Who's Pissing Me Off Now: MacLean's Edition

MacLean's. A Canadian institution. The Great White North's equivalent of Time Magazine. Except it's full of shit.

From half-researched stories on political corruption to half-assed stories on cultural figures, it has continually promoted a vision of Canada that exists to no one save a few elitist federalists but poses as a top news organization. Oh, sure, it's nowhere near Fox News' bias, but it no less depicts a country nothing like its real-life version.

All in all, here is the country as they view it: Vancouver is as expensive as New York City, but much safer, and hotter in weather. The Alberta sandpits are too valuable for their oil to complain about the pollution they make, and the people populating the Prairies are welcoming and hard-working, like American rednecks, but more tolerant of the indigenous peoples. Ontario is the best place on earth, with a strong economy, social services that work and a powerful establishment that protects it - and the rest of the country - from an American takeover, while Québec houses those retarded French people who cannot take care of themselves and are rotten to the core. Finally, the Maritimes are filled with unlucky toothless fishermen who, if they had any sense in them, should move to Toronto. The Inuit don't exist, except when you're running a story on global warming, preferably one in which we see polar bears drowning, at which time, you must show one toothless Inuit who says he's never seen the weather be so warm in his native Inuktitut language - to make sure people realize we haven't forced them to speak English and respect their ways of life.

In this recent piece about the Montréal subway system, they strive for a nostalgic tone, the good old days when the City had all these plans for the future and wasn't the desolate wreck it has become, with the World Fair, the Olympics, the first MLB baseball team outside the U.S. (The Expos)... things were looking up. Then came the 80s, Gino Vannelli, Men Without Hats, Corey Hart, Céline Dion... and bankruptcy, buildings crumbling, scarce jobs, no baseball team, the Habs' longest Cup drought ever.

And these MacLean's assholes saying they'll miss the ''old'' subway cars because they reminded them of better times, despite, and I quote:

Language woes, caustic politics, the War Measures Act, economic downturns, two referendums, an ice storm, the flight of thousands of its citizens for more English pastures: throughout all the calamities you could always depend on a bubble-bodied, rubber-wheeled, Smurf-coloured train to take you quickly and efficiently where you needed to go.

Uh, Champ... first off, ''language woes'' you were more than partly to blame for with the way you view the potato-and-beer dieting peoples, which, in turn, caused caustic politics, the ''terrorist'' acts that resulted in the War Measures Act, which themselves led to referendums to clear the air politically which then led to Anglos skipping town. It's all one thing. And none of that has anything to do with the subway system, which actually doesn't always ''take you quickly and efficiently'' anywhere near where one needs to go.

The fact that it doesn't even lead to the airport is a problem, as is the fact that it doesn't go all the way East and barely halfway West of the island. It goes North twice (one off the island) but leaves large territories unserviced. Not only does it not run 24 hours a day, one line doesn't even stay open until midnight on most nights. When it shuts down, the bus system replacing it is inadequate and doesn't run nearly often enough. It is now as expensive to use as NYC's system, but apart from two lines over-servicing downtown, under-services anywhere else. Rust and shit literally fall from the walls of most stations and rats run amok in the tunnels. Vomit puddles and stains can be left for months at a time where they sit - see Joliette station, half-way in the Angrignon direction platform, for proof. One station, Peel, was closed for a couple of weeks a few years ago because the building it was under collapsed on top of it.

It is a crumbling piece of nostalgic crap. People argue it's cheaper than hailing a cab or purchasing a car (factoring in insurance and licence costs and gas and whatnot). That's true. But such reasoning fails to factor in the amount of poverty in Montréal, the percentage of people making less than $15,000 a year who yet depend on said public transit to actually go to their shitty, underpaid, probably unhealthy job, and the fact that if the costs of the Métro keep rising, they still won't be able to buy a fucking car and will opt to stay home to cash their $10K welfare rather than walk three hours a day to bust their ass at work for $15K.