I wonder if my friends at RDS need any hockey commentators this season.

Because it seems the PQ has some really qualified experts.

Pierre Curzi may have been a fine actor before politics. But he is well over his head in his role playing a Member of the National Assembly.

Remember, he was the guy who tried to rally people against Paul McCartney playing on the Plains of Abraham.

That didn't work then, nor will his federalist puck plot.

And now his boss Madame Marois has waded in on the shortage of francophone players on the Habs.

She says it helps federalism.

A federalist conspiracy. What utter nonsense.

Here is the truth.

The Habs do make an effort to bring in top francophone talent.

A couple of years back they did everything they could to land Daniel Briere.

Their top draft choice last year was Louis Leblanc.

They had such high hopes for Guillaume Latendresse but they rushed him and eventually he moved on.

Some Francophones do not want to play here because the pressure is so enormous.

But the problem runs deeper. There are serious problems with player development in Quebec. There simply aren't as many good Quebec players as there used to be and fewer are being drafted out of the Quebec Major Junior League.

The NHL has also opened up to the world.

There is a very good study on this you can find on an online blog called HabsWatch.

The conclusion and the numbers bear it out. The Habs still draft more francophone players than any other team.

The Pierre Curzis of this world should be ashamed of themselves. It's cheap, uninformed, gobbledygook. It's intellectual dishonesty.

I would love to see more French superstars on this team. We love playing hockey and playing politics in this province.

But we also like to keep them very separate.

Put Bastarache out of its misery

Would someone put this Bastarache Commission out of its misery?

Marc Bellemare is right. It's a pitiful circus.

The star this week was an expert on ink trying to figure out when Bellemare scribbled his notes on a piece of cardboard. The commission held its breath as if they were carbon dating the Shroud of Turin.

What did we learn? Bellemare used three different pens.

At the end of the day, we will probably learn nothing more about this. Supposition, allegation, innuendo and hearsay.

Fournier victory a hollow one

I guess we should congratulate Jean Marc Fournier for his landslide win in St-Laurent this week.

There was a 20 percent turnout, which means 80 percent of voters didn't bother

And 20 percent is quite a bit less than the minimum of 35 percent that Fournier set as a democratic requirement for his municipal demerger votes when he was minister of municipal affairs.

Looks like those numbers speak for themselves.