RCMP say a 25-year-old man was accidentally shot in the wrist near in the community of Barnhartvale, just south of Kamloops, B.C.

The man and others were shooting at clay pigeons Saturday night.

But it was the drive to the hospital that proved more dangerous when the driver lost control on a curve and rolled the truck, ejecting both the driver and the already-injured passenger from the vehicle.

The shooting victim died in hospital early Sunday, while the driver is listed in serious condition.

RCMP say alcohol may have been a factor in the crash.

The Canadian Press

Google Earth

Thomas Mulcair’s home at 109 Lynwood Drive, in Beaconsfield, Quebec.

OTTAWA — New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair and his wife have repeatedly refinanced their home west of Montreal, gradually increasing the debt on the property over a series of 11 mortgages, land records show.

Mulcair’s office will not explain why the couple have loaded more and more financing onto the home they’ve lived in since the early 1980s, saying only that it’s a “private matter.”

It is unclear why Mulcair would need to refinance the modest two-garage home in Beaconsfield so many times, bumping the value of the mortgage from $58,000 to $300,000.

Before he became leader, Mulcair enjoyed a successful and well-paid career as a government lawyer and, later, a cabinet minister in the Quebec National Assembly. His wife, Catherine Pinhas, is a psychologist practicing in Montreal. Both their children are now adults with jobs — one is a police officer, the other an engineer.

Mulcair was hit with a judgment from a defamation case in 2005 after he accused former Parti Quebecois minister Yves Duhaime of influence peddling. He was ordered to pay Duhaime $95,000, plus legal costs.

He left provincial politics in 2007 and ran for the NDP in a byelection later that year. Even then, he stood to collect on a pension from his years as an MNA. When he was elected that fall, he began earning an MP’s salary that was then set at $150,800.

But in January 2009, he and Pinhas financed the home for the 11th time. They took out a $300,000 mortgage with the Royal Bank of Canada and then paid off the previous $249,000 mortgage from three years earlier.

While there could be a simple explanation for the transactions, none is forthcoming from Mulcair’s office.

“Mr. Mulcair and his wife made these decisions for personal and family reasons,” said George Soule, Mulcair’s press secretary, in an email.

“They are part of their private life.”

If past opposition leaders are any example, Mulcair is likely to become the target of Conservative party attack ads before the next election. As a New Democrat, his credibility as financial manager will likely figure into the critique.

The serial refinancing of a home does not necessarily indicate personal financial difficulties, however. There are plenty of entirely legitimate reasons why someone would borrow against a home. He might want to draw on the accumulated equity to remodel, send a child to school, invest in the stock market, buy another home or cottage, or just get a better interest rate.

Other parties would have probably have looked into Mulcair’s property records as part of their due diligence, says former New Democrat strategist and media consultant Ian Capstick.

“Most certainly the Conservatives would know about this,” Capstick said. “Everything about your opponent that is in the public domain is fair game.”

But without more information, Capstick doubts that the mortgages would figure in an attack on the rookie party leader, as the personal finances of Canadian political figures are usually off-limits.

He notes, however, that politicians’ private lives were breached in two recent attacks — Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’ divorce file, which a Liberal party staffer leaked in small chunks by Twitter; and late NDP leader Jack Layton’s 1996 visit to a massage parlour, which was publicized by the Conservative-friendly Sun News Network in the final days of the last election campaign.

Before moving to the Montreal area, Mulcair and Pinhas lived in Cap Rouge, outside of Quebec City, where he worked as a lawyer for the Quebec ministry of justice. Mulcair took a job with Alliance Quebec. His wife was listed in mortgage documents as an esthetician.

They paid $64,000 for the home in 1983, with a $56,000 mortgage from the Caisse Populaire du Lac St. Louis at 10.7 per cent interest — the going rate of the day.

Every few years, new financing with the Royal Bank of Canada was registered on the property with mostly increasing values as the amount owing rolled over.

The couple obtained loans in 1984, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1996, 1997, 2001, 2003, 2006 and 2009.

Nearly a year after the last transaction, Mulcair filed a report with the federal ethics commissioner, saying that he taken a line of credit with his wife from the Royal Bank.

Under the MP’s Code of Conduct, material changes in a member’s assets or liabilities must be reported to the ethics commissioner within 60 days.

The value of the line of credit is not specified.

Today, Mulcair earns $157,731 annually as an MP plus a $75,516 stipend as Leader of the Official Opposition. When in Ottawa, he lives for free at the official residence, Stornoway.

Postmedia News

That didn’t stop thousands from taking to the streets of Montreal for a 33rd night in a row in a protest that again made it clear the conflict has moved way beyond the issue of education.

One student leader, Martine Desjardins, said both sides must be prepared to compromise for the months-long crisis to be resolved.

Another, Leo Bureau-Blouin, made headlines on Saturday when he told CBC Radio he would be willing to accept some form of tuition increase. Later in the day Bureau-Blouin tried to clarify his comments, saying the students were willing to make adjustments if the government was prepared to do so as well.

“If the government is prepared to move, there could be an area where we can find common ground,” he told The Canadian Press.

Leaders of Quebec’s three main student associations could meet the province’s education minister as early as Monday.

While the proposed hikes would still leave Quebec with some of the lowest tuition rates in Canada, the issue has flared into a clash of ideologies that goes beyond the debate over education.

The nightly demonstrations continued Saturday with thousands of people pouring into the streets of Montreal, with several neighbourhood protests around the city. The focus at the marches has shifted from the proposed tuition increases to Bill 78, Quebec’s controversial emergency law designed to limit the scope of student demonstrations.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

One protester said he isn’t necessarily opposed to the tuition increases, but feels the government has gone too far in its efforts to end to the conflict.

“Everybody has to stand up at this point,” said Mark Sabourin, 26, who drove from the suburbs for the demonstration with his wife and three kids.

“I believe what they’re fighting for is deeper now. It’s about the law, it’s about the government’s tactics, it’s about taking back the streets.”

The mood was festive Saturday, and the crowd included many families, as people again banged on pots and pans. As in previous protests, Saturday’s march was immediately declared illegal because no route was provided, but it continued for hours, with no signs of vandalism or violence.

Early Sunday morning police said they had arrested four protesters, including two they accused of hitting a police horse.

The latest round of demonstrations came as Bill 78 drew more criticism — this time from Amnesty International. The human-rights organization said the legislation violates freedom of speech, assembly and movement in breach of Canada’s international obligations.

”Bill 78 is an affront to basic freedoms that goes far beyond what is permissible under provincial, national or international human rights laws,” Amnesty spokesman Javier Zuniga said in a statement.

”It is unreasonable and unacceptable to require citizens to apply to the authorities in advance any time they wish to exercise a basic human right.”

The organization first became involved in the conflict in April, when it expressed concern over the tuition increases and called on the government to tone down police measures.

Police presence on Saturday was minimal. The peaceful demonstrations were in stark contrast to a week earlier, when there were several violent clashes between protesters and police, and a small group built a bonfire out of plastic construction cones in the middle of a downtown intersection.

Julie Pelletier, 44, said she wasn’t sure a resolution on tuition would end to the demonstrations.

“It’s so much more,” she said. “It’s the tuition increases… it’s also the government in general. There’s a lot of people like me that came here, alone, and brought a pot and a spoon.”

The students have called for a tuition freeze but the government has flatly rejected that. The Charest government originally announced it would hike tuition fees by $325 a year over five years, beginning this coming September. That would have boosted annual tuition to nearly $3,793 by 2017.

The government later offered to spread the hikes over seven years, which works out to annual increases of about $254, and to cut some other fees.

The Canadian Press, with files from Marie-Michele Sioui

Fart. Poop. Pee. Bum.

They are words that cue, in most children, those unstoppable, from-the-gut giggles, especially when slipped into a well-told story.

Parents, however, are a far tougher crowd when it comes to celebrating the scatological in kiddies books, according to a new study of children’s librarians from across Canada. Some even go so far as to try to scrub their public libraries clean of poo jokes, deeming the reading materials too lowbrow or just plain disgusting, the librarians report.

For her paper Bums, Poops, and Pees: A Scholarly Examination of Why Children Love and Adults Censor the Scatological in Children’s Books, University of Alberta professor Ann Curry interviewed 16 children’s librarians in every province and territory with an average of 19 years experience to explore their reactions to books with scatological content. She will present her paper at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences conference in Kitchener-Waterloo on Friday.

All of the librarians “strongly defended” the place of scatologically themed books in the public library system (hey, even Beowulf and Shakespeare included references to feces). More than half said the “intellectual freedom rights” of children to have access to books they enjoy was important. Many said they used such books as Walter the Farting Dog to encourage boys to read, in light of troubling literacy data that shows boys don’t enjoy tucking into a book like girls do.

“One of the main reasons librarians defended these books was they felt children [when they start to understand stories] have just gone through a very difficult stage right after potty training — it’s been the entire focus of the child’s life and focus of much of the interaction between parent and child,” Ms. Curry said.

“But as soon as the child is potty trained, then all of a sudden you’re not supposed to talk about it. A child yelling in the library, ‘Mommy, mom I need to poo poo’ is met with a shhhh…. That’s why kids are enjoying this. They’re trying to figure out what is taboo and what isn’t.”

Having a book in the library that celebrates this taboo is “something they find really funny” because they know they’re not supposed to exclaim the words out loud, Ms. Curry said. It also helps make children more aware of their bodies, able to identify their various parts and not be ashamed, she added.

Even still, librarians expressed frustration with parents who “believed that public library children’s collections should contain just ‘the best literature,’ ” Ms. Curry’s paper reads. “Immensely popular books like Captain Underpants were deemed by these parents to be a waste of taxpayer dollars and more appropriate for low-class bookstores.”

Librarians also felt parents wanted to censor the books because they brought out “animalistic” tendencies in their children instead of “higher moral thoughts of a well-behaved child.”

“The librarians who had lots of experience as children’s librarians did mention that they felt disapproval of this type of information had decreased considerably over the years,” Ms. Curry said. “Part of the reason for that is this material is discussed much more openly in the general media.”

Oprah’s clinician-in-residence Dr. Oz openly talks about poop, and such reality TV shows as Fear Factor and Survivor are full of people being forced to eat gross things, she said.

And in the two decades since Canadian publisher Doubleday told children’s author Robert Munsch he could not put the word “Fart” on the cover of his book Good Families Don’t…, publishers have rushed to cash in on the “fashion of farting.”

Of course, some librarians themselves were grossed out by a number of the scatological books, Ms. Curry found, also noting that a surprising number of these were in translation (the book Everybody Poops is translated from Japanese; The Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business was originally penned in German).

At the end of the day, most were just happy to get a book into children’s hands, said Ms. Curry, who says her research into scatological children’s books provides a broader context for the study of censorship in libraries across Canada.

National Post

• Email: sboesveld@nationalpost.com | Twitter: sarahboesveld

Walter the Farting Dog
In 2004, a former school board trustee in Wisconsin was so upset over the word “fart” in this story about an old, fat dog with incurable flatulence that he wanted the book banned from the state’s school system (after all, it mentions the word fart or farting 24 times). His efforts were unsuccessful. “Walter the Farting Dog, particularly when it first came out, was challenged in a number of libraries in the U.S., but I don’t know if I came across an instance where it was challenged in Canada,” University of Alberta professor Ann Curry says. The book has grown into a successful series, raking in a tidy sum for the New Brunswick-based authors, William Kotzwinkle and Glenn Murray.

Good Families Don’t …
Back in the late 1980s, Canada’s king of children’s books, Robert Munsch, had trouble selling this tale of a little girl whose parents think good families, like theirs, don’t fart. Eventually, he was approached by a representative from Doubleday Canada who said they would publish the book, but they wanted to leave the word “fart” out of the cover title. “After it came out, I went to the Bookshelf [a favourite bookstore in Guelph that had originally said it wouldn’t put a book with the word ‘fart’ on it in the front window] and one of the owners said, ‘All the kids are coming in and yelling “have you got the fart book?” Maybe you should have called it Fart after all.’ ”

Everyone Poops
Originally published in Japan in 1977 and translated to English in 1993, this “groundbreaking” book by Taro Gomi is considered one of the more educational tales about excrement (it explains how poop is the form food takes after your body digests it). It shows that other countries were far ahead of Canada and the US when it comes to running titles with scatological references, Ms. Curry says.

The Fartiste
An illustrated book by Kathleen Krull based on the true story of Joseph Pujol, whose ability to create orchestra-style music by passing gas launched him into a career as the highest paid performer at the 1890s Moulin Rouge. “A really good bums, poops and pees book is one the child gets enjoyment from but [also] the words and the pictures are also very cleverly done, so that the parent also gets enjoyment out of it too,” Ms. Curry says.

The Story of the Mole who knew it was None of his Business
This tale by Werner Holz-warth about a mole with a turd on his head — he doesn’t know where it came from, so he asks all the other farm animals if it’s theirs — shows kids the excrement of all kinds of barnyard animals as they all try to prove their innocence to the mole. One of the librarians in Ontario that Ms. Curry interviewed said a parent had recently complained about the book (seen at top), which was originally translated from German.

The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts
Another in the Everyone Poops series, this book by Shinta Cho is “both informative and blunt,” said Publishers Weekly. “The book provides young readers with solid facts as well as plenty to snicker about.”

The Bear on the Bed
Parents complained that this rhyming tale by Ruth Miller (book cover seen at top) about a bear who hangs out with a little girl while she’s at camp and ultimately poops in her bed, was too gross, Ms. Curry says.

Chicken Cheeks
Some parents wondered “why we’re celebrating all these bums,” Ms. Curry says. Authored by comedian Michael Ian Black, this book (cover seen at top) offers an ample display of animal behinds to the delight of little readers.

Farley Farts
This tale by Birte Muller of a little frog who can’t stop farting is a big hit with little boys, Ms. Curry says. Better to let loose a fart than to hold it all in, is the take-home message here.

Captain Underpants
Among the books deemed by some parents to be a “waste of taxpayer dollars,” this series by Dav Pilkey for students in Grades 2 to 4 has been decorated with Kids Choice awards but also derided for being improper. Back in 2002, the American Library Association said it was the sixth-most frequently challenged book of that year. The books were also yanked off the shelves of a school library in North Dakota. “I didn’t care for the language. I didn’t care for the innuendos,” complainant Dawn Ihry, a former teacher, told the local paper in Fargo, N.D. The book is about 4th grade pranksters who hypnotize their teacher into thinking he is Captain Underpants. Others have complained that the books encourage children to disobey authority.

- Sarah Boesveld, National Post

1) It’s 13 times the size of New York’s Central Park At 47 square kilometres, Rouge National Urban Park is Toronto’s largest park and is 13 times as big as New York’s iconic Central Park. In pure Canadian terms, that’s 31,308 NHL size hockey rinks. “This will be much larger… larger than Central Park in New York, with many more pristine areas within the different areas in the park. And a lot of different species,” said Mr. Kent.

2) It’s home to deer, river otter, coyote, and even wild turkey It’s bordered by the suburbs of Markham and Pickering, and both a river and a highway run through it, but Rouge National Urban Park is teeming with wildlife. Nestled inside its thick Carolinian forest and wetlands are more than 11,000 birds from at least 225 bird species, according to the Rouge Park Alliance. These include turkey vultures, trumpeter swans and wild turkeys — of which, the latter was re-introduced into the area after the native species was wiped out nearly a century ago by diminished habitat and unregulated hunting. The Rouge Park Urban National Park also has 765 plant species, 55 fish species, 27 mammal species and 19 reptile and amphibian species.

3) It may be bigger than Central Park, but it’s not really a central park Nevertheless they are trying. Rouge National Urban Park is as much as 65 kilometres from the downtown Toronto core (depending on which part of the park you are trying to reach). That’s a far cry from Central Park, which sits in the middle of Manhattan, or Stanley Park, which is right in Vancouver. To reach Rouge National Urban Park from downtown Toronto using TTC bus or subway, it could take as long as an hour-and-a-half. Mr. Kent said efforts will be made to better connect the park to its surrounding urban pockets via public transit. And, he added, the park may become more accessible as the city makes transit improvements ahead of the 2015 Pan American Games in Toronto. “The transit connections will come with time,” he said. “There will be parking lots adjacent. There will be different modes of transit connecting it.”

4) Two national historic sites can be found within the park’s borders The human history of Rouge Park stems back more than 10,000 years, from the Iroquois villagers to the early European explorers. The Rouge River branch of the Toronto Carrying Place trail was originally a portage route along the Rouge River to the Holland River, linking Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe. The route was first used by First Nations peoples and later by early European fur traders, explorers and settlers. There is also an archaeological site with the remains of a 17th century Seneca Village, which was designated as a National Historic site. It has been closed from public use. But more recently, a more than 150-year-old farmhouse in Rouge Park has been used as a filming location for iconic Canadian shows such as Kids in the Hall and The Road to Avonlea.

5) It is intended to be the hot young rock-star park in Parks Canada’s repertoire Because Parks Canada needs help. The number of visitors to Parks Canada attractions have been tapering off, from 21.8 million in 2006-07 to 20.2 million in 2010-11 — a 7% drop, according to The Canadian Press. So, one of their strategies to get more Canadians to enjoy their national parks is to bring the park closer to them. Rouge Urban National Park is within travelling distance of seven million Canadians, or roughly 20% of the country’s population, the ministry says. Mr. Kent says by making it more convenient for Canadians to bask in their national parks, they may be more inclined to seek out others. “We want this to be a people place,” he said. “For a lot of people it will be their first, certainly new generations of Canadians, it may be their first experience with Canadian natural space and species. And we hope that it serves in future years as a springboard to get people into our more distant national parks.”

National Post

Since Premier Jean Charest passed a law last week limiting protests in the province, defiant demonstrations have popped up in cities not known as hotbeds of activism.

Small groups from Granby, south of Montreal, to Jonquiere, north of Quebec City, have joined Montrealers in taking to the streets with pots and pans to protest Bill 78.

Their message is clear: This conflict is not just about tuition anymore.

In recent days, between 50 and 200 people have been gathering to protest the law in Trois-Rivieres, an industrial city roughly halfway between Montreal and Quebec City.

“This has gone beyond the student movement,” said Gaetan Bouchard, a local blogger and longtime social activist.

“Bill 78 has brought out many citizens and workers,” Bouchard added. “The group has been about 50-50: half students, half people of all ages and all horizons.”

Below, a video that surfaced Friday night and started rapidly spreading online of the “pots and pans” protests:

Unlike Montreal’s protests, some of which have ended with broken windows and mass arrests, the demonstrations outside the city have tended to be calm.

Their festive atmosphere — the goal is to make as much noise as possible — makes an inviting environment for families and the elderly.

Reports from the 500-strong march in Granby described a wide cross-section of ages taking part, a sharp contrast from the student-dominated protests of previous weeks.

Participants have also remarked on their apparent spontaneity. There are no organizing committees, or leaders. Details are simply spread on Facebook or through word of mouth.

It is enough to give devoted leftists a ray of hope after almost 10 years of Charest’s Liberal government.

“I’m 44-years-old — I feel like I’ve been waiting my entire life for this,” said Bouchard.

Rogerio Barbosa/AFP/Getty Images

Protesters in Montreal on May 25, 2012. “This has gone beyond the student movement,” one activist says.

Bill 78 stipulates that demonstrations of more than 50 people must give advance notice to the police, including their intended route.

It also threatens heavy fines against student associations and their leaders if they contravene parts of the law.

Even though the law has only been used sparingly by police so far, Quebec’s student federations filed legal motions against it on Friday.

The Charest government hoped its bill would end the volatile scenes outside Quebec universities and colleges where students tried to establish picket lines.

Students were jostled and pepper-sprayed as police sought to enforce injunctions allowing the resumption of classes.

Such incidents have almost ceased altogether, but the bill has done little to temper the ongoing marches.

Some claim it has had the opposite effect by giving ordinary Quebecers a reason to protest.

National Post Graphics

Montreal’s nightly marches have grown in size since the bill was passed, including a demonstration on Tuesday in which more than 100,000 are estimated to have taken part.

“The demonstrations now are no longer about the tuition raises,” said Jacques Hamel, a sociologist at the Universite de Montreal.

“The people in the streets with their casserole dishes aren’t overwhelmingly people who would have confronted the government on other questions.”

But success in mobilizing against the law threatens to complicate matters for Quebec’s student leaders, who are expected to resume negotiations with the government soon.

They have added the law’s repeal to their list of demands, even though that could take the focus away from the issue at the origin of the current conflict: tuition.

“We’re still fighting about tuition fee hikes,” said Martine Desjardins, who leads the FEUQ, one of the main student federations.

“With the government passing this bill, it just changes the objective a little bit. So we have to fight on both sides.”

Mr. Jules, the chief commissioner and one of the creators of the First Nations Tax Commission, said dozens of reserves across the country are hosting third-party businesses, or have assets that they just aren’t taxing. That means bands are depriving themselves of revenue that would be independent of the federal government; money that could help create more responsible local government and fuel economic development.

“I visited a community yesterday. They had their first administrative office built with real property tax, a community centre built with First Nations taxes,” he said. “There were improved roads, improved relationships with neighbouring communities, better health care, better education facilities, better governments, a better community.”

Mr. Jules has made this a cause; he spoke to a group of native council members in Edmonton Friday to discuss these ideas, as well as on leadership and economic development.

Taxation is a cornerstone of an autonomous, responsible government, he said — and a baby-step away from a paternalistic Indian Act.

The problems of First Nations reserves run far deeper than the lack of independent taxation authority, of course, but Mr. Jules believes encouraging bands to implement property taxes could be part of the solution.

“You can’t separate taxation from fundamental government powers. You really can’t begin to advance without dealing with that question, otherwise, you’re always depending on someone else to do something for you,” he said.

He’s seen some communities transformed after adopting property taxation — which is not levied against band members, but rather on non-native business operating on native lands.

“It leads to a better system, a more accountable system and one that third parties are more comfortable with,” he said. “It creates a cycle where you’re able to re-invest in infrastructure.”

Increasingly, Mr. Jules said, businesses that wish to operate on reserve land are amenable to this type of taxation, as it ensures proper services like roads, pipelines and emergency services.

“Just being able to see with your own eyes over a period of time, the changes in a community. For me personally, it’s so rewarding,” he said.

The First Nations Tax Commission — it’s led by natives, but funded by Ottawa — was given royal assent in 2007. So far, 140 of more than 600 communities nationally have adopted property taxation authorities.

But Mr. Jules’ work with taxation is, in fact, a life-long cri de coeur. It began when he watched his father, the chief of the Tk’emlups Indian Band in Kamloops, B.C., struggle with tax issues in the 1960s. Businesses operating on the reserve wanted to get the roads plowed in the winter, a request that proved to be an impossibly byzantine task that required navigating the federal, provincial and local municipal governments.

In the mid 1970s, when Mr. Jules was first elected to council, he found out that residents of an industrial park on reserve land were shirking their municipal property taxes: Because the reserve had no power to tax businesses, and the non-native municipality in which it sits had no power to kick the businesses out, huge arrears were owed to the city while the native band was using its own funds to manage municipal duties.

It was this situation that drove Mr. Jules to push through the 1988 Kamloops Amendment to the Indian Act clarifying First Nations’ rights to collect property taxes on reserve lands.

Yet although the law now allows for this kind of taxation, Mr. Jules said many bands have been slow to adopt the power.

“It’s a huge, huge issue. For one thing, it’s very difficult to get First Nations communities to even consider taxation. I guess it’s a philosophical issue. They don’t think that it’s something that we had as indigenous cultures. They say there’s no history,” he said. “They’re very suspicious of it if they think it’s being imposed on them, or is an imposition from someone else.”

Of course, property taxes are no panacea. Reserves in very remote areas, or bands with few outside investors on their land have little to gain by taxation.

In some areas, the results have been marginal. The Enoch Cree Nation in Alberta, the first reserve in the province to adopt property taxation, has been little changed, said Don Morin, Enoch’s manager of economic development.

“I would say so far it’s been negligible. Soon it will be, hopefully, impactful. We’re just finalizing some commercial development and obviously it’s needed for sustainable development,” he said.

But Mr. Jules has high hopes. In conjunction with the First Nations Tax Commission, the Tulo Centre of Indigenous Economics in Kamloops this year graduated its first class of 11 students. They received certifications in First Nations taxation and applied economics, the first program of its kind in the world.

“We decided early on that we needed the professional administrative capability to handle this,” he said. “Ultimately, when you start to move toward getting rid of the Indian Act and creating a true government, you have to deal with taxation. You can’t split that hair.”

National Post

The forested area and wetland, east of Toronto, has been a hidden treasure for years, but that is about to change, said Minister of the Environment Peter Kent. He hopes once it is preened and restored, it will become a major tourist draw. “I think a lot of the people that may come to Toronto to shop or to go to a baseball game or whatever may also, in the fullness of time, be tempted to go out to the Rouge Park to kayak,” he said. “To see nesting birds, to see the leaves change as people do now.”

At 47,000 square metres, Rouge National Urban Park is Toronto’s largest park, 13 times as big as New York’s iconic Central Park, though considerably less central.

It could take as long as an hour-and-a-half to reach the park from downtown Toronto, but Mr. Kent said efforts will be made to better connect the park to its surrounding urban pockets via public transit. He cited transportation improvements ahead of the 2015 Pan American Games in Toronto. “The transit connections will come with time,” he said. “There will be parking lots adjacent. There will be different modes of transit connecting it.”

Police once again declared the main demonstration illegal under a municipal bylaw because a route hadn’t been provided. But bad weather proved to be more of a deterrent than police as flashes of lightning brightened the sky as people banged their metal pots.

The sky opened up shortly after the march moved out, drenching participants and sending many scattering for a nearby subway station.

Even though the rain was pounding at some points, a strong contingent of protesters marched on, almost seeming to revel in the downpour. They carted umbrellas and covered themselves in flags. Some even doffed their clothes and got stern warnings from police although there were no arrests.

Other marches were held in other Quebec cities, including Sherbrooke and the provincial capital.

Below, a video that surfaced Friday night that started rapidly spreading online of the “pots and pans” protests:

THE COURTROOM

After demonstrating night after night to protest a controversial law aimed at limiting protests against tuition hikes, students and myriad other groups are carving out another battleground.

Lawyers for student federations and other groups filed two legal motions on Friday against Bill 78, the law adopted May 18 to crack down on the protests.

The first motion seeks to temporarily suspend sections of the law that involve public protest. It will be heard next week in Superior Court.

The second motion is to have Bill 78 declared invalid altogether, although it may take longer to reach a judge.

Bill 78 has been used sparingly by police across the province, but the groups mounting the legal challenge say it severely restricts the fundamental rights of citizens. They call the motions ambitious but necessary.

The government argues the law preserves the rights of students to attend school.

It lays out strict regulations governing demonstrations, ordering assemblies of more than 50 people to give eight hours’ notice for details such as the protest route, the duration and the time at which the demonstration is being held.

Individual organizers and student groups could face huge fines if they don’t comply. The penalties range between $1,000 and 5,000 per individual; $7,000 and $35,000 for a student leader; and between $25,000 and $125,000 for unions or student federations.

National Post Graphics

One student association said Friday that just one fine would be enough to empty its bank account.

The legislation also provides for fines for anyone who prevents someone from entering an educational institution.

The student groups, labour federations and a wide range of other organizations claim the law is unconstitutional and a violation of basic rights.

“We are doing this because we are genuinely worried that basic important rights such as freedom of association, freedom of expression and the right to hold peaceful demonstrations are being attacked,” student leader Leo Bureau-Blouin told a news conference outside the Montreal courthouse.

He said students are being prudent about their chances.

Besides the student and labour groups, others supporting the legal action include feminists, ecologists, artists and community groups.

“We’re happy we’re not alone in this,” said Martine Desjardins, a student leader who represents university students.

“A lot of citizens in Quebec — not just students — are fighting for their rights to be preserved.”

Another student leader described the motions as the biggest constitutional challenge in the history of Quebec. Those bringing the motion forward say they represent one out of four Quebecers.

“It’s a unanimous answer (from) the civil society of Quebec against this unjust law that is for us is clearly breaking the fundamental rights and freedoms of our country,” said Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois.

Replying on behalf of the government, Transport Minister Pierre Moreau appeared unimpressed with the large number of groups rallying around the cause.

“I’ve pleaded (as a lawyer) long enough to know that what is important is not the number of applicants, it is the quality of arguments,” Moreau said Friday.

“The government took the time to prepare the law quickly. We have jurists and constitutional experts who think the law will stand.”

While the government indicated it would comply with the opinion of the court, Moreau said it’s ironic that student leaders are going to court after chastising their own members who sought injunctions to return to class.

“They’re going to court to declare the law unconstitutional, but when the courts recognize constitutional rights or the right to study, they do not recognize the judgment,” Moreau said.

Veronique Hivon of the Opposition Parti Quebecois said she isn’t surprised by the legal motions.

“It was written in the sky that that law would be challenged,” she said.

“I won’t speculate about their chances of success, but within 24 hours, the Quebec Bar talked about the law being unacceptable and 45 law professors signed a letter to that effect. So certainly, the violations of law are very serious.”

The first of the two motions is expected to be heard next Wednesday and is aimed at obtaining a temporary suspension of the law.

The objective of the second procedure is to have the entire law struck down. If the case can make its way through Quebec courts quickly, it could wind up before the Supreme Court of Canada in short order, Bureau-Blouin said.

“We hope that we will obtain something but, as you know, the judge will be the one to decide,” said lawyer Giuseppe Sciortino, one of nearly 500 lawyers who have volunteered their time to put the case together.

ROGERIO BARBOSA/AFP/GettyImages

Students stage a protest against tuition fee increases on May 25, 2012 in Montreal. The Quebec government invited student groups for talks to end a three-month conflict over a planned hike in tuition. Montreal, Quebec, Canada

BILL 78

Bill 78 was introduced as a response to mounting student protests after the Charest government’s insistence it would not back down on a previous announcement it would hike tuition fees by $325 a year over five years, beginning this coming September.

That would have eventually boosted the figure to nearly $3,793 a year in 2017.

The government later offered to spread the total hikes over seven years to $1,778, compensated with cuts to other fees. That would work out to an increase of about $254 a year,

While the proposed hikes would still leave Quebec with some of the lowest rates in the country, the issue has flared into a clash of ideologies. The students have called for a tuition freeze but the government has flatly rejected any idea of that.

Negotiations are expected to resume next week.

Meanwhile, protests of varying shapes, sizes and themes have been going on for three months and have picked up steam over the past month with nightly marches in Montreal featuring several thousand people.

Of the few thousand arrests, only a minority have been for criminal infractions. The vast majority have been for municipal bylaw and highway code violations. As for Bill 78 violations, the only reports of arrests have been in Sherbrooke and Quebec City.

Lately, regular citizens have been showing their own defiance to the bill by clanging pots every night at 8 p.m. as a form of popular defiance.

“We’ve seen from the outset that the population is behind us and, more than ever, people want to be able to exercise their right to freedom of expression, freedom of association and the right to take part in peaceful demonstrations,” Dejsardins said.

“This is a new step in the fight against tuition hikes.”

The Canadian Press

I had simply seen too much, felt too much and knew too much. I wanted out.
—Vancouver police officer and former missing women investigator Lori Shenher

Lori Shenher thought her career as a police officer was over. The reasons: Pickton trauma. Burn-out. Guilt, the result of failure. Anger. For more than two years, from 1998 to 2000, Ms. Shenher had led a Vancouver Police Department unit tasked with finding missing women. And in that time, more women went missing and were murdered by Robert Pickton. The Port Coquitlam pig farmer had been in police sights — her sights — a long time.

Pickton was her prime suspect. He was placed under police surveillance, yet he continued to kill and dispose of bodies at his farm. When he was finally arrested in 2002, Ms. Shenher didn’t celebrate. She despaired, knowing a serial killer had slipped through her fingers. While on leave, suffering from post-traumatic stress and thinking she would never return to police work, she decided to spill her guts. Ms. Shenher sat in front of her computer and began to write.

The result was a 289-page manuscript that Toronto-based publisher McClelland & Stewart planned to have in bookstores by September 2003. But circumstances changed. The manuscript was never published. It was buried and stayed that way until this year, when lawyers representing the families of Pickton’s victims at the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry in Vancouver forced its disclosure and requested that it be made public.

During hearings in April, several passages from the Shenher manuscript were read into the inquiry record. Some lawyers argued the entire document should be entered as evidence. Commissioner Wally Oppal rejected their arguments last week. The National Post has obtained a copy of the manuscript and is publishing previously undisclosed details for the first time.

_________________________________

David Clark/Postmedia News Files

Robert Pickton's farm in 2002.

‘It is only now that I recognize all of the signs and signals of burnout and post traumatic stress disorder brought on by doing a horrible job for an unsupportive and incompetent organization,” Ms. Shenher wrote, a year after Pickton’s arrest. “I was no longer able to bear the weight of our ineptitude and rationalization…. It had always been Pickton.”

Her book is the rawest, most immediate and revealing account of the botched missing women and Pickton investigations. It describes a major Canadian police department plagued by indifference, in-fighting, sexism, racism. And it reveals much about Ms. Shenher herself.

She was a fish out of water, a young lesbian trying to work her way up in an alpha male world. The VPD was not an exceptionally tolerant or progressive workplace in 1991, the year Ms. Shenher joined. Hostilities were common inside headquarters and on the street. She recalls how officers sometimes played it old school, kicking down doors and roughing up suspects.

After working on various assignments — patrol, surveillance, a prostitution task force in Vancouver’s crime-infested Downtown Eastside — Ms. Shenher joined the VPD’s Missing Persons Unit in July 1998. Despite her lack of seniority, she was made the unit’s lead investigator and file co-ordinator. It seemed the VPD brass had finally accepted that prostitutes from the Downtown Eastside were vanishing without a trace. Those cases became her focus.

Early in her assignment, she wrote, then-VPD inspector Peter Ditchfield suggested it “would very likely turn into a serial killer investigation.” She felt she had arrived. But her enthusiasm for the job waned when she discovered how thinly resourced the missing persons unit really was. It was moribund, perhaps by design, Ms. Shenher suggests in her account.

“There was no real plan to find these women,” she wrote, in one of the few passages that were read into the inquiry record last month. “I see now that I was merely a figurehead, a sacrificial lamb thrown into an investigation the VPD management was convinced would never amount to anything and would never grow into the tragedy it has become. An investigation they could care less about.”

Ms. Shenher is extremely critical of her colleagues; few are spared from her bitter attacks. She began at the top.

“At the time, beleaguered former chief constable Bruce Chambers was running the VPD,” she wrote. “Between trying to manage a highly dysfunctional organization and sniffing out snakes in his own senior management team, he was busy and not particularly interested in a bunch of missing hookers and drug addicts.”

The passage was read back to Ms. Shenher last month, when she returned to the inquiry for cross-examination by Cameron Ward, a lawyer for the families of the murdered and missing women. “I stand by that,” she testified.

The unit operated from a tiny, “airless and windowless” room inside department headquarters on Main Street. Missing person complaints were handled by a civilian clerk named Sandra Cameron, whom Ms. Shenher alleged in her book was prone to “diatribes and rants.”

On one occasion, “I listened to [Ms. Cameron] speaking to someone on the phone, obviously growing more and more impatient and agitated. Finally, she shouted into the receiver, ‘SPEAK ENGLISH, THIS IS CA-NA-DA.’ This was not the first time I had witnessed [such] behaviour on her part and I had had enough.”

In another passage read aloud into the inquiry proceedings by lawyer Ward, Ms. Shenher recalls asking Ms. Cameron “who she had ‘blown’ to manage to retain her job all of these years. She just laughed, perhaps thinking I was kidding. I wasn’t.”

Ms. Shenher received compelling information that summer, tips that identified Robert “Willie” Pickton, a creepy loner living on a messy pig farm in suburban Port Coquitlam. According to police sources who came forward in 1998, Pickton bragged that he could dispose of bodies on his farm using a meat grinder. Sources claimed that women’s purses and identification were inside Pickton’s trailer. Shenher met one of the sources and thought him to be honest.

She learned that a year earlier, Pickton was charged with the attempted murder of a Downtown Eastside prostitute, whom he had lured to his farm. An RCMP officer who had investigated the stabbing and had recommended the attempted murder charge to Crown prosecutors believed the case was a slam dunk, an easy conviction. But the Crown stayed the charge, on the belief — not shared by the RCMP or Ms. Shenher — that Pickton’s alleged victim was too drug-dependent to make a reliable witness.

“I became more convinced that Pickton was our man,” Ms. Shenher wrote in her book.

She had a potential ally inside the VPD: Kim Rossmo, a geographic profiler with a doctorate in criminology. He believed one or more serial killers were preying on Downtown Eastside prostitutes and he shared his perspective with Ms. Shenher.

Mr. Rossmo was not well-liked by certain colleagues, who thought him an inexperienced flake and unworthy of the unique title he had been given, detective inspector. Ms. Shenher had similar opinions. “His own arrogance and insecurity are his greatest faults,” Ms. Shenher wrote. “Rossmo told me he felt the offender or offenders had the ability to dispose of bodies in privacy, was likely Caucasian and probably used a vehicle, all things I had surmised on my own without the use of any computer program.”

Of course, the description fit Robert Pickton. If Ms. Shenher had already drawn similar conclusions, and was convinced he was the perpetrator, then why was Pickton not apprehended in 1998? How could Ms. Shenher have failed, knowing all that she did? In her manuscript, she blames the old boys, the apathetic men in charge.

“[The missing women] were dead, we had a strong suspect and, still, VPD management put their collective hands over their ears, loudly sang la-la-la and pretended we didn’t have a responsibility to find these women,” she wrote, in another passage read aloud at the inquiry by Mr. Ward, the lawyer.

She could have pressed harder, she admits. “I, too, should have complained long and loud about the lack of resources to properly investigate these files and I really didn’t.”

By 1999, she had decided it came down to this: Rock the boat and watch her career go up in flames or go with the flow and keep climbing the VPD ladder. She chose the latter course. “The best I could hope to do was try my best for these women and cover my own ass,” she wrote.

_________________________________

BCTV NEWS

Robert William Pickton

Mr. Rossmo’s VPD contract expired in 2000. He filed a wrongful dismissal lawsuit that ended up before the courts. This “became an embarrassing display of VPD upper management accusing each other of lying on the [witness] stand, like a bunch of school boys in a playing field arguing over a goal,” wrote Ms. Shenher.

She portrayed her immediate boss, a VPD sergeant named Geramy Field, as a well-intentioned yet powerless, even befuddled, cop. Ms. Shenher wrote that at one point, it seemed as if “we had changed roles and I was now the supervisor, guiding and advising her as to the right thing to do. She appeared lost and pleaded with me to tell her what she should do.”

In May 1999, with more women disappearing from the Downtown Eastside, a formal missing person review team (MPRT) was established and additional resources and VPD officers were put to work. Initially, Ms. Shenher was thrilled. Then she compared her resources to the Home Invasion Task Force which was set up next door. “New detectives dreamed of being asked to join the Home Invasion Task Force,” she wrote, “while those same people avoided the MPRT like the plague, uninterested in searching for a bunch of missing ‘whores’…. Apparently, victimized homeowners warranted the big guns; missing, drug-addicted hookers did not.”

Her assessment of two VPD officers assigned to her team is scathing. Detective Constables Doug Fell and Mark Wolthers are depicted as renegades whom nobody liked. “Not only did they have even less experience dealing with major files than I had, they brought with them a dubious reputation, both on the street and among their fellow officers,” she wrote.

The pair annoyed Ms. Shenher from the start. She was especially upset by the close attention they paid to a previously convicted sex offender and drifter named Barry Niedermeyer, whom she did not believe had any connection to Vancouver’s missing women. But arrangements were made with RCMP in Alberta to put Niedermeyer under surveillance. Ms. Shenher was miffed.

“Fell and Wolthers strutted and preened as the surveillance was going on, basking in the glow of their perceived new importance as the detectives overseeing this large undercover operation that was the collection of [Niedermeyer’s] DNA,” she wrote sarcastically. “[Another VPD officer] and I were so annoyed, we took to snorting like pigs in the office — our way of staying sane in such a manic environment and of saying they were pursuing the wrong man and that we believed Pickton was a far more worthy suspect.”

Niedermeyer was eventually charged with more sex offences and was convicted and imprisoned, thanks to the work of Messrs.. Fell and Wolthers. Yet Ms. Shenher slams them in her book, giving them no credit at all.

In testimony this month at the inquiry, Messrs. Fell and Wolthers claimed that information about Pickton was kept from them while they worked under Ms. Shenher. Other officers have denied the allegation. Mr. Wolthers also said the pair was unfairly criticized in the VPD’s official missing women investigation review, written by Deputy Chief Constable Doug LePard and entered as evidence early on in the inquiry. Mr. Wolthers called the deputy chief’s findings “disgusting.”

Both officers were removed from the review team in 2000. Mr. Wolthers, now retired, does not believe the VPD ever completed its job, even after Pickton was arrested. “I believe strongly that there’s two to three serial killers,” he told the inquiry. “I don’t believe that Robert Pickton is responsible for all of ‘em.’”

Ms. Shenher turned to clairvoyants and psychics to help her crack the missing women cases. She “didn’t exactly broadcast it around the office,” she wrote. One psychic seemed to have a gift, but nothing useful materialized.

By the summer of 2000, the number of names on the VPD’s missing women list had surpassed 30. Ms. Shenher and other officers were told the review team was winding down, that the RCMP was going to review the entire investigation and basically assume the missing women files. The Mounties took review team documents to their offices in Surrey, a Vancouver suburb; some have not been seen since, according to frustrated inquiry lawyers.

The RCMP had already been conducting an on-again, off-again investigation into Robert Pickton and had shared the same graphic tip information with the VPD. The farm that Pickton shared with his younger brother David was in the RCMP’s jurisdiction; it was just a few kilometres from the RCMP’s Port Coquitlam detachment, in fact.

The Mounties were also aware of Piggy’s Palace, a booze can the brothers owned and operated; it sat across the street from their farm. It was widely understood to be frequented by Hells Angels members and associates. The RCMP had great interest in such characters and had various biker investigations underway.

Then there was Bev “Puff” Hyacinthe, a civilian who worked inside the RCMP’s Port Coquitlam detachment. She was a Pickton family friend and neighbour, the inquiry has heard. She allegedly attended a New Year’s Eve party at Piggy’s Palace in 1999 and saw Robert Pickton cavorting with a woman later identified as missing. Remarkably, Ms. Hyacinthe was also aware that Robert Pickton had learned he was under RCMP surveillance, the inquiry has heard. (Inquiry lawyers wanted Ms. Hyacinthe to testify; David Pickton, too. Commissioner Oppal refused their requests, without offering any explanation.)

Like others, Ms. Shenher thought the Mounties’ on-again, off-again interest in Pickton was odd. Why, she wondered, had they suddenly offered to review Vancouver’s missing women investigations? “It became obvious the VPD was looking for an opportunity to dump this case,” she wrote. Perhaps the RCMP felt they needed to show “acceptance for some of the responsibility for the file.” The truth may be far more complicated.

Pickton kept on killing. Lori Shenher became fed up with the review team, and left in November 2000. This was “sooner than planned,” she wrote, explaining that “a murder took place in my own family and the only place I felt I should be was with my partner.” She and her same-sex partner had a baby boy early the next year. Ms. Shenher took maternity leave. When she returned to work, she joined the VPD’s Diversity Relations Unit.

But the missing women investigation gnawed at her conscience. The following summer, Ms. Shenher met with a Vancouver Sun reporter, Lindsay Kines, and she unloaded. “I told him of the set-up of the MPRT, of the shell game that was the VPD’s response to these women’s disappearances, of the incompetent people we were forced to work with,” she wrote in her manuscript. “I placed him in an awful position, knowing he wouldn’t be able to use any of it, but feeling someone needed to know this — the public needed to know this.”

She also discussed details with television producer Chris Haddock, the creator of the CBC drama da Vinci’s Inquest, which was shot in Vancouver. Ms. Shenher had been a journalist before joining the VPD and she often worked as an advisor for Mr. Haddock on his hit series. She couldn’t resist sharing with him her “frustration with the lack of progress on the Pickton file.”

_________________________________

Jason Payne/Postmedia News

Former VPD Const. Lori Shenher (centre) at the missing women inquiry in Vancouver, BC Wednesday, April 4, 2012

The RCMP had all kinds of information on Pickton: The 1997 knife attack on a Downtown Eastside prostitute. Reports from various sources in 1998 and 1999, about women’s clothing and firearms on his farm. About Pickton talking about his ability to dispose of corpses. A witness account, about Pickton purportedly skinning a female corpse in his barn. Bev Hyacinthe’s alleged knowledge of Pickton. And yet senior RCMP officers claim they lacked information to obtain a warrant to search the Pickton farm.

But in February 2002, a young RCMP corporal applied to the courts for permission to enter the property. His search warrant application was based on the suspicion that Pickton possessed an illegal handgun. Once on the farm, more macabre discoveries were made: Items that had belonged to missing women. The farm became a massive crime scene investigation and Pickton was soon arrested.

Ms. Shenher was invited to witness RCMP investigators interview Pickton at their Surrey detachment. She was told that Pickton “had masturbated almost immediately upon entering the cell the previous night and, to the horror of his poor cellmate, would do so several times throughout the night.” Pickton would give the RCMP a confession, of sorts, hinting that he might have killed as many as 49 women. By then, his fate was practically sealed. He was eventually charged with 26 counts of first degree murder and was convicted by a jury on six counts of second degree murder. But his trial was not held until 2007.

Ms. Shenher felt no satisfaction after his arrest. The RCMP had taken most of the credit for nabbing Pickton. VPD investigators were cast as failures. Truth was they had failed. Ms. Shenher wrote that she had come “to a startling and sobering realization — nothing in policing appealed to me.” She was done. Or so she thought.

She went on medical leave in mid-2002 and began working on her manuscript. It was a cathartic exercise, she told the inquiry and, clearly, she felt she had some scores to settle. She and her partner had another baby. Ms. Shenher went on a long maternity leave in February 2003. She hired a literary agent, signed a book deal with McClelland & Stewart, and began delivering chapters. She wrote 289 pages.

Inevitably, reporters caught wind of her book project. Families of Pickton’s victims were outraged. The VPD claimed Ms. Shenher was not writing a book. But she was, and was still collecting a VPD paycheque. She had been part of the Pickton investigation, and she had filled her manuscript with details about evidence. Yet Pickton hadn’t even been tried. There was confusion.

So the book disappeared.

It “just died a death,” Ms. Shenher testified last month, when inquiry lawyers quizzed her on it. “The VPD really had no knowledge that I had written it…. They had nothing to do with the decisions around it at all.” The VPD had not ordered her to kill it. “I wasn’t in any way pressured by them.”

On the other hand, she told lawyer Cameron Ward, “I stand by most of what I wrote, for the most part. There are a couple of things that I have come to, you know, in the fullness of time, have come to understand a little bit differently, or I have had more information provided to me, which has changed my view. But I think the overall tenor of the book I would stand by.”

Ms. Shenher returned to the VPD in 2004. She is now a Detective Constable with the Emergency and Operations Planning Section. Reached at her work late this week, she declined to discuss her book. “I still have to work here,” she said. “I do intend to rewrite it as a memoir one day.”

National Post
bhutchinson@nationalpost.com

His visit to is Alberta next week is unlikely to do much to change their minds, says Alberta Premier Alison Redford.

“I find him to be quite unpredictable with respect to some of his comments,” she said during a press conference with Joe Oliver, the federal natural resources minister, on Friday in Edmonton.

“Another point that’s been part of [Mr. Mulcair’s] comments for the past two weeks — and I don’t know if he’s ever going to change his view, but he should — is that we can’t go back.

“We cannot presume that what the Canadian economy was 15 or 20 years ago is the way it’s going to look 15 or 20 years from now.”

The Alberta premier said she hoped Mr. Mulcair would see the province was committed to balancing its economic interests with environmental sustainability. If he did not share that view, he would be advocating a position that would massively impact the Canadian economy, she suggested.

The NDP leader has come under heavy fire from the Western premiers in the past few weeks, after claiming the high Canadian dollar was responsible for hundreds of thousands of job losses in central Canada.

Mr. Mulcair believes Canada suffers from a condition economists have dubbed “Dutch disease,” in which the discovery of a commodity bolsters the value of a country’s currency, making it more difficult for such export-driven sectors as manufacturing to compete. It’s based on a theory proposed by economists who studied the impact of natural gas discoveries on the Netherlands in the 1960s.

A Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey, released Friday, found 45% of respondents did not agree with Mr. Mulcair’s argument, compared with 41% who did.

The responses varied greatly according to region, with more people in the Prairies disagreeing with Mr. Mulcair, and a larger portion in Quebec and British Columbia agreeing with him.

In Ontario, Canada’s manufacturing hub, more of the respondents disagreed with Mr. Mulcair.

Although Mr. Mulcair has said the manufacturing job loss statistics offer “irrefutable” evidence Canada is suffering from Dutch disease, many economists say his claims are overly simplistic and highly debatable.

For his part, Mr. Oliver condemned Mr. Mulcair’s remarks.

“We consider them to be divisive and unsound economically, and based upon a misunderstanding of the economic fundamentals of the country,” he said.

National Post, with files from The Canadian Press

But costumes don’t mean it’s all fun and games. One protest chant denounced Bill 78, the emergency legislation adopted last week, as a “fascist law” while another told Premier Jean Charest, “Shut your face!”

The students’ refusal to accept the government’s modest tuition hikes – $325 a year over five years – has plunged the province into a crisis. Montreal is the scene of daily protests that have officials worried about the fast-approaching tourist season.

To understand the students’ mindset, the National Post asked a set of questions to some of the marchers and to other students. Far from dampening their enthusiasm, the passage of Bill 78 has only hardened their resolve, and they say they are prepared to continue until the government gives in.

Displays of support ranging from small demonstrations in foreign cities to the latest pot-banging craze in and around Montreal have persuaded students they represent the will of the people – even though polls suggest most Quebecers do not support their demands.

They have little regard for the elected government and feel taking to the street is best way to bring change. “The street is a beautiful place,” one student said. “It’s a real power.”

If innocent victims suffer from their actions — the parents unable to fetch children from daycare because they’re caught in a demonstration, the downtown restaurateurs who have seen business dry up – it’s all for the greater good, they say.

“I don’t think being disturbed on your way to work is such a huge price to pay for something that is very important for the entire society,” as one student put it.

National Post

Patricia Dagenais, 24, art history student at Université de Montreal

Graeme Hamilton/NP

Patricia Dagenais

Q. What exactly are you protesting against?
A: It started out as student tuition fee hike. We were against it, and we’re still against it, but now it has turned into a social fight. We’re against this stupid law that restricts our possibility to demonstrate freely.

Q: How do you justify the fact that citizens are inconvenienced by the demonstrations, for example office workers, taxi drivers, shop owners?
A: Quebecers have long been what we call métro, boulot, dodo, basically take the métro, go to work, go home to sleep. We’re trying to wake them up, saying that, you know what, we’re fighting now, but it’s for you guys also. It’s for everyone. Is it justified to block [people stuck in traffic] from going to get their kids? It’s not pointless. It’s justified. So you’re stuck there. You’re going to be stuck for an hour, maybe 30 minutes, but what’s an hour or 30 minutes of your day? We’re not terrorists; we’re students. The only way we have to get heard is to bother people in the streets a little bit.

Q: Is what is going on evidence of a healthy democracy?
A: It’s direct democracy. It’s people going out in the streets. We don’t live in a democracy right now. We live in a representative democracy that is basically flawed. The corporations, the multinationals, and the oligarchies are going up against the people and getting richer and richer, with our money. That’s why people throw rocks at the banks because they’re getting so much richer than us, and we’re getting poorer every day.

Q: Is this a sign that the street should be more powerful than a democratically elected government?
A: I think at all times the street should be more powerful, except for maybe after a Canadiens game. For any social movement it’s justified. Everywhere in the world — in Chile, in Spain, in Italy — everybody’s taken to the streets, and they are far more violent than us, they are radical, they are against this austerity plan. The street is a beautiful place, and the energy that comes from it when you really participate is a real thing. It’s a real power.

Q: How much tuition should students pay?
A: I am a partisan of free tuition.

Q What should the demonstrators do if the government refuses to back down on tuition hikes? Is it possible that this is a battle you cannot win?
A: The whole world is taking interest in us, and it gives us energy. I’ve been in the street for three months, almost six hours a day demonstrating against this. And we’re able to go on further. As to the possibility of us giving in, well, dude, there’s some elections coming up. We’re saying, ‘We’re going to see you at election time, Mr. Charest.’ ”

_ _ _

Justin Arcand, president of student association at CEGEP de Valleyfield

Handout

Justin Arcand

Q. What exactly are you protesting against?
A: People are fighting for a principle, for accessible education and against student debt. The government hoped that by doing nothing the movement would fizzle out. On the contrary, it grew because other groups joined us in solidarity, for example professors, then parents and now we are really seeing a lot of ordinary citizens who join us. It shows that people are sick and tired. Often these sorts of conflicts begin with students, because we are not trapped in a straitjacket like workers are. May 1968 in France began the same way.

Q: How do you justify inconveniencing ordinary citizens?
A: Yes, people are bothered by this, but behind it all is the idea of disrupting to have a platform to be heard. If it puts people in a bad mood, maybe that means it’s time for the government to move.

Q: Is this a sign that the street should be more powerful than a democratically elected government?
A: I sure hope so. That is what we are trying to show. Yes, this government, it can be argued, was elected democratically, but is democracy just a question of marking an ‘X’ on a ballot every four years? Isn’t it also listening to the people when there is disagreement?

Q: How much tuition should students pay?
A: We are talking about creating a plan to go towards free education. We realize we cannot have it tomorrow, but these increases would make achieving free education even more difficult.

Q What should the demonstrators do if the government refuses to back down?
A: We haven’t spent so long on strike, sacrificed our terms to achieve less. The more time goes by, the more people want. They are ready to stay on strike and take to the streets. The government will have to make some compromise.

_ _ _

Samuel (declined to give last name), student at Collège Maisonneuve

Graeme Hamilton/NP

Samuel

Q: How do you justify inconveniencing ordinary citizens?
A: When someone is prepared to take to the street to shout that he is not happy, the government should pay attention. I think there have been almost 275 times that students have gone into the street to express their unhappiness, and every time the government says, “I don’t give a damn. I have no interest in listening to you.” So these people are losing patience, and they realize that if they don’t upset the government, they will not win.

Q: Is what is going on evidence of a healthy democracy?
A: Democracy is the participation of people in political life. I think we are fed up. We have discovered that democracy is not just marking an ‘X’ on a ballot every four years. Democracy is also defending our interests. I think this is a beautiful rebirth of democracy.

Q: How much tuition should students pay?
A: I believe in free education. A society cannot have too many educated people. I do not see a university as a factory producing workers but as a knowledge centre.

Q: What should the demonstrators do if the government refuses to back down?
A: I think we have already won. The eyes of the entire world are turned here to see how it will be resolved. Is it the government and its austerity measures that will triumph or is it the people? I think that the Quebec example will be reflected everywhere. We have proved that the police are not going to make us go home, the government is not going to make us go home.

_ _ _

Samuel Mailhot, 20, student at École nationale d’aérotechnique

Graeme Hamilton/NP

Samuel Mailhot

Q: What exactly are you protesting against?
A: Personally, what outrages me is that the government is ready to come take all this money [in increased tuition] and send it to the Plan Nord to fund private companies that are going to steal our natural resources and take them back to their countries. We will receive no royalties, as has happened many times throughout our history. Personally I find that disgusting, just as I find disgusting our government, which is corrupt to the bone.

Q: How do you justify inconveniencing ordinary citizens?
A: It’s very justified to disrupt the public, in the sense that it is not just a debate of the students, it’s of the society as a whole. My ancestors went across the ocean and were killed by Nazis to defend their ideals. I don’t think being disturbed on your way to work is such a huge price to pay for something that is very important for the entire society.

Q: Is what is going evidence of a healthy democracy?
A: The demonstrations we have right now are the very essence of our democracy. Democracy is the voice of the people. It’s not the voice of Mr. Charest, nor of the Liberals. It’s not the voice of big companies, either. We don’t hear in the media about government giving away our resources but we hear the students have broken a few windows. We don’t care about a broken window when compared to the political issues we are trying to defend.

Q: Is this a sign that the street should be more powerful than a democratically elected government?
A: Yes, precisely because the street represents the voice of the people more than the government.

Q: How much tuition should students pay?
A: I’m not opposed to any increase, but an increase of 75%, even 82% as the latest government offer proposed, I find that disgusting.

Q: What should the demonstrators do if the government refuses to back down?
A: The student protest is just the tip of the iceberg of the demands young people want to make. There is corruption in the government, the 1% that controls 99% of resources on the planet. There are plenty of injustices.

_ _ _

Nicolas Ouellet, 17, École nationale d’aérotechnique

Graeme Hamilton/NP

Nicolas Ouellet

Q: What exactly are you protesting against?
A: It’s no longer just a question of free education. We have got a government that doesn’t listen to us, that has no connection to the people and only thinks of itself. It doesn’t give a damn about the people.

Q: How do you justify inconveniencing ordinary citizens?
A: First of all, a lot of them agree with us. And those who don’t agree, they are only thinking about themselves. They are not thinking of the population as a whole and the sacrifices that need to be made if we want to move forward as a people.

Q: Is what is going on evidence of a healthy democracy?
A: If we are at the point where we have to take to the streets, it is because our democratically elected government no longer represents us. What we are seeing now is that the youth are in the street because they’re fed up with the government.

Q: Is this a sign that the street should be more powerful than a democratically elected government?
A: No, the street should not be more powerful, but sometimes we have to take to the streets when the government no longer represents us. The ship of state is sinking and it’s the captain’s fault, and the captain is Jean Charest.

Q: How much tuition should students pay?
A: I am not in favour of completely free education. I think everyone has to pay a share for their studies. It is a privilege after all. But the government is increasing it 75% and that money could be found in other places.

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Léandre Bolduc and Élodie Gilbert-Lachapelle, both 19, CEGEP du Vieux Montréal

Graeme Hamilton/NP

Bolduc and Gilbert-Lachapelle

Q. What exactly are you protesting against?
Élodie: We are protesting against the injustices that the government is imposing on us, like Bill 78, which infringes on our rights and freedoms – the right to protest and the freedom of assembly. Also against the tuition increase, which is really is too high.
Léandre: We aren’t marching for us but for all those who want to go to university, for future generations. The cheaper education is, the better.

Q: How do you justify inconveniencing ordinary citizens?
E: If we are going to be heard, we have to create some disturbances. That is how we will be able to get our message across. If there is no noise, we will never be heard, and it is time for change in Quebec.

Q: Is this a sign that the street should be more powerful than a democratically elected government?
E: The government is elected and it should respect what the population is demanding. It needs to take bigger steps than it has before.

Q: How much tuition should students pay?
L: In an ideal world, it should be free, because what makes a people is really the strength of its thinking. But if not free, at least maintaining a freeze would be good.

Q: What should the demonstrators do if the government refuses to back down on tuition hikes. Is it possible that this is a battle you cannot win?
L: I would not want the events to become more violent. The government will have to do something. I don’t think people are going to stop protesting for a long time yet.

National Post
ghamilton@nationalpost.com

The change in the Liberal government’s new anti-bullying bill — the Accepting Schools Act — is part of a government initiative to create a “safe and accepting climate” in schools, including Catholic schools.

“Schools need to be safe places for kids to be themselves, and for some kids, that means being able to name a club a gay-straight alliance,” Broten said.

“I don’t think there’s anything radical about allowing students to name a club.”

The legislation, which comes in response to the suicides of two bullied students last year, is about protecting and empowering students, Broten said.

Allowing students to name clubs as they see fit is part of that empowerment process, she said.

“It wasn’t for us to sit at Queen’s Park and tell students what the name of their clubs should be, and we weren’t going to do that.”

Despite objections from Catholic school trustees and some religious groups, the bill requires school boards to support student groups for “people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.”

It specifically makes reference to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, two-spirited, intersexed, queer and questioning people.

Some critics argue the bill is an affront to their family values.

Still, Broten said she hoped the opposition parties would support the bill, including the naming provision, and expressed appreciation for the backing offered by the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association.

The province’s New Democrats were quick to take credit for the “positive” amendments to the bill, saying the party has been pushing the minority Liberals for explicit protections for students who want to start groups aimed at combating homophobia.

“We’re glad after so many months the government saw the light,” the NDP’s Peter Tabuns said.

Among other things, the bill aims to encourage a “positive” school climate and prevent inappropriate behaviour, including bullying, sexual assault, gender-based violence and incidents based on homophobia.

It also would establish “Bullying Awareness and Prevention Week” beginning on the third Sunday in November.

Broten said the name of an activity or school organization would have to be consistent with the promotion of a climate that is “inclusive and accepting of all pupils.”

The government hopes to pass the legislation before the legislature rises for the summer on June 7.

Pastor Charles Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina told his congregation during a May 13 sermon that the Bible and God opposed homosexuality and that gay and lesbian people should be put in concentration camps.

“Build a great big large fence 50 or 100 miles long,” Worley said according to the video posted on YouTube. “Put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. Have that fence electrified so they can’t get out. You know what, in a few years, they’ll die out. You know why? They can’t reproduce.”

The Anti-Defamation League, which fights hatred, prejudice and bigotry, condemned Worley’s statements.

“Pastor Worley’s videotaped remarks are deplorable, inexcusable and incompatible with the tenets of his faith,” said David Freidman, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League in Washington, D.C. “Pastor Worley owes the LGBT community and the people of Maiden, North Carolina a swift and unequivocal apology.”

Phone calls to the church for comment from Worley were not returned.

Christopher Brook, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, said the church had posted the entire sermon on its website for a few days, and the Catawba Valley Citizens Against Hate had grabbed the clip and posted it on YouTube. The clip had been viewed 689,000 times by Thursday.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a religious liberty watchdog group, has filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service, asking that it investigate the tax exempt status of Providence Road Baptist Church.

“Pastor Worley’s vicious and mean-spirited assault on gays and lesbians is bad enough,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “His pulpit command that people not vote for President Obama is a violation of federal tax law. I urge the IRS to act swiftly to investigate the matter.”

In the sermon, Worley denounces gay marriage and President Barack Obama’s support for it. Obama announced his support for gay marriage on May 9. Presumed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney opposes same sex marriage.

During the sermon, Worley referred to “our president getting up and saying that it was all right for two women to marry or two men to marry,” and added, “I was disappointed bad. The Bible is against it, God is against and I’m against it.”

Later in the sermon, Worley says, “Somebody said, ‘Who are you going to vote for?’ I ain’t going to vote for a baby killer and a homosexual lover. You said, ‘Did you mean to say that?’ You better believe I did.”

Lynn said that Worley’s statements are a clear violation of federal law, which prohibits all non-profit groups from intervening in elections by endorsing or opposing candidates.

The demonstration against Worley’s comments is scheduled for Sunday morning at the Catawba County Justice Center in Newton, North Carolina, according to an invitation posed on the Catawba Valley Citizens Against Hate Facebook page.

In a Skype interview from her Toronto apartment where she is recovering from her double lung transplant, Campbell thanked DeGeneres for her support and surprised her with a “Dance Dare” video.

“I’m dancing and laughing and even brushing my teeth without feeling shortness of breath,” Campbell told DeGeneres and her cheering studio audience.

“It’s amazing. I can laugh again.”

Campbell said she could even sing again in her post-transplant “Louis Armstrong voice.”

The 21-year-old Ottawa woman was waiting in Toronto for a double-lung transplant last February when she received a surprise Skype call from the popular TV host, whom Campbell had been lobbying to use her celebrity to urge people to go online and register to be organ donors.

Campbell, suffering idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, was inspired to approach DeGeneres by her show’s Dance Dare contest, noting that she and other hopeful recipients were unable to participate until they received organ transplants. The contest challenges viewers to dance in public, preferably behind unsuspecting strangers.

On Friday, Campbell showed a video she recorded of herself secretly dancing behind shoppers at a Chapters-Indigo store in Toronto.

YouTube

Hélène Campbell, whose organ donation awareness campaign netted her an unexpected appearance three months ago on Ellen DeGeneres’s daytime talk show, Ellen, was a return guest Friday for the show’s season finale.

In Friday’s five-minute interview, DeGeneres said she was inspired by Campbell’s “attitude and enthusiasm.”

“Listen to you — 21 years old and so articulate,” DeGeneres said. “I promise you I will keep talking about this.”

She ended by promising to fly Campbell and her mother, Manon, to California for a live appearance on the show when the two could dance together in person.

Ottawa Citizen

John Moore: It’s the older generation that’s entitled, not students

Setting aside the fact that this intergenerational hectoring dates back to Socrates, let us ask: Who exactly is making the charge? Quebec has had low tuition rates for a half century. That means almost every living adult in the province, having already been afforded a plum goodie, is now wagging his finger at the first generation that will be asked to pay the tab. So who really is entitled here?

With Quebec tuition protest arrests at 2,500 and counting, Ontario students and unions say they’re gearing up to join their counterparts in demonstrating against tuition hikes.

The show of solidarity comes after nearly 700 protesters were arrested across Quebec Wednesday night, many in mass kettling roundups, which prompted Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Marois to declare the ongoing strife “the worst social crisis we have ever known in Quebec.”

Students in Quebec have been striking for more than a 100 days to oppose a proposed 75% tuition hike, which has sparked violent clashes and mass arrests by police.

Premier Dalton McGuinty, however, says his government has helped Ontario students — who face one of the highest tuition fees in Canada — by giving them a 30% rebate.

But the students say the rebate only affects one-third of students and the government hiked tuition rates shortly after it took effect.

They say they’re not advocating violence, but warn there’s unrest brewing among students who are frustrated with paying sky-high fees for their education.

The University of British Columbia student union is also showing solidarity with Quebec, announcing it will write to Quebec Premier Jean Charest, formally condemning Quebec’s special law that puts restrictions on the tuition protests that have rocked that province for months.

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The UBC student council passed a resolution earlier this week committing to call on Charest’s government to respect the financial, legal and intellectual autonomy of Quebec student unions.

However, an amendment that would have sent money to a legal fund for the Quebec protesters was voted down.

“At this point in time, what was immediately needed was a stance on Bill 78, considering its potential implications to student associations across Canada,” said Matt Parson, the student union president.

The UBC motion also disapproved of violence by all parties in the ongoing dispute.

The scope of the Quebec protests has turned toward the historic: With arrests surpassing 2,500, at least five times as many people have been jailed than during the 1970 FLQ crisis that saw martial law declared in Quebec.

While nobody has died, unlike in 1970, and most people arrested have been simply ticketed and immediately released, unlike those left to languish in jails back then, critics of the provincial government have spared no adjective to describe current events.

“Six-hundred-fifty-one — that’s the number of arrests yesterday … of ordinary citizens, men, women, young people arrested because they wanted to voice their opposition to decisions of the Liberal regime,” Marois said Thursday. “That’s where the Quebec Liberal party has taken us: mass arrests, more often than not arbitrary ones, to silence opposition.”

In that gloomy atmosphere, rays of hope emerged Thursday for possible progress.

There were plans for the government and student leaders to meet again, likely early next week. Education Minister Michelle Courchesne said she expected a “very, very important” session after having had positive discussions over the phone.

A new point man has also been assigned to help resolve the crisis: Premier Jean Charest has replaced his chief of staff with a well-regarded veteran who once served in that same role for him, bringing back Daniel Gagnier from political retirement with a mandate to make peace.

Restoring order in time for the tourist-filled festival season, which starts in only a few weeks, appears a monumental task given the events that unfolded in the wee hours Thursday.

A peaceful evening march that began with people festively banging pots and pans ended with police using the controversial “kettling” tactic on a crowd of demonstrators and arresting 518 people in Montreal. Scores of others were arrested elsewhere in the province.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

Protesters opposing Quebec student tuition fee hikes bang on pots and pans during a demonstration in Montreal, Thursday, May 24, 2012.

The pot-banging continued before the start of Thursday’s marches, the biggest one being in Montreal. Another protest hit the streets in Quebec City as well.

The clanging spread beyond the major cities, with people taking up the percussive protest in several towns and cities including Sorel, Longueuil, Chambly, Repentigny and Abitibi, which is several hundred kilometres from Montreal.

Police wasted no time in declaring Montreal’s march illegal on Thursday, saying it violated a municipal bylaw because the route was not provided beforehand. The demonstration was allowed to continue as long as it remained peaceful and police warned they would sound a siren 10 seconds before making any move to disperse the crowd.

One man on Twitter offered a cheeky response to the demand for a route, posting a map of the city with a route marked in red that formed into a design of a hand flipping the single-digit salute.

The march retained its defiant tone but also some of the circus-like tone of the other 30 nights it’s been held. Fireworks were set off and four solemn clowns wearing red noses and long coats walked among the marchers carrying a coffin.

The boisterous march, which could be heard from a kilometre away, soon split into two long processions that seemed to keep their distance initially from the downtown core where police made mass arrests on previous nights. One group went through trendy Outremont, skirting the area where Mayor Gerald Tremblay lives.

While thousands packed the streets in support, the Twitterverse exploded with reactions and observations.

Christina Stimpson offered a different glimpse of the average protesters, who have tended to be young students, saying, “Spotted a man in an Armani suit banging a pot. Feel the love people.”

Others noted that the students seemed outnumbered by other people during the march which drew smiles and encouragement from people in bars along St-Laurent Boulevard. There was even some variety among the pot-bangers as one man was seen rolling a small barbecue along the street and hammering away at its lid.

One of the popular chants was “Charest, get out! We will find a job for you in the North,” a reference to the premier’s recent crack about student protesters being able to find work in northern Quebec as part of his ambitious economic development plan.

Not everyone on Twitter was supportive — some asked the protesters to get out of their neighbourhood and protest in the provincial capital — but at least one man was concerned.

“Be careful out there MTL,” tweeted Tristan Lalla. “Don’t get Charrested. keep it peaceful.”

Rogerio Barbosa/AFP/Getty Images

Students march during a protest against tuition fee increases on May 24, 2012 in Montreal.

The Montreal march stretched into early Friday morning with only four arrests reported as it maintained its peaceful tone.

In Quebec City, there were several sit-ins in front of police but as of late Thursday night only a man in a banana costume was arrested after he was peeled from the crowd.

The Quebec protests have received worldwide media attention, with the unrest receiving prominent play in some of the biggest international news outlets.

Some of that coverage has depicted the protests favourably, as an example of youth mobilizing for a brighter future, while other play has focused on the scenes of disorder like those that occurred overnight Wednesday night when police used a tactic dubbed “kettling” before arresting more than 500 people.

The tactic is used extensively in Europe where riot cops surround demonstrators and limit or cut off their exits. It has been widely criticized because it often results in the scooping up of innocent bystanders as well as rowdies. A recent report by Ontario’s police watchdog blasted Toronto police for their use of kettling during the G20 summit two years ago.

Wednesday’s march was also quickly declared illegal but allowed to proceed peacefully with riot squad officers shadowing it from the sidelines all evening. Around midnight, the tone changed as police said they had been the targets of projectiles.

Montreal police said those arrested will face charges, some under minor municipal bylaws and others under the more severe Criminal Code. Many of those detained for municipal infractions will face $634 tickets. Some protesters are encouraging others to contest the fines.

The mass arrests came after five days of escalating violence in a dispute that began months ago over tuition fees and evolved partly into a struggle against capitalist practices. In recent days, it has mushroomed thanks to opposition to the Charest government’s Bill 78, which is aimed at cracking down on the protests.

That bill has not been invoked in any Montreal arrests — although it has been used elsewhere in Quebec, and Montreal police say it could still be used to arrest some protest organizers.

STEEVE DUGUAY/AFP/Getty Images

A student mockingly salutes police during a protest against tuition fee increases on May 24, 2012 in Montreal.

With files fromNelson Wyatt, Alexander Panetta, Jonathan Montpetit, Myles Dolphin and Jocelyne Richer

Billowing smoke and ash have the city of 43,000 on high alert and have prompted evacuations in the communities of Hydro Bay, Kamiskotia Highway and Cooks Lake.

That’s in addition to an evacuation order for the nearby Mattagami First Nation that saw 118 residents relocate to Kapuskasing on Wednesday.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources-Christine Rosche

A forest fire burns near Timmins, Ont. on Thursday, May 24, 2012.

The fire roughly 30 kilometres outside Timmins has also forced the closure of a gold mine operated by Lake Shore Gold Corp.

The Ministry of Natural Resources says high winds are fuelling the blaze and there are concerns strong winds today could push significant smoke into the community.

A forest fire that has been threatening the community of Kirkland Lake, about 140 kilometres southeast of Timmins, appears to be almost out but emergency crews are keeping an eye on dangerous hot spots.

There are currently 45 active forest fires in Ontario, 43 of them in the northeast region.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources-Christine Rosche

A forest fire burns near Timmins, Ont. on Thursday, May 24, 2012.

The 21-year-old Ottawa woman was waiting in Toronto for a double-lung transplant last February when she received a surprise Skype call from the popular TV host, whom Campbell had been lobbying to use her celebrity to urge people to go online and register to be organ donors.

Campbell, suffering idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, was inspired to approach DeGeneres by her show’s Dance Dare contest, noting that she and other hopeful recipients were unable to participate until they received organ transplants.

In Friday’s show, also recorded via Skype from the Toronto apartment where Campbell is recuperating from her April 6 surgery, it will be Campbell’s turn to surprise DeGeneres, sending along a brief video of her dancing while wearing a pair of underwear from DeGeneres’s Ellen line of clothing.

Ottawa Citizen

Mulcair has suggested the Alberta oil exports raise the value of the Canadian dollar, which in turn hurts the economy in other parts of the country.

The phenomenon is dubbed the “Dutch Disease” in reference to the manufacturing decline that occurred in the Netherlands after a boom in natural gas exports in the 1970s.

The Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey suggests slightly more Canadians disagree than agree with Mulcair — 45 per cent compared to 41 per cent — although opinions varied across the country.

The telephone survey of just over 1,000 people was carried out between May 17 and 20 and has a margin of error of 3.1 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Most people polled in oil-rich Alberta and the rest of the Prairies disagreed with the NDP leader, while those in Quebec and British Columbia were most likely to agree with him.

The poll indicates most people don’t share Mulcair’s sentiments in Ontario, the country’s manufacturing heartland, where the economy has been hard hit from the restructuring of the North American auto sector and other blue-collar industries.

But a study by the Canadian Energy Research Institute says Ontario enjoys the lion’s share of oil sands benefits outside Alberta. The Calgary-based think-tank has suggested the oil sands will create billions of dollars in economic spinoffs in Ontario and tens of thousands of jobs over the next quarter century.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and his Alberta counterpart Alison Redford got into a spat earlier this year over the same issue. When McGuinty said a strong oil sands industry means a high loonie that hurts the manufacturing and export sectors, Redford accused him of being too simplistic.

But Mulcair has insisted that statistics on manufacturing job losses are “irrefutable”’ and that “everyone” agrees more than half of those losses are the direct result of the artificially high Canadian dollar created by booming energy exports, particularly from Alberta’s oil sands.

The federal Conservatives quickly pounced on Mulcair for suggesting the Alberta oil sands have given Canada a case of Dutch Disease. Cabinet ministers have accused the NDP leader of pitting region against region and insulting hard-working workers in the resource sector.

Mulcair’s views have also angered Redford and Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall. Redford has said she won’t meet with Mulcair until he visits the Fort McMurray region to educate himself about the oil sands.

The NDP leader’s office has confirmed Mulcair will visit the region May 30 and 31.

The poll suggests less than half of Canadians had heard about Mulcair’s comments. People from parts of the country most involved in the oil sands told pollsters they were most aware of what he said.

“Our survey suggests that those who have the most to lose if oil sands development were to be slowed as a means to assist other economic sectors are the ones paying the most attention to the ’Dutch Disease’ debate,” said Doug Anderson, senior vice-president of Harris-Decima.

“On top of that, no region seems particularly convinced that oil sands development has been hurting exports of other sectors of Canada’s economy.”

There were few surprises along party lines.

The survey suggests 70 per cent of self-identified Conservative supporters polled either disagree or strongly disagree with Mulcair.

However, most Green party supporters also disagree with him — with 56 per cent offside.

Liberal supporters were roughly split, with 48 per cent agreeing with Mulcair and 44 per cent disagreeing.

The poll indicates 55 per cent of New Democrat supporters share Mulcair’s view.

But the NDP leader’s assessment was most popular with Bloc Quebecois supporters. The survey suggests 64 per cent of Bloc supporters back his musings.

John Moore: It’s the older generation that’s entitled, not students

Setting aside the fact that this intergenerational hectoring dates back to Socrates, let us ask: Who exactly is making the charge? Quebec has had low tuition rates for a half century. That means almost every living adult in the province, having already been afforded a plum goodie, is now wagging his finger at the first generation that will be asked to pay the tab. So who really is entitled here?

MONTREAL — The staggering number of student protest-related arrests in Quebec — 2,500 and counting — is about to add costs and delays to an already overburdened justice system.

The historic number has prompted two questions: what is the short-term impact on the system and what is the long-term impact on those rounded up?

Some of the accused will face lengthy waits to actually get to trial, while others will encounter similar delays fighting their fines.

Constitutional challenges are inevitable against some of the laws used to end protests, and some people will face the prospect of a criminal record that could hang over them for years.

The end result will be more pressure on the justice system, even though authorities appear confident they can deal with the numbers.

In Montreal, where most of the marches have taken place, a spokesman for the director of criminal prosecutions says 53 cases are before the courts for criminal infractions since February 2012.

“That doesn’t include cases that could be transferred to us eventually,” says Crown spokesman Jean-Pascal Boucher, whose office prosecutes the most serious cases.

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“The director of criminal prosecutions has the human resources and manpower necessary to deal with these cases.”

Three people were hit with criminal charges following rioting in Victoriaville at a recent Quebec Liberal party meeting and three other cases remain pending in that file.

But Boucher says no criminal cases have been reported in the province’s other major jurisdictions of Sherbrooke, Quebec City and Gatineau.

While there are no firm tallies, at least 2,500 people have been arrested and fined since the student demonstrations began three months ago.

That number includes 518 arrests in Montreal on Wednesday night. With further arrests in Sherbrooke and Quebec City, the final number that night swelled to about 700.

Since this February, Montreal alone has had more than 1,500 arrests, according to police figures. The majority have been ticketed and given hefty fines for violating the province’s highway safety code and municipal bylaws.

But it’s obvious many are unclear on the ticketing process. One exasperated defence lawyer told Twitter followers on Thursday not to call her in the middle of the night.

“We don’t call legal aid, or a lawyer in the middle of the night because we were issued a ticket,” tweeted Veronique Robert. “A little calm despite the context, please.”

Some in Montreal have been charged under a new anti-mask bylaw that results in fines for demonstrators who cover their faces during public protests.

Quebec’s controversial Bill 78, emergency legislation designed to severely undermine the ability of student groups to impose school shutdowns at faculties, has been used sparingly as authorities try to figure out how to apply it.

ROGERIO BARBOSA/AFP/Getty Images

Students march during a protest against tuition fee increases on May 24, 2012 in Montreal. The Quebec government invited student groups for talks to end a three-month conflict over a planned hike in tuition fees after nearly 700 people were arrested overnight in the Canadian province.

The use of the safety code has already been contested in court and a Montreal civil rights lawyer says the anti-mask bylaw and Bill 78 could also be challenged.

Julius Grey says it’s a good thing students are being ticketed and not charged criminally.

“I prefer them using this rather than using the Criminal Code because it doesn’t create a criminal record for people,” Grey said in a phone interview.

“A criminal record is an absolutely devastating thing, nothing is ever forgotten and 30 years later people will be coming up [listed] as a convicted criminal.”

“I still think it’s terrible but I think it’s very important not to give criminal records to idealistic students.”

The mounting number of fines and arrests is a cause for concern, according to student leader Leo Bureau-Blouin.

“In three months: 2500 arrests / Night of May 23: 450 arrests – worrisome arrests that show how improvised Bill 78 is,” Blouin wrote on Twitter.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

Police arrest a protester after a march against tuition fee hikes Thursday, May 24, 2012 in Montreal.

Many of the fines levied in recent weeks are expected to be contested. While they won’t have a lasting effect on a permanent record, the cases promise to clog up Quebec’s municipal court system.

Emmanuel Hessler, 31, an independent filmmaker, was on his way to join the protest on Wednesday when he was caught in the police operation.

After six hours of detention and being photographed, he received a $634 fine — a ticket he plans to contest. He says others he was with were simply trying to get home when they were rounded up by police and held.

Hessler said he’s a little apprehensive about heading back out but is determined as ever.

“[The ticketing] is certainly unjustified and it only makes people more frustrated,” Hessler said.

Criminal lawyer Steven Slimovitch says people don’t always grasp the kind of problems that come with having a criminal record.

“It’s there [the record] and I can assure it doesn’t help you,” said Slimovitch, adding it’s common to have problems travelling or even applying for work in some professions.

And it’s no longer easy to erase a record. The Conservative government has quadrupled the cost of getting a criminal pardon, now called a “record suspension.”

“We are quickly moving towards a society where there will be two classes of people — those with criminal records and those without,” said Grey.

“It’s not that the students don’t understand, but I think our whole society doesn’t know just how serious criminal record-keeping is and how important it is to move towards a system where things can be expunged.”

Cases can already take years to snake through the system to trial. Quebec court and municipal courts are the venue for most non-major crimes. A spokesman for Montreal’s municipal court says they are prepared to add more help if necessary.

City spokesman Gonzalo Nunez says there is no foreseeable congestion or overflow because the municipal court already processes nearly 1,000 criminal cases a week.

“We already have the necessary resources in terms of prosecutors and judges,” Nunez said in an email, adding the first cases would only be heard in early 2013.

The courts have already been used readily during the protest — mainly by students attempting to gain injunctions to allow themselves to gain access to class.

Dario Ayala/Postmedia News

Police block St. Denis street on the corner of Sherbrooke boulevard during a night protest against pending tuition increases and Bill 78 in downtown Montreal Wednesday, May 23, 2012.