Electoral Politics by Plop

I recently sat down to write an article about the municipal elections. I started reading up about the candidates, browsed their pages, explored some of the Montreal blogs. And the more I read the more depressed I became, to the point that the only way I was able to regain sanity was through a marathon session of SimCity 4, in which I decided to regain the trust of my simulated citizens by installing a tramway on my own personal Côte-des-Neiges Boulevard. Believe you me, I fixed transportation for a generation, and it’s all totally sustainable.

See, I like SimCity. By now it’s an old game, but it’s still a classic. As the benevolent mayor of a few hundred thousand simulated yous and mes, I can flex my muscles and do whatever I like. A housing project in my way? Bring in the bulldozers. I’ve installed add-on packs for everything you can think of: elevated trains, pedestrian malls, depressed freeways. In my town of Saint-Sam-sur-Richelieu, or whatever the current mayoral endeavour is called, there are no elections to speak of—but if I’m reeling from the strain of low mayoral ratings, I can always just build a few landmarks. I drop Statue of Liberty here; a Petronas Tower there.

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Forty Years Since Stonewall

“Freedom! I want freedom! Let me go!” The woman’s arms were flailing wildly, and she was shouting at a police officer standing guard at the intersection of Christopher and Greenwich Streets. Her gesticulations could have been mistaken for a political protest — she was, after all, among the hundreds pressed against the crowd control barriers, not more than a few feet from which New York’s gay pride parade was moving past: an hours-long stream of floats and dancers coursed down Fifth Avenue and filtered into ever-narrower Village streets before reaching the route’s terminus near the foot of Christopher. But it turned out all she really wanted to do was cross the street and get home.

For all the inconvenience and discomfort of hosting a full-scale urban celebration along its slim sidewalks and underneath the drooping limbs of its trees, though, there could be no more poignant destination for the parade than Christopher Street, where, forty years ago, an uprising began the U.S.’ gay rights movement.

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Tau Yat Piu! Throw a Vote!

It’s election time in Hong Kong. Today, hundreds of thousands of people headed to the polls to determine the makeup of the Legislative Council, a territorial legislature that meets in an old court building marked by a statue of Themis, the Greek goddess of justice. Half of the council’s 60 members represent geographical constituencies and are elected directly by the public, while the rest are elected by members of “functional constituencies” such as law, social welfare and the arts.

A cynical interpretation of Hong Kong’s electoral system would be to dismiss it as an ersatz democracy designed to shore up the power of Hong Kong’s establishment and maintain the territory’s status quo, while giving people the illusion of having a say. But, for all its flaws, I’m willing to subscribe to a most optimistic view, which is that this is a very much a nascent democracy, which I think is pretty remarkable when you consider the context in which it exists. For all the efforts Beijing and its supporters have made to influence the way that Hong Kongers think and vote, 60 percent of the popularly-elected seats in the 2004 Legislative Council election were won by pro-democrats.

Here, perhaps more than in many more established democracies, election time is messy, emotional and pervasive. I love elections because they bring a process that is normally aloof and unseen right down into the streets. In Montreal, there seems to be an election or by-election every year, be it of the federal, provincial or municipal variety. Posters and advertisements are ubiquitous but, as passionate as people there are about politics, you never quite get the feeling that there is anything particularly gritty or grassroots going on.

There’s no shortage of that here, where vast slates of candidates compete intensely for the few seats available. Vans with loudspeakers mounted on the roof drive around town blasting warbly messages in support of one party or another. Candidates and other well-known politicians stand on neighbourhood streetcorners, pageant-style sashes strung across their torsos, where they attempt to glad-hand onto anyone who walks by. Election posters festoon shops, buildings and minibus windows.

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Long Live the King

Although Canada has a monarch, Britain’s queen retains very little presence in Canadian culture. The kind of curiosity and adulation that inspired thousands of Montrealers to flood the streets when King George VI visited in 1939 has long since vanished. It’s a bit of a shock, then, to visit Bangkok and realize the exent to which the King of Thailand appears to be adored, with utmost earnesty, by the city’s inhabitants. Shrines to the king are found throughout the city, on streets and in shopping malls. Each Monday, many people in Bangkok—a significant minority, at least—wear yellow shirts in honour of the king.

Of course, it’s easy to forget that, as well-loved as Thailand’s king appears, he is protected by lèse majesté laws that are used to prosecute anyone who dares criticize any of Thailand’s royalty. This despite the fact that the king himself, an American-born, Swiss-educated man named Bhumibol Adulyadej, has admitted that “the king can do wrong,” and that “I must also be criticized.” Nonetheless, accusations of lèse majesté levied against Thailand’s former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, were among the motives behind the 2006 military coup against the country’s democratically-elected government.

Earlier this year, the king’s only sister died; shrines to her have been erected in the city’s metro stations. In one station, the shrine is accompanied by a book in which passersby can write their condolences. If only I could read Thai — what have people written?

Will the United Nations Move to Montreal?

Last week, La Presse reported quite breathlessly that the federal government, which owns the Port of Montreal and much of the land along its waterfront, has been lobbying the United Nations to move its headquarters from New York to Montreal. The rationale, apparently, is that the UN’s current headquarters, housed in an iconic complex built in 1949 along the East River, needs nearly $2 billion worth of renovations over the next couple of decades. It would cost a lot less to simply pack up and move to Montreal, where a state-of-the-art new headquarters would be waiting on the site of the Silo No. 5 and on adjacent piers.

You have to admit, as outlandish an idea as this may be, it would be pretty cool to have the United Nations in Montreal. So far, La Presse is the only paper reporting any of this in depth — Montreal’s other media outlets seem to be rolling their eyes in disbelief — but the Gazette’s Henry Aubin came up with a list of reasons why moving the UN to Montreal would be a swell idea. Among the most convincing? The UN would be an enormous boon to the city’s economy, bringing in 20,000 highly-paid workers and creating as many as 60,000 spinoff jobs. The UN’s two working languages are French and English, which would reinforce Montreal’s bilingualism while infusing the city with plenty of new people who speak good French.

Real estate promoters certainly like the idea of moving the world organization: here in Montreal, they’d get a share of multi-billion dollar contracts to design and develop the new headquarters. In New York, they’d get to redevelop the UN’s old headquarters, also worth billions of dollars.

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Politicians, Slippery in More Ways than One

Quebeckers head to the polls today in a provincial election that might produce the first minority government in more than a century. Most of the snow has melted, but for most of February and March, the election provided for more than just news-hour entertainment: it made for great impromptu tobogganing for people who don’t have enough room in their apartments for real sleds. Just like politicians, you see, election signs are very slippery.

My first experience with election sign tobogganing came just over a year ago, on a clear, cold January night. Canadians have gotten used to constant election fever since the Liberals lost their majority in 2004, but last winter was exceptional: in Montreal’s Outremont riding, there were three elections in as many months. First was a municipal election in November, then a provincial by-election in December. By the time we trudged to the polls to vote in January’s federal election, leftover election signs from all three races were in abundance. It only seemed natural to put some of them to good use on the bunny hill at the corner of Park and Mount Royal.

So, armed with scissors, we snipped down a few green Omar Aktoufs, found some NDP-orange Léo-Paul Lauzons, recovered a diamond-shaped Farouk Karim and scored what we considered to be the prize of the night, a giant rectangular Raya Mileva. Bracing against the wind, our skin frosty despite layers of wool sweaters, scarves and mittens, we walked to the edge of Mount Royal and clamoured up the small tobogganing hill.

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The Motorcycles of the Pearl River Delta

The fast ferry between Hong Kong and Macau is disorienting. It is essentially a floating airline cabin, with neat rows of preassigned seats in which you are expected to remain for the duration of the trip. Roving attendants offer drinks and sandwiches. There is no outside deck on which you can stand and taste the salt air, or feel the wind on your face as you move inexorably towards your destination. Instead, you sit down, take a nap and then, one hour later, emerge into a city that in theory shares a language and culture with Hong Kong but in practice is so much more exuberantly Latin.

Macau is an disorderly but very intimate city, especially in the labyrinth of crowded streets and laneways that make up its oldest, most interesting and thankfully least-touristed section. The first thing you notice when you leave the ferry terminal and emerge into its streets is the abundance of motorcycles and scooters, giving Macau the feel of a grimy Mediterranean port that somehow washed up on the shores of the Pearl River Delta.

From a practical standpoint, scooters make sense in Macau because the city is so dense and compact. The Macau Peninsula, home to 390,000 people, covers just 8.5 square kilometres—in the Santo António parish, 104,200 people are squeezed into a single kilometre—so scooters are the fastest and most space-efficient way to move the population. In fact, scooters are so popular they outnumber cars 66,000 to 64,000. Something about the constant buzz of tiny motorcycles speeding down impossibly narrow streets and leafy boulevards gives Macau an unpredictable edge that even Hong Kong lacks.

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Ottawa Votes!

Although not big news outside of Ottawa, the municipal election this year is making daily headlines in the local papers. I’m not sure if this is a regular thing, as I’ve only been here for one previous, but based on my experience in Calgary I’d guess it isn’t. I’ve taken a collection of photos of the numerous election signs all over Ottawa, which seem to be even more extensive then for the last federal election.

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