Dinner Out in the Other Capitale nationale

I am in Ottawa for two days for a meeting and had the pleasure of dining with a friend this evening. We went to a place quite close to the Château Laurier, much bigger than it looks from the outside, and quite lovely. (Below is the Château Laurier, and the restaurant was built in the construction zone seen in the bottom centre-right of the photo.)


The waiter working the section next to ours was quite lovely – tall, shaved head, very good shape – and we were both as pleased as anything that he was at the door when we left, opened the door for us and shook our hands on the way out. I guess he must have noticed that our eyes followed him every time he walked by our table to wait on the tables in his section. ;-)

Something I found quite shocking about the experience of going to this restaurant here was the apparent lack of ability of the staff to speak much French at all. I asked for our table in French and was responded to in English, our waitress spoke to us only in English, and it continued in that vein. (Notice how I didn’t complain about the lovely waiter’s wishing us well in English on our way out – *blush*!) Really, though, we are in the Capital of a supposedly bilingual country, not far away from the border of the big French-speaking province, and the staff of a business catering to travelers and locals alike is unable to function in the other of the official languages? That is truly a shame.

But if that waiter wants French lessons, I’m sure that either I or my friend would be happy to oblige.

Aarrr! This be pleasin' to me eye!

It started rather innocently, seeing a post from a Facebook friend who had inadvertently changed her Facebook language to Czech, and the the comment from another friend of hers encouraging her to try English (Pirate). Say no more!

I have now been facebooking in Pirate for several days, mateys, and it's starting to infiltrate the rest of my life. It shivers me timbers to see the number of wenches and scurvy dogs who will not sign on for the ride, and fail to laugh at my piratical rantings. Aarrr!

I hope to be cured of this affliction within the week, but in the meantime I have to be getting to my pi-ra-tes session (I be hearin' the groaning from here!).

Cash in Envelopes

We are living through yet another episode of a fascinating tale of political intrigue in Canada these days. A royal commission is looking into the relationship between ex-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Karlheinz Schreiber, a German-Canadian businessman, to see if there are any links between the latter's payment of either $225,000 or $300,000 (depending on who you might believe) in cash to the former and the so-called Airbus Affair (allegations of bribery in the sale of Airbus planes to Air Canada).

I can't help wondering how anyone could accept that accepting thousands of dollars in cash in envelopes in hotel rooms would not be a little suspicious. According to Mr. Mulroney's testimony, that would be an 'error in judgement'. I'll say. Leaving aside what these payments might have bought, let's look at what was done with the cash.

Put into one or more safes and not touched for years. Hmmm. I guess there's no way to prove or disprove that. Years later, he used a part of the tax rules to declare the income and negotiate to pay taxes on part of it. I won't join in any chorus denouncing this as special treatment, as this clause is available to anyone who wants to voluntarily come forward and declare income that they neglected to declare when they should have, and it often results in paying taxes on a part of that money only, which is better than the government's never getting any of that tax money. But don't we all wish we had forgotten to declare hundreds of thousands of dollars?

What about Mr. Mulroney's obligations as a member of the Bar of Québec? If these payments were indeed some kind of retainer for services to be rendered, the Bar has some very specific rules about what you do with the payment, and this does not include putting cash into a safe or safes somewhere. Considering that the Bar regularly sanctions, often with disbarment, its members who fail to deposit advances of amounts as little as $500 in their trust accounts, or who use those amounts for their own purposes before they have properly billed the amounts after having done the work. Lots of decisions about disbarment for various periods of time for this offence here.

So is a safe an appropriate trust account? Just asking.

I am so glad that we taxpayers have had to compensate him over $2 million after his lawsuit for defamation (where he did not disclose anything about the cash, but was not specifically asked about it) and now we are covering another $2 million in his legal expenses for this royal commission. And still he paid taxes on only half of the cash received in envelopes in hotel rooms.

Someone got their money's worth out of all this.

Neighbourliness

I have become one of those people who doesn't really know their neighbours, but that doesn't mean I don't have a tale or two to tell. Today's stories both involve shifting reactions to my neighbours.

Story one harkens back to my ongoing (or repetitive) problem with the delivery of the scab rag on a daily basis to the front porch I share with my upstairs neighbours (see here or again here). Well, in the process of speaking about it to one of the upstairs neighbours, I discovered that he had spent a number of years of his childhood in the town next on the highway from my parents' house. He told me his name, but I promptly forgot it before being able to ask if my parents knew the family.

Back to the scab rag. After all of my antics to put an end to the deliveries, they started again, and the paper wouldn't listen to me, insisting they were delivering next door. I passed on the information about where to call to end it to the neighbours, but they have done nothing. I now feel quite justified in kicking the paper in front of their door if it ever strays near mine. The pièce de résistance? Today, there was an invoice attached to the paper, in the name of someone who was probably my neighbour years ago, but with whom I never really had any exchanges. They are, however, moving very shortly, so I doubt they will deal with it.

Story two concerns the neighbours below me. When they moved in a few months ago, I noticed three things about them: they are running some kind of computer consultation business from their apartment, they have two large-ish dogs and they are incredibly cute. Okay, that last one is probably a bit exaggerated. The business is unmistakable, as there is a big sign at their front door, and I first became aware of the dogs when they were in a place they shouldn't be: upstairs, on my back porch, marking their territory. I was annoyed almost to the point of saying something (yes, I'm very outspoken), and then I noticed that a fence had been constructed to keep the dogs from climbing the fire escape stairs in the back, and I only see them in their window when I am coming home.

The other part of this story is what I came home to today. A lovely anonymous envelope, addressed to the locataire (tenant) at my address, with a photocopied letter about the noise made by the dogs. Apparently, several of these dogs (to my knowledge there are only two dogs in the building) make so much noise that at least a dozen of our neighbours on the next street (their bedrooms back onto the back of our building) are losing sleep. Their letter suggests a doggie curfew (they could be in the yard from noon until 9 pm) and threatens a call to the police if the dogs are not quieted.

I was a little taken aback by this, as I believe that there are only two dogs in one of the six apartments in this building. Do they think we will rise up and correct our neighbour? I have to say that I have noticed the dogs, but not in such a way that I found their noise disturbing me. I hear them from time to time, but it doesn't keep me awake. The true impact of the letter on me was to set me to thinking about what I would do if the police came to my door to talk about this. I switched into defensive mode and my neighbours downstairs got included in that bubble.

Surely it isn't just because of the cuteness thing? ;-)

Lipodystrophy (reprise)

In lieu of new content, how about a new presentation of old content?

I discovered a fascinating web site that allows you to make your own animated film, so I decided to use that technology to re-tell the cut-up version of my experiences with lipodystrophy.

While my skills are low, rivalling only the effort I put into this, I find the experience interesting. Maybe this is something I ought to develop.

The original post is here.

This fascinating technology can be found here.

Timing

What unfortunate timing for my previous post. Here's why.

Camo-rama

It's a funny thing to see these sights on the streets of Montréal: members of our police force not dressed in their uniforms. This had been going on for so long that I'm not sure that we actually notice anymore. We might, in fact, do a double-take if we saw them in full uniform.

The reason behind this is a contract dispute with their employer, the city. Their contract actually expired more than two years ago, which seems a little extreme to me, as well as irresponsible on the part of the city. Why would you let a situation like this go on for so long? Because you know that they can't really strike, so you think you have all the power.

Now the tactic started out with a simple change in the outfits that we have seen here before: jeans substituted for the uniform pants, red baseball caps with the logo of the Fraternité des policiers et policières de Montréal (their union).

On those occasions that called for it, the baseball caps gave way to other headgear.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a picture of the bicycle cop I kept seeing last summer wearing his cycling helmet over his red cap turned backwards. Lovely.

Now I'm not sure if this tactic has had the desired effect. Yes, the city is outraged, but the citizens not so much. I stole the first picture above from the blog of someone passing through town who saw the police in jeans and thought it was cool. My personal reaction was to notice that some of the officers looked better and more comfortable in their jeans than others. I would even go so far as to suggest that jeans become the uniform, but we'd have to agree on a flattering style.

The jeans being too accepted and too little noticed, they moved on to something else.

The city, quite predictably, was beside itself with rage. So much so that they have kept trying — most recently this week — to have the Essential Services Commission rule this pressure tactic illegal. (They keep failing in these attempts; maybe they should just negotiate instead of trying to coerce.)

I have to admit that I was a little put off by the jeans to camo change, as it looked a little like we were being occupied by a paramilitary force.

But with time and lots of exposure, including exposure to varieties of camouflage I have not seen in nature (although not yet the pink version in my little checkerboard above), it's kind of growing on me.

After all, if you put a cute boy in relatively good shape into any kind of outfit, he will still be a cute boy, no?

UPDATE

For another point of view, here is the editorial cartoon from the Montreal Gazette today (Saturday, 14 March). I found it here and Aislin's (Terry Mosher's) own web site is here.