When laughter is political.

We've been off for a couple of days, so let's catch up on the latest from the “Quebec nationalist insecurities” file.

Comedian Sugar Sammy's unilingual advertisements on the Montreal Métro — “For Christmas, I'd like a complaint from the Office de la Langue Française,” they read — have reduced Mathieu Bock-Côté to fabulously entertaining hysterics. They are a “political manifesto and a declaration of war against the very principle of Bill 101,” he fumes on his Journal de MONTRÉAL blog; and he says Sugar Sammy represents a new, aggressive brand of federalism designed to “impose a bilingual and multicultural Quebec where francophone Quebecers are just one community among others.”

People say Sugar Sammy is a “child of Bill 101,” he notes — i.e., an immigrant raised in French; a success story. But that's deeply disturbing if true, he says, because it means the children of Bill 101 might actually be trying to change Quebec society, and we can't have that! Oh, and as for all those Quebec francophones who flock to Sugar Sammy's gigs and laugh at his jokes? “Happy cuckolds” Bock-Côté sniffs; “colonized” simpletons “proud to applaud those who despise them.” It's truly magnificent.

Sugar Sammy got his complaint, incidentally; and he furthered the joke by blacking out the English parts of the ads. And he probably sold quite a few tickets to his shows,Sophie Durocher suggests, also in Le Journal. She likens this nationalist freakout tendency to a bull being goaded with a red flag. “They charge at the target, to the delight of the crowd,” she writes. (That's us!) “And after the show, the matador chuckles to himself as he cashes his cheque.”

Whereupon Maxime Laporte, president of the Société Saint-Jean Baptiste, writes to Durocher trying to convince her Sugar Sammy is a “francophobe.” “[He] says he's mocking everyone equally, but this is simply wrong,” says Laporte. “He specifically targets Quebec.”

“Duh,” says Durocher. He's from Quebec.

More ominously, Laporte suggests Sugar Sammy ought not to lampoon Quebec society because it “welcomed and accepted him.” Cripes almighty, does he even hear himself? Why shouldn't Quebec society “accept” a French-speaking person who was born in Montreal? Durocher wonders: Should he should get on his knees and thank the pure laine Québécois for their benevolence in accepting someone with dark skin?

“This is hysterical nonsense,” the Montreal Gazette‘s Don Macpherson opines. “Sammy didn't attack either the Québécois or their identity. He poked fun at a law, which has often been made to look ridiculous by its enforcement” — indeed, which is lampooned even by nationalist francophones when it suits them, such as over Pastagate.

“Do we have such a thin skin,” Lise Ravary asks on her Journal blog, that “a nation and its language, which stood up to the most powerful empire in human history on a 100% anglophone continent, would be threatened by a son of Indian immigrants who tells jokes for a living?”

Sugar Sammy's box office takings would suggest not, thankfully.

Ugly, ugly politics

At iPolitics, Michael Harris very reasonably argues that if Stephen Harper actually cared about mending fences with Canadian veterans, he would have jettisoned Julian Fantino as minister long ago. No kidding. Surely Fantino wouldn't object. He clearly doesn't like his job.

Postmedia's Michael Den Tandt thinks everyone on Parliament Hill has been largely well-intentioned in dealing with this sexual assault mess — with some notable exceptions — but that they simply are “not equipped” to resolve it in a coherent way. “The House of Commons requires a set of practices, a process, that ensures complaints are dealt with thoroughly, and in a way that is fair to both the complainant and accused,” Den Tandt argues. “That should be managed by an outside party with expertise in the field.”

The Ottawa Citizen‘s David Reevely, meanwhile, recounts how efforts in the Ontario legislature to strike a committee to study these issues have collapsed in a giant partisan squabble over whether the committee should have a Liberal majority or include all parties equally. Reevely has a message for politicians: “If you ever wonder why so many citizens think you're awful, this is why.”

Duly noted

In the Citizen, Terry Glavin argues against the Canadian tendency to look down our noses at American race politics, especially in a time of crisis like we're seeing in Ferguson. As he demonstrates with the aid of multiple horrifying statistics — on incarceration, disease, violent death, suicide, education — Canada's aboriginal population as a whole is just as badly off as America's black population as a whole.

At Maclean's, Stephen Gordon notes the David Suzuki Foundation's contention that Canadians are willing to pay to fight climate change, which it backs with a poll showing 57% think it's “reasonable for consumers to pay $100/year.” By Gordon's math, that translates to a carbon price of roughly $5 per tonne — whereas one recent model suggests it would need to be $100 even to meet our existing modest targets. In other words, “a small majority of Canadians are willing to pay one-twentieth of what it would cost to implement a modest climate change agenda. You can see the problem,” says Gordon. “So can politicians.”