Stephen Harper has revealed his Quebec strategy. The prime minister wants to punish Quebec for sending 59 New Democrats to the House of Commons in last May's federal election. To achieve his petty partisan goal of scaring Quebecers away from the NDP, he is willing to ignore years of work to create trust in Quebec, about the place of French in Canada.
Canadians of good faith have tried to show Francophones across Canada that there is a willingness of the Anglophone majority in Canada to want to protect and promote the French language. Such civil society activity seems not to matter to our current prime minister. For a good example, take Canadian Parents for French, a citizen initiative started in Calgary under the noses of Harper and Preston Manning when they were campaigning against the use of French.
Last week, the Harper government appointed a unilingual candidate to be auditor-general of Canada. The position requires, by law, a knowledge of both official languages. Ironically, the unfortunate individual who agreed to accept a job for which he was not qualified, came from New Brunswick, the only province where both English and French are protected as official languages. A senior Francophone in the office of the auditor-general resigned in protest against a government which does not feel bound by its own laws.
As was widely remarked upon, and not just in Quebec, Harper saw fit to elevate a unilingual Ontario judge to the Supreme Court, while passing over a highly qualified candidate from the same court with competence in the two official languages.
Denise Bombardier writes a widely read, and influential weekly column for the nationalist daily Le Devoir. This past Saturday she exclaimed that so long as Stephen Harper appears bent on reviving the movement, sovereigntists have no reason to stop fighting for their option.
Having the prime minister of Canada taking the bellows to a fading Quebec nationalist fire, gives heart to the weakened and divided PQ, and the not quite moribund Bloc Québeçois.
Harper biographer William Johnson was convinced that the one-time Reform party stalwart understood that every Canadian prime minister had to place national unity considerations high in every decision. So what gives?
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Stephen Harper is hoping that rookie les néo-démocrates will get sufficiently annoyed so as to allow him to keep alive the "socialists and separatists" rhetoric he used to discredit the coalition government proposed by Jack Layton, accepted by Stephen Dion, and assented to by Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc, who promised voting support.
Harper now thinks he has an even easier target lined up. He is itching to say the NDP is not only socialist, it is also separatist. To help things along, he is even pushing the British monarchy as a symbol of Canadian unity.
By attempting to divide Quebec along nationalist lines, Harper is following a well-tread path. Who has not heard successive Ottawa politicians proclaim how bad sovereignty would be for Quebec, and how good federalism has been for Quebec? And by extension, how Quebec is divided into good, and bad Quebecers.
We are not supposed to notice that "the bad guys" have been calling for social and economic policies that make a lot of sense to New Democrats from Newfoundland to British Columbia. Quebec nationalists have been fighting in Ottawa since 1993 to restore unemployment insurance, and to adopt fair, progressive taxation principles.
The dividend Harper expects to get outside Quebec by ignoring federal official language laws is solidifying support from his base of voters suspicious of any laws that appear to favour someone other than themselves.
Stephen Harper wants to be prime minister of the 37 per cent who voted Conservatives. To his everlasting discredit, this prime minister divides people around language (or whatever else) in order to maintain his position of full power while enjoying barely one-third support from the public.
Divide the country rather than bring it together? Is that not precisely what strong federalists could not accept about sovereigntists?
Duncan Cameron is the president of rabble.ca and writes a weekly column on politics and current affairs.
Quebec has very little choice, but to be part of our shared Canadian reality, regardless the possibility of their declaring and suceeding into independance. I'm from Ontario, and would rather have my province separate along with Quebec, if that day were to come. But an easier solution is at hand; for the sake of Canadian unity, kick Alberta out of confederation, before its parochially blinded, right-wing federal political class, set all Canadians at each others throats, as seems to be their goal. Bye bye Alberta, Vive la Canada!.
Bye bye Alberta? Nothing divisive about that approach?
The Conservative share of the popular vote was of course 39.62%. Shame about that. At 37% we might have been able to put together a coalition this time.
Harper indicated in his past writings that it would be no big deal if Quebec were to leave (and in fact the far West might suffer the least). As the last election showed, it would be far easier to push forward the radical Americanizing agenda on the rest of the country if Qeebec were to depart. Not neccessarily what he intends but he would hardly lose too much sleep if that progressive part of the country were to depart.
Under Harper, the Mongols are in Charge in Ottawa
Under Harper, the Mongols are in power in Ottawa and they intend to destroy everything that has been built over half a century in Canada in order to fulfill their irrational, fanatical and crazy far-right agenda. They are a disaster to Canada and when people finally realize that, it may be too late, even after they are kicked out.
Insulting Quebec is only one part of a comprehensive far-right and imperialist strategy.
There are national ties that bind. Bilingualism is one of them. When a unilingual judge is appointed to a bilingual post, that threats national unity. (That judge was chosen because he's more to the right on issues of criminal law than the competition and that suits the PM.) But there are other national institutions as well. One of them is medicare. The Canada Health Act outlaws user fees. Quebec has them; other provinces do as well. When NDPers don't insist that the Act be enforced because it will upset Quebecers whose votes they seek, that threatens a national institution more vital than bilingualism. So when the PM appoints unilingual job seekers over bilingual ones, NDPers shouldn't look inward. Perhaps what they're seeing is their beloved asymmetrical federalism -- with a Conservative twist.
You have to understand that Le Devoir is not especially nationalist. At least not officially independentist. No newspaper in Québec is, while nearly all of them have owners that are openly federalist (though they do have to preserve a minimum amount of neutrality). As such, Le Devoir is an exception sticking out. Nonetheless, Denise Bombardier is known for her frequently federalist writings.
In Quebec, there is a whole spectrum of many opinions in which nationalists can be either federalists or independentists, but might move from one to the other in situations of hopelessness. All political analysts in Quebec have to acknowledge that parties that cultivate certain forms of hopelessness can shift the opinions of the nationalists from one side to the other... it already happened many times (in constitutional matters or not). Stating the obvious (something that is obvious in Quebec) is something that could have happened in any newspaper in Quebec, and it's not related to where le Devoir or Bombardier might lie on the political spectra.
To cassius : not every opposition of Quebec to federal law is a will of the population. Outrage over user fees were all over the news in Quebec and few are in favour of them. Both Harper and Charest began politics with Mulroney, and it's not surprising that if Charest makes Bachand announce user fees, then the even more right-wing Harper doesn't appear to mind much about applying the Health Act.
Nevertheless, citizens of Quebec are often wary of federal intervention, because of the precedents it creates or the past precedents it reinforces, etc., despite how it could actually solve a problem for the population.
There is also that Charest spread the notion that it's not possible to go on with the 1970 public healthcare law of Quebec as it is, for economic reasons, etc.. Though most in Quebec don't believe this, there is a small fraction of the population that is sensitive to that kind of argument.