SIX YEARS AND PENNY-PINCHING: Concordia’s 450 support staff staged a half-day strike on Monday to protest their six-years-and-counting wait for a wage increase, and used the opportunity to draw sharp comparisons to the university’s alleged $1.36-million buyout of unpopular outgoing president Claude Lajeunesse late last year PHOTO BY WILL LEW

Quote of the week

“It was both memorable, and a bad memory.” —Former Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard, on the 1998 ice storm.

A for student action

Now that university students are back in class, l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (ASSÉ) will be renewing its thorn-in-the-side behaviour by pointing out just how the province’s tight fiscal ways are impacting school life. It isn’t pretty, they say.

Beginning on Thursday, Jan. 10 at 11 a.m., ASSÉ members will take on UQÀM over its financial boondoggles and the government’s reaction to same. The economic consequences of millions of wasted dollars in real estate flops and its brush with bankruptcy will be highlighted, including hiring freezes and faculty strikes. They’ll be moving on to the Université du Québec en Outaouais next week.

“The impact has been very diverse among different institutions,” says ASSÉ media rep Marc-André Faucher. “We’ve seen hiring and space problems, as well as in the quality of education and even the quality of buildings” the institutions call home. He says the air quality in parts of CEGEP Joliette is almost unbreathable due to a mold infestation, and some classes at CEGEP Lionel-Groulx in Ste-Thérèse are being taught in trailers due to a lack of classrooms.

The group is also planning an as-yet-unspecified “day of economic disruption” on Friday, Jan. 18.

FRAPRU’s new year

Social housing pressure group FRAPRU plans on having a busy 2008. Late last week they aired their hopes for a renewed and reinvigorated five-year social housing plan from the provincial government, even if the past few years have been more than disappointing, says its coordinator François Saillant.

“We’ve been hearing about five-year plans from Quebec since 1987,” he states, but says that the government has only been acting piecemeal, building housing for low-income Quebecers erratically, if at all. “Last year was particularly disastrous. There were only 2,000 units built in all of Quebec.”

The group is calling for an admittedly ambitious government commitment to building 50,000 units over the next 10 years, which will require both more money and a cooling of the housing market. “We want people to be able to buy buildings that don’t necessarily require major renovations and transform them either into co-ops or non-profit housing,” says Saillant.

With a general assembly due in the next couple of weeks, FRAPRU will flesh out their plan before they present it to Quebec Finance Minister Monique Jérôme-Forget. But Saillant says that plans and meetings alone won’t be enough to get the government to act, and plans a series of demonstrations over the next two months.

by Patrick Lejtenyi

Two years for Kader

It’s been two long years since Algerian native Abdelkader Belaouni (aka Kader) was first notified that his Canadian refugee application had been rejected. And, according to Mary Foster, of Belaouni’s support group Soutien pour Kader, “At that point, there are no further recourses for someone applying for refugee status, other than applying on humanitarian grounds, which Kader did but was rejected.”

Since then, Kader has avoided deportation by finding sanctuary in St. Gabriel’s Church in the Point, but he and his supporters are growing restless. Their constant lobbying of federal Immigration Minister Diane Finley continues to fall upon deaf ears, so, in the effort to force her to finally address Kader’s situation, they’ve geared up their efforts.

Besides a march planned for Friday, Jan. 18, leaving Phillips Square at 11 a.m., a call-in to Finley’s office has been underway since last week, a photo exhibit of his life in sanctuary has been installed at 2533 Centre St. #101 and a concert is planned on Saturday, Jan. 28 at St. Gabriel’s Church (2157 Centre), sliding scale admission, 7 p.m.

For more information, and to obtain support letters to be sent to Finley’s office, go to www.soutienpourkader.net.

by Chris Barry

Your wallet, your planet

If you’ve been feeling a little empty after the orgy of consumerism known as Christmas, you might want to head over to Concordia this Tuesday, Jan. 15, for “Vote With Your Wallet,” a public conference featuring noted environmentalist and fair trade campaigner Laure Waridel.

“If every human being consumed as much as we do in North America, we’d need three to five planet Earths,” says Waridel, co-founder of Quebec-based environmental group Équiterre and author of several books on ethical consumption.

Waridel will offer practical advice on how individuals can reduce their “ecological footprint,” such as buying locally produced and fair trade goods.

“The conference is about empowerment, what we can do as individuals and as a society to make a change, and make sure our children have a sustainable future—because we’re not going in that direction now,” she says. “Of course we need economic growth, but not at the expense of the environment and social well-being.”

The conference, organized by Citizens in Action, takes place at Concordia’s Hall Building (1455 de Maisonneuve W., seventh floor, room 760), 7 p.m. sharp, for free. For more info, call Nadia at (514) 846-0644 or e-mail alexan.nadia@sympatico.ca.

by Christopher Hazou

Rear-view mirror

10 YEARS AGO - JAN. 8–15, 1998

On the cover: Bloc Pot leader Boris St-Maurice, for the annual Noisemakers issue. In the coming year, St-Maurice plans to establish the Bloc Pot as an official political party. “I’m sick of politicians dodging the issue every time they’re asked about marijuana,” he says.
• Lizanne Cousineau of the drug-awareness collective GRIP, formed as a response to more speed use in clubs, says, “We believe that people have a fundamental right to make their own conscious decisions regarding the drugs they choose, or choose not, to ingest. But to make such an informed decision, they need to have all the facts.”
• “This is the sort of film-making your average North American seldom gets the chance to see, let alone on a crazy-gigantic screen with a thousand shrieking fans,” says Mitch Davis of Fant-Asia, which expands to Toronto in 1998.
• Other Noisemakers: Anarchist Patrick Borden, chess whiz Alexandre Lesiège, speed garage DJs Buster and Big Bob, Fred Everything, Gangster Politics, DJ Jordan Dare, record label Alien 8 and playwright-director-actor Eric Goulem.

Angel >> Mapping Quebec’s genomes The Université de Montréal’s genome-mapping project, CARTaGENE, officially began recruiting the first of 400 Quebecers willing to provide their genetic blueprints this week, with plans to expand the pool to some 20,000 subjects. The data, acquired through donated blood and urine samples, will be stored in biobanks and studied by health researchers looking for possible genetic causes of a variety of diseases affecting Quebec’s population, from cancer to arthritis (privacy of DNA donors will be rigorously protected, say the project’s leaders). Quebec’s biobanks joins 20 others worldwide, containing the genetic information of some 100,000 people from over 35 countries.

Insect >> Dismissing carbon solutions It’s a new year alright, but Conservative Environment Minister John Baird is doing nothing different. The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy—an advisory council made up of environmental groups and business leaders, and commissioned by the federal government in 2006—recommended a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system on greenhouse gas emissions as efficient and cost-effective methods of reducing Canada’s release of heat-trapping gases. But the Tories rejected it the same day, saying the idea was “Liberal.” Baird says the Conservative plan will force big polluters to emit less per unit of production—but that would allow sectors like Alberta’s oil sands to continue polluting massively, as the industry is poised to quintuple its size over the next decade, say critics.