The Quebec government is destroying our universities

 

The campus at McGill University, Montreal, 1906

One day last fall, in 2023, Premier Legault of Quebec walked out of his Montreal office, which is across the street from the Roddick Gates entrance to McGill University, and decided, as he described it at the time, that he could hear too much English being spoken and, he claimed, this was to the detriment of the French language, and therefore it had to end. And who did he blame for this linguistic pollution? He blamed out-of-province and foreign students although he probably would have liked to have included all English-speaking Quebecers. This was the beginning of the Quebec government's attempt to destroy English language university education in Montreal and Quebec. 

Here is the scenario we were presented with by Premier Legault justifying cutting provincial funding and doubling tuition for out-of-province students at the three English-language universities in Quebec, Bishops University, Concordia University, and McGill University. The money from this drop in funding would go to French-language universities; the three English-language universities would now subsidize the French universities; however, Bishops was later exempted from this attack on English universities. Legault made the situation even worse; out-of-province students would now have to pay a higher tuition fee than they were currently paying (it was doubled but a few months later McGill and Concordia announced they would will subsidize students affected by this) and these students would also have to take French language courses that would add a semester to their studies, courses that are possibly beyond the ability of most Francophone students. Almost immediately applications to study at McGill and Concordia began to fall, the three English-language universities are now subsidizing French-language universities. As well, Moody's downgraded the credit rating of both universities based on Legault's pronouncement.

The gates to McGill University, McGill College Ave, August 25, 1869.

Of course, many of us in the English-language community are in shock over this, it feels like being stabbed in the heart; it is the wilful destruction of what has taken over two hundred years of work, dedication, and commitment to build. It is the legislated cancelling of McGill University and Concordia University, two of our most important institutions. These universities define our community but they have also been a welcoming place of learning for the majority French language community and they have helped generations of immigrants get ahead in Quebec. And it doesn't matter to Legault that McGill is one of three internationally recognized Canadian universities of excellence, the two others are the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto, or that McGill is a 203 year old institution with a reputation for excellence in learning, teaching, and research. Or that McGill is the equivalent of a head office of a prestigious company and brings more revenue to Quebec than it costs to have it here. As for the threat to the French language, based on demography, this is bogus and it's an excuse to attack the English-speaking community; compare the linguistic make up of Montreal or the Province of Quebec in 1976, when the Parti Quebecois was first elected to office with today, and it is obvious that the French language in Quebec is flourishing, and in all respects English is declining. All of Quebec, French and English speaking people, should be proud of McGill for its long history and international reputation; instead, Premier Legault and his cohort see McGill as a bastion of the English community even though about 25% of McGill students are Francophone. There is no reasoning with irrationality, ethnocentricity, and bigotry; no matter what concessions and compromises we make, Legault and his cohort are intransigent about their disdain for anyone who is not Francophone, white, and culturally Roman Catholic.

While Premier Legault blamed foreign students for the dystopian crime of speaking English in public, what he was also attacking was the very existence of McGill University and Concordia University and English-language higher education in Quebec. Here is a hypothetical (but equivalent) situation to what is happening to McGill University, it would be if the premier of British Columbia visited the Vancouver UBC campus and, apparently, just on a whim, announced that he was cutting funding for the University of British Columbia because the student body is more than half Canadian born Asians and 25% of the student body are foreign students; all of Canada would be appalled by this, the situation would be denounced, Federal politicians would be shocked and demand redress; Justin Trudeau would be apoplectic. What we have in Quebec is a racist attack on the English language community, an attack on both McGill and Concordia; it is an attack on our community's history and presence in Quebec. It is an attack on higher education. What Legault wants is a white French speaking province of Quebec that is ethnocentric and isolated from the outside world; if you aren't white and pure laine, then you are not a part of the Quebec nation, they want you gone. But since this atrocity is happening in Quebec, and it is against our English-language community, it is greeted with silence and even applause by our Federal politicians. From them we hear absolutely nothing, it is total silence, they want the French vote in Quebec no matter that it is destroying our community.

Redpath Museum on the McGill Campus, Montréal, QC, circa 1893

And so, we see that the government of Quebec has targeted our institutions, our language, and our history;  Premier Legault's plan is the elimination of the English language in Quebec, whether it is English language signage, all evidence of our extensive historical role in Quebec, or our hospitals and institutions that the English-speaking community founded, or speaking English on the street or, inevitably, speaking English or any language other than French in the privacy of one's home. This is a very dark, dystopian, and shameful period in Quebec and Canadian history.

The wilful destruction of an institution of excellence, based on hate and hubris, is evil. 

Addenda: enrollment is declining at Concordia University due to Legault's defunding English-language universities in Montreal. 29 August 2024.

Read this re McGill's "sustained excellence", https://reporter.mcgill.ca/sustained-excellence-mcgill-tops-macleans-rankings-again/

The Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad

 

I highly recommend Gad Saad's The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense (Regnery Publishing, Washington, DC, 2020). It’s an excellent book that deals with revealing truth and common sense in a world corrupted by a progressive woke ideology. Towards the end of the book Professor Saad, who teaches at Concordia University in Montreal, writes,

Everybody has a voice. Activate your sense of personal responsibility. You have agency. Participate. Do not be a bystander as truth, reason, and logic call out for your help. Do not subcontract your voice to others. Do not self-censor. You and your children have a stake in the outcome of this battle, so don't be afraid to speak up. Do not succumb to the Tragedy of the Commons (as popularized by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968), in this case a tragedy of collective inaction. (p. 172)

A walk in Mount Royal Cemetery, 28 August 2010

A copy of the Roddick Gates main entrance to McGill University, 
here it is a site for the graves of the prominent Redpath and Roddick families.

It was 28 August 2010; a summer day for a walk at historic Mount Royal Cemetery located in the center of Montreal, on Mount Royal, beside Cote des Neiges Cemetery.

Grave of Sir Alexander Galt, prime minister of Canada

The Molson mausoleum at Mount Royal Cemetery

View of the Molson mausoleum

 

The fallen apples

Right now, in the garden, there are so many apples on the ground that it smells like apple cider, rotting fallen apples, so many I no longer pick them up, I kick them into the hostas, the hydrangeas, the beds of flowers, these fallen apples that fill the air with their smell, their perfume, these green and red apples visited by wasps, half eaten by squirrels, a ground hog passing through the garden, and the sound of heat bugs on a hot August day with their loud call from wherever they may be.               

Sailing by Habitat 67 on 17 August 2017

 

Tony, Knife Sharpening

First you hear the bell ringing, then you see Tony's knife sharpening truck passing by your home. If you have knives, garden shears, or a lawn mower that needs to be sharpened, just wave to Tony and he'll stop his truck at your door and in a few minutes whatever you've had sharpened will be ready to go!

Psyche's Night Journey, July 2018

 

2012

1.

 

From the bottom of a garbage can in the kitchen

honeybees fly out as a great black cloud,

I ran to the living room and then closed myself in the sun porch.

A dog, with a black face, joined me.

“They stung my face,” he complains.

Others join us and somehow we get rid of the bees.

Meanwhile, someone is sitting on the stairs outside by a pool in the garden.

  

2.

 

There are three of us sky diving,

holding hands forming a circle.

We are not falling, instead

we are ascending the sky.

As we rise higher, the physical body  

feels not only healed, but ecstatic

in freedom from earth and an aging body:

I did not want to return to the life

I am living, I did not want to return

to the old life. I weep as I feel the joy of freedom.

 

3.

 

Former Prime Minister Chretien tells me

he’ll do what he can for us

to hang onto the building,

but there are other people who want it.

Also he wants me to lose weight, improve my health.

 

4.

 

In a basement, flooded with two or three feet of water,

big shits like loaves of bread

float in the water and I try to break them into slices

with a paddle so that when my wife arrives,

walking in the water, she won’t step on the shit.

I try to stuff the shit down a drain

 

5.

 

My son tells me he wants me as a “friend”.

I reply, “I am your father, not a friend;

a father is better; I love you as a father,

a friend is less than a father.”

  

6.

 

The key is broken to the old Volkswagen,

but it still starts the car. Returning home,

the car’s gear shift comes off in my hand and trying to repair it,

I crawl into the car’s body and discover the car is a wooden vessel,

a web of slats covered with plywood, almost paper thin

for lightness. I arrive at Oxford Avenue where I grew up;

at the front door a man’s corpse covered with a white sheet

sits in an upright position. When I return that evening he is gone

and I am relieved: But who was this corpse?

Someone I have forgotten or never knew,

the white sheet a shroud, like a body

found in the frozen north—one of Franklin’s crew—

preserved by the cold, lips pulled back in the permanent

grin of the dead, like a wolf’s bared yellow teeth.

 

7. Five Black Horses

 

It was a demonstration of something, the severed

horse’s head on a chair and the four black horses

standing facing the audience. Behind the middle horse

a man took a hammer and drove a bolt

into the horse’s neck; at first, the horse stood as before,

we were all calm, including the horses,

and then the animal fell to the floor.

The others were to follow.

 

8.

 

I am told my father has just died.

He was alive all the years

I thought he was dead.

For fifty years I grieved

and regretted his death.

Now, again, I have missed him.

 

9.

 

A cat has been a nuisance,

the landlord next door is dealing with it.

He has a big knife and has cut off the cat’s paws,

and then cut further up the leg.

Someone holds the cat for him.

He may even have skinned the cat,

and planned to keep it alive to suffer.

We are in his car and I am pleading with him

to kill the cat, pleading kill the cat, end his suffering.

His daughter is also pleading with him to kill the cat,

“Daddy, please kill the cat. Please, please kill the cat.”

 

10.

 

I am walking along a street of ice and snow.

I stop and pay for a newspaper with tokens from the casino.

Then I am in a dentist’s office full of Americans,

all smiling and young, each in a separate cubicle.

The dentists in their white jackets

are all eager to work, they ignore  

a small black dog trying to get into the building.

I open a door for the dog and a stag is there,

I try to hold him back, but he’s large

and incredibly strong as he breaks through the door.

Now he’s in the building, in the hallway, in the room.

 

11.

 

A man is trying to get into a house

through an attic window,

the attic full of old furniture,

paintings, books, and old cardboard boxes

with writing in black felt pen on them.

Two children run down the stairs

to escape this man standing on a ladder

at the attic window. Outside, in a barren field,

 two other men lean over a dead animal,

behind them are cattle they killed

covered with six inches of soil;

“oh no,” they say when a grey horse,

they thought dead, rises up on its front legs.

 

Our politicians don’t care

2022

Justin Trudeau claims that Canada is in great shape and he and his team are doing a great job running the country. Justin doesn't mention the many homeless people living in tents, shacks, or in their cars, they’re everywhere; or that young educated Canadians are the first generation who will never be able to own a house and can barely afford to pay inflated rents common in cities and towns; or that over 20% of Canadians are dependent on food banks because groceries are so expensive; or that many people live in fear of getting sick because they have no family doctor and will never have a family doctor. It wasn't this way just ten years ago, before Justin Trudeau became prime minister; he has made the country unrecognizable to all of us who were once proud of being Canadians. He is a man who has no interest or belief in civil liberties in this country.

We know that Justin Trudeau doesn't care about civil liberties; just remember his use of the Emergency Act regarding the freedom convoy. As well, he and his cohort have allowed, condoned, and promoted the CAQ government in Quebec to get away with the abnegation of civil liberties, all of it legislated in Bill 96, against the English-speaking community in Quebec; the federal Liberals have even included Bill 96 in the federal Official Languages Act (2022). See no evil and hear no evil is their approach to this situation. Justin Trudeau, and the other federal party leaders, should have had the integrity to oppose Bill 96, but none of them said a word, they supported Bill 96.                                   

Premier Legault and his CAQ party have attacked McGill University, one of Canada's greatest universities, and they've attacked Concordia University, and they would like to see both universities closed down; that is their intention even though they might deny it. Their intention and objective is to destroy the English-speaking community.

The latest aggression against the English-speaking community is an assault on health care for English-speaking Quebecers; they have directed health care workers not to speak English with patients who do not have an eligibility certificate to receive health care in English; however, these eligibility certificates don't exist. Just imagine, this is happening in Canada. I would advise anyone thinking of investing in Quebec or relocating here to think twice, your civil liberties will be annulled, you will face a provincial bureaucracy that will invade every aspect of your business, and you will be taxed to death. 

The following is especially egregious and Orwellian: under Bill 96 the government can enter the premises of a business, with no warrant, at any time of day or night, to see if their computers contain any language other than French. This is bad enough but it is also possible that these government agents, the Language Police, will read and copy private documents on these computers and what will they do with this private information? Is this why Walmart bailed from investing in the province, after building but never opening a $100M warehouse? There are other explanations but I tend towards Walmart wanting to avoid the inevitable invasion of their privacy in terms of operating their business.

Justin and his cohort want the French vote in Quebec and he has condoned and promoted the loss of civil liberties in order to get the French vote. Now read this:

Section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects against all forms of unreasonable search and seizure. But for the notwithstanding clause, if a person believed that the Office had violated this fundamental democratic right against State intrusion, there would be legal protections. Under Bill 96, however, there would be no such right. Worse, the Bill does not create a requirement of reasonable grounds, or even reasonable suspicion. There is no requirement for prior judicial authorization of any kind, such as a warrant. And so, there would be no grounds whatsoever to contest what would otherwise be an unlawful search and seizure if the Bill as tabled in First Reading is passed.

                                                        --Pearl Eliadis, Associate Professor, 

                                                       Faculty of Law, McGill University

                                                       "Pearl Eliadis on the Overreach of Bill 96"

There is a cost to whatever Justin Trudeau does, a significant part of the cost is a denial of our individual and collective freedom. What I have said here is what the majority of English-speaking Quebecers think and feel about being abandoned and betrayed by our provincial and federal political parties. They have all sold us out; none of them care about civil liberties. How did we end up in such a situation? How did civil liberties end up meaning so little in Canada? 

Note: this information was correct at the time of writing; it is possible that some details may have since changed. The main thing here is the abnegation of civil liberties in Canada.

AI on the future of poetry

 

July 2021, beebalm 

Stephen Morrissey: Is there a future for poetry?

ChatGPT: Absolutely, poetry has a bright future. Here are a few reasons why:

1. Digital Platforms: Social media and digital platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr have given poets new ways to share their work and reach wider audiences. This accessibility has democratized poetry, allowing more voices to be heard.

2. Diverse Voices: There is a growing appreciation for diverse voices and perspectives in poetry. Poets from various backgrounds, cultures, and experiences are gaining recognition, enriching the literary landscape.

3. Spoken Word and Slam Poetry: These forms of poetry are thriving, particularly among younger generations. They offer dynamic, performance-based experiences that resonate with live audiences and often address contemporary social and political issues.

4. Educational Emphasis: Poetry is increasingly being integrated into educational curricula, encouraging young people to engage with it creatively and critically.

5. Collaborations and Interdisciplinary Projects: Poets are collaborating with artists from other disciplines, such as musicians, visual artists, and filmmakers, to create multimedia works that push the boundaries of traditional poetry.

6. Publishing Opportunities: There are more opportunities for poets to publish their work through independent presses, self-publishing, and online journals.

7. Cultural Relevance: Poetry continues to be a powerful tool for social commentary and personal expression, making it relevant in times of social change and upheaval.

In essence, poetry is evolving and adapting to contemporary society, ensuring its ongoing relevance and appeal.


Stephen Morrissey: That's interesting, maybe we should be more optimistic about the future of poetry.


ChatGPT: Absolutely! Optimism about the future of poetry is well-founded. Here are a few more reasons to feel hopeful:

1. Community and Connection: Poetry fosters a sense of community and connection among readers and writers. Poetry readings, workshops, and festivals provide spaces for people to come together and share their love for the art form.

2. Therapeutic Value: Poetry is increasingly being recognized for its therapeutic benefits. Writing and reading poetry can be a powerful means of processing emotions, dealing with trauma, and promoting mental well-being.

3. Innovation and Experimentation: Poets are continually experimenting with form, language, and medium. This innovation keeps the art form fresh and exciting, attracting new audiences.

4. Recognition and Awards: Prestigious awards and recognitions for poets, such as the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and international prizes, highlight the significance of poetry in the literary world.

5. Integration with Technology: Advances in technology, such as virtual reality and augmented reality, offer new ways to experience poetry. Interactive and immersive poetic experiences can attract tech-savvy audiences.

6. Global Reach: The internet has made it possible for poets to reach global audiences. Translations and online platforms allow poetry to transcend linguistic and geographic barriers, fostering cross-cultural appreciation.

7. Environmental and Social Advocacy: Many contemporary poets use their work to address pressing issues such as climate change, social justice, and human rights. This advocacy through poetry can inspire action and awareness.

By embracing these developments, poetry can continue to grow and thrive, resonating with people of all ages and backgrounds.

After the storm

Last Friday we had over 160 mm (over six inches) of rain and very strong winds, it was the remains of tropical storm Debby; over 250K people lost their electricity. I thought there was very little damage but today I am hearing about many flooded basements (including in this area where we had many basements flooded just last summer), washed out roads, and people still without electricity. I have also heard that back water valves sometimes don't work, flimsy plastic or metal valves can't stop a surge of water from the city's sewer system. So, this seems to be the face of the future, flooded basements every summer and the City of Montreal doing nothing substantial about it. Here is the garden the day after the storm.

        

Bee balm

Hostas

"Age" by Robert Creeley

 

Most explicit—
the sense of trap

as a narrowing
cone one's got

stuck into and
any movement

forward simply
wedges once more—

but where
or quite when,

even with whom,
since now there is no one

quite with you—Quite? Quiet?
English expression: Quait?

Language of singular
impedance? A dance? An

involuntary gesture to
others not there? What's

wrong here? How
reach out to the

other side all
others live on as

now you see the
two doctors, behind

you, in mind's eye,
probe into your anus,

or ass, or bottom,
behind you, the roto-

rooter-like device
sees all up, concludes

"like a worn-out inner tube,"
"old," prose prolapsed, person's

problems won't do, must
cut into, cut out . . .

The world is a round but
diminishing ball, a spherical

ice cube, a dusty
joke, a fading,

faint echo of its
former self but remembers,

sometimes, its past, sees
friends, places, reflections,

talks to itself in a fond,
judgemental murmur,

alone at last.
I stood so close

to you I could have
reached out and

touched you just
as you turned

over and began to
snore not unattractively,

no, never less than
attractively, my love,

my love—but in this
curiously glowing dark, this

finite emptiness, you, you, you
are crucial, hear the

whimpering back of
the talk, the approaching

fears when I may
cease to be me, all

lost or rather lumped
here in a retrograded,

dislocating, imploding
self, a uselessness

talks, even if finally to no one,
talks and talks.