Toronto Book Fair

Well, they've done it again. It wasn't enough for them to rip off the Nuit Blanche from Montreal (via Paris), now Toronto is going to have a go at a salon du livre. As an alternative to the nearly defunct Book Expo Canada, a Toronto Book Fair has been proposed for 2-4 October 2009. This is, of course, nothing more than a salon du livre, the likes of which have existed in the francophone world for many decades (Montreal since 1978, and Paris since 1981).

According to Publishers Weekly, Book Expo Canada — also known as the Dullest Literary Event in the History of the World™ — is on its last legs, as most of the publishers and distributors, including HarperCollins, Random House, Penguin, Scholastic, H.B. Fenn and ‘a handful of other Canadian houses’, have all decided not to attend. In its place, Reed Exhibitions (who, incidentally, are also the people behind Publishers Weekly, the Salon du livre de Paris and Book Expo Canada) are going to try to put on an English-language salon du livre in Toronto.

As these events are wildly popular in the francophone world — the six-day event ($8 admission charge per day) in Montreal attracts about 125,000 visitors every year — and as Reed know how to put on such an event through their experience with the Salon du livre de Paris, I would expect them to do a good job with a similar event in Toronto, even if the concept of a salon du livre doesn't exist in the anglophone world and even if the demand for books is considerably greater in Paris than it is in Toronto.

All of this begs the question: why does Toronto keep copying everything done in Montreal and/or Paris? If Paris is a first-rate city, and Montreal following them in almost everything they do (see Vélib' v. Bixi for the latest example) makes us a second-rate city, does that make Toronto a third-rate city?

L'Histoire criminelle des anglo-saxons

New from the wonderfully zany world of Québécois publishing, we have L'histoire criminelle des anglo-saxons (literally, The Criminal History of the Anglo-Saxons) by a chap called Normand Rousseau.

Although best known as the publisher of dodgy new age books (as seen on her website), Louise Courteau has varied her output here with a violent, anti-English polemic. The description on the back cover reads as follows:

L'ethnie anglo-saxonne est née dans la violence des affrontements avec les Celtes et les Vikings.

Les Anglais ont torturé presque à plaisir l'Irlande pendant sept siècles la réduisant à la grande famine qui fit plus d'un million de morts. De plus, ils ont conquis par la force les Écossais et les Gallois qu'ils ont assimilés.

Les Anglo-Saxons ont été responsables des guerres de Cent ans et de Sept ans qui ont fait des milliers de morts.

Les Anglo-Saxons sont partis à la conquête de la terre tout entière pour fonder l'Empire britannique. En Australie, ils ont commis des génocides envers les Tasmaniens et les Aborigènes. En Nouvelle-Zélande, ils ont écrasé les Maoris et leur ont volé leur pays. En Inde, ils ont détruit l'économie d'un grand peuple, ont réprimé dans le sang la révolte des Cipayes et sont responsables du massacre d'Amritsar.

Les Anglo-Saxons sont responsables de la Traite des Noirs, de la déportation des Amérindiens et des Irlandais. Ils sont responsables des génocides des Beothuck de Terre-Neuve.

En Afrique, ils ont volé l'Afrique du Sud aux Boers, ont inventé les camps de concentration bien avant les nazis où 26 000 femmes et enfants sont morts; ils ont pillé l'or et les diamants de ce pays et pratiqué l'apartheid envers les Africains.

Les Anglo-Américains ont exterminé les Amérindiens, pratiqué l'esclavage des Noirs, volé la moitié du Mexique, ont agressé le Canada, Cuba, la France et l'Espagne.

Ils ont pratiqué la discrimination et la ségrégation envers les Noirs jusqu'au milieu du 20e siècle.

Ils ont été les premiers à utiliser la bombe atomique contre un autre pays et ils ont écrasé un petit peuple comme les Vietnamiens.

Les Anglo-Canadiens ont volé le Canada à la France, ont déporté les Acadiens, ont dépossédé les Amérindiens et écrasé les Métis. Mais ils n'ont pas réussi à assimiler les Canadiens-français, malgré tous leurs efforts.

Les Anglais ont inventé l'eugénisme et les Anglo-Américains l'ont mis en pratique, bien avant les nazis.

Les Anglo-Saxons ont imposé au quart de la planète leur langue, leur religion ainsi que leur culture par la force des armes, de l'économie et de la politique.

L'ethnie anglo-saxonne domine la planète depuis les deux derniers siècles et sa domination n'est pas finie. Ce livre la met devant ses crimes et apprend aux autres ethnies à bien la connaître et à s'en méfier.

Ce livre invite les Anglo-Saxons à réparer tous les crimes qu'ils ont commis depuis des siècles. La belle image qu'ils tentent de se donner ne doit pas nous faire illusion.

For those of you who don't read French, I've translated the best bits (my comments in parentheses):

• The Anglo-Saxon ethnicity was born of the violent clashes between Celts and Vikings.
• The English tortured the Irish and assimilated the Scots and the Welsh.
  
• The Anglo-Saxons were responible for the Hundred Years' War and the Seven Years' War, which led to thousands of deaths (yes, thousands!).
• The Anglo-Saxons are responsible for the slave trade (it's not like the French, Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch had anything to do with it...).
• They stole South Africa from the Boers and invented concentration camps well before the Nazis came up with the idea.
• They discriminated against Blacks until the mid-twenieth century (that never happened in Quebec, did it? And in France? Unthinkable! Impossible!).
• Anglo-Canadians stole Canada from the French (how can people that the author himself identifies as Canadians steal Canada? Only a clown would fail to recognise that Europeans collectively stole America from the Aboriginal populations.).
• The English invented eugenics and the Anglo-Americans put it into practice long before the Nazis got around to it.
• Through military, cultural and economic force, the Anglo-Saxons have imposed their language upon a quarter of the planet.
• The Anglo-Saxons have dominated the world for the past two centuries (obviously, the French were never in a position of dominance, right?).
  
• This book is an invitation to all Anglo-Saxons to repent for the crimes they've committed over the centuries.
  

Golly! I'm not sure if I should apologise for being Anglo-Saxon, or demand an apology from myself for the slave trade that brought my paternal ancestors over to this hemisphere in the first place. Skipping lightly over that conundrum, it has to be said that this is quite simply a brillant satirical book from an up-and-coming talent of the Quebec comedy circuit. It actually makes you proud to be Canadian, to be able to live in a country that supports the arts (as seen on the left-hand sidebar of her website, Louise Coutreau's publishing programme is subsidized by the governments of Quebec and Canada). And thanks to the first-rate system for new releases known as la grille d'office, virtually every bookshop in Quebec received at least one copy of this little gem, whether they requested it or not.

I invite all interested readers to go and have a laugh with Monsieur Rousseau at his upcoming stand-up gigs at the Salon du livre de Montréal on 22 and 23 November 2008. Sacré farceur ! Qu'est-ce qu'on rigole bien...

I'm back with scars to show

I haven't posted here in almost a month, but I have lots of good excuses:

1. I'm never sick, but was sick three times during the month of April. Feeling better now, fortunately.


2. Tax returns. Yes, tax returns plural. In Quebec you have to file a completely separate provincial return too. Killer.
   


3. I really enjoy listening to podcasts (MP3 over RSS), especially French and British ones, but my MiniDisc setup just hasn't been letting me enjoy them in the way I want to. I'm so tired of Sony and SonicStage and all that they've done to cripple the MiniDisc format. Consequently, I've been thinking about getting an MP3 player for a couple of years now. While I was ill and feeling depressed a couple of weeks ago, I finally caved in and bought my first iPod (6th generation iPod Classic, 160 GB), not because I think it's particularly hip or well designed, but because of the seamless podcast integration in iTunes. I can no longer deal with all of the complications of transferring files via SonicStage, nor the inconvenience of swapping MDs when I want to listen to different music or different podcasts. So I've been happily busying myself with adding podcast subscriptions and transferring all of my music. The thing is already half-full!
   


4. In turns out that in Quebec, if you don't give your landlord three months' notice that you're moving, your lease is automatically renewed for another year. I find it a bit odd to provide this kind of protection to property owners at the expense of poor, impoverished renters, given that this is supposed to be the paradise for progressive social policy (in North America at any rate). After all, in Manitoba there was always a form to sign every year, and none of this implied renewal business. Anyway, what I'm getting at is that my current lease expires on 31 July 2008, so I had until the end of this month to tell the landlord that I want out of this overpriced trou pourri that passes for an apartment. Consequently, I spent most of the past month desperately searching for something better, with the April 30th deadline hanging over me the whole time.
   
   I signed the lease on much better place last Tuesday, so I can finally breathe easy. I'll be moving from being right next to Université-de-Montréal Métro Station, to being right next to Mount Royal Train Station. I'll be a bit further away from downtown, but only a nine minute train ride from Gare Centrale, versus the 20 minutes it currently takes me to reach essentially the same destination on the Métro (including transfer from the Blue Line to the Orange Line). Technically speaking, my new apartment is not actually in Montreal proprement dit, but in the independent Town of Mount Royal which is located in the centre of the Island of Montreal. This is neat because Mount Royal was designed and built by the old Canadian Northern Railway, the same company that built the inland freshwater resort at Grand Beach in my home province of Manitoba, a favourite childhood destination of mine.


5. I'm now on Twitter (see sidebar for live updates).


6. The 2008 edition of the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival is happening this week, and I'm running the English-language section of the festival bookshop. Stress, stress, stress!!! Tomorrow we're bringing all of the stock downtown (several trips with the van) and setting up, then the festival runs from Wednesday to Sunday, and Monday we're returning the unsold stock to the publishers. Lots of twelve-hour days in perspective. On the bright side, I'm hoping to meet Nora Young, a favourite CBC personality and adolescent radio crush of mine, who will be hosting an event on Saturday night.
   

Don't expect too many posts anytime soon, as it won't be long until I start to stress about the move, and that should keep me occupied until well into July.

Damn You, Cineplex Entertainment (An ONEX Corporation)

So, according to Le Devoir, Cineplex Entertainment is blackmailing art house film distributors into helping kill off the network of independent salles parallèles cinemas in rural Quebec. Basically, because K-Films Amérique, a local distributor of foreign and domestic art house fare, has decided to show the forthcoming French film Un baiser s'il vous plaît (which, by the way, is supposed to be quite good) in salles parallèles in Rimouski, Victoriaville and Sept-Îles, in addition to Cineplex locations in Montreal and Quebec City, Cineplex has decided to pull the film. Never mind the fact that they were never going to show this film in those towns anyway (art house films weren't even being shown in towns like that at all until the salles parallèles came about), they just for whatever reason feel they should have exclusive, Quebec-wide rights to any film that they screen in Montreal, even when they themselves do not have any intention of presenting them across Quebec. In the past few months they've also pulled 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (last year's Palme d'or at Cannes), as well Up the Yangtze.

Cineplex, and the other mainstream commerical cinemas represented by the Association des propriétaires de salles de cinéma du Québec, claim that the salles parallèles represent unfair competition, because they are partially subsidised by the SODEC. But these are the same mainstream commercial cinemas that refuse to show art house films outside of the major metropolitan areas, and whose refusal to do so led to the creation of the salles parallèles in the first place! When it comes right down to it, the salles parallèles do $600,000 of business a year, versus $450,000,000 for commercial cinemas in Quebec. This competition argument hasn't got a leg to stand on. They just want to kill off all cinéma d'auteur so that the only option remaining for people is to go and see the same Hollywood rubbish they've been forcing down our throats since long before I was born. When I was just on the cusp of my twenties, I graduated from this to this, and there's no way I'm going back now!

What is wrong with this company, anyway? Notice how they renamed the Paramount Cinema in downtown Montreal the Scotia Bank Cinema? What has Scotia Bank got to do with cinema? No doubt this has more to do with Gerry being on the board of both Scotia Bank and Cineplex (via ONEX) than anything else. He may be a fellow Winnipegger and University of Manitioba old boy, but I'm afraid he's trying to do to the culture of cinema in this country what his wife is doing the culture of books.

Let's just boycott the whole thing, shall we? Independent cinemas like the Cinémathèque, the Globe Cinema and the Park Theatre in Winnipeg, as well as Ex-Centris, Cinéma du Parc, Cinéma Beaubien and the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal are definitely the way to go. Stay away from Chapters/Indigo while you're at it too.

By the way, ridiculous commercial practices such as this give rise to the following comments that find their way into Le Devoir

«Cela veut-il dire que c'est à Toronto qu'on décidera si le cinéma d'auteur pourra être vu en région au Québec?», dénonce M. Dussault.

«C'est Toronto qui applique sa loi, et c'est le public francophone qui écope», a tonné Michel Gagnon.

«Il faut que Québec s'en mêle pour remettre un peu d'ordre dans tout ça. Ce n'est pas Toronto qui doit décider de ce qui va se diffuser au Québec», ajoute M. Gagnon.

which in turn continues to give the rest of Canada (as represented by Toronto) a bad name in Quebec. Thanks a lot Gerry. Well done!

The Best Indie Record Store in Canada

CBC Radio 3 has initiated a contest to indentify Canada's Best Indie Record Store. My submission to the nomination committee went as follows:

Located at River & Osborne, the hipster equivalent of Portage & Main, Music Trader has got to be the best record store in Winnipeg. They have EVERYTHING (new & used, tons of indie), they host live, in-store performances of local and touring bands all the time, and they're open until midnight!

They've got knowledgeable staff, a kooky mascot and, of course, the famous wall of customer polaroids. Plus, their long 'bar' of listening stations in front of windows facing out onto Osbrone Street is perhaps the best spot in the city for people watching.

For a kid from the suburbs, the plan was simple. Listen to RadioSonic (the predecessor of Radio3 for you kids out there) on CBC Radio 2, then go to Music Trader and buy the records. What could be easier? My taste in music is due in large part to the existence of this store.

I've been in Montreal for about year and a half now, I haven't really found anything that compares, so I'll be curious to check out the recommendations posted here.

Music Trader
97 Osborne Street
Winnipeg

On that note, I await your recommendations for a good indie record store in Montreal, preferably one with a fun atmosphere and all the week's new releases.

By the way, we also have an annual contest to designate the best independent English-language bookstore in this country. But no one cares.

Things They Don't Got Here

Over the past few years, as I've extolled the virtues of Montreal while languishing in Winnipeg, exasperated interlocutors have often exlaimed 'what don't they have in Montreal?!'. Now that I've been here for a few months, I can start to answer that question. Rapid transit, film festivals, bike lanes and a general European feel are all well and good, but there are a few things missing:

1. Old Dutch Potato Chips. This is the obvious one. It's fairly well-known on the Prairies that when you move out East, you sacrifice easy access to perhaps the world's best crisps, made with loving care in Winnipeg and Calgary. When I was a lad my cousin moved to Ottawa and would always stock up on Old Dutch whenever she was back in Winnipeg, and I suspect I'll be no different. In all Canadian cities, especially in the big ones like Montreal, there are specialty food shops catering to ethnic groups from almost every country in the world, but nothing for us folks from the West. I can easily find obscure brands of Caribbean hot sauce, but no potato chips made two provinces over. Just another Canadian paradox.


2. Mandarin Oranges, a.k.a. Christmas Oranges. I don't what it's like in the rest country, but in Winnipeg, between November and January, the shops are full of those tasty little oranges imported from China, Japan and (possibly) Korea. Here, all you find are Clementine Oranges from Morocco, or clementines as they are known. Whenever I ask about mandarines, people either haven't heard of them or tell me they only come canned, not fresh. Clementines are apparently a variant of the Mandarin Orange, and people have told me that they're exactly the same and that my preference for Mandarins is purely psychological, but I'm not convinced. Although Mandarins are everywhere in Winnipeg at this time of year, you can still find Clementines here and there. I remember trying some a few years back and it just wasn't the same. My local open air fruit market has temporarily turned into a Christmas tree stand for a few weeks, and my local specialty fruit vendor has no Manadrins, so I'll be out at the giant, year-round open air market at Jean-Talon to see if I can find some Mandarins. If they don't got'em, no one does, and I'll have to give in to this Clementine business. Until then, there's still hope.


3. 4-litre jugs of milk. You simply cannot purchase them here. It might even be an environmental regulation. You can get one and two litre cartons like everywhere else in North America, but no plastic 4-litre jugs. Instead, you buy your four litres of milk in bags. I seem to recall there being bags of milk in Winnipeg when I was really young, but they have not been around since I've been old enough to buy milk (what is the legal age for that here, by the way?). For a while I was buying two-litre cartons while wondering what one would do with one of these bags, but I've since figured out that you have to buy a separate jug for the bag. Except the bags are huge and the jugs are tiny. It turns out that each bag contains three smaller bags, each one containing 1 1/3 litres of milk. Anyway, it's been a journey of dairy discovery, but everything is now under control.


4. Winter. They don't seem to have that here. Everyone's telling me that it's not usually like this, but I think they're having me on. There is simply no winter here. The first of December is only a few hours away, and today's high temperature at noon was 17°C. Contrast that with Winnipeg where it was -17°C at the same hour. Most people in this country, suffering as they do from the Northern Latitudes, Southern Attitudes syndrome, would be thrilled to move to a winter climate that is a full 34 degrees celsius warmer, but I am one of the few Canadians who actually like winter. What I can't deal with is the constant rain that has accompanied this mild weather. Worse than bloody Vancouver! I need sunshine. It can be 30°C or -30°C (as it often is over the course of the year in Winnipeg), I don't care as long as the sun is shining. Since I moved here I've heard that Winnipeg has more sunny days than most, if not all, other Canadian cities. Now you tell me...

Notwithstanding, I am still thrilled to be here; all of the postive aspects of life here more than counterbalance the few lacunes outlined above.

From Winnipeg to Montreal in Three Months Flat

Well, here we are once again. After an absence of almost four months, I've decided to come back and do some blogging again. While I wasn't blogging I was moving my life 2000km east, and am now comfortably installed in Montreal, the land of film festivals, bike lanes, bookshops and rapid transit. Having been born and raised in Winnipeg, it was not an easy decision to leave, but after nearly 25 years I was ready to try something new. Since my first visit in 1999, I always thought in the back of my mind that I might want to try and make a go of it out here, and now seemed as good a time as any. Better to have a go now while I'm still young. If I don't like it after five years, I can always go back (or move on), and I still won't even be 30 years old.

In the coming days, weeks and months I'll be writing quite a bit about what it's like living here, especially about how it differs from life back home (as I still refer to it... for now). At this point, it's officially the longest time in my life that I have ever spent away from Winnipeg. In 2001 I did a 13-week internship with the Government of Quebec in Quebec City, but it's now over 14 weeks since I moved here.

Another young Winnipegger flees the city of his birth. It's that same, depressing, oft-repeated scenario, but at least I didn't move to Calgary or Toronto...

Les citations du jour 2006-08-05

Parmi les commentaires suscités par ce billet de blog au sujet de la qualité du français au Québec, retenons les phrases suivantes :

• Au Québec, parler un français hexagonal, digne d'une page éditoriale du Monde Diplomatique, c'est s'exposer dangereusement à de lourdes représailles qui peuvent aller jusqu'aux coups.[Permalien]

• Je me demande bien sur quoi, nous les québécois francophones, appuyons notre fierté nationaliste alors que nos universitaires peinent souvent à former des phrases cohérentes et alors que des soubrettes françaises expriment distinctement leurs idées avec des phrases dignes d'une langue littéraire....[Permalien]

• Regardez et écoutez nos bons artistes canadiens français québécois qui sont supposés être les haut-parleurs de notre langue:
  Star academie, Excès de stars, Elvis story, Les Boys, Showtime, et maintenant Bon Cop Bad Cop. Etc. Etc...
  Ils ont des leçons à nous donner? C'est vrai, c'est de la faute du fédéral et du Canada anglais...[Permalien]

• Les universités ont failli aussi dans cette tâche en baissant les bras...Quand l'Université Laval s'adresse à mes jeunes "Chers gradués" et"débutez le questionnaire..."et quand à la maïtrise l'élève demande au prof:"on les apprend-tu toutes les poèmes?" sans que le professeur ne bronche,aussi bien dire que le ver est dans le fruit...et là,je ne vous fais pas rapport de ce que j'entends dans le chantier de construction à deux rues d'ici..Pour moi,cette partie est perdue,mais entre-temps,ça peut amuser réviseurs linguistiques,traducteurs et tutti quanti...[Permalien]

Je vous recommande fortement la lecture du billet d'origine et de sa suite, ainsi que les autres commentaires qui s'y trouvent, pour retrouver l'intégralité contextuelle des propos cités ci-haut.

Après les acquis de la révolution tranquille, il me semble que c'est maintenant la qualité du français qui doit être le grand enjeu linguistique au Québec. Récemment, j'ai fait remarquer l'incongruité de la phrase suivante : SÉPARONS NOUS DES TETE CARRER ET DES LIBERAL ET VIVE LE BLOC QUÉBECOIS (sic). C'était plus facile de m'insulter que de reconnaître que ce jeune revendiquait un état francophone souverain dans un français pourri, et qu'il existe un vrai problème au Québec. Le combat pour un français de qualité est loin d'être gagné.

Vélo-Cité

Do you see what happens when you try to ride your bicycle in this city? What a disgrace. I ride and walk everywhere in this city and have also been harassed by cops and nearly killed by motorists on a regular basis. Have you noticed how this doesn't happen in real cities like Montreal, or even in cities that have essentially the same population as Winnipeg like Quebec City (check out their amazing network of cycling paths and cycling lanes). Not to mention the cyclist's paradise that is the European city.

Further rides are planned for June 30, July 28, August 25, Sept 29 and October 27.

Cyclistes du monde, unissez-vous...

Update: Here are some additional photos from yesterday.

Update n°2: More photos, and also video. Plus a most instructive first-hand account and discussion on Tear It Down. Also, you can read what this poor fellow has to say over here.

Canadian Provincial Cabinet Sworn In

Without making a qualitative judgement one way or the other, the new Harper cabinet seems rather provincial, doesn't it? Provincial in two ways.

Provincial (adj.): of or concerning the regions outside major urban centres. There are only three such centres in Canada, and there is no minister in the new cabinet who was elected in either Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver under the Conservative banner.

Also, using the word in the context of the Canadian federation, many of the new ministers have formerly been provincial cabinet ministers or have worked in provincial government. My list includes:

Jim Flaherty (Ontario)
Vic Toews (Manitoba)
John Baird (Ontario)
Tony Clement (Ontario)
Stockwell Day (Alberta)
Loyola Hearn (Newfoundland & Labrador)
Lawrence Cannon (Quebec) as ministers,

and

Rona Ambrose (Alberta)
Josée Verner (Quebec) as having worked in or for provincial governments.

Hopefully this will reduce the squabbling between the two different levels of government that sometimes makes us wish a for a more centralised state (until we come back to our senses of course).

Winnipeg Wants In

Forget about The West Wants In. Winnipeg Wants In. For as long as I've been old enough to follow politics, the Liberals were never stingy on cabinet seats for Winnipeg. You get accustomed to a certain level of representation, y'know? Well here we are. Sure, only 35% of us voted Conservative, but they still got the plurality of seats in Winnipeg (tied with the NDP). I've never seen that happen before. Granted, my political memories go back only as far as 1993, but still, it's noteworthy. What do we get in return from Stephen Harper? Zero cabinet seats. Outrageous!

Business as Usual in Ottawa

New Conservative government sworn in today:

Liberal David Emerson crosses the floor to join the Conservatives as a minister, before the first meeting of parliament. In other words, he won't even sit once in the house for the party for which he was elected in this parilament.

Unelected Michael Fortier who, admittedly, seems like quite a good sort, is appointed to the senate and joins the cabinet.

I'm sure they'll put Robert Nicholson, minister for Democratic Reform, on the case.