Quote of the week

“They’re for hours missed at work, bad relations with employers, late fees at daycare pick-up, disturbed family life, stress, insomnia, aches, taxis and train passes.” —Ania Kazi, of irate commuter organization Group United for Train Service, which wants $1-million in compensation from the Agence Métropolitaine de Transport for its disastrous changes made to commuter rail lines since Jan. 12.

On the pot trail

In an attempt to develop a consensus on the issue of marijuana, as used both medicinally and recreationally, longtime legalization activist Boris St-Maurice is holding a series of cross-country presentations and town hall meetings that recently had him in glamorous Ottawa, Guelph and Hamilton. St-Maurice, the executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML)-Canada, heads to Vancouver in two weeks’ time, where he, along with Vancouver’s current mayor Gregor Robertson and former mayor—now Senator—Larry Campbell, will host a panel discussion. Talks in Calgary and Edmonton will follow.

“We’re looking at four pillars,” says St-Maurice. “Economy, health and medicine, social and policy implementation.” The talks will focus on how legalizing the weed will benefit Canada and how the nuts and bolts of it would be carried out.

“We’ll be showing video slides, encourage discussion and match the tour with local participants, and a Q&A period,” he says. “It’s reconciliatory, and very political.”

By the end of the 12-city tour, St-Maurice hopes to draft a resolution that can be presented to Parliament for its consideration. St-Maurice says dates in Montreal and Toronto are planned for the spring.

For more information, see norml.ca.

Rights go wrong

Last week saw another embarrassing moment on the world stage for the Harper government, as Canada saw its human rights record dissed by the United Nations. The report by the UN’s Human Rights Council, a 47-state body that aims to assess nations’ human rights situations, came out Friday, Feb. 6.

“Canada was severely criticized on several points,” says Martine Éloy of Quebec civil rights defenders the Ligue des droits et libertés. “The main criticisms were of the refusal to ratify the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples [in 2006], excessive use of Taser guns by police, rendition to torture and trials of terror suspects in which the accused don’t have access to the evidence being used against them.”

The Ligue has spent the last few years struggling to get people to pay attention to these issues. This Friday is their annual fundraising concert, in which civil-rights-savvy artists perform in support of “human rights, now more than ever” and to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The show takes place Friday, Feb. 13 at 8:30 p.m. at Kola Note (5240 Parc). Tickets are $30 and are available from admission.com.

For more info on the Ligue, see liguedesdroits.ca.

by MATT JONES

Flowers of evil

This Saturday, Feb. 14, the people at the Comité pour les Droits Humains en Amérique Latine (CDHAL) want you to think twice before purchasing any Valentine’s Day flowers for your sweetie. At the very least, they’d like you to ask your florist where their flowers are coming from, because apparently there’s no shortage of misery involved for the Latin American peasants who’ve most likely picked them for you.

“February 14 is also the international day of workers for the flower industry,” says filmmaker Sarah Charland-Faucher, whose 54-minute documentary, A Fleur de Peau: Un Bouquet de la Colombie, will be screening at Café Volver (5604 Parc) on Saturday, Feb. 14, at 6 p.m., as part of a conference/discussion CDHAL will be holding on the subject.

“Not only is buying flowers a poor ecological choice, but in Columbia, where 50 per cent of the flowers sold on Valentine’s Day come from, flower workers labour up to 100 hours a week in advance of St. Valentine’s Day. Many of these workers don’t have contracts, so it’s really easy not to pay them or respect their safety and human rights—and there are countless health risks associated with all the pesticides used.”

For more information, go to afleurdepeau2009.blogspot.com and/or cdhal.org.

by CHRIS BARRY

Music for the streets

Local musicians take to the stage for a fundraising concert to help homeless youth next Thursday, Feb. 19, at la Sala Rossa (4848 St-Laurent), with proceeds going to the Hébergement Jeunesse Le Tournant.

“I’ve been organizing benefits for street youth for the last nine years,” says Dave Dumouchel, the man behind the show, who works with Dans la Rue when he’s not indulging his “hobby” of raising money for those in need.

Thursday’s line-up will include Black Diamond Bay (featuring ex-members of the Dears, singer/guitarist Patrick Krief and drummer George Donoso III), francophone rockers Huis Clos and newcomers Hugh Manatee Party.

Praising the work of the Hébergement, which helps youth aged 18–30 get off the street, Dumouchel says he chose them because of a personal connection he had with one of the young people, now deceased, that they were helping. “They’re very open to what [youth] need and want,” he says.

Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door, and are available at Atom Heart (364 Sherbrooke E.), Cheap Thrills (2044 Metcalfe) and Casa del Popolo (4873 St-Laurent). The show starts at 9:30 p.m. For more info, visit casadelpopolo.com.

by CHRISTOPHER HAZOU

Rear-view mirror

14 YEARS AGO - FEB. 9–16, 1995

On the cover: 24-year-old youth worker Nicole Sinclair, in an article on new black leadership. One problem, Sinclair says, is the media. “Instead of focusing on positive people with a message, the media choose to promote reggae artists without values,” she says.
•“Rebel cellist” Claude Lamothe looks for his place in rock. “I still don’t know why there is not a real rock cellist—not an experimental cellist and not some cliché cello like in the Beatles—but a real rock cellist.”
•“People tell me I’ve made two movies now with really rotten women in them,” says The Last Seduction director John Dahl. “But at the same time, I’ve got a lot of rotten men up there on the screen. Nobody sees them.”
•Romance, writes sex reporter Sasha Van Setten, is “perfectly sickening when the perpetrator is some icky foppish freak writing poems à la Richard Brautigan (moonbeamvaginashit) in honour of your genitals…. Whatever happened to the good old days when you could just brain somebody and drag them back to your cave?”

Angel >> Standing up to Ticketmaster Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins may be pompous and egomaniacal, but one of his Toronto fans became so enraged at ticket gouging that he was spurred into launching a $500-million class action suit against Ticketmaster on Monday. The suit alleges that Ticketmaster withheld high-demand tickets on its subsidiary TicketsNow, charging extortionate rates (although that still didn’t discourage people from buying them). It’s still unclear how the suit will affect ticket-buyers in Quebec, where Ticketmaster-owned Admissions is king. Also irate at the company is Bruce Springsteen, who last week said he was “furious” with Ticketmaster for sending potential ticket buyers to TicketsNow.

Insect >>Phony tar sands piety When Alberta and Ottawa suddenly decide to show some concern over the excesses of the tar sands industry, something has to be fishy. The two governments are threatening to fine Syncrude up to $800,000 as a result of the deaths of an estimated 500 migrating birds last spring, who died after landing in the energy giant’s tailings pond. But skeptics say the move is designed to show the new U.S. administration—a strong critic of the tar sands industry—that Alberta’s dirty oil isn’t so dirty, and that they take environmental concerns seriously. After years of denial, and given events in the U.S., this about-face isn’t all that convincing.