Video Of The Week: The Tragically Hip

Well, it had to happen, and so it has: The Tragically Hip's lead singer and central figure, Gord Downie, has passed away from his incurable brain cancer.

My own personal history with the Hip began with their 1989 "true" debut Up To Here's second single, New Orleans Is Sinking, the first (Blow At High Dough) not making a dent in what I was listening to at the time at 10-11 years old (Guns N' Roses' Appetite For Destruction and GNR Lies, Kiss' Crazy Nights, N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton, Def Leppard's Hysteria, Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bad, Prince's Batman soundtrack, Queen's The Miracle, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Mother's Milk, and Bon Jovi's New Jersey). But New Orleans had something, a feel, a groove that I could deal with. I say "true" debut, by the way, because I'd seen their self-titled Tragically Hip 1987 EP release in stores at that point, but didn't buy it until 1992 or 1993; Up To Here was their first full-length endeavour. I didn't really think much of the rest of that record, so I waited for the second one, 1991's Road Apples, to be very discounted (under $10) to give it a go, and I loved Little Bones, Twist My Arm, and Cordelia right away. I liked the rest of it, too, but not as much as the one-two-three punch at the beginning of the record, which I still go to in order from time to time.

1992's Fully Completely was a whole new ballgame. All killer, no filler. This was what cemented the band as a force to be reckoned with on the Canadian mainstream rock stage, with reason. Out of the 12 songs on the album, only four do not qualify as "hits". They're great nonetheless, but the Big Eight just pack so much: Courage (for Hugh MacLennan), Looking for a Place to Happen, At the Hundredth Meridian, Locked in the Trunk of a Car, Fully Completely, Fifty Mission Cap and Wheat Kings all became staples of their live shows until the very end, and remain in full rotation on Canadian rock radio to this day.

1994's Day For Night was even better, with such classics as Grace, Too, Greasy Jungle, So Hard Done By, the tear-inducing Nautical Disaster, Inevitability of Death, Scared and An Inch an Hour. With sleeker production, this was a band at the height of songwriting genius made to sound like early R.E.M. - and it worked. It felt real, honest, and raw.

1996's Trouble At The Henhouse might be their finest work, with standouts Gift Shop, Springtime In Vienna, and the masterpiece Ahead by a Century. It has a more acoustic feel to it, it seems warmer and softer then their preceding works.

They released Live Between Us, a live album recorded in Detroit, in 1997, containing most hits, then went in the studio to make 1998's Phantom Power, with standout tracks Poets, Bobcaygeon, Something On, and Fireworks. It was a fine record, but nothing original; it was The Hip sounding like The Hip - not as generic as future releases, but there was a comfort level setting, there wasn't much surprise.

The same can be said of 2000's Music @ Work. If anything, even the four singles (My Music At Work, Lake Fever, The Completists and Freak Turbulence) sound almost sarcastically like keeping with the band's signature sound. And titles like Tiger The Lion do nothing to dispel that notion. This is where I moved on from the Hip a bit, so I bought 2002's In Violet Light because I'd bought all the others, but I played it twice in its entirety and never really went back to it. They made videos for It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken and The Darkest One, and that was my lone contact with this album.

2004's In Between Evolution, however, struck a major chord in me. Perhaps it's the fact that unlike others, it's politically-charged, in the midst of George W. Bush's Iraq War, or maybe they just started trying again, but songs like Heaven Is a Better Place Today, Summer's Killing Us, Gus: The Polar Bear from Central Park, Vaccination Scar, It Can't Be Nashville Every Night, As Makeshift as We Are, One Night in Copenhagen and Goodnight Josephine really resonated. The album was produced by engineer extraordinaire Adam Kasper (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Queens Of The Stone Age, R.E.M., winner of two Grammys for his work with the Foo Fighters), which probably helped.

2006 brought World Container, which I remember liking, but The Kids Don't Get It is the only song from that album that's made its way into my Permanent Playlist. It's pretty much the same for 2009's We Are The Same: Coffee Girl, Now the Struggle Has a Name, The Depression Suite, and Love Is a First are all fine tunes, but Queen of the Furrows is the only song off that record that I still listen to on a regular basis.

Then there was the two-album conclusion, Now For Plan A and Man Machine Poem, the latter of which is named after a song from the former. Confused? Good. These are good records, introspective, deep in thought, with dark yet groovy pieces of music. Not what I would recommend for someone who has never heard the band (the 1992-96 output would be a better starting point, in my opinion), but for a casual fan or radio listener who was curious to find out how their 1990s sound evovled with age and technical skill, I'd recommend these two ahead of the previous two.

Pretty much as soon as the cancer diagnosis was confirmed, the band embarked on what doubled as the Man Machine Poem tour and its farewell tour, playing 15 shows in 10 cities - it was originally 10, but controversy surrounding ticket scalpers getting the bulk of the tickets (promoter Live Nation estimates upwards of two-thirds of tickets were purchased by bots, not people) forced the band to add a show apiece in Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary, and two in Toronto; the tour did not go farther East than Ottawa, meaning Québec (specifically the rather large Montréal market) and the Maritimes drew blanks. The final concert was held at Kingston's Rogers K-Rock Center, in the heart of the group's hometown.

I bring this post home with the song that first caught my ear, New Orleans Is Sinking:

I don't know who directed it, but if I come by it, I will update this post.

Let's Talk (About Mental Illness)

In the mid-to-end 1990s, following the telecom boom and as the World Wide Web was just beginning to be used as a means for self-promotion, companies were trying to present a more humane side by publicly showcasing the benefits their employees could take advantage of, such as an in-house daycare services (Patagonia, SAS) and gyms, multiple team-building retreats per year (Philip Morris, Distributech), State of the Union-type gatherings in exotic locations where spouses were welcome (Industrial Alliance, Toyota), etc.

For many of these companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Industrial Light & Magic), the ethical treatment of their employees translated into additional sales; for others, however, additional expenses meant nearing the brink of bankruptcy.

And, thus, because every major action brings forth an equal reaction, the 00s brought with them budget tightening, with organizations looking mainly to reduce what they saw as expenditures: wages, customer service, free coffee, lowering their standards from “excellence” to “satisfying” or “good enough”, extending their client base’s patience to its limit. Some cut on the big expenditures such as rent, travel or daycare. Others, such as American Apparel, saw their managers take on a more hands-on approach that was not appreciated by their employees.

What we are left with in the wake of a noble idea like #BellLetsTalk is to bring attention to such things as employee comfort and peace of mind, as work-related exhaustion and depression now accounts for 90% of mental illness in North America, among other overwhelming statistics such as:

(This infographic was crafted by Officevibe. )
So when Patagonia (and Goldman Sachs, for what it’s worth) claims it has a 25% lower turnover rate, that 100% of moms return to work after maternity leave and that morale is always high, when, in Canada, a dozen of the Top 100 Employers (according to the Globe & Mail) offer family-related perks and benefits, when ten of the Top 100 Employers (according to Fortune Magazine) in the U.S. offer daycare - including five insurance companies (Aflac, Atlantic Health, Meridian Health, Baptist Health South Florida and Bright Horizons Family Solutions) - it may be time for some employers to think about certain expenses, particularly those related to employee morale, as investments in current and future productivity instead of just money thrown away.

Which brings me back to #BellLetsTalk, a smart initiative and tool in de-stigmatizing mental illness in Canada, in getting people to talk about it and trying to find solutions to the problem. Marketing-wise, it’s also pure genius, as social media was saturated with Bell’s brand name for an entire day in support of a great cause.

If only they didn’t have a couple of public-relations disasters on their hands involving their firing of medium-profile employees over their asking for help in dealing with… mental illness.

Video Of The Week: The Tragically Hip

I know I featured The Tragically Hip not too long ago, but this is a Hip summer, and Ahead By A Century is one of their best songs, from 1996's Trouble At The Henhouse, which could very well be their best record.

The video was directed by Eric Yealland and filmed on a small farm in Brooklin, Ontario. It won the award for "Best Video" at the 1996 MuchMusic Video Awards (i.e. Canada's MTV Awards) and was also nominated for "Best Video" at the 1997 Juno Awards (i.e. Canada's Grammys):

Video Of The (Past) Week: The Tragically Hip

We learned last month that Gord Downie, lyricist and singer of Canadian band The Tragically Hip, has terminal brain cancer. And that they were going on tour so he can go out on his own terms, one last hurrah and a final "fuck you" to his illness and to Fate.

You can argue about the "best" or "greatest" Canadian band of all time; you can try to compare the virtuosity of Rush with the universal acclaim of a The Guess Who, the endurance of a Neil Young, the critical acclaim of an Arcade Fire or a Sloan, the public adulation of an April Wine, or you can go sarcastic and say Nickleback.

You can even pretend her impact was as wide as Babes In Toyland's and Hole's and suggest Alanis Morissette, or you can try to "go roots" with Blue Rodeo, Ashley MacIsaac or one of the many legendary folks whose names still strike chords in villages but opted not to make their way to any of the major cities and are now close to being forgotten.

I'll put the Hip up there with Rush and probably be so-Canadian about it and call it a tie.

However way you rank it, there has never been a "more Canadian" band than the Hip, whose lyrics are almost all based on true Canadian stories, be they political (kidnappings and murders of provincial ministers such as Pierre Laporte, language laws in Sault-Ste-Marie), historical (war heroes, events in small towns, the Polytechnique massacre) or sports-related (the 1972 Summit Series, the disappearance and eventual death of Toronto Maple Leaf Bill Barilko).

There would have been two dozen songs I could have chosen to first feature them here, and yet I've chosen It Can't Be Nashville Every Night, because it's the only thing that comes to mind after the Montréal Canadiens traded their best home-grown (i.e. "team-drafted") player in 25 years, P.K. Subban, to the Nashville Predators for becoming-a-liability Team Canada member Shea Weber.

The video for the song was directed by Christopher Mills, who also has worked with the likes of Modest Mouse, The Dead Weather, Interpol, Buck 65, Broken Social Scene, Blue Rodeo, Metric, The Joy Formidable, Senses Fail, Tortoise, Ken Mode, Rush, Breaking Benjamin, Ra Ra Riot, Young Galaxy, Great Lake Swimmers, Mandy Moore and The Boomtang Boys:

Furrians And Refugees

So, uh, Syrian refugees arrived in Canada this week, greeted by The Face Of Canada, Justin Trudeau (i.e. the prettier Stephen Harper). Then they were put in a hotel where there was a Furry convention...

... and good times ensued, because the kids are innocent and haven't been corrupted by Life, or Religion, or Politics, or anything else yet. They can just be.

The New Colossus

The world is still a shitstorm of awful humans who have the means to fuck it up not just for the rest of us of the same race (the Human Race, by the way, the only not one decided by religion or skin colour or language), but for every other living organism on the planet.

On this side of the Pond, the Right and the Left argue about petty stuff and both sides use the weakest possible arguments to get their points across; the Left has the added bonus of never being able to forgive past mistakes regardless of context (Thomas Jefferson owned slaves when it was legal! Paul Reubens is a sex offender!) and any good from anyone who's done something bad previously is wiped off the table - which is one context where the Right's obsession with religion should come in handy: let he who has never committed a bad action cast the first stone, where no one over the age of 3 would be able to do so.

The Big Topic of the day is that of Refugees.

There needs to be a debate, and each country has to decide whether to take them in or not, and how many, and how. NOT ALL COUNTRIES NEED TO OPERATE THE SAME WAY. Honestly, we really need to start accepting other cultures' differences more, whether we agree with them or not, whether we think their practices are humane or not, whether they go against our values and/or common sense and/or our conception of rights or not.

This will be the subject of a much longer exposé eventually, one that encompasses a worldwide minimum wage, universal dual citizenship, a complete repeal of the death penalty, and the ability to exclude or deport citizens who do not conform to one place's chosen way of life. Not everyone wants the same life or lifestyle, and freedom includes letting others live their lives the way they want to.

But I digress.

Here is the text that lies at the bottom of the Statue Of Liberty:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door

Ideally, these are values I would like to strive for. But it's hard. Even Americans can't do it all the time. And I live in a country that I, myself, do not feel a part of, among people who refuse to stand up for themselves and declare their independence, their Humanity, and choose their own paths, despite all the old ones having failed.

I want to live in a place where people's differences are appreciated and encouraged. Where the only place religion has is as an equal to sports, meals or TV shows - as something you share with people close to you, people like you, that you can talk about in public but has no incidence on how the State operates. Three main rules: don't kill, don't steal, and don't fuck it up for everyone else. Where health and education are priorities and are NEVER cut in government spending. Where people don't get offended over the smallest fucking detail (or worse, WORDS!) because in this place, ALL PEOPLE ARE EQUAL, ALL THE TIME.

It's not about the past and all about the future, because this place hasn't existed yet.

Those who do not like it do not have to live there; they can go anywhere where their values are best reflected, because every place should have differences - we were not all meant to evolve at the same pace, nor should we force anyone to follow any rules they do not agree with when they can go to places where people think like they do, the same way we wouldn't like being forced to abide by shit that goes against the very fiber of our beings.

It's 2015, people. There are 8 billion of us. Either kill us all, or let's start tolerating our differences a little better, eh? And that includes intolerance as well, by the way. If, as a whole Russia seriously wants nothing to do with gay people, just make it clear to their President that jailing/killing suspected homosexuals before they become adults is wrong and punishable, and when those people turn 18 (or 21), help them to new lives in places where they'll be accepted better.

Intellectuals? Prague.
Speak French with a tendency to root for the underdog? Anywhere in Québec.
Big dreams? New York.

Same goes for people with all sorts of problems.

Which brings us back to refugees. And today's special, Syrians. Not every country can afford to take in huge masses of people - perhaps international aid would help, not just to pay for the refugees themselves, but also with a slight incentive, a bonus, to help the country itself and those already residing there who could use the pick-me-up (Greece, Spain, Québec) - that type of incentive would also invalidate any false sense of racism that refugees cost money, because they would actually bring in money.

We might also need to start planning long-term a little better: there are always a dozen wars raging, and there are always mass exoduses, and we need to start thinking about a permanent physical location where we can take care of their basic needs while they wait to be processed and sent to the best place for their needs, be it short or long term, depending on how badly they want to return home upon conflict resolution.

This is but mere reflection, possibly just the first step of a larger scale. But we do need to start thinking outside the box, because our old ways have always ended with the same old problems, and they have yet to adapt to this New World.

Video Of The Week: Rush

When I shared Chops playing over Rush's Tom Sawyer earlier this week, I kind of made my bed as to what band I'd be featuring later, though I opted for the title track from their 1991 album Roll The Bones, the first song of theirs that I was truly acquainted with:



It has a lot of what made the 1990s cheesy, from the fast rock intro-slow chorus mix to the ''rap'' near the end, but done early enough in the decade that it still comes off as genuine and experimental. Kind of.

Video Of The Week: Dead Messenger

Well, it's Canada Day, or Dollard Day, or Moving Day - whatever your allegiance and/or political affiliation. Mine lies with rock and roll, and summer - thus, Dead Messenger's newest video, directed by Big James Arsenian, Cold Summer:



You may remember them from my constant reminders about how they're the best live band in Montréal, how Jonathan Cummins calls them ''the ideal power pop band'' or just by how fucking amazing they are. Just like Ben Affleck in Phantoms, they're the bomb.

I remember them as good people, terrific musicians, and crafty songwriters. And, well, it's fitting, this song, considering the weather so far.

Happy St-Jean Baptiste Day!

It was going to be a paid Holiday like most others: spending three hours finishing the work I hadn't done last night, taking it slow, alone, in my shitty apartment, then heading out to see friends in a band performing, this time Orchestre Afrobeat Jeunesse Cosmique outdoors, at Parc Hibernia, in Pointe St-Charles.

But it rained, so all we got were the openers, Le Trio Poitras, for 75 minutes, then the rest of the festivities were cancelled.

But the Jeunesse Cosmique folks decided to turn the botched outdoors Québec National Holiday into a house party of sorts, and invited me over since I had friends in the band and was already there.

By the middle of the first song, i was the third percussionist, and by 10 PM we had recorded a live album. And I'm pretty proud of my playing on two tracks, particularly the last one.

And when I got home, I made myself the second-most Quebecest meal (because I wasn't going to make myself a maple syrup poutine this late at night), a bowl of spaghetti covered in Schwartz' smoked meat:

It was one of my best days in a very long time.

That Canadian Feeling

I rarely identify as Canadian on the international scene, except when nothing else gets understood.

I do, however, fully identify with this year's Miss Canada contestant in the Miss Universe pageant, who went all-out Canadian stereotype (minus, say, beer, maple syrup and poutine) for her amazing uniform, preferring fun (with winks to the sometimes off-the-wall absurdity of High Fashion) to sexiness or whatever else might make a judge look at her beauty instead of her character:

The internets were both aflame and all-praise for her boldness, and I stand firmly in the line of ''backers'' on this one.

The score (20-14) reflects the year she was crowned Miss Canada, but some idiots went misogynistic in their disapproval (''is that the number of guys she's just had'') while others doubted her hockey knowledge (''those are football scores / there are no touchdowns in hockey dummy''), but I have decided to not promote angry adults living in their parents' basements because they're still grounded from 20 years ago; they can keep doing what they've been doing most of their lives and fuck themselves.

Kudos to you, Chanel Beckenlehner, for having the galls to have balls and character, not just stunning looks and a degree in Political Sciences from the University of Toronto. I don't know if you've won or will win Miss Universe, but you've won my respect.

The Canadian Environment

There's yet a another petition making the rounds in Canada, asking Prime Minister Stephen Harper to not go overboard in allowing the complete destruction of our environment. It's a weekly occurrence, it seems.

He does not see the small picture, let alone the big one.

Whether (or not) federal elected officials prefer to support big businesses instead of the people who elected them and whom they represent is irrelevant.

The bottom line remains: if they allow anyone or anything to compromise our environment, we are all screwed. And not just Canadians. Pollution and devastation knows no borders, no boundaries.

Even the businesses who pillage nature to sell it back to us need it to not be a finite resource. That's in addition to biodiversity proving everyone its actual food sources. Basing decisions we know are wrong on some half-assed biased research is worse than just a skewed lack of vision, it's step-by-step suicide.

I mean, shit, right, the companies have proven for a long time that their profit-driven ways go in just one direction with blinders on, and always need us to protect them from themselves - not help them fuck the rest of us up more.

This is a fast way to get to a post-apocalyptic world, when ''I told you so'' won't mean anything anymore.

Darren Aronofsky and Leonardo DiCaprio took a trip to the Albertan tar sands earlier this year and came back with a troubling report. Once pioneers in progress and progressive views, and formerly the voice of reason on the international scene, Canada has become the laughingstock of the international community, particularly on environmental and scientific issues.

Ironic that the country who wouldn't let the U.S. back out of the Kyoto protocol now won't even come close to meeting its own objectives on the matter.

We Will Become Unicorns

There's a unicorn at the end of every rainbow, and to ride it one must follow the rain to the exact spot where it meets the sun. It's an oasis in a sandbox, atop a mountain and overlooking the ocean. It's where birds sing instead of chipping, where bears hibernate even during the summer, and squirrels help young girls braid their hair.

And the unicorn stands tall and majestic, living proof that everything eventually falls into place, like a reward for good behaviour and effort.

I have been that unicorn for some, and others have been it for me. But to be your own unicorn, for yourself, is a gift only you can strive for.

It was Thanksgiving in Canada yesterday, and while it's good to be humbled by where we have come as a species, to look back and be grateful for all the help we've received in our accomplishments, it's also good to keep in mind the work that still lay ahead.

Some of us are zebras, some are studs, some are ponies and many are donkeys. Becoming unicorns might require some help, a little bit of input from the outside world, but it's also work one has to do on their own.

I want to be a unicorn again. For someone else, maybe, but mostly for myself.

And, yes, someone dared me to write something with unicorns as the main subject matter. Doesn't make it any less true.

Saint-Jean-Baptiste

I mean, sure, I appreciate the effort, kind of. But, uh, maybe it lacks decorum and gravitas:

FYI: bridges are of federal capacity, meaning Canada, which owns Québec, manages these signs. Great Britain, which owns Canada, couldn't care less.

Kudos for the ''accent aigü'', thumbs down for calling the population a ''nagtioon''. Though, semi-funny. Like Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider asking if you ''like-uh the juice, eh, the juice is good, uhn?'' in classic episodes of Saturday Night Live.

Chickenshit Fil-A

There's a petition making the rounds in Canada these days about/against Chick-Fil-A opening its first Canadian branch inside the Calgary airport, and people want to stop them.

A letter is not going to stop them.

A letter shows how fucking weak their opposition is. A petition shows them how hundreds of thousands of anonymous nobodies may or may not (but would prefer not to have the option to) frequent their establishments.

We're talking about a company whose owner donated two million dollars to anti-gay groups in the U.S. to try to stop homosexuals from having the right to marry, something that doesn't sit well with a majority of Canadians (though you could argue the best place to start a franchise is in Calgary).

What the petition does is give Chick-Fil-A free publicity. I had no idea they were coming - and probably neither did most Canadians.

What should have happened is people physically going there and protesting the store, warning its patrons as to where their food money might be going (again, perhaps not as efficient in Alberta as anywhere else in Canada); the only petition worth writing is one demanding for a competing chain right in front of Chick-Fil-A's, to have the option to spend our money where our allegiances lie - and to show them right in their face that we do have money to spend, and are choosing to spend it elsewhere.

If you don't agree with someone who is as powerful and determined as their CEO Dan T. Cathy, who is aggressive in taking action, the only way to fight him is to bring him down, and stop him from having money in the first place - make him go bankrupt, buy elsewhere. Don't send him letters and petitions that he can frame and masturbate to when he's tired of fucking human rights in the ass.

Video Of The Week: Kandle

It's been a couple of months since I last featured Kandle, and she remains one of the acts I listen to the most these days. Directed by David Valiquette, this black-and-white video for Demon will have its main line (''You've got to go'') stuck inside your brain for weeks, I promise.

Kandle looks like a human version of Taylor Swift and sounds like P.J. Harvey covering The Velvet Underground on modern instruments, so she's everything I could ask for in terms of layered, smart dark-ish pop, and her songs fit so well with the current weather, with summer struggling to arrive, and grey skies and rain a daily occurrence, feeling more like autumn than spring.

Then again, if the Montréal Canadiens beat the Boston Bruins tonight, no one on this God-forsaken island will care about the temperature, because the sun will rise within our entrails, warm our hearts and burn our depression away.

Jim Flaherty Is Dead

After attempting to kill the CBC by slicing its budget to death (while financing private-sector TV networks like CTV and Global), I was hoping the network wouldn't cover Canada's Conservative former 8-year Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's death except by holding an office party.

Instead, they first reported on his death like it was just anyone's, then ran a whole other story to say he will have a state funeral in Toronto.

I understand the ''state funeral'' part, not because he was in charge of running Canada into austerity until just a few weeks ago, but because his friends and Party are still in charge and that's what those people do: spend our tax dollars amongst themselves.

But why Toronto? Hold it in Ottawa - the capital - where he worked and did his evil deeds. Picture this:

Flaherty died of a heart attack Thursday. Colleagues, including opposition MPs, are remembering him as a generous friend who could spar heatedly with someone in Parliament and later laugh over a drink outside the House of Commons.

Laugh over a drink. ''We sure screwed most Canadians on that one! No more benefits for the unemployed, let's toast with this 15-year-old bourbon!''

I don't mean to be an asshole, but the media overall are acting like fucking fanboys now that he's dead, and even the NDP's Thomas Mulcair saying how ''great of a man'' he was though pretty much every single thing Mulcair supposedly stands for and has been fighting for his entire political career was in complete and total opposition to Flaherty's views.

One piece stands in contradiction of them all, and I can't just quote from it since all passages are important, so here it is, from Socialist.ca:

Flaherty was part of Mike Harris’ government in Ontario, whose cuts to water inspection services led to an E.Coli outbreak that killed seven people in Walkerton, Ontario. The same government imposed massive cuts to welfare and social housing, killing Kimberly Rogers in the process, and years later people continue to die from homelessness.

Flaherty was also part of cuts to healthcare at both provincial and federal levels. As the Council of Canadians wrote last week in an article titled Broken Promises and Abdication: Flaherty’s Healthcare Legacy, “March 31 marks the end of the 2004 Health Accord and the last day Canadian health care will have equalization payments to have-not provinces, national standards, and federal funding tied to achieving set benchmarks. March 31 is also a day to mourn the fact that we remain the only wealthy country with a universal health-care system and no national pharmacare plan.” Healthcare cuts kill, including the Tories' inhumane cuts to refugee health--denying basic health care to people who had fled rape, torture and war.

Flaherty was also proudly part of the Harper government that turns its back on global health crises—boycotting the International AIDS conference in Toronto, imposing a maternal health plan denying abortion, cutting humanitarian aid to Gaza, and defunding Sisters in Spirit that investigates missing and murdered aboriginal women.

While destroying social services, Flaherty and the federal Tories have poured billions into the military, which has killed countless people in 13 years of occupying Afghanistan, the bombing campaign in Libya, and the UN occupation of Haiti. At the same time, Flaherty’s budget policies included the New Veterans Charter—cutting benefits from veterans despite an epidemic of suicides and protests across the country.

Flaherty also pioneered the technique of using omnibus budgets to hide life-threatening cuts, from Bill C-45’s attacks on environmental protection and indigenous sovereignty that sparked Idle No More, to the more recent Bill C-4 that attacks workers—including their health and safety.

We mourn these countless victims of Flaherty’s policies of austerity.

Too soon? It's never too soon for the truth.

Video Of The Week: Kandle

One of the main reasons why I can't get into Lana Del Rey is that I prefer more honest stuff, and I like my pop a tad darker, too - and Kandle is a perfect example of how that can work.

Born in Vancouver (as Kandle Osborne) but now living in Montréal, she inherited her father's songwriting skills, as he is Neil Osborne of Canadian rock legends 54-40.

She is set to release her debut album, In Flames, but hasn't released a video for that yet, so instead I present you with All That I Need, directed by Thibaut Duverneix. off her self-released and self-titled EP from 2012:



You just can't go wrong with a girl in the snow in the forest.

For the song I wanted to feature, though, hear it here.

Justin Bieber: Not Safe For Life

When it isn't Rob Ford, it's fucking Justin Bieber. Since ''retiring'' a month ago, he has been arrested more times (5) than I know songs of his (1, that Baby thing if it even qualifies as one), and when the cops don't get him on their own, his own friends show the rest of the world just how much of a deranged attention whore he really is:

I mean, she doesn't seem to mind, so I really shouldn't care - and I don't - but isn't Bieber the ''ultra-Christian guy'' who advocates not having sex before marriage? Unless licking tits and anal don't count?

Good morning, by the way, I hope you didn't throw up your breakfast.

Rob Ford: The Sequel

Yes, I know, I too was under the impression that his 15 minutes were up, that not only had we had a sequel (if the crack smoking was Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, then the odd behaviour and ''plenty of pussy to eat at home'' was surely Episode 3: Revenge Of The Filth), but that we were probably at the Police Academy 5 stage of his tenure by now...

Except we had all forgotten the essential rules of sequels: they not only introduce new characters to the cannon, but oftentimes also take place in new surroundings (Hangover Part II, Vegas Vacation).

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Rob Ford in Vancouver. Not only did he get a ticket for jaywalking, he also tried to get out of it by contacting the chief of police. That's right: he bothered the boss of the police force for a $100 ticket, because he's an entitled fucking asshole. And he did so at this classy establishment: a Shell gas station, situated across the street from the bar where he'd been drinking all night (though he was to have stopped drinking last Fall):

Video is available on Twitter and YouTube.

Which begs the question: is he ever not in a drunken stupor?

Canadian Rednecks Exist

Before reaching the end, you'd think this picture would be from Ohio, Montana or Idaho...

What if the soldiers I want to thank speak French first and foremost?

Also, isn't the point of having a rear window to be able to see what's happening behind you? How do you do that when it's tainted black and full of text? Do Manitobans have x-ray vision?