Quote of the week

“To hell with the recession! Let’s dance!” —A leprechaun, leading the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin on Tuesday.

Tarring natives

With pipelines poised to carry over 200,000 barrels of Alberta’s tar sands oil through Montreal daily for refining, a member of a First Nation upstream from the world’s largest industrial project is bringing news of the human costs of oil thirst. Mike Mercredi, whose community of Fort Chipewyan has been hit with staggering disease rates because of pollutants leaked into the Athabasca River by tar sands projects, will speak on a panel Friday, March 20 at McGill.

“Where I live, the people around me are dying,” says Mercredi, a former tar sands worker who has lost close relatives to cancer. “The toxic effects of the tar sands go into the trees, the animals, the land, the water.”

Though the economic downturn has forced oil giant Enbridge to shelve their Trailbreaker pipeline, which would ship western crude through Ontario and Quebec to markets in the U.S., they plan to restart development in 2010.

“Quebec must make a decision to perpetuate a major ecological disaster, or to help stop it,” says independent journalist Maya Rolbin-Ghanie, who’ll participate on the panel alongside environmental justice organizers Clayton Thomas-Muller and Macdonald Stainsby. The event begins at 7 p.m. in the Leacock Building (855 Sherbrooke W., #26). Info: tarsands.fairtrademedia.com.

by Martin Lukacs

PPP protest

Although six years of the Charest government has led to an increase in Public-Private Partnerships—an increasingly popular method of financing public services and projects with private capital—not everyone agrees that PPPs are the political panacea they are purported to be.

The Web site of student association ASSÉ (Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante) calls PPPs a form of creeping privatization that brings “insidious precariousness” to people who rely on public services. ASSÉ is organizing a demonstration against the intrusion of the private sector into public health and education on Thursday, March 26 at 2:30 p.m. at Berri Square.

“Being a student is a temporary situation, and students have interests besides education,” says ASSÉ’s Alex Desrochers.

ASSÉ hopes the demo will also be an opportunity for students to oppose Bills 107 and 110, which intend to reorganize the structure and administration of postsecondary schools in the province. The bills have had the unusual effect of uniting student protesters with campus administrators in opposition to them. While McGill has expressed concern about increased government interference in university affairs, ASSÉ is worried about the requirement that two-thirds of administrators come from outside the university, likely from the private sector. For details, see asse-solidarite.qc.ca.

by Matt Jones

More on Mile-End

Next Monday, March 23, will be the last chance for Mile-Enders to sound off on what kind of Mile-End they want to live in. Is the ’hood—which will face a serious change when the ground breaks on the coming St-Viateur E. revitalization project—too hipster heavy? Too little? Not green enough? Well served by development and public transportation, or not?

The good news is, the Plateau borough has been listening. A series of citizen forums has been underway since January and wraps up next Monday. The theme will be the environment. Previous discussions, which had been held since mid-January, focused on specific issues: transportation, housing, economy and services, culture and heritage.

“We want to define what a green neighbourhood is,” says Michel Gauthier, an organizer with the Mile-End Citizens’ Committee.

With the meetings wrapping up, the Corporation de développement économique communautaire Centre-Sud/Plateau Mont-Royal is also offering up online surveys that can be filled out by those wishing to sound off on the neighbourhood’s future. A “grand forum citoyen” is planned for April 26.

The last meeting will take place at the Green Room (5386 St-Laurent). For more info on the project, meetings and survey, visit citoyensmileend.blogspot.com.

by Patrick Lejtenyi

Art against AIDS

In spite of noted humanist George W. Bush’s crusade to deal with the issue in Africa, back here in la belle province, the rate of HIV/AIDS infections continues to rise, largely because the dimmer among us seem to believe that getting the disease isn’t really all that big an inconvenience anymore. Or at least not as inconvenient as slapping on a condom during the heat of the moment might be.

In an effort to “pursue creative ways to establish funding and get our message of education and prevention out to people,” AIDS Community Care Montréal (ACCM) will be presenting Projet HOPE, a three-week “International Art Exhibition and Fundraising Auction for the Fight Against AIDS” beginning Monday, March 23 at Galerie Dentaire (1239 Amherst).

Featuring a collection of donated works from over 60 internationally renowned artists, including Tom Bianchi, Gustavo Hannecke, Issa (aka Jane Siberry), Daniel Beaudouin, Abu Jafar, Lea Shabat and Scarlet Raven, the auction itself will take place at Lion d’Or (1676 Ontario E.) on April 15, 8 p.m.

Says Alexander Wysocki-Najar, fundraising and volunteer coordinator for ACCM, “It’s really a message of hope. The fact that all these artists have given a bit of themselves for this cause is wonderfully inspiring.” For full details go to projethope.org.

by Chris Barry

Rear-view mirror

10 YEARS AGO - MARCH 19–25, 1999

On the cover: Vinnie Jones as Big Chris, from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. “It seems like a fella movie, but the birds like looking at the fellas,” says director Guy Ritchie. “They’re quite amiable fellas. They don’t overfella, if you know what I mean.” The article also dispels the rumour that Ritchie and the movie’s fan Madonna are dating.
• “Even if you wanted to claim that the Holocaust was the worst suffering ever endured [by a people], you would be hard-pressed to make a moral case for the state of Israel,” says U.S. scholar Norman Finkelstein, “in his uncomfortably high-pitched New York Jewish accent,” reports Dominique Ritter.
•Adam Gollner interviews “surfer dude” and rap/metal fusionist Adam Paskowitz of the Flys. The interview opens like this: “Mirror: ‘This is Adam from the Montreal Mirror.’ Adam Paskowitz: ‘Adam! Fuckin’ rad name, dude!’”
• “Dr. Raté Nattruss” asks Sasha: “What do you call that obscure spot between a man’s scrotum and his anus?” The answer is the perineum or perineal body.

Angel >> Condoms As a guy who isn’t supposed to have sex with a woman—much less a man or a boy—Pope Ratzinger may not be the best person to offer contraception advice. But he did anyway, on his way to Africa this week, when he suggested condom use actually helps the spread of AIDS. Which is nonsense. Condom use could have averted the 22 million people currently infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, where more than two-thirds of the global number of people with the virus live, and where three-quarters of AIDS deaths occur. Dogma may be important to an out-of-touch supposed celibate, but in the real world, it’s a killer.

Insect >>Science Minister Gary Goodyear And it just keeps getting weirder. In an interview with The Globe and Mail this week, Goodyear, a chiropractor from Cambridge, Ontario and an avowed Christian, wouldn’t say whether he believes in evolution or not. This is the same person who presided over funding cuts to research scientists earlier this year. Goodyear wouldn’t out and out say he was a creationist when asked, instead dodging the question and claiming that questions about his religion are inappropriate. But they aren’t: when an elected official won’t say whether he believes in a fundamental building block of all modern biology, genetics and paleontology or not, it’s everybody’s business..