Protest

I drove by this house the day the federal election was called and noticed a single Canadian flag hanging upside down. I figured he was not happy with the calling of the federal election (neither was I). Then a few days later he upped the ante to 5 flags upside down! See the photo.
Then another week goes by and I find an article in the Journal de Montréal. It turns out he was protesting the nasty federal government all right. But not for political reasons.
He claims the government of Canada are terrorists! Yes, they are terrorizing him! They have slapped a $1.8M mortgage on his house! (It's worth about $600K). And since then, the Quebec government has slapped him with another $1.5M bill for their share of unpaid taxes. Also seized were some $728K and a Rolls-Royce.
Per the Journal de Montréal, he's alleged to have not paid taxes (including payroll taxes collected from employees) in 2001 through 2005.
Various arms offenses and other criminal charges related to organized crime have also been brought against the owner.
Other items seized include "valuable family property".

He said (translated from French), "As Canadians we have the right to defend ourselves and be treated equally under the law."

In fair turnabout he is suing the government for, get this, $385 million dollars.

Per the Quebec government (as reported in the JdeM), he managed to acquire a home, businesses, a Rolls-Royce and other luxuries here since his arrival in Quebec in 1991 and citizenship in 1995, yet he has never filed a tax return in Quebec!

The Rolls-Royce was in the name of a Florida company, and the beater car (a mere Mercedez) was in his wife's name. (She has been ordered to leave Canada - presumably to her native France).

The city of Lorraine is owed some $8K in municipal taxes too...

The kicker? He claims he's not subject to Canadian tax since he's a citizen of Dubai...

What's worse than that? He hasn't paid his lawyers. So he'll represent himself in court.

Obituary - l'indépendance du Québec

I found an interesting new tool on Google today. I had heard about it, but never tried it. Then while reading an article about false new normals in economics, I discovered the joys of ngram.google.com. In a nutshell you enter words or phrases and it graphs the usage of that word out of English (and some other languages) books for each year. You enter a range of dates and voila.

Of course I began, like a schoolboy with his first dictionary, looking up all the words that used to be called 'dirty'. After that amusement died down (why is there a near 20 year gap in the peaks between fellatio and cunnilingus in English books? Maybe that sparked the woman's movement after all), I moved on to more serious issues.

I switched the search to French books and entered the phrase indépendance du Québec and there was a marked drop in interest after the 1980 and 1985 neverendums with the occurrence for 2005 about equal to 1968 and still trending down. One can't read too much into these numbers. We don't know if all of the Québec literature has been scanned for the past few years, for example, and perhaps the database for recent years is France biased. Perhaps we need to try this again in 3 years to see where we were at, er, today.

Here's the chart.

Or, replace the word indépendance with souveraineté, and you'll get quite a different result (an exercise for the reader) due to shifting language of the land when selling the idea needed a softer language. But still, since about 1995, the decline in the literature remains.

With an aging population, immigration and the success of various liberty reducing laws in Québec, perhaps it is true that L'indépendance est morte.

Important note: for the above it is critical that spelling be accurate, to the inclusion of accents.