Quote of the week:

"Holy cow! That's cool." - William "Captain Kirk" Shatner, witnessing the launch of SpaceShipOne, the first private aircraft to reach space, in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Tuesday.

Boring art plagues boneyard

At a place like the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery, 1,000 new tombstones go up a year, with about 100 of those being of the big budget kind that can go for $10,000 to $30,000. What has irked some public art lovers is that the cemetery salesmen have had an exclusive deal with Lacroix Granite since 1995, meaning that although grieving families can hire the artist of their choice, cemetery staff are required to only inform them of the Lacroix option. Jan Stohl, creator of the dazzling Robert Bourassa monument, received a letter from Jean Drapeau's widow in 1999 complaining that she would have preferred he create a monument for the ex-mayor but that cemetery staff didn't provide his coordinates. "So Drapeau got a black cubic tombstone which wasn't up to the measure of the man," says Stohl.

The concerns are shared by Alain Tremblay, who runs the Écomusée de l'au-delà, which aims to preserve the beauty at the boneyard. Tremblay wants the cemetery to stop pushing Lacroix Granite and make people aware of other options.

"In the future they'll be putting in tens of thousands of new monuments. There needs to be a competition among artists. This exclusive agreement isn't in the best interest of heritage," says Tremblay. "These people spend a lot of money for very boring monuments. Everything they're adding now is so dull and completely insignificant. The monuments are made before the death. They just put a name on them so there's no personalization." » Kristian Gravenor

Refugee vote ignored

As a 17-year-old refugee from Pakistan, Sadaf Ali Khan is not allowed to vote in the coming federal elections. Even if she was, she would have no idea who to vote for. None of the candidates have come forward to help prevent her Shia Muslim family from being deported back to Karachi, Pakistan, a city where sectarian violence against Shia Muslims is at its highest in two decades, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. In May alone, two suicide bombings of Shia mosques and numerous other attacks left over 50 dead, with hundreds more injured in her hometown. As Canadians wake up to election news June 29, Khan, along with her sister, two brothers, mother and father, may be on a plane to the United States, then Karachi.

In Pakistan, violence and harassment prevented the children from attending school or the mosque for months on end, says Khan. Yet the family's refugee claim was refused because Khan's father, Naeem, was not active in the Shia community and therefore not considered susceptible to sectarian violence. "It is very surprising that immigration people here think they have better insight into the situation than human rights groups," says David Chalk, the family's lawyer.

Frustrated by political indifference, Khan is using the election to shore up support. "[Our] Liberal candidate, Stéphane Dion, said it's the dream of a million people to become Canadian, but that is not my dream," she says. "My dream is to save our lives. If they want our community to vote for them, they need to help us out." » Shannon Devine

Homeless animals available

Just in time for Montreal's annual July 1 moving day insanity - consistently the busiest time of year for local animal shelters struggling to find homes for the thousands of pets abandoned each year on this day - comes The Dog Days of Summer, a two-day mega animal adoption event taking place at Bourgeau Park in Pointe Claire Village this weekend, June 26 and 27, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Should you be getting ready to move and are feeling left out because you don't have your own loving pet to callously leave behind, here's a golden opportunity to pick one up in time for the big day. Over 14 shelters, adoption agencies and animal welfare societies have stopped bickering among themselves long enough to sponsor what may well end up being the largest event of its kind in Quebec.

"Most of the animals up for adoption will be dogs and cats, but we'll have everything from guinea pigs to horses there as well," says Kelly Wilkie of the Animal Rescue Network, one of the groups participating in the event. "Also, we'll have animal trainers on hand to give people information and we'll be serving refreshments." All proceeds will go to various animal welfare groups.

Only animals that have been spayed or neutered will be up for adoption, partially in the effort to prevent unsavoury puppy mill owners, always happy to pick up an inexpensive new purebred to help replenish their inventories, from attending. Call 695-9412 for more information. » Chris Barry

REAR-VIEW MIRROR

16 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK
June 23 - July 7, 1988

On the cover: Jazz Fest stalwart Pat Metheny, who will be attending his eighth (although he admits to losing count). Montreal, he says, is "one of my favourite towns in the world, and I think that its jazz festival is universally recognized as the premier jazz festival in the world. Certainly in North America there's nothing close to it."

• Critics contend that the province will actually entrench religious instruction in schools with its reorganization of the educational system along linguistic lines.

• Despite what she describes as Kevin Costner's whining, Susan Sarandon's ridiculous and/or ugly costumes and the seemingly meaningless title of Bull Durham, reviewer and former Expos bat-girl wannabe Nancy Klein writes that even if the movie "isn't a grand-slam home run, it's still a solid double."

• Good acting, score, lighting and set design can't save Whatever Happened to "Peace and Love", a musical set in the '60s, from what reviewer Mary J. Martin says is "dialogue that writes itself, hinged as it is on every '60s cliché you've ever laid ears on, man."

Angel >> Voting Last weekend, municipalities around the province voted on the future of their merged municipalities, with a majority of Montreal suburbs choosing to reclaim their independence, for good or ill. The vote was the one and only time hundreds of thousands of citizens of merged municipalities actually had a choice in the matter, thanks to the PQ's undemocratic, bigger-is-better legislation railroading. Which brings us to next Monday's federal election. The prospect of a Harper government is a creepy possibility and the only thing standing between it and reality is a strong contrarian voter turnout. And while not voting may be considered a political act itself, a Canada governed by the slash-and-burn Harperites probably isn't the kind many of us would like to live in.
Insect >> CSIS's ambivalence to torture Ward Elcock, Canada's former top spy, told the Arar inquiry commission this week that Canada probably uses information obtained under torture supplied by other countries. Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen deported to his native Syria in September 2002 and jailed there for 10 months as a suspected terrorist, says he was tortured repeatedly. So was the person who fingered him. Information obtained by torture is known to be dubious as victims often tell their captors what they want to hear in order to ease their suffering - and although Elcock said there are many safeguards in their system of corroboration of evidence, he did not say whether he believed Syria routinely tortures its prisoners.