7 p.m. at Project Genesis (4735 Côte-Ste-Catherine), free.

“If somebody has an accident or their child gets sick, they have to take on massive debt,” explains Morris. “They are legal, tax-paying residents without the same rights.”

by STEVE ZYLBERGOLD

Radio does time

As convenient as it might be to ignore the suggestion, certain segments of the population might find themselves surprised to learn that convicted criminals are people too. Some even share human emotions with the rest of us.

Don’t believe it? Say it’s impossible those pricks who burgled your apartment last year and left a giant pudding turd on your pillow as a gesture of thanks might, deep down, know anything in their hearts but contempt? Then tune in to CKUT 90.3 FM this Friday, Aug. 10, anytime from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m., as the station dedicates its programming to national Prisoner Justice Day. “We’ll be covering a whole range of prison issues,” says Sara Falconer of the Prison Radio collective. “Issues like race, poverty, queer prisoners and Guantanamo North in Kingston. There are men who’ve been held there for six years now with no charges laid against them.”

If there’s someone inside who you care about, or if you just want to show solidarity with the plight of the incarcerated, call (514) 448-4041, extension 2547, and leave a message for CKUT to broadcast over the course of the day’s programming.

by CHRIS BARRY

Rear-view mirror

12 years ago - aug. 10–17, 1995

On the cover: Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Black Panther and journalist on death row for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia cop. Many pro-Mumia supporters believe that he was convicted because he’s black and politically active. “If this were happening in China, everybody would be crying foul,” says Alfie Roberts, a local black activist. A Mumia support demo was held in Montreal that week. Mumia’s sentence was commuted in 2001 to life.

• Wayne Kramer plays Montreal to support his solo album The Hard Stuff, and talks about his drug use and prison time following the break-up of the MC5. “That was my whole world and those were my brothers, and all of a sudden it was all gone, and we went into denial on a massive scale,” he says.

• Mario Van Peebles’s Panther, about the Black Panther Party’s early days, is positively reviewed as “a stopgap in the filmography of black history that takes off where Malcolm X finished.”

• Sex reporter Sasha van Setten describes the joy of having a pierced nipple.

Angel >> La Route Verte The longest bike path in North America will be officially inaugurated this Friday, Aug. 10, in Quebec City, 12 years and an estimated $100-million after it was first announced. The 4,300-kilometre trail still isn’t completely finished, but its Montreal segment was opened last Monday, Aug. 6, at Parc Lafontaine. The 100-kilometre stretch on the island runs through seven municipalities and 11 boroughs, and the north-south route is one of the busiest on the continent—and is generally a pleasant and safe way to get from one end of the city to the other. Meanwhile, the de Maisonneuve bike path should be operational this fall, city officials say.

Insect >> Poo in the river Okay, so how gross is this? The Journal ran a big spread last Monday on the raw sewage—that’s dinner-table talk for human shit, tampons and toilet paper—entering the St. Lawrence directly from the bathrooms of 48 homes on Nuns’ Island. Testing stations revealed levels of fecal coliform concentration that were 650 times above acceptable norms. Nobody knows who’s to blame yet—it seems the wrong pipes were attached somewhere during construction—although the city is saying that landlords are going to have to pay for repairs. At any rate, the problem probably won’t be fixed till the fall. The Journal made much of the irony of Nun’s Island, one of the city’s swankiest districts, having the filthiest water, comparing it, screamed a page 3 headline over a photo of the open sewer mouth, to “le tiers-monde.”