Quote of the week

“We have to realize that these are quite large fires. It would take months of rain to completely put it out.” —Mélanie Morin, spokesperson for the provincial fire fighting agency SOPFEU, on this week’s rain and the forest fires raging in central Quebec.

Toronto gets exciting!

Toronto’s business district is preparing to go on lockdown in anticipation of the arrival of the leaders of the world’s eight and/or 20 richest nations and the inevitable angry masses that will assemble around them. That’s right, that early 21st century pastime is back: summit protesting!

“The movement’s always been around,” says QPIRG organizer Andrea Figueroa. “There haven’t been big demonstrations against summits but struggles have been happening all over in small communities. At these big summits, all these people get together, so it’s a continuation of multiple struggles.”

To make sure you know exactly what kind of nefarious superpowers you’re up against, QPIRG and a re-founded Convergence des luttes anticapitalistes (CLAC-2010) are holding an Anti-capitalist Teach-in Against the G8/G20, featuring workshops on the consequences of these institutions’ policies on students, workers, women, the environment, indigenous peoples and the global south.

The Anti-capitalist Teach-in takes place Saturday, June 5 from 12:30– 5:30 p.m. in room A-2885 of UQAM’s Hubert-Aquin Pavillion (400 Ste-Catherine E.).

Information about how to get on a bus to Toronto for the protest will be available on site. See clac2010.net for details.

MATT JONES

Rich in,
poor out

If you’re fed up seeing government policies that favour the rich being enacted while services are cut and the costs keeps rising, then the time to let those ne’er do well folks on the hill know you’ve reached your boiling point is now. Or, rather, Monday, June 7, when the big shots who enslave us will be gathering for la Conférence de Montréal to discuss new and better ways to screw the rest of us over.

According to François Saillant, spokesperson for la Coalition opposée à la tarification et à la privatisation des services publics, who, along with social housing group FRAPRU, have organized the demonstration, “our action will coincide with their opening luncheon where Jean Charest will be speaking and international economic and political elites like Jim Flaherty, IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and big businessmen like Power Corp’s Paul Desmarais will be in attendance. Their plan is to enact budgets that fight against the rights of poor people around the world. So the Coalition will be there to let them know that we’re not only against their plans, but that we know who the people are behind them.”

The demo begins at 11:30 a.m., outside the Bonaventure Hilton (900 de la Gauchetière W.). For more information, go to frapru.qc.ca.

CHRIS BARRY

Post-quake
blues

Still reeling from the shock of the earthquake that hit the island five months ago, Haiti now faces the prospect of becoming a laboratory for disaster capitalism, according to one participant at a talk next week about Haiti’s future.

“They still pretend that it’s the Haitians that are running Haiti, but there is an accentuated disregard for the existence of the Haitian state by the international players,” says Jean Saint-Vil of the Haitian diaspora organization AKASAN. “I call it Hollywood-style aid.”

Saint-Vil criticizes the Canadian intervention for focusing on revamping the justice system and building prisons: tasks that bring big contracts to Canadian companies while offering only minimum wage jobs to Haitians.

Donations from around the world flooded largely into the coffers of international organizations, which meant that the Haitian health sector did not develop out of the crisis.

“One thing we ask is, at the end of this whole process, will the Haitian Red Cross have at least a website?” says Saint-Vil.

He and others will speak at the What Is the Future of Haiti in the Wake of the Earthquake? discussion on Wednesday, June 9 at Concordia’s de Sève Cinema (1400 de Maisonneuve W.), 7 p.m. See globalresearch.ca for details.

MATT JONES

’Hood memories

Half a century after the City of Montreal unceremoniously evicted residents and razed entire neighbourhoods in an ongoing orgy of megastructure madness, the thinking has changed. Expropriation is out, city living is in.

Perhaps faced with urban planning remorse, the city-owned Centre d’histoire de Montréal is asking Montrealers with connections to four vanished neighbourhoods to step forward and tell their stories. The memories are being collected for an exhibit opening at the museum next April, to run for 11 months. So if you or someone you know was kicked out to make way for the Habitations Jeanne-Mance housing project near St-Laurent metro, the Radio-Canada/CBC building, the Bonaventure expressway or the Ville-Marie expressway, the museum wants to hear from you. Also welcome are any artifacts, photos or films of the neighbourhoods.

Personal testimonies will be a major part of the exhibit, according to the museum, and organizers are pointing out that you don’t have to have lived in one of the now-gone zones to participate. If you shopped there, went to school there, worked there or even worked making an area vanish as a construction worker, urban planner or city drone, the museum wants you.

For more info, see ville.montreal.qc.ca/chm.

PATRICK LEJTENYI

Rear-view mirror

14 YEARS AGO - JUNE 6–13, 1996

On the cover: Six summer festival bigwigs, including Andy Nulman (Just for Laughs), David Gobeil Taylor (the Fringe) and André Ménard (Jazz Fest), for the Hot Summer Guide. The Montreal World Film Festival’s Serge Losique was “unavailable” for the shoot.

• The police raid on the Limelight club in NYC won’t, reports Josh Bezonsky, affect the supply of ecstasy in Montreal. According to a “small-time ecstasy dealer” who had “himself emerged from a two-day-long K-Hole only hours before,” local ecstasy is either made here or in Amsterdam. “I’ve got such good drugs right now,” says the dealer. “I’ve been taking like 100 at a time or whatever. It’s great.”

• Kim Mitchell, stopping in Montreal on a Max Webster reunion tour, discusses balding: “Yes, I thought about transplants. But when I saw Alex Lifeson [of Rush] going through the whole procedure, I decided against it. He was always having to fly into gigs from some high-priced doctor who’d just plugged him up. So instead I got used to wearing a baseball cap.”

Angel >> Trivia master Chris Haney For a former Gazette photo editor, Chris Haney didn’t do too badly. Haney died this week at age 59, but not before he changed the board game world forever by inventing Trivial Pursuit with sports reporter Scott Abbott. The peculiar game, with its pie wedges and circular board, became a runaway success in the mid-’80s, when an estimated 20 million copies were sold, not to mention countless spinoffs and Genus editions. Toy giant Hasbro bought the game off them two years ago for a tidy $80-million. By most accounts a good if somewhat eccentric person, Haney lived the Montreal dream: he created something fun and lasting, and made tons of money off it.

Insect >> Liechtenstein Like Switzerland’s smaller, sneakier cousin, the Alpine principality is best known as an offshore tax haven, meaning it’s a favoured banking destination for despots, criminals and rich, greedy Canadians who don’t want to pay their taxes. Unfortunately for them, the Canadian Revenue Agency is determined to get the money, and this week three Canadian financial institutions—UBS Canada, BMO Nesbitt Burns and Financière Banque Nationale—said they would comply with the CRA’s demand to divulge information on 46 accounts that may be linked to Canadians. Pay up, you cheap fat cats! And as for you, tiny, morally compromised Liechtenstein, feel free to screen your sleazy clients any time now.