It took a while, but the federal government finally seems ready to invest a bit of money in the Quebec arts scene.  In fact, the department of Canadian Heritage is giving $4,222,861 to Montreal organizations like the National Theatre School, Les Grands ballets canadiens de Montréal and The Leanor and Alvin Segal Theatre.  They are doing so through the Endowment Incentives component of the Canadian Arts and Heritage Sustainability Program.

The National Theatre school is scheduled to receive funding

Arts funding, particularly in Quebec, is always a welcome thing.  The industry employs quite a few people here as the Conservatives found out when cuts to funding may just have cost them their majority government last election.  It’s also a good thing considering having any type of job is becoming a rarity these days.

Does this mean that the government has changed its tune towards the arts?  Or could this be the continuation of a pattern that they started this past February when they replaced the Trade Routes program that helps Canadian artists travel abroad with an “Arts Prize” to be given out to artists from around the world by the people behind Toronto’s corporate-funded Luminato Festival.  This pro-corporate model was also apparent when the government refused to give extra funding to the CBC and instead considered bailing out CanWest Global.

Could that be what’s happening here?  Well, these investments aren’t donations to arts organizations in a vacuum.  The funds are to match donations by individuals, companies and community groups.  In fact, in its press release, the government claims that “this initiative complements other measures taken by our Government to encourage private-sector participation in arts funding.”

This is not new investment in artists that don’t have funding to begin with.  While it’s certainly a good thing that Harper’s government wants to “ensure that these organizations continue to enrich our lives for many years to come,” the fact that it took so long to get to this point could mean that it may take even longer for new artists that don’t have backing already to get some startup cash.

When someone or a group of people is doing art that challenges our corporate culture or even the capitalist system in general, government funding is usually the only outlet for them to be able to survive and do their work without changing it.  Now that the government is playing politics with culture and insisting on a public/private model instead of funding the arts out of obligation to our culture, then what chance will underground artists have in the future?

In 1971, Augusto Boal started what he called Newspaper Theatre to theatrically deal with current social issues in Brazil.  The concept soon blossomed into a tree of theatrical techniques including Forum Theatre and Image Theatre called Theatre of the Oppressed.  The concept soon spread to other countries in South America and eventually around the world.

Inspired by this model, Canadian teacher Jessica Bleuer hopes to use this model to help people with theatre skills supplement their salaries by finding non-theatre gigs while creating meaningful social changes in their communities.  In this vein, she is giving an intensive workshop called Making Theatre Work For Change this weekend in Montreal.

She has been offering this concept as a course to students at the University of Toronto since 2004 and has facilitated theatre for change workshops in various community centres, high schools, universities and peace camps around the world including places like Northern Ireland, South Korea and Argentina.

She hopes to show how theatre-of-the-oppressed techniques and narrative theatre skills can be used to educate, create public awareness or public dialogue on various issues, mediate conflict and create meaningful social change.

This weekend’s Montreal edition costs $150 to participate and runs tonight from 6-9pm, tomorrow from 10am to 5pm and Sunday from 9am to 1pm with an optional showcasing of skills from 5:30-9pm.  Please contact jessicableuer@gmail.com to get involved.

The Reverend Kevin Annett knows what it’s like to be under the microscope.

He was kicked out of the United Church for speaking out against what happened to native people in Canada’s residential school system. When it became apparent that he wouldn’t be silent and do what he was told, they made things very difficult for him. Despite the breakup of his marriage and being denied a degree among other things, he persisted, bringing survivors of the schools all the way to the United Nations.

The movie Unrepentant juxtaposes Annett’s story with that of residential schools and the genocide native people endured through this system.   He now hosts a weekly radio show called Hidden From History which first went on the air in 2001 and runs a website with the same name that spreads the word about the struggle for acknowledgment of what happened in the past as well as what is going on right now.

Some of those posts have caught the attention of the RCMP, not only for exposing the force’s complicity in past wrongs such as removing native children from their families on gunboats and taking them to the residential schools where many died but more importantly for allegations of RCMP involvement in the disappearance of indigenous women from Vancouver’s downtown east side.

In 2006, he published six eyewitness statements claiming government, police and church involvement with pedophile rings, child pornography and snuff films. Annett sent copies of the statements to various police and government agencies and received no response until last week.

Reverend Kevin Annett in a scene from Unrepentant

He got an e-mail from RCMP Corporal Sabrina Mill who wants to meet with him and discuss the allegations and other postings. Annett wants to make this meeting a public one.

He has invited Cpl. Mill to take part in “an open forum on the issue of police and RCMP complicity in the disappearance and death of aboriginal people, including in the Indian residential school system.”

She has not responded yet, so Annett has started an online petition asking her to take part in a public meeting, you can sign it here.  Here is a trailer for Unrepentant:

While many films, along with entertainment in general, have been known to desensitize people to violence, the Bloc Quebecois hope to use the medium to sensitize Members of Parliament from all parties to the magnitude of tragedies like the massacre of 14 women by Marc Lepine at Ėcole Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989.

This event, now known as the Montreal Massacre, was what got the ball rolling on talk of stricter gun restrictions in Canada which eventually led to the creation of the Federal Gun Registry.  The Conservative government wants to eliminate the registry and currently have two bills under review that would see it scrapped completely.  They are hoping that some Liberal and NDP MPs will side with them.

In order to turn the tide and stress the importance of gun control, the Bloc Quebecois will screen Denis Villeneuve’s film Polytechnique on Parliament Hill tomorrow night.  They have invited MPs from all parties to attend.  The movie is a fictional account of the massacre told through the eyes of two students who survived.  In it, Lepine is never referred to by name and actor Maxim Gaudette is listed as playing simply “The Killer” in the credits.

The film did cause controversy when it was released in February with some arguing it shouldn’t be made at all, others claiming that it was not done the right way or for the right reasons and some seeing it as a necessary movie and a force for social change.  Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe clearly sees it the third way and is giving it a chance to be just that with the screening.

NDP leader Jack Layton will attend the screening, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has a “prior engagement” and won’t be there and Stephen Harper’s office won’t say whether he will be there or not, claiming that revealing the Prime Minister’s schedule would be a “security risk.”

One person who will be in attendance is Suzanne Laplante-Edward.  She lost her daughter Anne-Marie Edward in the rampage and was quite vocal pushing for gun regulation.  She will speak to MPs before the film at the invitation of Gilles Duceppe.  She will not, however, watch the movie.

Montreal is no stranger to graffiti, in fact some of the most celebrated graffiti artists in recent memory, such as Roadsworth, call or have called Montreal their home and some walls, especially in the Plateau neighborhood, boast some of the nicest underground art around.

Sadly, Montreal is also no stranger to police brutality, police repression and in particular police killings.  Yves Francoeur, president of the Montreal Police Brotherhood, said that “repression is our job,” which is a philosophy that seems to have guided their attempts to ban  masks at public protests and their actions at recent events such as the Anti-Police Brutality March and even the St Patrick’s Day Parade.  Sadly, last August, SPVM (Service de la Police de Montréal) officers carried out the ultimate form of repression when they killed 18-year-old Montréal-Nord resident Freddy Villanueva.

memorial graffiti in Montréal-Nord

Villanueva will not be forgotten and to make sure of that, an anonymous group of activists have given him a memorial on the spot in Parc Henri-Bourassa where he was killed in the form of graffiti.  The spraypaint simply states his name, age, the date he was killed, the fact that he was killed by police and a website, www.flics-assassins.net.

This right-to-the point approach has been employed all over the city to commemorate the spots where the 43 victims of police shootings since 1987 when 19-year-old Anthony Griffin was shot dead outside a police station in NDG.  On the website, you can see pictures of all of the memorials and read information and posts about police repression in Montreal.

memorial graffiti in NDG

The website makes it clear that it is merely a catalogue of this graffiti and does not condone any illegal acts.  Also, while it links to information provided by groups like the Collectif opposé à la brutalité policière (COBP) it makes it clear that the members of the linked groups have nothing to do with the website or in particular the graffiti.

It seems fitting that people killed by the police are being eulogized in a way that is in itself a challenge to the authority of those who killed them.  It also may be the only way for these people to get any sort of monument at all.

With the Tax Day Tea Party, it looks like Fox News and the Republicans have now embraced a form of activism: the theatrical culture jam.  Now co-opting activist tools for corporate purposes is nothing new, in fact stealth marketers have been doing it for years, but using an activist technique to bolster a right-wing message or in this case protest a tax hike for the wealthiest people in society is new.

early cultural appropriation: the Boston Tea party

This event taking place in several cities around the US today, is scheduled to coincide with American tax day and is modeled on the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773 where a group of colonists threw tea into the waters of Boston Harbor in protest of the British Parliament’s desire to tax them.  Not only was this an early example of cultural appropriation (the colonists who threw the tea overboard were dressed in Native garb) but the event that many consider sparked the American Revolution and eventually led to independence from Britain.

Now, the GOP is using this historic example of cultural appropriation as the basis for their appropriation of viral media and culture-jamming. This “collaborative grassroots effort” (yes, that’s what they’re actually calling it) involves people dumping the contents of coolers labeled “TEA” (stands for Taxed Enough Already) into bodies of water around the US.  Online, it almost looks like the real deal: there are several blogs all linking to a main page, viral YouTube videos, a live streaming broadcast and they’re even on Twitter and Facebook.

viral marketing for old ideas

When you look a little deeper, though, you’ll discover that this “new movement” is actually run by old Republican bosses and an attempt to slam Obama’s economic policies which actually cut taxes for all except the wealthy and make it look like he’s taking money away from your average American.  There’s even a YouTube video that ends with a little white girl pleading with the president to not steal from her piggy-bank.

That hasn’t stopped Fox News from jumping on the bandwagon, even to the point of denying that they are promoting the event and then, immediately following that assertion, promoting it, have a look:

While their bias in this case is not surprising, it is funny given their unconditional support of the Bush administration’s suppression of individual freedoms.

Regardless of your view on Obama and his policies, it is clear that this “rebellion” is one for more status quo, no matter how it looks online.  Let’s only hope that people can see through the façade.

The latest evictees in Montreal’s new Quartier des Spectacles aren’t sex workers, historic hot dog joints or even the homeless.  The latest residents forcibly removed by the city do have a history in the area, though. Each of them, in fact, has been living there for 45 years and their roots do run deep.  The newest evictees in this plan touted in the media as very green are the 67 crabapple trees chopped down by workers of the Martel Company last week.

eviction procedures (photo La Presse)

Clément Demers, Director General of the société Quartier international, the group responsible for the Quartier des Spectacles project, told La Presse that the trees, formerly found in Place Albert-Duquesne behind Place des Arts, aren’t part of the plan for the new Place de l’adresse symphonique which will occupy the space.  In fact, they would interfere with plans to excavate the space.  The trees were deemed too old to be transplanted.

The Quartier, which will be bordered by Sherbrooke, Rene-Levesque, City Councillors and Berri streets, has caused some controversy since being launched in the wake of the Montreal Summit in 2002.  Overall, the project uses three main things to deflect criticism: that it will offer mixed-income dwelling, that it will be a haven for arts and culture and that it will be green.

The lower part of St-Laurent boulevard is Montreal’s historic Red Light District and also home to several landmarks such as the Montreal Pool Room restaurant, not to mention many people with lower incomes.  Having already bought up several buildings, Angus Development is trying to buy up the rest of the block and adjacent Clark Street and turn it into a commercial complex with pedestrian walkways.

The trees in their prime, May 2008 (photo by Kate McDonnell)

They promise no chain stores and green and fair-trade businesses on the bottom floors but offices are supposed to occupy the upper levels.  This has some concerned that it will diminish the residential character of the neighborhood and force many people to find a new place to live.  Evictions have already begun.

While the area is home to several artistic venues, some are raising concerns that rents will be far too high for working artists to set up shop.  Other artists trying to add to the proposed creative expression that is supposed to inhabit the area had their Quartier de Contre-Spectacle speakers’ corner busted by the cops in 2003.

As for being a green project, one may wonder just how green it will be, given that one of the first acts developers took was to cut down 67 trees.

Abitibi-Témiscamingue is no stranger to mines, in fact, there are over 100 of them in this mineral-rich region in northern Quebéc.  Along with forestry and agriculture, mining is one of the most important parts of the region’s economy.  There is, however, one type of mine that has fortunately not found its way to the region yet: the open pit mine.  Now, that might change.

A company called Osisko Exploration is planning to build an open-pit gold mine in the city of Malartic and they are doing so without any public consultation.  That is rather alarming, considering that the company has already begun the forcible relocation of a fifth of the population, not to mention the environmental damage and health risks associated with open-pit mining that have become apparent since the process started spreading globally in the 1990s.

Open-pit mines are known for turning communities into ghost towns and destroying the lives of many citizens.  This process also has a history of being done without input from the public, with public opinion silenced or, as in the case of the Mexican village of Cerro de San Pedro, in a completely illegal manner.

The project in Malartic is one of four potential open-pit mining projects in Abitibi, considering the lack of public consultation and the fact that Canadian mining companies are some of the largest in the world and are also some of the biggest offenders when it comes to irresponsible mining practices and in some cases unethical business practices vis-à-vis the local population, people are starting to take action to ensure that these projects don’t turn Abitibi into a hole in the ground.

Their main goal is creating public awareness in Quebéc about what may befall their communities.  They have begun circulating a video on the internet that goes into detail of what is happening and what very well might happen.  Here it is:

If you don’t want to see an open-pit mine in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, please consider spreading this video to your friends and colleagues.

You may have noticed something a bit strange if you happened to pass a police officer yesterday morning.  No red cap, no camouflage pants, just an ordinary Montreal cop uniform. That’s because, in order to speed up contract negotiations, the patriarchal-sounding Montreal Police Brotherhood, the union representing Montreal’s police officers, has agreed to drop its pressure tactics.

In what many have seen as a rather bizarre form of protest, Montreal cops have been sporting the aforementioned paramilitary fatigues, occasionally switching the pants out for pajamas since July.  This even became a contentious issue before the recent anti-police brutality march as many felt the military look could provoke violence.  Turns out the extra provocation wasn’t a factor as the teargas thrown by police and cordoning off several streets sparked plenty of violence on its own.

The choice of using costuming as a form of protest is an interesting one for the Montreal police, considering they have been petitioning the city to ban the use of theatrical costuming, in particular masks, at public protests.  However the made-for-Afghanistan dress code seems to be in keeping with recent statements by Yves Francoeur that: “as police officers, repression is our job. We don’t need a community relations officer for a director, we need a general. Let’s keep in mind that the police force is, after all, a paramilitary body.”

Maybe now with resumed negotiations and possibly better pay, the cops can go back to being cops instead of a paramilitary force because after all, a community relations officer would probably be better-equipped to solve a pay dispute than a general.  Then maybe they could leave the dress-up games and theatrical expression through costuming to the artists, activists and the general public they are supposed to be protecting.

In an about-face of the previous government’s position, Australia decided on Friday to endorse the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous people to their own culture, institutions and spiritual traditions. With Australia joining the 143 countries that came on board when the bill passed in 2007, the list of nations opposed to the declaration is now only three: New Zeland, the US and Canada.

Australian protesters

The non-binding declaration, which sets out standards for the treatment of indigenous populations around the world, was criticized by the Harper government in large part for stating that “indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired.”

Many native activists feel that the Canadian government is refusing to sign the document because it may force them to act differently in regards to several native land claims such as the one in Barriere Lake and many in British Columbia (in fact, the whole province is pretty much in dispute).

Map of Native Land Claims in BC

Another reason cited for the Conservative’s refusal to jump on board is the fact that Canada has a sordid history to say the least when it comes to its treatment of indigenous populations to say the least for which it would have to account for.

The residential school system, which was only finally stopped in the 1990s, is responsible for numerous abuses and even several deaths. Essentially, it was a government and church-run system of genocide against native people in Canada.

Stephen Harper did apologize for it, but the apology was short and barely scratched the surface of what went on.  Not only was it incomplete to say the least and much shorter than an earlier one by the Australian Prime Minister about his country’s historic abuses, it is also mere lip service.

Native populations continue to live in some of the poorest conditions in Canada, Native women are disappearing and never being found (at a rate much faster than non-natives) and the past that led to these conditions remains largely unknown.

Rather than deal with this, or sign the declaration which may force them to start dealing with it, the Canadian government would rather spend their time and money promoting the further theft of native land under the guise of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.