Street beat: Steel drum band Martin Albino and the Savoys get to work at the 8th annual Walkley Street Festival held on Sunday. Several hundred people took part in the block party, which included singing and dancing contests, food and music.
Photo by Jason Felker >>
Quebec’s
happy stoners
Pot smokers and those thinking it’s high time to get real about marijuana laws were surprised this week by federal Justice Minister Martin Cauchon’s statements about decriminalizing the weed. Cauchon said it is important for law enforcement across the country to have one coherent policy, rather than a patchwork of different ways from province to province.
So which province is best and worst for potheads? According to the most vocal pot advocates in the country, the federal Marijuana Party, the best place to smoke is right here.
“Having travelled up and down this country, I’d say Quebec is the best, and that’s shown from having the lowest arrest rates per capita in the country,” says Marc-Boris St-Maurice, head of the Marijuana Party. “B.C. is second. And the rest of the provinces all pretty much suck.”
When pressed, he admits Ontario probably rates third-although he says it is still “really bad.” And Atlantic Canada and the Prairies are the worst. St-Maurice thinks rural parts of the country-including Quebec-are more inclined to bust pot users and send them to the courts out of boredom and small-town attitudes on the parts of the police and judges.
The Marijuana Party has gone on record opposing decriminalization, because they feel it will be easier for cops to ticket casual users rather than either ignoring them or letting them off with a warning. :
-Patrick Lejtenyi
Beware
animal pee
The provincial Minister of Agriculture is recommending that people stay away from dog and other small mammal urine, which could be contaminated with leptospirosis, the bacteria that causes fever and conjunctivitis. And if that means fencing off your garden so raccoons don’t pee on your carrots, so be it, according to official counsel. According to government stats, not a single case of leptispirosis was detected in the province’s canine population in 1995, but that number rose to three the next year, six in 1997, and has jumped to 34 last year.
And that’s just the tip of the animal iceberg, according to the ministry’s zoonosis (animal diseases that are transmittable to humans) coordinator Chantal Vincent. “It’s a sickness that affects many types of animals. We’ve been talking about dogs because those are the animals that humans are most likely to be in contact with,” she says. The bacteria attack the liver and kidneys, and in humans cause sore muscles, headaches, fever and can even lead to meningitis and yes, on rare occasions, death. Newly developed vaccinations for your pets are available through your local vet.
Meanwhile, try to make sure your pet pooch doesn’t
drink from dodgy beaver ponds or still pools in parks that may have been
visited recently by bladder-weary animals. If the bug hits your home,
it’ll most likely be later this year. “The great majority
of cases came in October, November or December,” says Vincent. “It’s
a question of water temperature, because the bacteria survives better
in cold water.” :
-Kristian Gravenor
Raw sewage avoids floods
Last weekend marked the 15th anniversary
of the Montreal floods, the result of a freak formation of three thunderstorms
over the city that dumped about 104 millimetres of rain in less than two
hours over downtown. One man died as the Décarie Expressway became
a soggy trench trapping hundreds of vehicles.
As a result of the floods, Environment Canada today shares radar data
with the city and is in closer consultation with Montreal and provincial
emergency bureaus. And that has improved response time for the city’s
sewage system, which has the unenviable task of managing floodwaters.
The system is designed to handle, under normal circumstances, between
25 and 30 millimetres of rain an hour.
“With more warning, the system can open the gates to let more water go through into the river without treatment,” says Gaëtan Deaudilin, Environment Canada’s chief of the Quebec City and Rimouski weather bureau, who worked in Montreal during the floods and wrote the case study about it. “In 1987, we had maybe a half-hour warning. Now we’re looking at more like an hour, which should be enough. And that’s about the maximum you can have with this type of storm, because they form directly over you.”
Deaudilin says the only time he has seen comparable rolling thunderstorms like the ones in 1987 were the ones that hit the Eastern Townships and Beauce region on July 1 and 2. :
-Patrick Lejtenyi
Angel
>> CJAD’s Gord Sinclair Cantankerous old
Conservative radio host kicks the bucket and yes, the city is a worse
place for it. An original among drones, Sinclair, 74, was a fixture
on Montreal airwaves for five decades, soothing and agitating listeners
with his sonorous croak and right-wing opinions. In the end, severe
diabetes, bad legs and near-blindness only slowed him somewhat, and
he’d still get up every day before dawn to make the perilous drive
from Hudson to downtown to ad lib the news, encourage debate and light
up the phones. Furniture Wholesalers will miss him, and so will we.
Insect
>> Filthy federal real estate Some of the federal
government’s most visible properties, both abroad and at home,
including the Parliament building, are sitting on sites suspected of
being contaminated. The Canadian High Commission in New Delhi is especially
at risk, with drillings around it confirming the presence of PCBs, nickel
and zinc at levels above those deemed acceptable here. Embassies in
London, Paris, Tokyo and Washington were also considered at risk but
have been cleaned up. The government says it owns about 1,250 properties
that are contaminated, and it’s estimated the total clean-up cost
will reach about $2-billion.
