Up until yesterday, Valerie Plante had a pretty good chance of defeating the current mayor of Montreal Denis Coderre. That changed when she refused to answer which way she voted in the 1995 referendum asking Quebecers to vote to stay in Canada or leave. Everybody remembers how they voted. She said it was a ‘tricky question’. Really? Sounds pretty straightforward to us.
Here’s a headline for Plante: The Quebec political scene is tricky but ya gotta make a decision and take a side. Maybe she thinks she can dance at everybody’s wedding. Guess what? She can’t.
She either voted no to leave Canada or yes to separate.
The fact that she won’t answer the question is indicative of the fact that perhaps she doesn’t want to tick off the separatist vote in Montreal. Instead, she ticked off the federalist vote. The truth is, her non-answer is an answer. She must have voted to leave Canada and doesn’t want to spook her chances of winning and be thought of as a separatist. Too late to undo the damage that she has done and we may get stuck with the bellowing, ungeblusen (overblown) Coderre for another four years.
Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller is bottom-feeding. We learned that quasi-legal term yesterday with the arrests of Trump’s ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort, his aide Richard Gates and last July, George Papadopoulos, Trump’s ex-policy adviser.
While Mueller’s directive is to find out about Russian colluding in the US general elections last November, Manafort and Gates were indicted on charges of money laundering and illegal lobbying charges on behalf of Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych. Papadopoulos was quietly arrested on July 27 of this year and pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI, specifically about meetings in which he discussed potentially colluding with Russian agents to acquire Hillary Clinton’s private emails.
So what is Mueller’s strategy? It appears to arrest lower level people and then, to get them to lessen their sentences, give up the bigger fish. It also came out that no one knew when Papadopoulos was arrested and the thinking is he was wired and caught many conversations that people would have rather not been on a recording.
Mueller’s arrests are being compared to how Al Capone was caught. The feds couldn’t get him on murder, bootlegging, etc. The only thing they could really prove was that he had been hiding the profits from his criminal enterprise, which led to a conviction on tax evasion.
Manafort and Gates will sell their mothers, children and Trump to stay out of jail. This latest drama in US politics is just beginning.
Now for Quebec’s drama:
Last week, Guy Ouellette, a Member of the National Assembly was arrested by Quebec’s anti-corruption unit (UPAC). He was not charged with anything. Today, Ouellette stood up in Quebec’s national assembly and fought back.
“In an unprecedented attempt to intimidate, I was the victim of a setup by UPAC at the very same time where the members of the committee I preside were preparing to hear testimony from witnesses under our jurisdiction.” He claims that he was set-up and framed.
From the looks of things, someone has to police the police. That of course, would be the normal thing here in Quebec where collusion, graft and corruption has been the norm forever.
UPAC was formed to uncover corruption in Quebec. By arresting Ouellette, it looks like they picked on the wrong person to intimidate. If he knows stuff and can co-oberate his facts, he has UPAC by the short-hairs. He’s not afraid of them (although we would venture a guess that he now has permanent 24-hour protection). Another drama just beginning.
A muslim yelling Allahu Akbar killed at least 8 people in Manhattan today. He used a pick-up truck to run over pedestrians and those on a bike path on the West Side highway. It was a bloodbath.
Another muslim following ‘orders’. isis put out an edict today threatening halloween attacks. The peaceful koran strikes again. GRrrrrrrrr.
Here’s a tip for the tree-hugging liberals who want to ‘dialogue’ with isis and other terrorist groups and muslims and to Trudeau who wants to open the doors to immigration into Canada:
First go save a whale. Then watch your back cause muslim terrorists are using cars and trucks to go after you. Unless they are vetted for a few years, they are not welcome in North America. And one more thing: the imams who are not reporting these dudes need to be arrested as well. Rant over.
Guess what? The new Champlain bridge won’t be completed on time. We hope you are not surprised. In fact, you should be saying, what else is new in Quebec.
A consortium led by SNC-Lavalin (the same company that is always used and always late) — is suing the federal government for nearly $124 million, alleging it wasn’t forewarned that the existing bridge couldn’t bear the weight required to transport important pieces to the worksite. Seriously?
Isn’t that the job of engineers to find that out? Gets better. Lavalin was forced to come up with alternate routes, “resulting in substantial cost and scheduling issues”.
Nothing in Quebec is done without costing ten times more than anywhere else and nothing is ever completed on time. We hope you are not wondering if this also applies to all the construction going on in Montreal. It does. It will all be late, all be over budget and all be filled with corruption and collusion. Quebec sais faire.
We’ll talk…