Goverment Talking Corruption Free Turcot

To say I am behind the times on Turcot would be an understatement.  Seems I have drifted into focusing a lot of my online attention into relaying the ongoing tragedy that is our federal government under Stephen Harper via Facebook and occasionally Twitter in recent years. Of course it is all interconnected when you  follow the dots.

A non corrupt Turcot? It sure is an interesting concept, pretty much a fantasy actually. But all of us in Quebec owe the Charbonneau Commission a big tip ‘o the hat for showing us how corrupt the City of Montreal has been. Of course it was never a surprise to someone like yours truly who knew Olympic Stadium concrete was being poured as foundations for new housing developments on the South Shore and elsewhere, as just one odious example.

While a few weeks old this article is something of an update.

Quebec’s integrity test turns Montreal interchange into a symbol of clean dealings

INGRID PERITZ and RHÉAL SÉGUIN

Montreal and Quebec City — The Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Mar. 25 2013, 1:44 PM EDT

Companies hoping to snag a piece of the biggest roadwork contract in Quebec history will first have to prove they’re corruption-free, a major test for the province as it aims to fix its failing infrastructure while tackling graft in the construction industry.

Premier Pauline Marois’s government has set a $3.7-billion ceiling on the cost of rebuilding Montreal’s Turcot interchange, a critical and decrepit spaghetti interchange in the heart of the city that moves 300,000 vehicles daily. Soon, the roadway could stand as a symbolic challenge to Quebec’s promise to carry on business while holding the construction world to account.

Pushing forward with badly needed roadwork without benefiting firms tarred by corruption allegations has become a new dilemma for elected officials in Quebec – a problem sure to recur as the federal government pours billions into infrastructure spending across the country. Last week, Montreal Mayor Michael Applebaum asked Montrealers whether they wanted their city’s potholes plugged by some asphalting companies named before the Charbonneau commission into corruption and collusion.

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Montrealers Getting Screwed By Tremblay

C’mon, tell us how you voted for Tremblay again and again and how much you thought he was a good mayor. Tell us you had no idea that there was corruption at City Hall. And tell us us how you figured out that voting for a guy who was “not a separatist” actually did the city any good. The corruption at City Hall has been point blank obvious to anyone paying attention for the last, say, 30 years. The game is over and they want you to kick in 3% on your property taxes. But it’s not likely you will see the irony.

Montreal taxes up 3.3 per cent in 2013 proposed budget

Montreal property taxes would go up an average of 3.3 per cent under the city’s proposed 2013 budget, presented this morning.

The increase would translate into about $100 more for the average homeowner.

Residents of the Plateau Mont-Royal would see the biggest increase, with their tax increasing by 5.7 per cent. Tax increases would be the lowest in Anjou at only 0.5 per cent.

Mayor Gérald Tremblay said the $4.9 billion budget marks a major change, offering for the first time a new structure for financing the boroughs that he says will provide them with more autonomy.

A new tax transfer in the budget plan would allow boroughs the flexibility to make more financial decisions without city approval.

From this Gazoo article.

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Charest Continues Cover Up Of Corruption

(might be my most tabloidish headline yet )

Jean Charest rejects demands for collusion inquiry

by Andy Riga

MONTREAL – He has not read the report and he’s not going to call an inquiry or take extra steps to ensure the Liberal Party of Quebec is not benefiting from payoffs from firms getting road-construction contracts.

That’s in part how Premier Jean Charest reacted Friday to an explosive report about road-construction collusion. The report, by former police chief Jacques Duchesneau, points the finger at bikers, the Mafia, construction firms, engineering companies, Transport Quebec employees and political parties.

“No government before us had done as much to fight corruption and collusion,” Charest said at a news conference about the secret report, which was leaked to the media this week.

“We are providing the means to stop the problem; we’re putting permanent and independent tools in place” to collect evidence and prosecute wrongdoers, he said.

But he rejected renewed calls for a public inquiry, an idea supported by 77 per cent of Quebecers, according a new Léger Marketing poll.  Full article  here.

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What is it they are afraid of? 77% is surely a number that makes governments stop and take a look in a democracy? But this is the way it is today, they get power and completely ignore the people. Stephen Harper is going to run Canada like that, so why should Quebec be any different? Trouble is we are at the dawn of an era of unprecedented infrastructure spending, and a lot of people are expecting  to get the gravy ( Can you hear that Rob Ford? Stephen Harper?) from all those big fat contracts rebuilding and replacing our crumbling infrastructure,  while Ottawa promises a construction boom for new prisons that will only increase crime across the country as the American lesson has so profoundly taught the world.

And they will continue cutting all the social programs that have made our communities healthy while feeding the greedy and corrupt with our hard earned tax dollars.

Is the truth so terrible that we should not embrace it for our own good? That seems to be the underlying theme to Mr. Charest’s ridiculous claim that he is to be trusted to bring justice to our society and our economy. I tend to think most of us could take it. The truth will probably be much worse than we have imagined, but we are past the point of no return on this one. A positive future for Quebec is dependent on resolving this issue once and for all.

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Anti-corruption team under the gun

by Henry Aubin

Is there any good news at all in that terribly discouraging report on how political parties and Quebec’s Ministry of Transport systemically enable organized crime and construction companies to drive up the cost of publicworks projects?

Yes. There’s at least one unit within the provincial government that is manifestly earnest (as distinct from rhetorically earnest) about uprooting corruption. This is the squad that produced this week’s devastating report. The squad, headed by Jacques Duchesneau, was created by the Ministry of Transport to cast light on shady practices in road construction. The report names no names, but in detailing ways in which political financing, ministerial failings and corporate colluding combine to create an orgy of waste, the team has proved itself to be a beacon of hard work and integrity.

That’s the encouraging news. The bad news is that more powerful players in the Charest government’s ostensible war on corruption are undercutting the squad. The vast majority of team members are considering leaving. Reached Friday, one authoritative source on the team told me that Duchesneau himself is so upset that he has told colleagues he could leave. Full article here.

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Why is it that we have the worst roads in Canada and the US? Cheaper materials would be one obvious answer. The weather does not get dramatically better as one drives into New York or Ontario but the roads sure are nice. How much money do we lose every year because Americans have heard how lousy the driving is in Quebec?  Pride of building anything here died with the Olympic Stadium and it has been 35 years since those games opened in an unfinished stadium. And it’s been 35 years of paying off  an absurd price for a two week event, and, just as that debt finally gets paid off, we have  to rebuild everything!

It’s time, folks, time to stop being taken for the dumbest batch of people that an institutionally corrupt government could ever hope to have vote for them.

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Tremblay’s City Hall Corrupt? Wow, Surprise, Surprise!

Anyone paying even a little bit of attention over the course of the Tremblay administration can see corruption all over the place. Time and time again stories come out how the city made idiotic real estate deals – losing money on purpose because they aren’t the ones that are that stupid, Mr and Ms Taxpayer. But every time Gerald Tremblay gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar or just simply being monumentally incompetent, he claims that he “didn’t know”. Hey, it’s worked so far because the dumbed down masses keep voting for him. And English Montrealers should know better by now – voting for a mayor primarily because he is “not a separatist” is stupidity defined in the year 2011, or 2009, or 2005, etc…

The big picture part of this latest news is that the whole Quartier du Spectacle development is a mediocre piece of crap that does not in any way reflect the dynamics of Montreal. It is not something you proudly walk your visiting out of town relatives and friends through with a mischievous grin on your face. The Tremblay administration has bent over backwards to devalue Montreal, to take away the magic. And we have given him permission to go for it!

City of Montreal took real estate bath: auditor-general

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Anger And Resentment In Canada

A funny and inexplicable thing happened in two mayoralty elections in Canada in 2010 as both Toronto and Calgary went against the traditional grain electing mayors that would probably have seemed like a surreal joke only a year earlier.
Naheed Nenshi, a member of a visible minority, a Muslim, and an urban activist, won in Calgary on a progressive platform. Riding on a very clear mandate and a successful social media campaign, Mr. Nenshi downplayed personal things such as his faith, and ran on the issues including putting a lid on suburban sprawl which has become a large problem in Calgary. No city in the history of this country has ever done more in one day to absolutely destroy a negative stereotype, and bravely declare itself an open minded progressive international city. The whole world will see Calgary differently now.
In Toronto things were very different. Rob Ford, running on a conservative anti government spending, pro automobile campaign, carried the suburbs into victory. Rob Ford represents the anger and resentments in the Canadian suburbs, that repetitive, boring and crowded hinterland that lies somewhere between urban and rural. Rob Ford is a merger mayor, perhaps a precedent for how politics plays out in our large cities once the suburbs have been annexed. Rob Ford’s first major move was to cancel Transit City, a massive sustainable transit project that would have catapulted Toronto to center stage in international urban development. Instead, the voters chose to go backwards, to rush madly into the sunset of Peak Oil and the overwhelming negativity that that will bring to future generations.

There are plenty of articles on the net that attempt to analyze these two elections, especially in regards to demographic turnouts, though you may find it hard to pinpoint exactly where the tipping points lay. One thing remains very clear, Torontonians voted against something and Calgarians voted for something.

Canada is heading towards an election with a minority Conservative government demanding, in it’s relentless attack ads for example, that Canadians vote against something, a campaign that feeds on voter anger and resentments. Given how much scandal has rocked this government, and despite their Nixonian claims that they have done nothing wrong, one has to seriously question how this government could even have a chance of being reelected. Canadians are not that stupid, so what is going on?

A lot of it no doubt is caused by a general distrust of politicians and the national perception that none of the leaders of any of the opposition parties have the charisma required to capture the imagination of the country- there is no Trudeaumania like movement to be seen anywhere on the horizon. Still, how can you explain a willingness to vote for a party that cheats, lies, and is the only political party in the history of the country to be found in contempt of parliament?
This should be a no brainer, but they are still alive and with a chance of getting a majority.

The only answer can be that people are angry, frustrated and, yes, full of fear. And fear causes a paralytic effect that can spread across society like a seasonal flu. You turn your back away from most things and focus on the fact that you are ill, that no one seems to be respecting your discomfort, and you get angry and frustrated, and even more sick, and more resentful, and you certainly are in no mood to hear that any changes in the world are necessary. And how dare anyone suggest that you don’t have your grandchildren’s best interests at heart, that your chosen lifestyle is somehow a bad thing? The mind wanders a little, but mostly it is looking for an affirmation. This may at least partially explain how Rob Ford made it in suburbia.
But it still doesn’t explain Canadians turning their backs on each other or becoming supportive of blindly following the Americans into war and approving tax breaks and opportunities to corporations who kickback generously to those who can change laws for them. It still doesn’t explain how our collective pride in the nation is being so seriously corrupted by a government that distorts the truth, makes a mockery of transparency and fair play, that openly attacks the family of the leader of an opposition party. I don’t love a possible Canada where that is okay.

In Calgary the people took a brave step forward and voted for something different. They voted for change. They voted to get themselves firmly footed in this brave new world called the 21st century. Torontonians voted for pushing the pedal to the past and to stay under a cloud of impending doom. The Conservative Party of Canada will work every hard to make sure that change becomes impossible, and just as Governors in the United States are passing bills that make collective bargaining a thing of the past, the Conservatives will make sure that only they, and the corporations they are so beholden to, will control everything including your health care and your old age pensions.

And so Canada stands at the crossroads of history and we have a choice between keeping our autonomy and everything that has made this nation of strong, peaceful, tolerant people so attractive and admired around the world, or we can just choose to leave Canada as we have loved it alone, unrecognizable, heartbroken, on the side of an abandoned road stretching out to a land no one knows.

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Collusion: Clean This Up Before Deciding On The Turcot

Jason Prince over at Turcot.ca calls for some serious investigating of corruption and collusion in the Quebec construction industry.

“Le Devoir and other papers have been reporting for months on how the construction business works in Quebec.

It is complex, with allegations ranging from mafia influence over municipal contracts all the way up to collusion between the highest levels of the Quebec government and a handful of massive engineering consulting firms (including Dessau, SNC Lavallin, and BPR).

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“Construction firms colluded to boost prices: report”

And I have to ask if they have been watering down the asphalt for our roads because it just doesn’t make sense that the roads get dramatically better when one crosses into New York or Ontario!

From CBC

Construction firms colluded to boost prices: report

A small number of construction firms are colluding to control bidding and keep prices high on major municipal infrastructure projects in the greater Montreal region, with taxpayers footing the higher costs, an ongoing Radio-Canada investigation suggests.

The province has committed to spending billions of dollars on construction projects over the next decade and several whistleblowers have come forward to say a small group of contractors has cornered many of the contracts.
The report suggests taxpayers are paying up to 35 per cent too much.

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