22:47 on 2012/07/13 Reply  

• erydan 01:05 on 2012/07/14 Permalink

  Yes, yes, yes. We hate Tremblay, we have always hated Tremblay. But, like Charest, he is the only VIABLE option we have besides the crazies.

  So, only 1/3 of the 1/3 of people who vote voted for him, thank god for them.

• Matt 03:50 on 2012/07/14 Permalink

  I love receiving the ballot on election day and voting for the random party I know nothing about, just because voting for the main candidates would cause me to vomit all over.

• Anto 08:15 on 2012/07/14 Permalink

  @erydan: Why are the other candidates crazies, and why is Tremblay viable?

• Kate 10:06 on 2012/07/14 Permalink

  It’s a good question. So many of Tremblay’s sidekicks have gone down that even if he himself is clean, the mere fact that he chose those people, and either didn’t know what they were doing or looked the other way, is a condemnation in itself.

  But I don’t think hating Tremblay is a political force and that may be bad news for his opponents. Nobody loves him, but nobody hates him either. So choosing not to vote for him has to be on more intellectual grounds, because you don’t like the track record of his administration or because you find its history of corruption is an insult. And intellectual reasons don’t propel feet to the ballot box like love or hate do.

• Kevin 13:07 on 2012/07/14 Permalink

  @Anto
  Bergeron thinks 9/11 was an inside job, and that no plane ever hit the Pentagon..
  Harel just thinks that after creating one island one city she should be allowed to run it.

• Kate 13:17 on 2012/07/14 Permalink

  Kevin, how much does Bergeron insist on this 9/11 stuff? Is it important to him, or is it something he riffed during one interview that has come back to haunt him?

• david m 14:07 on 2012/07/14 Permalink

  yeah, it’s getting to be so that you can’t even talk with an anglophone about politics anymore, they’re just so disconnected from montreal’s reality. they all live in places you need a car, so they’re insanely pro-car. there’s no buy-in, so there’s a ferocious opposition to large scale projects in the central city (like tramways). they consume anglophone media, so they basically don’t believe that a city can be well-run in quebec. this bergeron nonsense about sept 11th has nothing to do with anything, it’s a way of marginalizing the guy without engaging with his ideas. in some dream eventuality, projet montréal will end up sweeping the neighborhoods east and south of westmount, and brutally punishing the fools in the western portion of the island, parking meters on all their streets, closing the ville-marie, the works.

• Ian 15:36 on 2012/07/14 Permalink

  I’d like to disagree with you but I work in NDG, most of my co-workers are West Island, Laval, or Hudson/ St. Lazare Anglos… and boy, are they ever out of it. Right wing, apathetic, distrustful… It’s a real shame that CTV and the Gazette are the 2 big Anglo news sources because they’re 3rd rate at best. The Anglo media in the ROC rarely reports on QC issues and when they do they usually got ot “respected Anglo journalists” which means people who would normally work here for CTV or the Gazette, so that’s no help either. My experience of Anglo culture is quite different, but I live in the Plateau and the Anglos here aren’t like that, but most of us are bilingual so we read La Presse or Le Devoir. I’m really saddened to say that this whole carré rouge thing has shown me that for the msot part, Anglos really do live up to all the negative stereotypes Francophones lay at our doorstep, at least politically. I’m pretty embarrassed, to tell the truth. I work in a mostly Anglo office of about 350 people and I am the only one who wore a red square even at the height of the protests. It’s like another planet in the west end.

• david m 03:01 on 2012/07/15 Permalink

  seriously. the student protests were a breaking point, just unreal how crazy the anglo media went, pan’s labyrinth-style. luckily we don’t have greater numbers, or there might really be trouble, it’s a happy (uh) fast that oldline anglo montreal has, for the most part, devolved into a gang of cranks and malcontents, ghost-hunters and delusionalists – it makes it easier for the younger generation to make a clean break from their ignorance, rather than unwittingly carry it forward in a softer form.

• Ian 08:46 on 2012/07/15 Permalink

  I’d like to agree with your notion of a clean split but looking at the participation rates from McGill and Concordia in the student strikes, I kind of doubt that. If anything Concordia was way more political 20 years ago than it is now.

• Kate 10:00 on 2012/07/15 Permalink

  Wow this is depressing. I didn’t think a lot about who the Gazette plays to, because my friends are mostly east-end anglos like you, Ian.

  I wonder if the conservatism of the anglo universities is partly because of fears from the recession – a desire to buckle down, get that degree no matter what, not “waste” time on stuff like student government, and finish up so’s to be able to become wage-earning as quickly as possible in an attempt to recession-proof oneself. Of course the people who do that tend to make a virtue of having done it, and tend to see any other way of proceeding as lazy, self-indulgent and so on.

• Blork 13:25 on 2012/07/15 Permalink

  Well, Concordia’s student government has a pretty inglorious history; almost as bad as the Quebec government’s. I can’t blame students there for not having much faith in either. I followed it for a while in the early 90s when I was a part-time student there. It was just endless bitching and moaning about procedures and (student) constitutional bullshit, lots of in-fighting, a fair bit of actual financial fraud, and a whole lot of “justify our existence” activities.

  I haven’t seen much evidence that it’s gotten any better, so why should the average student allow that to distract them from their studies?

• Kevin 12:00 on 2012/07/16 Permalink

  @Kate
  It keeps coming back to haunt him, and I’m certain he’s been advised to dodge the subject whenever asked about it again.
  (but I was just answering @anto’s question about why people dismiss him as being crazy)

  I think for those who would consider voting Projet Montreal, what Ferrandez does in the Plateau is more important.

  @Ian
  You do realize that francophones in NDG (about half the population) despise the carré rouge movement, right? I was eating dinner one night when the (small) protest went by, and the francophone couple eating behind me nearly hurled their plates into the crowd. They settled for screaming abuse.

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