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Monday, September 10, 2018

The Byelection Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal


On its deathbed, the church has nothing to lose  …  [a]s the church implodes before our eyes … [t]he church that has played such a huge part in lives is dying, and we are helpless … the church will be remembered as a nonprofit hijacked in the name of God
  ….

A deathbed prayer for the Catholic Church | Opinion

Teachers moonlighting on Instagram




'I accept the message':  Mistrust of politicians decided byelection

People are feeling disengaged in the process, the Premier says, and she will 'work her guts out' to fix it.
  • EXCLUSIVE
    CRIME

    Conveyor belts, cocaine and the link to the ATO scandal

    After anxiously scanning the oversized luggage coming in on a conveyor belt, the tall chubby Qantas worker snapped off his blue latex gloves and threw them into the bin in disgust.
    • by Kate McClymont
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Could Director Identification Numbers counter illegal phoenixing? 
Of all the strange birds you can meet in business, the phoenix is surely one of the ugliest. It’s the company that siphons off tax collected from staff salaries and their super contributions, doesn’t pay its bills and, when the going gets tough, calls in the administrators. Staff and other creditors are left with the debts, pained and poorer for their efforts, while chapter two begins.

The following is excerpted from a Huffington Post guest post by Peter Trent, author of The Merger Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal.



Just over ten years ago, two hundred municipalities all over Quebec were merged against their will. Some were amalgamated into megacities. The governing Parti Québécois had no mandate to do this; moreover, pleading the "urgency" to act, they refused to consult citizens. Besides, we were told, mergers would save money and redirect suburban taxes to the central city. Mergers were supposedly a world-wide trend and had always been imposed in Quebec. None of those claims was true.

Once the legislation imposing the mergers, Bill 170, was rammed through Quebec's National Assembly, there remained only two strategies available to me in fighting a law that wiped out so many municipalities including my own. We could try to overturn Bill 170 in court; and, failing that, to force the opposition Liberal Party to honour their increasingly flaccid promise of "de-merger." The two strategies were interlinked: pursuing the matter in court kept the public's ire on the boil, long enough for the Liberals possibly to get elected and -- with a little help from me -- to bring about the world's first urban de-merger.

The following is excerpted from the Globe & Mail article The ‘undecided’ can make or break a party



Quebec’s two major polling firms, CROP and Leger Marketing, underestimated Liberal support by five and four points, respectively, because they distributed the undecided proportionally to the decided, even though undecided voters tend to vote for the Liberals.
During the 1980 referendum on sovereignty, several polls predicted a Yes victory, but polling firm Sorécom and its renowned adviser, distinguished McGill University sociologist Maurice Pinard, correctly predicted the result by allowing a larger portion of the undecided and the “discreet” to the No side.
Unfortunately, this method fell out of use in recent years. Claire Durand, a Université de Montréal sociologist, was the only analyst to foresee the strength of the Liberal Party because she went back to the old, proven method of Prof. Pinard.
The pollsters also ignored another factor that worked for the Liberals: a formidable organization that “got the vote out,” an advantage the CAQ’s fledgling organization was unable to emulate.