[BRIEF NOTE] The Jean Affair

Continuing from last night's topic, it struckl me as worthwhile to note that back in 2005, there was a controversy over the possibility that future (now current) Canadian Governor-General Michaëlle Jean harboured separatist sympathies.

Governor General designate Michaelle Jean ended her silence Wednesday on the recent allegations that she and her husband harboured separatist sympathies.

In a written statement from Rideau Hall, Jean affirmed her and Jean-Daniel Lafond's commitment to Canada.

"I want to tell you unequivocally that both he (husband Jean-Daniel Lafond) and I are proud to be Canadians and that we have the greatest respect for the institutions of our country," Jean said in a brief written statement released Wednesday.

"We are fully committed to Canada. I would not have accepted this position otherwise."

Jean also dismissed rumours that she and Lafond supported the Quebec independence cause.

"We are equally proud of the attachment to Quebec that we have always shown beyond any partisan considerations. Let me be clear: we have never belonged to a political party or the separatist movement," she says.

[. . .]

The controversy largely began after Quebec media reported on a documentary made 12 years ago by Jean's husband.

Critics pointed to a scene in the film where several people seated around a table raise their glasses to independence, including Jean and former FLQ member Pierre Vallieres.

A companion book to the film, written by Lafond, quotes Jean as saying that "one doesn't give independence; one takes it." It's unclear what her comments are referring to.

Quebec media also added fuel to the rumours by unearthing quotations made by Lafond from a book he wrote in 1993. In it, he says: "I applaud with both hands" Quebec independence and promises to be at "all St. Jean (Baptiste) parades."

Even before the film came to light, Jean had come under scrutiny after allegations were levelled last week that she and Lafond and were once known in Quebec cultural circles as sovereigntists.

Parti Quebecois leadership hopeful Pauline Marois didn't support or rebuff the allegations Wednesday, but she said people have a right to change their minds.

"You can make another evaluation of the situation and have another point of view and defend another point of view," Marois said in Montreal. "It's not for me to judge this."

I'm with Marois on this one. So far as Jean didn't (say) advocate terrorist violence or try to arrange for foreign military intervention--and most importantly, so long as she was presently committed to Canada, enough to serve the position fully and fairly--why shouldn't she have been considered a candidate for Canada's head of state?

Your thoughts, of course, are welcome.

[TOR] "Toronto's transit plans on separate tracks"

Tess Kalinowski's article in the Toronto Star today, "Toronto's transit plans on separate tracks", started off by giving me a certain amount of hope for Toronto's transport future, but then things start to go downhill from there.

A draft proposal of the Metrolinx regional transportation plan shows a juiced-up version of the planned light rail line across Eglinton, the conversion of the Sheppard subway to light rail and another U-shaped subway that includes Queen St.

If the plans were to proceed, the three east-west endeavours could derail significant pieces of the TTC's highly touted Transit City plan to build $10 billion worth of light rail lines to Toronto's borders.

They're also among a few surprises contained in a preliminary draft of the regional transportation plan by Metrolinx, which has repeatedly promised a bold approach to attacking road congestion in the GTA.

Metrolinx, formerly the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority, was created by the province in 2006. Its 11-member board, which includes Mayor David Miller, has been mandated to develop a regional transportation plan designed to be "a seamless, integrated transit network" from Hamilton to Newmarket to Oshawa.

Metrolinx chair Rob MacIsaac stressed yesterday that the versions already circulating among board members and transportation insiders aren't the ones that will be released to the public at the end of the month.

But he expects many of the ideas will be the same.

The plans include campaigns to devote more road space to transit, promote biking and walking, expand GO service around the region to two-way service every 15 minutes, extend major regional highways and build a high-speed rail link between Pearson airport and Union Station.

The early drafts include a map showing a "Metro" line along Eglinton, as well as a light rail line where the Sheppard subway currently exists. Sources have said Metrolinx has been pushing for a subway line along Eglinton.

MacIssac denied this. "I do not anticipate we will be recommending a subway on Eglinton," he said, admitting he doesn't want to inflame tensions between the provincial planning agency and Toronto.

"I really want to downplay that we're in a pitched battle with the city. We need to continue to work with them to try so that the regional and local needs are met on Eglinton," said MacIsaac.

[LINK] Some columns from The Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail's opinions page is filled with interesting columns today.

• From Lawrence Martin comes "This campaign will come down to one geeky guy", concerning the possibility for Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion to do well. "[A]anyone with half a cranium bets on Team Blue [Conservatives]. The only hesitation in so doing is that Mr. Dion has shown himself to be a serial defiler of the odds. He has shredded them no less than four times. The first was when he took down the allegedly overpowering Lucien Bouchard in the unity debate. The second was when he was turfed from the Liberal cabinet after Paul Martin took office but scraped his way back in. The third was when he pulled a global agreement out of the hat as chair of an international environment conference in Montreal. And the fourth was when he came out of a lunar module to win the Liberal leadership race. [. . .] Somehow, the pale professor has been able to use his naive and nerdy unimpressiveness to his advantage."


• Margaret Wente has fun in "The culture wars are baaack!". "For a while back there, I thought the culture wars would not be a big deal in this election. We had two serious men of substance who had vowed to grapple with the serious issues of the day - the staggering economy, America's shattered moral leadership in the world, the health-care mess, loose nukes, stuff like that. Silly me! It turns out the real issues are abortion, evolution v. creationism, the role of God in public life, why Sarah tried to get her no-good ex-brother-in-law fired, what's up with her mother-in-law, and whether she herself was pregnant when she got married."


• As Jeffrey Simpson points out, "John McCain as a maverick is so yesterday' "So forget the image of Mr. McCain as a maverick. He used to break with the party occasionally. But as he zeroed in on the nomination, he became more of a fundamentalist Republican - another way of saying that he now epitomizes orthodoxy rather than radicalism, sameness rather than novelty. And, sadly, a politician who's learned little from the fiscal, ethical, foreign policy and social policy failures that produced what his own party's platform calls 'public disgust.'"


• Noah Richler, in "Didn't we see this movie?" points out that American political life has been stealing scripts already written from popular culture (did Bristol see Juno at one point?) and wonders if that might be one reason why (among others) the Canadian government is cutting back on funding to the artistic community.

[MUSIC] Kate Bush, "And So Is Love"

I first heard Kate Bush's song "And So Is Love", taken from 1993's The Red Shoes, through the portable CD player that I'd brought along with me for the train trip to and from a week-long student exchange program in Ottawa back in June 1997. And So Is Love was one of three albums I bought at a HMV in a neighbourhood in the Montréal that I had blitzed during train's stopover, items discounted to $C 6.99 or 7.99, one of the several with cases I'd looked at eagerly on the increasnigly rainy walk back to the train station..

The single was the first indication that I'd had, really, about the existence of Kate Bush, and amusingly enough this CD single was one of her last singles before 2005's Aerial. It was a compact enough piece of media, featuring in addition to the title song an exceptionally bouncy US mix of "Rubberband Girl" (US mix) and the 12" mix of "Eat the Music".

"And So Is Love" is a sad song, as you can tell for yourselves when you go to YouTube to listen to the song and watch the video. (The people who uploaded the video to YouTube have all disabled this video's embedding feature.) That's not an all surprising, since The Red Shoes is a sad album, inspired by Bush's sufferings following the deaths of her mother and her guitarist, among other people. Wikipedia's suggestion that "And So Is Love," is a song "about finding out that love, like life, is not perfect [and that] as we get older, we learn that our loved ones matter most" works for me.

We used to say
"Ah Hell, we're young"
But now we see that life is sad
And so is love

Ooh baby for the sake of love
Ooh baby for the sake of love

And whatever happens
What really matters?
It's all we've got
Isn't that enough?

Perhaps unfortunately, it didn't work for me at the time in the way that Bush might have intended, for my return to the Island intensified what remains my worst untreated episode of depression, complete with spells of keening in my family's pleasant bungalow basement. I was unhappy before I left, I was unhappy after I returned, but I was just unhappy with everything, and hearing that life was sad and so was love and that, now at the end of things there was nothing left to do but resign oneself to the steady wearing down of things. That sentiment persisted after the anti-depressants, which did allow me to stretch out my time in a terrified functional manner, since I could hope that "indeed there will be time/To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?'" (and do I yet?).

Going back to that rainy afternoon in Montréal, I feel upset with how I was so fucking stupid as not to have clued into the album. Bush certainly didn't mean what I thought her to have meant, not least since her experimentalism aside she's a commercial artist; rather, the fact that I, a single teenage male, bought a Kate Bush single in North America in the late 1990s pointed to something completely different. My taste in music was probably the only thing particularly differentiating me from the heterosexuals in my cohort, I knew that difference existed, I knew that sort of difference existed in others with similar relationships to their cohorts and that these other people had certain erotic and other inclinations which differed and yet--It ended there.

So much for my pretenses to authenticity.