Blog about politics (mideast and pro-Israel, Canadian and local Montreal), world events, and random thoughts.

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The World I Know is updated on a semi-regular basis by segacs.

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2:53 PM
Laval metro opens... yes, really

It only took 30 years of talking about it, 5 years of construction, and $745 million, but the 3 Laval metro stations are finally opening to the public this weekend.

Will it be worth it? The stations will really only conveniently serve people in Laval-des-Rapides, and the cost of a monthly pass will be prohibitively high:

$750 million in new transit infrastructure spending would be spent more wisely elsewhere.

"No serious cost-benefit analysis would have given the Laval metro top priority," he said. "Dorval would have come first" - meaning improved transit and road links between downtown and Trudeau airport in Dorval.

Other higher priorities, by purely objective criteria, would have included improving mobility along the Metropolitan Expressway corridor or extending the metro's Blue Line east to the Anjou area, Galella said.

Still, it's nice to finally see a project move from "Hell-Freezes-Over" status to complete, whatever its faults. Maybe this means there's still hope for other projects, like finishing highway 30. Or fixing the potholes. Or even extending Cavendish. (Yeah, right!)

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2:46 PM
"Freedom, democracy, transparency and fairness"

That's how the Syrian Interior Minister described this week's Syrian parliamentary elections, in which - surprise, surprise - the Ba'ath ruling party won:

The rubber-stamp legislature is likely to consolidate the rule of President Bashar Assad, who is expected to seek its nomination to run for a second seven-year term in July. There had been no doubt about the outcome, because the constitution guarantees the Baath Party and its allies a two-thirds majority in the parliament.

[ . . . ]

Interior Minister Bassam Abdel-Majid said the National Progressive Front, a grouping of 10 political parties led by Assad's Baath Party, won 172 seats in the 250-member parliament in the tightly controlled elections on Sunday and Monday, an increase of five seats.

Abdel-Majid said the remaining 78 seats went to independents, who have to be approved by the government under Syrian law, and rarely challenge the administration.

Yes, we can clearly see how an election in which the ruling party is guaranteed to win, independents are hand-picked by the ruling party, and dissidents are barred from running or imprisoned, is free, democratic, transparent, and fair. That's the kind of logic that apparently only applies in Syria... or maybe in Nancy Pelosi's mind.

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