Quebec’s real revolution will come when it looks itself in the eye! | BlogsCanada.ca

 

Share

Dear Readers;

Conrad Black, as usual, puts things back into ‘Perspective’ for us when the subject is the Quebec election.

—————————————————————–

The campaign is so lacklustre because all the parties are dancing around the Quebec problem without addressing it. Most Quebecers are not really interested in Canada, but aren’t especially hostile to it, dimly recognizing that their adherence as Canadians has been bought by transfer payments from English Canada; and they resent that fact. In their frustration at the impossibility of Quebec seceding — not only because it would be impossible to assemble a clear majority for a serious referendum question, but because it would be too harmful economically — some Quebec leaders are outbidding each other in their cultural oppression of minorities.

In the 1980 and 1995 referenda, there at least was the appearance that a bare majority on a trick question would tear the country apart, and Quebec seemed to have some ability to frighten Canada. Quebec nationalist dogma in those days was that English Canada was just an excrescence of the Anglo-Americans, whose chief purpose was to anesthetize the flowering Quebec nation, so long stifled by English money and the weakness of inadequately patriotic Québécois, but the future belonged to the true believers. René Lévesque and Lucien Bouchard — the only sovereigntists to win provincial elections, along with Jacques Parizeau — both lost faith in the project, and the Benjamin Franklin of Quebec independence, Claude Morin, proved to be an RCMP double agent.

Now Quebec has provincial debt as great as the provincial economic product. It is a public sector-heavy society that is productive only in some natural resources, and would collapse if the province seceded, as transfer payments would cease and hundreds of thousands more Quebecers would leave. The political and economic correlation of forces is shifting to Ontario and the prairies beyond; 30 more federal MPs are being added, almost all of them west of Quebec, and the collapsed French Quebec birthrate is being replaced with immigrants whose knowledge of French is marginal in many cases, and who have little interest in the parochial fetish of Quebec independence.

What is needed, and will come eventually, is a Quebec leader and party that sells full participation in Canada with retention of the French language in those regions where its numbers make that possible; an ungrudging subscription to federalism with two official languages; and a return to the undoubted pecuniary vocation of French Canadian enterprise, not the dead hand of a clumsy, pompous, imitative, stifling public sector.

Quebec and its Quiet Revolution have failed, and its politicians have failed. The real revolution will come when Quebec looks itself in the eye and realizes where its ambitions and possibilities intersect.

National Post

cbletters@gmail.com

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/09/01/conrad-black-quebecs-real-revolution-will-come-when-it-looks-itself-in-the-eye/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NP_Top_Stories+%28National+Post+-+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

———————————————————

Just remember folks, if the”sovereigntists” ever get their way, they will lead the people of Quebec, like lemmings, over the side of a fiscal cliff! -Ed.

Quebec’s real revolution will come when it looks itself in the eye! | BlogsCanada.ca