Quote of the week

“We will not make it easy for the government… It’s not an issue of national security, it’s not an issue of national importance.”—Lawyer Dennis Edney, reacting to Ottawa’s appealing of a Supreme Court ruling to repatriate his client Omar Khadr. The Canadian citizen has been a Guantanamo prisoner since he killed two U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 15.

Activist
role model

American political wunderkind Adrienne Maree Brown will be in Montreal to share her take on that perennial daydream of underdogs everywhere: “What if we were to take power?”

Barely 30, the writer, singer and activist will be keynoting the Institute du Nouveau Monde’s (INM) summer school for young (15 to 35-year-old) Quebecers on Friday, Aug. 28, 7 p.m. at UQAM’s Salle-Marie-Gérin-Lajoie.

Having secured Brown, co-editor of How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office and executive director of the Ruckus Society (boosters of civil disobedience for persecuted communities), the summer school’s organizers are excited to host someone who fancies action over talk.

“Adrienne shows young people, even those coming from underprivileged backgrounds, that citizen engagement has meaning and is worth the effort. Through her actions, but also her dynamic and lively personality, she will surely motivate our young participants to follow her lead and act for a better world,” says Michel Venne, the general director of the INM.

This year’s school, which runs from Aug. 27–30 on the theme of taking power, has drawn 800 youngsters for civic debate, education and general merriment.

For more info, see inm.qc.ca.

MARTIN LUKACS

More
pencils, more books

Not only do they dress cool, but Mennonites also do good things every once in awhile. Certainly one of those things is their long-running Classrooms in Need program, where, in partnership with the Ten Thousand Villages fair trade retail chain, they send school supplies off to disadvantaged kids in the third world and/or other messed up hot spots like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Take note that organizers are requesting specific items because, as Sally Richmond, manager of the Ten Thousand Villages store at 5674 Monkland says, “The Mennonites want to send identical kits to everyone so they don’t create any jealousies or inequalities among the kids who receive them.”

The items in need are, per kit: four spiral notebooks, four unsharpened pencils, one ruler, 12 coloured pencils and one pencil eraser. Feel free to drop off as many kits as you can afford at any of the three Ten Thousand Villages stores in Montreal. The other two are located at 4128 St-Denis and 290 Lakeshore #108 in Pointe Claire. The campaign runs until the end of September.

CHRIS BARRY

Endangered forest

What’s the best time for a government to sneak through menacing new forestry laws? When professional ecologists are vacationing in the bush.

The Charest government introduced Bill 57 in June and hopes to pass the legislation this fall. Despite being caught off-guard, critics are piling up their complaints, arguing the bill—which would allow forestry in an area 150 times the size of Montreal—will erode Quebec’s remaining intact forests, endanger woodland caribou, create large-scale plantations and infringe on the rights of First Nations.

“This law will be so important for the future of the forest, so why is the government rushing consultations in the summertime?” asks Maude Prud’homme of the Réseau Quebecois des Groupes Ecologistes (RQGE). “We have a complicated situation. The old forestry regime is not working. Eco-systems and communities have suffered. We need to take the time to do a serious review.”

Action Boreale, a member of RQGE, will hold fundraising concerts on Wednesday, Sept. 2 and Thursday, Sept. 3 at the Medley (1170 St-Denis), with musicians Richard Desjardins, Zachary Richard, Mes Aïeux and Fred Pellerin. They’ll outline their positions on the bill at a press conference on-site on Wednesday at 11 a.m.

For more info, see actionboreale.org and rqge.qc.ca.

MARTIN LUKACS

Plateau
electro dump

Plateau residents looking for a quick and easy way to dispose of old computers, batteries and other electronic equipment are in luck this week, as the Éco-Quartier Plateau Mont-Royal teams up with information technology recycling company Computation to collect the stuff this Saturday, Aug. 29, from 10 a.m.–3 p.m. at Parc Lafontaine (opposite 3819 Calixa-Lavallée). “We don’t want our electronic waste to end up in dumps or in China or India, where people work with it with no masks and in the poorest of conditions,” says Éco-Quartier coordinator Raphaëlle Groulx.

In addition to computers and batteries, printers, fax machines, cell phones, TVs, CDs, DVDs and videotapes will also be accepted. A fee of $1 per screen inch will be charged for television and computer monitors. Only Plateau dwellers with proof of residence (lease, driver’s licence etc.) are eligible to participate. Items will either be refurbished and resold or disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner. If you can’t make it down Saturday, you can drop off your junk directly at Computation (7080 Alexandra, #101) during regular business hours. For more info, visit velo.qc.ca/eco_plateau or call (514) 521-8356.

CHRISTOPHER HAZOU

Rear-view mirror

16 YEARS AGO - AUG. 26–SEPT. 2, 1993

On the cover: “Radical” Québécoise director Paule Baillargeon, whose second feature, Le Sexe des étoiles (featuring a 6’2” transsexual as one of its main characters), opens the World Film Festival (WFF). “It’s a lot of pressure,” she says. “Filmmakers here are condemned to succeed.”
•On the same page, a review of Le Sexe des étoiles calls it “a mawkish melodrama,” slamming both its director and the author of the book on which it was based, Monique Proulx.
•An exposé on a detox therapy known as “chelation,” thought to rid the body of heavy metals, suggests that the medical establishment has quashed the practice to profit from our degenerative ailments.
•Artsweek recommends checking out Jamaican dancehall star Yellowman, a WFF memorial for director Francis Mankiewicz (Les Bons Débarras) and the Little Burgundy Festival block party in Vinet park.
•Al South is impressed by the “laid-back, trippy feel,” “heavy grooves” and “ganja-gangster edge” of Cypress Hill’s Black Sunday.

Angel >> Homes for the homeless More than 1,000 homeless people in five cities across Canada, including Montreal, will be moved into subsidized apartments for four years in a $150-million federal experiment aiming to re-integrate the mentally ill into society. The Canadian Commission on Mental Health’s project will include “intensive psychological and social support,” but some fear that, without addiction treatments and counselling, the subjects may be ill-prepared for the move. However, the feds clearly have their hearts in the right place, and if this pilot project succeeds, it could yield great results for Canada’s down and out.

Insect >> No junk for the junkies Last week, The New England Journal of Medicine published the results of the controversial NAOMI study showing that heroin is significantly more effective than traditional methadone in the treatment of addicts, and that some fared just as well with licensed narcotics. A follow-up study, SALOME, was due to compare treatments using both illegal and legal drugs over three years in supervised clinics in Montreal and Vancouver, but within days of the NEJM revelation, the province withdrew SALOME’s $600,000 funding—simple cost-cutting, according to the health ministry. Doctors say that the groundbreaking study would have aided heroin addicts everywhere.