David Winch

David Winch
Past to future? Jean Charest greets Pablo  Rodriguez before his leadership victory

New Liberal leader bets Quebec wants a change from CAQ

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

The Quebec Liberal leadership convention ended Saturday with excited cries of “Pablo! Pablo!”, and the hours before were plenty suspenseful. Political speeches stressed party unity, but there was a serious contest among three top candidates — Pablo Rodriguez, Charles Milliard and Karl Blackburn —to be leader of the provincial party.

The candidates finished in a predictable order, with Rodriguez coming out on top with 52.3  per cent of the adjusted final vote between two candidates, with Milliard at 47.7 per cent. This followed a first-ballot result with Rodriguez at 37 per cent to Charles Milliard’s 27.9 per cent.

Blackburn finished third, and two minor candidates won less than 4 per cent of votes cast.  

Stressed mismanagement

Many Liberal, media and other personalities crowded into the Quebec convention centre, including former Premiers Daniel Johnson, Jean Charest and Philippe Couillard, and defeated leader Dominique Anglade. Each of these gave rousing speeches, often blasting the CAQ for financial mismanagement and “divisive” cultural policies.

Liberal speakers pointed out that they left power in 2018 with a budget surplus of $7 billion, which has turned under the Legault administration into a deficit of $13 billion.

– A $20 billion reversal! they cried.

Former leaders also emphasized that the CAQ election programme stressed management and efficiency, but its government has been breathtakingly sloppy and ineffective — most notoriously in the SAAQclic  scandal, with half a billion being spent on a failed software system, and the $270 million poured into a bankrupt Northvolt EV battery operation.

A feisty Jean Charest pointed out that the Bombardier-built Airbus 220 project was roundly denounced by opposition member François Legault in 2015 during the Couillard administration. However, this month, the Premier will be in Paris at the Bourget air show touting the same, now very successful Bombardier product, which is likely to anchor the Montreal aerospace industry for decades.

Both at the podium, and more tellingly, in private I heard repeated appeals to oppose Legault’s CAQ policies on immigration and integration for being “divisive”. These were underscored by English-language segments in each candidate’s speech assuring anglos they were full and respected members of Quebec society.

Couillard noted that he was a descendant of French-Canadian settlers who could trace their lineage in the Saguenay to the 1600s. However, he insisted that this gave him no more importance or precedence here than “somebody who arrived in Quebec just a few weeks or months or years ago”.

Choice of ridings

If the Liberals do sweep out the CAQ – and a recent Léger poll showed them putting a nose ahead of the PQ for first place — the Townships could end up with a powerhouse cast in the Cabinet. Rodriguez might choose to run for MNA in Sherbrooke, and new North Hatley resident Charles Milliard could decide to seek election in Orford.

I approached  Rodriguez on the convention floor with the question: “Is Sherbrooke special to you?” and, almost as if the question was too loaded, he answered cautiously:  “Sherbrooke is very special to me, I grew up there. But as to whether I run in Sherbrooke, nothing is decided”.

Rodriguez needs to fend off two perceptions: one, that he is responsible for the record of the unpopular federal government of Justin Trudeau, and two, that he is above all a spokesman for multicultural Montreal. Running in Sherbrooke could help distance himself from Montreal, while his new policies will have to fend off any “federal subsidiary” label.

Convention confetti

• Political conventions are like a combination of business meeting, family reunion and rock concert, with lots of discussions among old acquaintances in an atmosphere punctuated by excited delegates screaming (Pablo!) around a charismatic winner. This one ended with a cheerful tone, unlike some conventions. For example, the 1975 Joe Clark upset of Brian Mulroney led to years of bitterness and long-term rivalries within the PC party. There seems to be little of that today in the PLQ.
• TO achieve regional balance, the Liberals used a new formula of assigning 3,000 “points” to every riding (125) across Quebec, regardless of size; 1,000 points derived from young Liberals’ votes. These points were then distributed proportionally among candidates if no candidate finished with over 50 per cent support, as was the case Saturday.
• Tom Mulcair, a former Liberal minister and now a media commentator, came out of this campaign with his political smarts in question. For over a year, Mulcair had insisted on his daily CJAD Montreal radio commentary that Karl Blackburn was the man to watch and that his delegate strength and appeal were underestimated. Blackburn finished third. This is the latest misjudgement by Mulcair, a former party leader who, like Pierre Poilievre, blew a large lead in a winnable federal election.
• The second-tier party chiefs, a trio of former Liberal interim leaders — Jean-Marc Fournier, Pierre Nantel and Marc Tanguay — had their moment in the sun with an onstage panel. They had each held the fort after the defeats of a Liberal leader, respectively Charest, Couillard and Anglade. There is something admirable about them restraining their ambition and ego to serve the party. As Fournier concluded, after riding the campaign bus for years in support of candidate Charest: “Being a No. 2, c’est pas si pire (not so bad)”. Congrats are surely due for that loyalty.
• The press room at political conventions has historically been filled with three things hard-bitten journalists loved:  coffee, cigarettes and newspapers. Pardon my moment of nostalgia as I note that two of these three things have entirely vanished from there. But I enjoyed my coffee.

Courtesy Quebec Liberal Party
The three front-runners for Quebec Liberal leadership show a range of political styles.

Quebec’s most successful party gets ready for another run at the top

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

What’s up with the Quebec Liberals?

The rise of Mark Carney and a tariff-driven federal election overshadowed the provincial Liberals’ leadership campaign. It officially kicked off in January and the five candidates for PLQ leader gamely pursued support, but with little or no media presence.

Now, they’re back – maybe all the way back.

Recent leadership debates (available on YouTube) showcased the five candidates for Liberal leader. They often defied preconceptions with strong statements of principle, notably as regards public finances and minority rights.

Cyclical rebounds

The Quebec Liberals were given up for dead after their 2018 and 2022 defeats, certainly by many Montreal pundits and instant-reaction “analysts”.

Unsurprisingly, the PQ’s poll numbers have soared in the political vacuum left by the CAQ’s unpopularity. My wager: that is a temporary bubble of homeless voters.

Particularly exasperating was the readiness of big-foot national correspondents, such as Ottawa commentator Andrew Coyne and Montreal columnist Konrad Yakabuski, to crown the Parti Québécois as 2026 winners. Each published columns under the headline “constitutional crisis”. These alarmist takes may look ridiculously premature after the next Quebec election.

The Liberals have repeatedly “risen from the dead”, then governed for years afterwards. I recall the red-splattered electoral maps in La Presse after Quebec elections in the early 1970s — Liberals everywhere. Then in 1976 they suffered a devastating defeat to the PQ.

The premier, Robert Bourassa, was even beaten in his own riding in central Montreal. The party drifted through a losing period, initially under dour leader Claude Ryan, before emerging victorious again in 1985, led by … Robert Bourassa.

In the mid-1990s a wave of post-Meech nationalism again forced the Bourassa Liberals out, and again the Liberal party looked hapless and hopeless for years.

Once reluctant Sherbrooke MP Jean Charest was drafted to lead the provincial Liberals, however, the PLQ won in 2003 and resumed its dominance — proceeding to win not one, not two, but three consecutive terms in office, a post-1960 record for them.

So it is unwise to underestimate a party with such broad-based history and appeal. Last year I wrote here (“Can the Quebec Liberals bounce back?”, September 2024) that, despite its perilously low poll numbers since its second big defeat in 2022, the PLQ had the most potential for growth among the four parties in the National Assembly.

Parties rotate in power

Recent history shows how quickly Quebec’s chameleon-like voters can “change colour” when the mood strikes them.

Back in 2012, the newly formed Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) proposed to bring a fresh tone to provincial politics. Its founder François Legault explicitly renounced future referendums. He promised to focus on the practical concerns of Quebec voters – health care, above all, but also tax burdens and government efficiency. It even feigned an opening to anglophone and ethnic voters.

It’s hard to recall now, but the CAQ was portrayed as an innovative vehicle for political problem-solvers. On that front, there has been disappointment all round.

The governing CAQ is facing severe headwinds, given the failure of its platform: healthcare is no better than when it took office, and nobody believes new body Santé Quebec will improve anything. The provincial deficit has ballooned to $13 billion, after being reduced to zero in 2018 by Liberal finance minister Carlos Leitao. Bottomless investments in electric battery maker Northvolt drained public finances.

And the general tone of society has become more tense, with cultural conflicts exacerbated by a Premier stuck on some 1950s-vintage cultural fears.

By contrast, the Quebec Liberals match some criteria of a “parti attrape-tout” or a catch-all party. This was defined by political scientist Otto Kirchheimer as a party that “appeals across the board, beyond social classes and especially the classic divisions between right and left”.  Such a party can appeal to many factions in society, as well as their opposites.

 At its best, the PLQ is a unifying party of broad reform, as with the Jean Lesage government of the early 1960s. It established a fully public education system, including Cégeps and a new university network, nationalized Hydro and promoted the francophone business class.

The Charest Liberal governments (2003-2012) tried to rein in spending and proposed “re-engineering” the state, an effort that ran into severe opposition when higher student fees were proposed to cover university deficits. But that government mostly presided over a decade of social peace.

Townships links

The five Liberal leadership candidates cover a broad range of styles. At the English-language debate held May 3 in Laval, several candidates stood out.

Pablo Rodriguez, a veteran Justin Trudeau-era federal minister with all the baggage that entails, comes across as firm and knowledgeable. This is matched by a reputation for being no-nonsense and even arrogant in private. His experience in the Township is extensive, as he was a Université de Sherbrooke grad and maintains links to the community. (He played soccer for the UdeS squad and broke his leg twice, which suggests his hard-charging style.)  By all accounts Rodriguez holds the lead.

Charles Milliard, by contrast, is smooth and confident sounding. He was head of a Chamber of Commerce group and is predictably critical of the CAQ’s spending misadventures. A new resident of North Hatley, Milliard could conceivably run in the Townships to upend the CAQ in a nearby riding.

Finally, Karl Blackburn, third of the most serious candidates, is solid in his small-l liberal convictions and business smarts. A former MNA for Roberval, he was also head of the executive group Conseil du Patronat. But his campaign was handicapped by his early absence, prompted by a serious illness. He is trying to regain ground, but for several months Milliard and Rodriguez were largely unopposed in recruiting delegates.

Any of these candidates could lead Liberals back, after they plumbed the electoral depths. Here’s hoping delegates choose the strongest candidate on June 14.

If April weather is often trouble, what should we expect in May?

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

We made it! Or did we?

Spring is surely the most anticipated season in four-season Canada. But as we enter May, can we expect our weather to finally behave?

In 2025, Townshippers have lived through a frigid January then a February white-out, followed by a cold March and a turbulent April.

Having learned nothing over the years, I decided to change to our summer tires on April 7.  The following day, we had a big snowfall. Driving cautiously through the snow front to Montreal, it dipped to minus-8 C. Later, I trudged along city sidewalks in the dark to a big hockey game, feeling like it was winter all over again. Brrrr.

We had more light snow in mid-April, followed by a slush storm to wake us up on the last Sunday of the month. Yup, for readers outside the Townships, we had winter weather much of the day on April 27th.

–Enough, already! The weather affects my mood and dictates our recreation and travel. Since I wrote about winter and summer seasons in Townships Weekend back in 2023 and 2024, now let’s try to figure out spring.

April fools us

The roller-coaster ride in April was not entirely unforeseen. Nobody here is ever sure about that month, and it often baffles commentators.

For years, one AM radio morning host in Montreal orchestrated an “April is winter” call-in rant to back his claim there were “six months of winter” in Quebec. Uh, not really. As a mid-April birthday kid, I recall many outdoor parties, garden events and baseball games then.

Newcomers to Canada, most recently a European acquaintance in Montreal, say Canadians “talk a lot about the weather”. But we have so much of it! Others quip that, while England has too much history, Canada has too much geography. You might add: lots of weather.

England has fine writing and most intense gardening culture, so it’s no surprise they have crystallized many apt sayings and aphorisms about the seasons. We just need to adapt these to Canada.

The end of winter unrolls slowly: “March — in like a lion, out like a lamb”. This is true enough in England but needs a tweak here. In southeastern Quebec, March regularly storms in like a lion, then slinks out like a tiger.

Then there is the hopeful “April showers bring May flowers”. Again, this is often true here, if you also count snow as a shower. The bloom may finally come only in June.

Anglophile poet T.S. Eliot’s lines from “The Wasteland” capture the ambiguity of spring thaw:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Yes, springtime can be a groaning, steady process. It does not happen all at once.

One old Townships country house we lived in featured a hand-scrawled pencil record inside a cupboard of “the dates the ice went out” on nearby Lake Massawippi. This record started in 1961, when ice was reportedly last visible on May 3-4. That was a late thaw; these dates more often clustered around April 20-22nd.

This year, the ice went out a bit earlier on Lake Massawippi, unofficially on April 14th. At least, no ice was visible from the North Hatley shore across to Baltimore Bay. Winter had ended, sort of, and we looked hopefully toward May.

May takes its time

The month of May in the Townships can be lovely and mild, or dour and overcast. The “darling buds of May” that Shakespeare cherished can always fall victim to a morning frost.

Environment Canada and private weather apps forecast that, in the first half of May, daily highs in Sherbrooke will cluster between 14 C and 18 C, and the outlook will often be cloudy and rainy.

The weather25.com site helpfully advises foreign travelers that “temperatures in Canada in May are quite cold … between 9 C and 16 C; warm clothes are a must”.

“You can expect about three to eight days of rain in Canada during the month of May. It’s a good idea to bring along your umbrella so that you don’t get caught in poor weather.”

That’s the May norm for our region.

German meteorologist Wladmir Köppen classified climate regions across the world with a five-letter scale, denoted from A to E. The five groups are A (tropical), B (arid), C (temperate), D (continental) and E (polar).

Each group is also identified by extra letters to denote its seasonal precipitation and temperature.

Much of eastern Canada falls into group D; southern Quebec is classified as Köppen Dfb: “Warm-summer humid continental climate; coldest month averaging below 0 C (32 F) …. , all months with average temperatures below 22 C (71.6 F), and at least four months averaging above 10 C (50 F)”.

Sherbrooke, like Montreal — and Moscow — is a Köppen Dfb locale. It experiences “long, cold, and snowy winters, warm summers, and short but crisp springs and autumns”. Short but crisp, maybe that’s the spring descriptive we’re looking for.

So we’re not alone with our loudly four-season calendar. I have lived through grey winters with little drama or variety (including in northern Europe and highlands Mexico). Their seasonal spectacle is dull compared to Canada.

So gardeners, beware those comfortable English aphorisms when it comes to planting. To be safe, as one Townships grandmother cautioned, never plant “until after the first full moon in June”. Even May is not safely spring, it seems.

Despite all that, we love our springtime. English poet William Wordsworth, in his “Written In March”, sums up the season’s promise:

There’s joy in the mountains;

There’s life in the fountains;

Small clouds are sailing,

Blue sky is prevailing;

The rain is over and gone!

Montreal Metropolitan Airport
The renovated air terminal on the South Shore expects to handle 4 million passengers a year.

New air facility on South Shore set to become the “Townships airport”

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

Everyone’s flying everywhere. The phenomenon is so widespread, we scarcely notice it anymore.

I am no frequent-flyer, unlike members of my broader family who jet away somewhere every month or even sometimes every week: to Vancouver, Florida, London, Bangladesh, Thailand, you name it.

But I do fly somewhere about twice a year, putting me in the Canadian median. “On average, most individuals take around one to three flights per year. This number includes both domestic and international flights”, concludes consumer site NCESC.com. Canadians mostly travel in winter to sunshine destinations in the Caribbean and, until recently, in the U.S.

Travel has changed

Over the years, the nature of air travel has greatly evolved. Security has been hugely enhanced since 9/11, sometimes making airports a gauntlet to battle through. Budget-cutting by airlines has ended the “luxury” of flying, except in business class. Classy service was the norm in the 1950s into the 1960s, with attentive stewardesses, as they were called, and enhanced menus.

Seats and leg room are now usually cramped in economy class. And as one Internet meme snidely portrays it, a pretzel with a plastic cup of ginger ale now constitutes an airline “meal”. The term Airbus aptly describes this uninspiring experience. –Get over it, buddy, reply the airlines.

Security restrictions are expanded in the aircraft, of course. When I first took a transatlantic flight, in 1975, I carried with me a business card signed by an Air Canada pilot I knew from Toronto. I handed that to the stew, and she quickly walked me up to the cockpit of the Boeing 747 so I could sit beside the pilots and chat with them. –Unimaginable today!

As for flight technology, even 50 years ago the two 747 pilots raised their hands in a shrug and admitted candidly that “the plane flies itself”.

Most mind-blowing today, certainly for me, is the growth and “normalization” of instant worldwide travel – flying anywhere right away. I recall a lecture in the 1980s by the then-moderator of the United Church, Dr. Robert McClure. He had served as a medical missionary in China from 1926 to 1948. McClure recalled having recently been in an airport in London where a giant poster boasted its flights to “Singapore in 16 hours”.

He mused that when he first started his work in the 1920s it was six weeks’ travel to China, then another six weeks to western China. With no stewardesses, ha.

Still, that does not mean that everyone today can just jump in a taxi and take off to wherever. Smaller, rural and regional locales often have no nearby airport with national links. As is the case with, yes … Sherbrooke.

In a Townships Weekend column comparing Sherbrooke to the very similar city of Burlington, Vermont (“Burlington-Sherbrooke: Twin cities?”, April 2023), I noted the ease of access to the American city’s airport and its many national airline connections. We do not have that in the Townships, and so we’ve been stuck with a two-hour drive to the Montreal-Trudeau airport in Dorval.

New facility in 2025

That all changes this year. The Montreal Saint-Hubert Airport, operational since 1927, is being transformed into a commercial aviation hub. It is being relaunched as the Montreal Metropolitan Airport (MET) and is expected to open its new terminal and begin commercial flights in late summer this year.

The renovated Saint-Hubert airport will give Montreal a second, smaller airport for regional and national flights. Many other cities have such secondary terminals, notably Toronto with its little Billy Bishop airport on the city’s waterfront.

MET is partnering with Porter Airlines to build a nine-gate passenger terminal, forecast to handle up to four million passengers per year (Dorval handles about 20 million). It will host domestic flights only, with no customs facilities for international flights.

Reader comments at the OMAAT site, which monitors airports and travel worldwide, have been generally favourable to MET:

“Saint-Hubert airport is much more convenient for a catchment area of about two million people stretching from the South Shore eastwards and northwards”, added one reader.

Another poster added: “There’s a train station right next to the airport that’s about 20 minutes away from Gare Centrale. If they can run a shuttle bus and increase train frequency (especially in off-peak times and directions), then I see no reason how this would be a worse option than YUL, even after the REM opens. Maybe even better.”

Indeed, this will mean – at least for domestic flights — no more requirement for Townships-based travelers to struggle through traffic in Brossard, Longueuil and over the Champlain bridge before navigating autoroute 20 west to Dorval.

Instead, after driving in on autoroute 10, at the junction with autoroute 30 at the edge of Brossard, you will just turn east and drive 13 minutes (Mapquest estimate) to the junction of highway 112 (Boulevard Cousineau). Then turn north on Cousineau another 13 mins to the airport entrance. Voilà!

Trips to downtown Toronto via boutique airline Porter are sure to be particularly popular. In the 1980s, I used to fly regularly on City Express airline from Dorval to the Island airport in Toronto. That greatly reduced stress and transit times by arriving near the city centre.

Sherbrooke is close to the South Shore of Montreal; indeed, there is a campus of the Université de Sherbrooke there, with a metro station of the same name. We are all part of the broader southeast region of Quebec.

Handled correctly, this new air link offers great opportunities for regional diversification. Business travelers and tourists will be eager to see this new gateway.

Are Townships political and business leaders prepared for takeoff?

Seniors are changing our society, economy. How can they really thrive?

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

If you were gifted a “second lifetime”, what would you do with it?

The question isn’t often asked that way, but it should be. Seniors today have mostly received a gift of life-extension. While people living in their 60s, and even their 50s, used to be viewed as old and in decline, now their 70s are increasingly spent in fruitful activities and often in part-time or even full-time work.

The notion that reaching 70 is the Exit door for professional and social life has steadily been losing ground. Work years are being extended as the younger population stagnates. This has brought openings in the labour market.

The pension and benefits systems have not really caught up. Nor has the general culture. I noticed this recently when I was asked to check the boxes on a banking application, quizzing me whether, at 68, I was: Retired / Working part-time / or Full-time.

 Actually, in some tax years I’m all three!

Governments and voters also seem confused. The Harper government raised the pensionable age to 67, then the Trudeau government rolled it back to 65. In France, attempts to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 almost provoked a revolution.

Older workers can also be misconstrued as interlopers. In Ontario, for example, the retirement age for professors was broadly abolished in 2006, as long as these academics were “able to continue to perform their work duties”.

Media then focused on eager young grad students struggling to grasp the bottom of the career ladder as older faculty continued to teach into their 70s. But in truth, only a small minority of faculty in that age group chooses to keep teaching.

Historic age changes

I feel this “age-quake” in my own family. My paternal grandparents were born in the late 19th century, in 1898 and 1899 respectively.

As such, they were born on farms before the Wright brothers’ first flight, then lived well into the era of satellites and moon landings. This was an astounding era of technical progress, by far the greatest ever. Just as astonishing perhaps was the jump in life expectancy.

The data agency Statista notes that life expectancy for Canadians born between 1891 and 1900 was 52 for women and just 49 for males.

Since then, Statistics Canada reports that life expectancy in Canada has greatly improved.

“Since the early 20th century. The life expectancy at birth for men has increased by 20.5 years, from 58.8 years in 1920–1922 to 79.3 years in 2009–2011. During the same period, the life expectancy of women increased by 23 years, from 60.6 years to 83.6 years.”

Sure enough, my father —  born in 1927 — lived a decade and a half longer than his parents.

Better nutrition and the advent of mass vaccinations were crucial. The decline of infant mortality showed these gains. Anyone strolling the cemeteries of the Eastern Townships notes the sad evidence of many infant deaths. StatsCan notes: “About 1 in 10 Canadian babies died within the first year of life in 1921, compared with about 1 in 200 in 2011”.

If they survived, prospects were fairly good; by 1920-1922, one-year-old boys in Canada were expected to live until age 64.7 and one-year-old girls until age 65.3.

This extension of life led, paradoxically, to new dilemmas. In 1935, U.S. President Franklin D Roosevelt introduced Social Security pension payments, starting at age 65. While a great social advance, it was a cruel irony that most people would never live to benefit, as the median age of death in America was then 62 years.

Once everyone started to live past their mid-60s, however, public pensions anchored a new social class – retired seniors.

Changes shape attitudes

Pessimism and bleak perspectives have often darkened our views of old age. Stereotypes portray seniors as helpless dependants.

Folk balladeer Joan Baez in her song Hello Out There sings that “old people, they just grow lonesome”. Isolation is still a serious issue, but far from universal these days for active old folks.

French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in 1970 wrote a weighty tome titled La Vieillesse (Old Age). Colleagues were not too supportive. She noted: “When I say that I am working on an essay about old age, most often people exclaim: ‘Quelle idée! But you are not old! Such a sad subject’. This is precisely why I am writing this book: to break the conspiracy of silence. Regarding the elderly, society is not only guilty, but criminal”.

De Beauvoir wrote astutely that the aged are not some separate class or category: “Old people are just young people who suddenly find themselves old”, she concluded.

Balanced against the negative takes is the modern retirement industry’s chirpy invocation of the “golden years”, or the cheerleading notion that “age is just a number”.

UN health agency WHO defines ageing more bluntly: “At the biological level, ageing results from the impact of … a wide variety of molecular and cellular damage over time. This leads to a gradual decrease in physical and mental capacity, a growing risk of disease and ultimately death.” Hence the pessimism.

Today, WHO promotes healthy ageing, which it defines as “developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables well-being in older age”.

That trend continues to change the economy. The Vanier Institute of the Family reports that data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) showed that “in 2022, approximately one in five people aged 65 to 74 were employed … these workers were more likely to report working primarily by choice than necessity”.

The more active seniors of the 2020s embody a new optimism. Fewer rocking-chairs are visible, especially amid all the leisure activities, part-time paycheques and continuing life interests. Long live that trend!

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

Donald Trump is dominating the news these days, “flooding the zone”, with multiple and often conflicting actions. News coverage is so intense, one wonders: is there anything to add? —But wait!

There are several angles on Trump that are worth highlighting.

During Trump’s first term, a couple of books impressed me. One was a work of politics, the other of psychology. These come to mind again today.

To start, the Mueller Report of 2019 on election interference and foreign influence was a lengthy (758 page), and very detailed FBI report. I read every page, reference and footnote.[1] It dominated headlines, was briefly debated, then disappeared.

The other book I often consulted was a work of psychology, one which helped explain why Trump’s actions often seemed incongruous or disturbing. The work, titled Our Inner Conflicts, was published in 1945 by a German-born psychotherapist, Dr. Karen Horney. I had picked it up in a Psych course at college, and her thesis struck me as insightful.

Damaged by conflicts

Horney posits, after her long history of clinical work, that many people are damaged by conflicts as children and cannot resolve these intense issues.

Such damaged people are often hobbled by inner tensions but still must navigate daily life. Horney concludes that they adopt one of three semi-conscious “coping strategies”: they may systematically move away from people (withdrawal) or move towards people (submission and compliance). Finally, they may reflexively move against people (assertiveness and aggression).

The symptoms of the latter, “move against” strategy define Trump to a T. They provide a key to understanding many inscrutable actions.

Why does he constantly pick fights? Why is he so mercurial and unpredictable? Canadians might wonder: Why does Trump make enemies of people he should befriend?

Dr. Horney’s analysis of such “conflicted” cases explains well Trump’s obsession with pointless fights (asserting his independence), his spontaneous dislikes (asserting dominance), and his unpredictable enthusiasms (defying others’ predictions).

It’s worth another read.

‘Dangerous case’

However, a more recent set of psychiatric specialists have commented directly on “the case of Trump”.

Early in his first term, in 2017, a group of US psychiatrists protested the rule against psychiatrists trying to diagnose public figures. Called the “Goldwater Rule”, this professional guideline stood for nearly 60 years. The clinicians argued that this President was a mortal threat, and they needed to alert the public as to his psychic state.

The group published The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (2018). In that collection of essays, the authors proposed that he was “impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganised, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important, and self-serving”.  Whew.

(There was some criticism that these mostly liberal psychiatry professionals were as much about politics as medicine. No conservatives were included saying, for example, that they liked Trump’s Republican policies, but were troubled by his personality.)

Trump’s re-election campaign prompted another protest. In October 2024, an open letter condemning Trump was signed by 233 psychology professionals and ran in the New York Times.

The signatories contended they had “an ethical duty to warn the public” that Donald Trump showed  “symptoms of severe, untreatable personality disorder—malignant narcissism— that make him deceitful, destructive, deluded, and dangerous. He is grossly unfit for leadership”.

In a new collection, titled The More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (2024),psychology professionals again argued that the Goldwater rule was ill-suited to the present and full of loopholes.

Most of the authors agreed that Trump grew up under a tyrannical father who belittled his sons relentlessly. His father’s disapproval likely led to alcohol abuse by Trump’s older brother Fred.

One essay in The More Dangerous Case particularly caught my attention. Its author focused on “malignant narcissism” and its personal manifestations. As it turned out, the writer is a Canadian psychologist now living in Stratford, Ontario, Dr. Richard Wood. I contacted him and we had a wide-ranging discussion.

In his essay, Dr. Wood notes the rough upbringing Trump experienced under a demanding and hard-nosed father: “Becoming tough and ruthless like father and as relentlessly acquisitive was a Faustian bargain indeed. In order to be safe, Trump had to be willing to sacrifice his connection with others and his very humanity. To ensure he could never be invaded again and defined by someone else, he had to hold himself apart from meaningful engagement with other people, maintaining a tough guy posture, much like his father had, that denied need, dependence, and recognition of his own flawed humanity”.

In another essay, Wood had underlined that a child growing up this way “becomes implacably mistrustful, anticipating rapacity from others rather than love or generosity”.

Wood quotes psychologist Erich Fromm, who stated that malignant narcissism denoted “a grotesque expansion of grandiosity and omnipotence that produced profound distortions of the human character”.

Wood adds that psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg, who made “a deep investment in understanding malignant narcissism”, similarly found that it led to “grandiosity, extreme self-centeredness, and a remarkable absence of interest in and empathy for others”. In spite of this, those suffering from it can be politically successful as they “are still very eager to obtain admiration and approval from other people”.

While the contributors to The More Dangerous Case collection set out varied analyses, Wood notes that they agreed on the basics of malignant narcissism: “damaged or absent empathy, impaired thought process, and prominent paranoid elements”.

Malignant narcissism “tends, over a lifetime, to escalate the damage it imposes on the self”. No happy ending is evident.

We have been warned.

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[1] The Mueller Report delivered a message that many U.S. observers found counterintuitive. As special prosecutor and former FBI head Robert Mueller wrote in his executive summary, “the investigation could not establish evidence of collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence”. That basically ended Congressional investigations and led to a separate impeachment process focusing on Ukraine.

PM from Townships showed skill and integrity, but image remains grey

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

The last two months have seen a whirlwind of political activity in Canada, with the rapid-fire resignations of a finance minister then the prime minister, followed by the suspension of Parliament and the launch of a Liberal leadership race. All this occurs as Canada braces for the incoming hurricane of a disruptive new President in the U.S.

Even apolitical folk wonder, where are we headed? What responsible and competent political leaders will emerge?

As a politico, someone who follows politics intently, I do not recall many recent eras with such rapid-fire changes in the Canadian scene. One possible example: back in 1979-80 Joe Clark’s Conservatives defeated the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau. He then returned to power just eight months later and propelled himself into the midst of Quebec’s first sovereignty referendum, the year Ronald Reagan came to power in the U.S. But such a collision of big events is very unusual.

High-ranking low-profile PM

Today, as we look for solid and competent governance, the name of one Townshipper, Louis St.  Laurent, comes to mind. Largely unknown to Gen X and younger Canadians, St. Laurent does not even benefit from having his face on the currency, as his francophone predecessor Wilfrid Laurier does on the five-dollar bill (visible at least for those not swiping all their purchases). A somewhat grey, grandfatherly image also clouds the picture people might have about LSL’s achievements.

And yet, St. Laurent was ranked fourth-best among all prime ministers in a survey of Canadian historians assessing the first 20 PMs (through to 1999 and Jean Chrétien), as reported in the book Prime Ministers: Ranking Canada’s Leaders. In that poll, St. Laurent fell behind only the Big Three of Macdonald, Laurier and Mackenzie King.

The Compton-born St. Laurent was also ranked No. 6 in recent Macleans magazine surveys on prime ministers (trailing PMs Mackenzie King, Laurier, Macdonald, P. Trudeau and Pearson). Yet when I scanned the stacks at the excellent North Hatley library recently, its extensive shelf of political biographies included the Big Three above as well as multiple bios of Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien. But nothing on Louis St. Laurent.

St. Laurent did not seek attention or glory. He was exceptional for his personal integrity and sense of responsibility. In his lifetime, he declined both a Rhodes scholarship and a Supreme Court appointment. After he started his federal career as an adviser, Prime Minister Mackenzie King saw his discreet ability and recruited him in 1941 as wartime Minister of Justice.

By all accounts, St. Laurent showed remarkable ability early in his life. After a small-town upbringing, St. Laurent was successively an outstanding student, a top lawyer, a Cabinet appointee, then Prime Minister from 1948 to 1957.

St. Laurent was born in 1882 to Jean-Baptiste-Moïse St. Laurent and Mary Anne Broderick, an Irish Canadian. Like Pierre Trudeau, St. Laurent grew up fluently bilingual, as his father spoke French while his mother spoke only English. (His English reportedly had a noticeable Irish brogue, reports Wikipedia.) A museum in Compton, conveniently located on route Louis-S.-St-Laurent (the 147), commemorates his family life and roots in their onetime storefront.

He received his B.A. in 1902 from the Séminaire Saint-Charles-Borromée (also known as Séminaire de Sherbrooke) and then his law degree in 1905 from the Université Laval (where he declined the Rhodes). He continued with a prosperous and very successful law career in Quebec City, where he retained his father’s Liberal partisanship.

In 1941, with World War II exploding, Mackenzie King asked the sure-footed St. Laurent to accept the post of Minister of Justice. He retained this office until being named External Affairs minister after the war, during which time he attended the birth of the United Nations at San Francisco. On the strength of his accomplishments, St. Laurent succeeded Mackenzie King in 1948. His Liberals won a majority government that year and again in 1953.

Popular 1950s government

Productive and popular as PM – and widely admired as “Uncle Louis”— St. Laurent’s Liberal government expanded the social safety net, while also launching major public works such as the St. Lawrence Seaway. As Policy Options magazine noted in an enthusiastic assessment (“Uncle Louis and a golden age for Canada: A time of prosperity at home and influence abroad”, June 2003): the St. Laurent Liberals “could boast of hospital insurance, the Canada Council, a six-dollar raise in old age pensions, and Canada’s prominent peace-making in the Suez crisis”.

However, his Liberal government – stop me when you’ve heard this before –started to wear out its welcome by the nine-year mark of governing in Ottawa. Calling an election in June 1957 proved hazardous, despite Liberal achievements and St. Laurent’s pleasing personality. A controversial pipeline debate in 1956 was forcibly ended using parliamentary closure. A recession also appeared on the horizon. Suddenly, a Conservative populist was nipping at the government’s heels.

 The Liberals were defeated by the Conservatives of John Diefenbaker. In September 1957, St. Laurent announced his retirement as Liberal leader, returned to Quebec City and lived in “honourable obscurity” there until he died on July 25, 1973. He is buried with family at the Saint-Thomas d’Aquin cemetery in Compton.

Policy Options concludes that St. Laurent“left behind an enlarged and prosperous Canada, respected in the world. He was an architect of the multilateralism which, with American power, kept the Cold War cool. His era was such a golden age that many Canadians believed that peace, order and good government was their natural destiny.”

We can only hope that 2025 will again offer us political leaders of his calibre. Canada is perhaps ready to trade in glamour and clever talk for a dependable pair of hands.

Many tech options and apps may not suit you — just turn them Off

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

Everything’s digital these days. Soon, you’ll be able to click Start on your car from the bedroom on a cold winter morning, then have it drive to the local grocery for a litre of milk.

Just kidding about the milk part, but the wonders of tech are proliferating.

While digital stuff is generally useful and labour-saving, it is sometimes a pain. I actively avoid some innovations, while letting others wither from neglect.

This is not some rebellion against tech or a fruitless call to turn back the (digital) clock. I am quite comfortable with desktop computers, laptops, smartphones and their various apps, and spend endless time online. I have run two websites (including, ahem, davidwinch.website) and I operated a governmental publishing unit that was 100 per cent online and paper-free.

So I am not incompetent. Just critical: there’s lots of digital stuff you don’t need.

Shift for yourself

In our household, we have one foot in the new world, one in the old. I write cheques regularly, read many paper publications, opt sometimes for counter service at banks, keep an emergency landline at home, pay for cable TV rather than streaming, and choose numerous non-digital services.

In our car, for example. We first bought a Volkswagen ten years ago straight off the boat from Wolfsburg. So we were able to get a European model with manual stick shift. Vroom.

We bought another VW in 2024, but now, no chance of a stick shift. No clutch, just a push-button start. Luckily, it still has handy manual controls for wipers and a radio dial.

During car repairs, however, we had to rent a vehicle. It included a super-proliferation of digital everything. A big screen dominated the dashboard, with many flashy options. We had trouble turning the radio off. It was a relief to return to our old car, with less digital clutter.

Resistance is futile! you say. No, it isn’t. There have been several successful pushbacks.

Let’s look at some choices:

Banking: Yes, everything can be done online. Cash transfers, bill payments, direct deposits. But I still use paper cheques often enough, ordering packs of 50. I find them handy to pay our many contractors and for small gifts and local transactions. It feels simpler.

Media: I love newspapers, always have — I sold them on street corners, delivered them by hand, then founded a couple of high-school newspapers before becoming a letters-to-the-editor regular then a writer. I call paper “the real thing”. Once it has been printed and is in your hands, nothing can be revised, retracted or touched up. There is no risk of losing a story in cyberspace.

Buying papers these days, I am a real outlier. While their outlets have definitely shrunk, we keep track of the supermarkets, dépanneurs and bookstores that stock daily newspapers. I head straight to MultiMags in NDG-Montreal for the Globe and Mail, or to Maxi in Lennoxville for Townships Weekend and the Journal de Montréal.

Retro trend albums

Music. The most striking retro trend is in musical recordings. Vinyl LPs have made a huge comeback in recent years. In the hippest parts of the trendiest neighbourhoods, they are everywhere.

 I always liked CDs, and amassed quite a collection — classical, rock, jazz, country, Christmas —from the 1990s through their decline in the 2010s. And we have a solid Bose stereo with CD tray in my office. All good.

But I am bombarded with online requests to sign on to Sirius for our car radio and to subscribe to Spotify at home. I guess creating your own playlists is convenient; it avoids storing physical CDs. But I don’t really want it. However, since our new car has no CD tray, my hand is being steadily forced.

Meanwhile, vinyl LPs keep surging:  The Conversation reported in 2023 that “over the past decade, vinyl records have made a major comeback. People purchased $1.2 billion U.S. of records in 2022, a 20 per cent jump from the previous year. Not only did sales rise, but they also surpassed CD sales for the first time since 1988, according to a report from the Recording Industry Association of America”.

In Vancouver’s trendy Gastown district last month, we came upon a huge music store entirely stocked with LPs. Every type of music (see photo). In Toronto’s hipster Ossington district, LPs seem just as popular, with young and youngish music-lovers.

Why this change?  The blog Freestyle Vinyl concludes: “This trend reflects a growing appreciation for the tangible, analog aspects of vinyl and its unique sound quality”.

Landline phones: As cell phones have surged, landlines have steeply declined.

Statistics Canada reports: “In 2021, 93.9 per cent of Canadian households reported having at least one cellphone …. Conversely, the share of households that reported having a landline has declined consistently, from nearly two-thirds (63.3 per cent) in 2017 to less than half (47.4 per cent) in 2021”.

In a recentarticle in The Atlantic monthly on “things we wish would come back”, one writer mused:

“My parents disconnected their landline, but the number is seared in my mind alongside the other home numbers of my childhood friends. I recently learned that my internet provider offers a free landline, and my apartment has a number of its own. All I have to do is plug a phone into the jack.

“It’s an idyllic thought: coming home, putting my cellphone—and all its distractions—away, but not being disconnected. I can still chat aimlessly with my sister while doing chores, or catch up with a long-distance friend. I’m all for bringing back the landline as a way to create a just-large-enough opening for the outside world to reach me.”

Go ahead: carve your own niche in this all-digital world.

Photo courtesy

Does it matter if we don’t know the ‘other’ culture’s stars?

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

Boomers will be boomers. Give us a name-brand musician from the 1960s or 1970s, and we flock to the concert halls. Whether it’s vintage James Taylor or Pink Floyd or whoever (Who-ever?) at the Bell Centre, I’ve seen ’em all. Or at least, the most memorable ones.

Another music-nostalgia date came on Thanksgiving weekend at the U de Sherbrooke cultural centre. And what an evening it was!

Robert Charlebois has been a rockin’ dynamo since I was a teenager in the 1970s. He somehow found a place on our after-school turn-table rotation beside the Stones, Jethro Tull, Mike Oldfield and David Bowie.

A fun and inventive musician, Charlebois in his prime was as big in Quebec as Céline Dion ever was, but he never “crossed over” to the English market.

His show prompted me to muse about Quebec and Canada and the bicultural dream.

—Is that overdone, or even possible?

First, Charlebois live

The 80-something Charlebois retains his full voice and range and he pranced about the stage, Mick Jagger-like, in a trim black outfit.

A dynamic performer, his repertory varies between soft, heartfelt ballads and quick, witty rockers. As a songwriter, Charlebois often collaborated with poet and novelist Réjean Ducharme, whose colloquial lyrics often slide into an impenetrable joual.

Always inventive, Charlebois used instruments and symbols in novel ways: at one point he played a nickel-plated guitar, and famously wore a Canadiens sweater under his full head of curls.

In October, he covered many trademark hits, from wistful air-travel fantasies Je Reviens à Montréal and Lindbergh! to the barroom comic-opera Cauchemar. But I missed other favourites like Entre Deux Joints and Demain l’Hiver, a rave about fleeing our winters to Florida.

Charlebois was at his peak in the 1970s, when his eclectic style fit urban Quebec like a glove. Sure enough, this large 2024 crowd was entirely francophone Boomers.  Was I the only anglo? Sure felt like it.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, Quebec generated iconic stars in several fields. Somehow, they emerged in series of three. Sports heroes Rocket Richard, then Jean Béliveau and finally Guy Lafleur each embodied their era.  In parallel, three top chansonniers sang out French Quebec’s dreams: Félix Leclerc, Gilles Vigneault, then Charlebois.

Lafleur and Charlebois personified the turbulent Quebec of the ‘70s, and each could bring a Montreal Forum crowd to its feet with electrifying performances.

Cultures interact

In the early 1970s, there was an authentic bicultural moment in Montreal. CHOM-FM was a magnet for Montreal teenagers and CEGEP students, and listeners there regularly heard Offenbach, Harmonium and Charlebois alongside Genesis, Gentle Giant and the Moody Blues.

But the CRTC put an end to that, ruling that FM music stations basically had to stick to their language and not infringe on other stations’ niches.

English Canadian interest was generally light. Does anyone listen dutifully to the stars of the “other” culture? Sometimes this did work, in Montreal at least, as seen in the cross-cultural fan bases for Leonard Cohen or Céline Dion.

More recent stars have appealed to all comers, like 2024 Juno winner Charlotte Cardin. (Checking into a hotel in Baltimore this year, a clerk looked at my ID and chirped: “Oh, Canadian?! I love Charlotte Cardin!”)

But more frequently, bands that enthrall English Canada are unknown in Quebec, and vice versa. The 2017 death of Gord Downie of Toronto’s Tragically Hip prompted an outpouring similar to a state funeral; Justin Trudeau even gave an elegy. Quebec barely noticed. Then in 2023, Karl Tremblay, lead singer of folk-rock band Les Cowboys Fringants, passed away. It was a huge shock for Quebecers — not so much in Vancouver.

Brendan Kelly, a culture and sports critic at The Gazette, encourages anglos to try some French content: “The two communities still live in their own worlds for the most part”.

 In Montreal, “the Mile End anglo hipster alt-music community has little connection to the franco music milieu. Go see an anglo artist and the audience will be likely evenly split French and English. Go see a hot franco band … and you’ll be lucky if you find one anglo in the hall. That’s just the way it goes”, he noted resignedly in 2016.

MacLennan’s legacy

For some time, I have thought the phrase “two solitudes” was stale and tiresome.

When I hear a Toronto-based pundit use it, it sounds like a substitute for first-hand knowledge about Quebec. A cliché. Or a headline writer’s last-minute patchwork.

The phrase’s origin is clear, in Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 novel Two Solitudes. The source is poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect, and touch, and greet each other”.

The book famously begins: “Northwest of Montreal, through a valley always in sight of the low mountains of the Laurentian Shield, the Ottawa River flows out of Protestant Ontario into Catholic Quebec […. ]”.

“But down in the angle at Montreal, on the island about which [the] two rivers join, there is little sense of this new and endless space. Two old races and religions meet here and live their separate legends, side by side”.

The novel’s 1920s French-English romance focuses on the values clash between rural religious folk and big-city anglo moneymakers.

• Does this sound compelling in our world today?

MacLennan commuted between his teaching job at McGill and his country home in the Townships. Today a large stele, an upright stone slab, stands in front of that property above Lake Massawippi, inscribed “Two Solitudes”.

Is this a division worth overcoming?

I worked for 15 years in Switzerland, where the Swiss live peaceably separate, each in their own language-based cantons. They are as blissfully unaware of pop culture on the “other side” of their Confederation as we are. Yet somehow, they’ve stayed together for over 700 years.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that. But I still love Charlebois.

Two years of musings on Justin, population booms and smoky summers

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

Since its launch in fall 2022, Townships Weekend has continued to defy the trend of newspaper downsizing. As other papers disappeared or thinned out, The Record … expanded!? Great news!

A defiant generalist, my 30 columns since 2022 have ranged over politics (seven articles), culture and society (five), the environment (five), population/demography (four) and sports (four).

Today, it’s perhaps time to follow up on some articles, and invite reader feedback.

Politics: Justin fatigue

In April 2023, Townships Weekend published my take on Justin Trudeau (“Tale of Two Trudeaus”), which contended that J.T.’s act was wearing very thin. Decades after we were enthralled with his father, the entire country now seems to have caught anti-Justin fever.

This was perhaps inevitable. For any elected leader in power nearly a decade — Mulroney, Chrétien, Harper – the rule is: Yer out! Voters get tired. Agendas are exhausted. Pollsters note that, once leader-fatigue sets in, it doesn’t matter who the alternative is.

Pierre Trudeau was defeated in year 11 as prime minister. He resigned and actively sought a job elsewhere. Then suddenly, a miracle. The Conservatives bungled a vote of confidence, and PET was called back in extremis.

In 2024 Justin, perhaps dreaming of his father’s Houdini-like escape from the iron laws of politics, refused to get the hint. He could easily have taken a final-act “walk in the snow” back on February 29th, as his father had. That would have been strikingly symbolic. Instead, at press time he is hanging on, in a clinical study of denial.

The Liberal party, a useful vehicle for centrist voters that sets Canada apart (the U.K. Liberal Party has been marginal for a century), may be headed for a crash landing.  Good MPs will go down in the next election — maybe even Madame Bibeau, the hard-working Liberal MP for Compton-Stanstead, who is present for every ribbon-cutting and school fair. Dommage.

Demography, not exodus

One repeated subject has been population and demography. In short, people numbers. I wrote several columns on federal census results, mostly based on 2021 StatsCan data.

In 2023 Canada bounced over the 40 million mark. On Oct. 1, 2024 we were 41,706,342 Canadians, while Quebec had jumped to 9,125,657 people.

My demography interest was sparked in the 1970s when the term “exodus” was thrown around recklessly. Recently, one anglo community leader used it again. This is a mistake.  

Exodus means: “a large number of people leaving a place or situation”, with the implication that it is definitive and perhaps fatal.

The encyclopedic Histoire des Cantons de l’Est (Presses Laval, 1998) cites a 1991 figure of 42,400 anglophone Townshippers; The Record’s Outlet banner today claims 41,000; the correlation of rising English school enrolment here with general population suggests about 45,000 anglos. These estimates fall within a fairly stable range. Anglos are here to stay.

Personal anecdotes are often deceptive in population matters. I discuss that in detail here: http://tinyurl.com/Anglo-Numbers .

And remember: the 2026 mid-term census is just around the corner.

Forest fires: the day after

The year 2023 was a torcher for forest fires in Canada. Writing last June (“The Burning Question”), I asked: Are forest fires actually more frequent or severe than in the past?

The article traced the history of a heavily forested country in which fires are a permanent menace. They were first recorded in the 1700s when smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketed Boston and Detroit.

So, after a very high-fire year in 2023, how bad are fires likely to be in 2024 and after?

The authority on Quebec fire levels, SOPFEU (Société de protection contre les feux de forêt), reports that fires plunged in 2024. Through early October, a total of 16,961 hectares burned. This is about one-seventh the level of the 10-year average for Quebec fires: 116,152 hectares. Somehow, this good news did not inspire any journalistic applause (hello, CBC).

(Canada-wide data is reported in the national database, CNFDB, Canadian National Fire Database; that will be released late in the calendar year.)

Doomsaying predictions that high wildfire levels are inevitably rising recall some communication fiascos of the green movement. Climate change may be incontrovertible, but its impacts need to be thoroughly verified. As a journalist I can attest, however, that green messaging has often been terrible.

A decade ago, polar bears were highlighted as symbols of climate-change devastation. Majestic animals were portrayed as pathetic victims. Then that message stopped. Why?

Polar bear numbers have risen, reports the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), from about 12,000 in the 1960s to over 26,000 in 2024. Despite fluctuations in the mid-2010s, their numbers remain healthy. There never was an extinction crisis.

Then there was the Great Barrier Reef panic: coral was alleged to be shrinking away. (Not so, concludes the Government of Australia in its interdisciplinary report.) Same for Pacific atolls and islands. (They’re similarly resilient, reports France’s national research institute.)

Then a whopper by the U.S. Parks Service. It erected signs during the 2010s in Glacier National Park, stating: “Computer models indicate the glaciers will all be gone by the year 2020”. Oops. In 2021, with no indication the glaciers had changed much, the signs were discreetly dismantled.

Forest fires in Canada – a serious and ongoing environmental issue — should be saved from alarmist narratives. These prompt cry-wolf weariness. Fire seasons vary hugely in intensity and level. Not every wildfire is unprecedented or human-sparked. Even the CBC should grasp that.

Feedback welcome

A surprise comment came in August after a wedding at St. George’s in Lennoxville. A lady approached me to say: “I know you; I read your columns. Every word”. Gee, thanks. For a writer, that is like Christmas morning.

While friends and family have reacted, both pro and con, I have not been otherwise reachable. So here we go: dcwinch-editorial@yahoo.com

And bravo, Weekend!

Despite its fall in 2022, PLQ has voters, ideas and soon a new leader

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

Have we seen this movie before? A restless Quebec electorate tires of a government after a couple of terms. The beleaguered party leader struggles against the new tides of opinion. Then comes the election, and voilà – a brand-new government.

These are the cycles of Quebec politics, both provincial and federal: successive waves of red, blue, orange and light-blue party support. New parties are formed, rise, quickly grow, then get bounced.

Liberals and PQ alternated for decades in Quebec City. Then the CAQ upset the checkerboard.  

Historically, this is quite new. Provincial parties in Canada often used to stay in power for decades. The Union Nationale of Maurice Duplessis retained power for almost two decades, totalling 18 years before 1960. (In Ontario, the Conservatives governed for 42 straight years, from 1943 to 1985.)

By contrast, the last two Liberal and PQ governments were each kicked out after just one term. Maybe it’s the caffeinated effect of new media— voters are often impatient for change.

CAQ failures

In 2018 the Coalition Avenir Québec was elected. Ostensibly pragmatic, the CAQ proposed to move past federalist-sovereigntist debates and focus on practical matters. Health care, for example.

But after six years in power, there’s been no progress on that front. The CAQ’s latest initiative, a large central health agency called Santé Québec, is not trusted by anyone to improve service or access to doctors.

“In their daily lives,” writes soft-nationalist commentator Josée Legault in the Journal de Montréal, Quebecers “are at the end of their tether with a health system which, instead of improving, is deteriorating.”

“If a real change of direction does not occur on this crucial issue, whether or not the federalist-sovereigntist debate returns, there will be no forgiveness in the voting booth.”

Today, given these and other policy shortfalls, the CAQ is viewed as ineffective. It looks like a new Union Nationale, a regional, patriarchal, top-down party losing touch with social trends.

Can the Parti Libéral du Québec (PLQ) now challenge the CAQ?

“Any new leader of the PLQ who is the least bit presentable would pose an additional danger to [the CAQ] on the electoral front,” concludes Ms. Legault. And this, despite what she described as “the historic debacle of the Couillard-Barrette duo” during the 2014-2018 Liberal reign.

Predictions galore

So what will happen in the 2026 election? Nobody knows. Political consensus is often wrong.

A decade ago, Quebec media were unanimous: the 2014 election was the PQ’s to lose. One top writer at La Presse, Lysiane Gagnon, published a guest column in the Globe and Mail titled: “PQ Has Reason to Be Confident”. Gagnon basically foresaw an easy victory for Pauline Marois’ PQ and another defeat for the hapless, post-Charest Liberals.

My political intuitions told me this was quite wrong.

So I published a comment in the Globe pointing out that in British Columbia just a few months earlier, the media had been similarly unanimous that the NDP would win — and yet it was crushed by the Liberals in a huge upset. Conclusion: “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

Indeed, the Liberals in Quebec surged back to power in 2014 with a new majority.

Fast-forward to 2024. The Parti Québécois has moved ahead in most polls. Many voters may be “parking” their votes there, as the nationalist CAQ steadily declines. In April this year, l’Actualité magazine published a poll by Pallas Data showing the PQ in first place, but with the resurgent Liberals moving into second, ahead of the CAQ.

Few polls have repeated this result, but it is credible: Quebec Liberals thrive when sovereignty becomes an issue. Despite its aura, independence is not a winning option with mainstream Quebec voters; it has stagnated in polls for decades.

In a three-way race, the Liberals might just slip up the middle. The Montreal media would again be stunned.

Slow to relaunch

After the Liberals’ humiliating defeat in October 2022, they proceeded slowly toward a relaunch. Many voters asked: Where are they — in hiding? Callers deluged talk radio with complaints about their absence.

Finally, in mid-2023 dates were set for an official leadership race to be held between January and June 2025, leading to a Liberal convention.

Some contrarians argued that the steady-as-she-goes Liberals might be on the right track.

 “With the next [Quebec] election on the distant horizon, the decision to hold off selecting a new leader might not be such a bad idea after all,” wrote former MNA Robert Libman in The Gazette, in September 2023. “Timing in politics, as it relates to election cycles (momentum, peaking too soon, political honeymoons) is a critical consideration that must be managed skilfully to maximize chances of winning.”

This go-slow strategy is largely the work of André Pratte, president of the political commission of the PLQ and former editor of La Presse. An honest man, Pratte quit his plum post as a federal Senator (“I was ‘fed up’ with partisanship in all its forms, which continues to derail debates,” he wrote). Instead, he is carefully preparing a serious Liberal programme to govern again.

 Pratte, in an interview with Radio-Canada in May 2024, described his role as trying to “rebuild, find our values, create an alternative”. He said Quebec Liberals need to stress individual freedoms, along with a commitment to Canada and to economic liberalism.

As for identity politics, Pratte told The Gazette in 2023: “Liberal nationalism is not the same as the identity nationalism of the CAQ or PQ. The nationalism of the Liberals is to make Quebec’s interests in the Canadian federation a priority.”

“We are convinced that there are many more Liberals in Quebec than the ones who voted for the party in 2022.”

Can slow and steady win the race? Pratte’s wager suddenly has decent odds.

As deer proliferate in the Townships, many residents cry «stop!». Photo by David Winch

Why are animal species both thriving and facing extinction in Townships?

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

Wildlife is everywhere in the Townships. But some animal species are surging, while others are definitely not. Two examples of these extremes are deer and sturgeon.

Everyone sees how ubiquitous white-tailed deer are here. Regional conditions are ideal, with leafy deciduous forests, many farm fields and … tasty gardens.

 Anaïs Gasse, a biologist for the Quebec ministry of forests, wildlife and parks, told The Record in November 2022 that the provincial government is aware of the deer boom in the Townships and has been trying to address the situation. “In the Eastern Townships, we have milder winters [than further north] … and we don’t have very many effective predators in the territory,” she explained.

There are no wolves, a few pockets of coyotes and some bear in the region, but not nearly enough to effectively control the deer. In 2021, the Quebec ministry of wildlife estimated the provincial deer population at 250,000 head— double the number in the 1990s. More control measures are needed.

Hunting licences increased

The province has increased the number of antlerless deer licences, allowing more hunters to target fawns and females, government biologist François Lebel told the CBC.

Hunters are now bagging nearly 50,000 deer a year. “When we are overpopulated with deer, we must reduce the population, and unfortunately, to decrease [that number], it is with a lethal method,” said Lebel.

This reduction may be difficult. Deer are a species known as “synanthropes” – animals that can thrive around human settlements. Deer have this aptitude, along with raccoons, squirrels, geese, rats, coyotes, pigeons, crows and, increasingly, wild turkeys.

Pristine nature is not their sole home. Even the biggest cities feel their increasing presence.

The New Yorker magazine reported in 2021 how deer are thriving in the biggest city in North America. There are now lots of deer in the New York borough of Staten Island; they first swam there from suburban New Jersey. Aerial studies by low-flying planes in 2014 counted 763 deer in the green spaces of the borough’s 18.7 square miles.

This puts local greenery under pressure. And the lack of predators for these urban and suburban deer is obvious.

A much-viewed YouTube documentary highlights how the reintroduction of predators can radically affect deer numbers and forest biology.

Deer in Yellowstone Park had been running wild, with populations booming. They chomped down grass pastures, and reduced the number of full-grown shade trees (see https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wildlife/wolf-reintroduction-changes-ecosystem/ ).

Once wolves were re-introduced there in 1995, deer started to avoid open grassy areas. Vegetation bounced back. This provided more habitat for songbirds. Firmer watersheds were good for beaver, and fish took advantage of deeper rivers. Wolves also killed coyotes, which meant more foxes and small mammals.

We can only imagine – or fear — how a peak predator prowling around the Townships might affect our deer population, and later, local vegetation.

Instead, we will have to rely on hunters. Venison, anyone?

Sturgeon still around?

At the opposite end of the wildlife spectrum are sturgeon, known to biologists as lake sturgeon (or in French, esturgeon jaune).

Many people in the Townships have seen the classic “fishermen’s chart” wall-plaque, sold around Lake Massawippi. Its handwritten text highlights fishing holes and Massawippi-area animal habitats. It states clearly: “Sturgeon, 50 to 75 lbs., once swam in this lake. Last seen about 1927.”

A brief internet search turns up evidence to the contrary. The Eastern Townships Resource Centre site displays several photos of triumphant fishermen with sturgeon; in one catch dated 1969, a sportsman holds up an 86-pounder from Lake Massawippi.

After I asked on Facebook’s “Friends of Lake Massawippi” page for recent sturgeon sightings, one poster replied: “I saw a large one in Bacon’s Bay around 1999. It was in shallow [water], resting on the bottom. It looked like a log. It then slowly rose near the surface when I passed over it on a windsurfer board. There were two other witnesses with me. We’ve never forgotten it.”

Veteran fishermen in the area, however, caution that false sightings are common. The real number of sturgeon in that lake today, they say, is likely “zero”.

The water-control dam built downstream from North Hatley in 1967 effectively ended sturgeon spawning in the Massawippi River. The fish ladder installed there is not appropriate for slow-moving bass or sluggish sturgeon; they don’t leap like salmon.

Lake sturgeon prefer fast-moving water and spawn where they find that environment. They “can be found at depths of at least 5 meters but no greater than 20 meters,” clarifies Nature Canada. Sturgeon can still be found in good numbers further downstream in the St. Francis River, which eventually empties into the St. Lawrence.

Nature Canada notes that lake sturgeon also remains a threatened species because “it was overfished starting in the late 1800s and early 1900s.” Huge sturgeon hauls were even used as farm fertilizer. Their numbers fell steeply.

 Sturgeon have relatively few outspoken defenders, perhaps because they are not cute and cuddly: “The largest freshwater fish in Canada, the lake sturgeon, can be easily recognized by its external bony scutes which are noticeable ridges along the fish’s body … They also have a pointed snout and four dangling, whisker-like organs, called barbells, located around the mouth. The lake sturgeon has shark-like features such as a cartilaginous skeleton”, adds Nature Canada.

One large biological study (Fortin et al., 1992), concluded that “Quebec is one of the rare regions of North America that still has relatively balanced and productive populations of lake sturgeon,” mostly clustered in the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers or in northern Quebec. Sturgeon have a long life cycle with relatively infrequent spawning, and they can live over 150 years.

So there is still hope for sturgeon here. But unlike deer, they need our help. That recovery could start with something as simple as a workable fish ladder.

Family doctors have many demands on their time and often little flexibility. Courtesy StockCake

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

It used to be so simple!

After we moved in the 1960s, my mother found us a new family doctor, as I recall, by looking one up in the phone book. She likely asked: when can you see us?  — “How about next Tuesday?”

It was often that easy to book a GP.

This has all changed in recent decades, as everyone sees. Finding and keeping a family doctor today is a real worry.

Somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent of Canadians have no family doctor. In B.C., roughly one million people have no GP, while a McGill survey concludes two million people in Quebec have none. In Ontario, the figure is officially 2.2 million; the Ontario College of Family Physicians said that by 2026 that shortfall may rise to as high as 4.4 million.

Alarm bells were ringing throughout the early 2000s, as hospital emergency wards became clogged with people seeking basic care.

Now we face a Boomers’ Crunch: boomer-age doctors are retiring in large numbers, just as their cohort seeks more medical care as seniors.

In my Townships village, two doctors retired in the last decade, with no replacements in sight. We joined a cooperative clinic 20 km away for nursing services and referrals, as needed, to an MD. That works, but nobody thinks it is ideal.

Overall, the doctor shortage risks getting worse before it gets better.

Canadian Medical Association data show government recruitment websites advertised full-time positions for 2,571 family doctors in late 2022. But only 1,461 completed the postgraduate training required to become licensed family doctors that year.

How did this crisis come about in a rich, developed country?

Specialization an issue

Many analysts point to budget cuts. In the early 1990s, during a deep recession, Canadian governments agreed to reduce medical admissions.

As the Toronto Globe and Mail reported in 2022, “Much of the decline in the share of younger doctors can be traced to 1992, when provincial health ministers agreed to cut medical school admissions as part of a plan to curtail mounting health care costs. A Canada-wide 10-per-cent reduction in admissions in the 1993 academic year left the country with fewer doctors entering postgraduate training for the first time, beginning with the graduating class of 1997.”

These cuts, concludes the paper, “resulted in Canada losing part of a generation of doctors”.

Another point of view is put forward by Dr. Anthony Sanfilippo, professor of medicine at Queen’s University. He wrote a 2023 op-ed titled, aptly, “This is why you don’t have a family doctor” and he is author of a new book, The Doctors We Need (Sutherland House Experts).

Dr. Sanfilippo stresses that medical education has changed, with more specialist training. This downplays general practice. When Sanfilippo graduated from medical school in the early 1980s, he was fully trained to start a practice after one year of internship. Today’s graduates are not, given the number of specialties that crowd medical training.

“Canadian medical schools graduate approximately 3,000 new doctors each year … but only about 45 per cent are choosing to engage in family medicine as a career, and just 50 per cent of those are opting to provide the continuing and comprehensive care that would address the needs of unattached patients”, he writes.

Sanfilippo spoke with Townships Weekend recently, and noted that, while each institution in the doctor-certification process does its job well, there is “no consolidated oversight”. We are left, for example, with family doctors working at a piecework rate, while a team approach and single fees might serve patients better.

A career full of obstacles

Some medical students avoid a career path that seems full of headaches.

Most family doctors, after all, must run a small business whose expenses —from office rental and computer service to staff —are entirely dependent on them. Patients suffer from multiple, complex issues. Time is short with many demands in doctors’ workdays. Paperwork stifles any extra time with sick people.

Macleans magazinein 2021 published the personal account of a youngish doctor, a female with four children, whose life in small-town B.C. might resemble the rural Townships.

In “A doctor’s dilemma”, Dr. Kristi Herrling recounted her daily life, starting with 6 a.m. wakeups, managing her children through school prep, then opening her medical office. After a workday often disrupted with emergencies, she helps her husband to make the family supper. She is finally free at 8 p.m. for a further 2-3 hours of paperwork and clinical data.

This includes all manner of tasks: “charting patient visits, checking labs, reviewing imaging, requesting consults, reading specialist reports, filling out forms, researching unusual presentations, advocating for patients, answering pharmacist queries, speaking to home care nurses, and discussing cases that can’t wait with specialists”. Such administration often takes up 25 per cent of a doctor’s time.

As for time off, Dr. Herrling despairs that a “locum”, or replacement doctor, is often elusive to cover her small-town practice.

Before we can graduate more doctors, governments across Canada must act to get the most patient hours from the existing pool of doctors. To this end, several provinces have expanded the responsibilities of nurse practitioners. Pharmacists in Alberta have been granted more initiative in issuing prescriptions.

Quebec has taken welcome steps to reduce paperwork: signing notes to certify student or employee sick leaves have traditionally made doctors “the police arm of human-resource departments”, said observers. Bill 68 has made this optional. Doctors will also be exempted from approving insurance and workers’ compensation claims. Quebec estimates these reforms will cut unnecessary appointments —up to 750,000 annually.

More practical action is needed, and more general-practitioner grads must be graduated for a growing country. Otherwise, regular appointments with the family doctor could become a thing of the past.

Wellington North at Frontenac should be bustling, but downtown often lacks oomph. Photo by David Winch

Sherbrooke struggles to establish an attractive, walkable central city

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

The pop tune “Downtown” was a perky 1965 hit by Brit singer Petula Clark (ask your parents) that captured the allure of nighttime streets:

Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city

Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty

How can you lose?

The lights are much brighter there

You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares

So go downtown, things’ll be great when you’re

Downtown, no finer place for sure …

Clark evokes the fun of “movie shows” and “little places to go to” to forget all your troubles.

Sadly, that kind of city sparkle is missing in Sherbrooke — and has been for decades. Sure, there is some downtown life on Wellington St. North and King West, a good cineplex here or a nice Thai restaurant there, but overall, the area comes off as shabby and undistinguished. Red-brick industrial buildings and 1920s-vintage banks sit listlessly waiting for some purpose — anything.

“It’s just ugly”, said one dinner companion bluntly, speaking of central Sherbrooke.

To be fair to Wellington North, the main downtown street, walking around there on a sunny Saturday recently I noted the many restaurants, Asian-fusion, Lebanese, Iranian and Italian, the clothing boutiques, the excellent book and magazine outlets, and the Granada concert hall with its full slate of concerts. But somehow, this didn’t make for a bustling street scene. There was barely any bustle.

Longtime Townships residents recall nostalgically being drawn to the big Woolworth store on Wellington or to nearby Tony’s Pizzeria. But retailing has mostly moved to suburban outlets. The food court at the Carrefour de l’Estrie mall today matches the fast-food variety available in downtown Sherbrooke.

Plans to revitalize

As in cities throughout North America, Sherbrooke became progressively more suburbanized from the 1970s onward, with malls and autoroute-accessible restaurants, cinemas and shops dominating the retail trade.

Across Canada, a range of mid-sized cities resembling Sherbrooke – from Thunder Bay and Sudbury to Moncton and, in Quebec, Trois Rivières – also suffered the impact of declining industries: pulp and paper, forestry, mining, railroads and shipping and, in the Townships, the textile industry. This affected these cities’ dynamism.

A year ago, I wrote about my pleasant experience in Vermont’s capital (“Sherbrooke and Burlington: Twin cities?”, June 3, 2023). I enjoyed Burlington’s picturesque and walkable urban setting. A broad pedestrian mall straddles the downtown, the result of a push by key town councillors to follow examples in Europe, notably the Stroget in Copenhagen.

Can downtown Sherbrooke ever compete with that? Planners are aware of the stagnation issue. The “Mon Centro” revitalization plan posted on the city’s website “is the result of an initiative that began approximately 10 years ago, and culminated in 2015, with the adoption of the Downtown Sherbrooke Sustainable Development Master Plan (also known as Centre-ville 2020)”.

Its goal is ambitious: “The master plan aims to double the population living in the city’s downtown within the next 20 years, while greatly increasing availability of retail and office space” (for English summary, see www.sherbrooke.ca/en/major-projects/mon-centro ).

Pursuant to this plan, downtown Sherbrooke is now seeing “many large-scale projects materialize at the same time: construction of the Espace Centro project, redevelopment of a section of Galt Street West, moving the Grandes-Fourches Bridge … And that’s only the beginning!”

Sherbrooke planning chief Yves Tremblay is a believer; he lives downtown by the river on King. He says he can walk to everything, from the local Maxi to his work at city hall. He agrees there is “no magic formula” for downtown revitalization, especially when Internet is changing shopping habits so fast.

The rugged topography of Sherbrooke also affects its downtown. “Its geography is not linear; there are about six different ‘plateaux’,” which affect neighbourhood character. “Some streets such as rue Alexandre, stand out for their distinct local feel”, notes Tremblay.

Upgrades coming

Other experts in urban planning, however, stress that mid-sized cities don’t often have the downtown population or the geography to maintain a lively scene. The success of Burlington is a special case.

Planning specialist Pierre Filion of the University of Waterloo, for one, has studied dozens of mid-sized cities, ranging from 100,000 to 500,000 residents. He concludes they have to be “very lucky” to bring together all the plusses needed to revive a downtown. Filion also chronicled the “Eaton’s effect” that killed other Canadian downtowns – one department-store closing greatly reduces pedestrian traffic.

Among the successful mid-sized cities that Filion cites — standouts include Madison, Wisconsin, and Kingston, Ontario — there is often a built-in downtown population around a university campus, a major public employer such as a state or provincial capital, and geography that discourages sprawl. Madison’s centre, for example, is built on an isthmus squeezed between two lakes.

Sherbrooke has none of these advantages. And it never even had a downtown Eaton’s.

Today, you can see upgrades on Wellington St. South (until recently a headache for drivers): the broken pavement was replaced with brick and concrete squares, sidewalks have been widened, with planters installed for small trees, and parking made more convenient. Two new office towers of 6 and 10 stories anchor a young working population. Software developer Ubisoft and the school of digital arts (NAD) of the Université du Québec have already moved in. Trendy coffee outlets have followed.

In coming months, the city will adopt “intervention plans” for five more neighbourhoods, denoted as Galt; Alexandre; Marquette, Dufferin and, crucially for downtown life, Well Nord.

But, will these earnest revitalization efforts work?

Filion cautions: “All the elements have to be present for a downtown to be revitalized; above all, there have to be people living and working in the area”.

A tall order, for sure. But well worth it if locals can, some evening soon, like Petula, cheerfully head downtown.