Re: On coalition, Gilles Duceppe's credibility is questionable

On Tue, 29 Mar 2011, Mike Findlay wrote:
> How serious are they, (I'm not even sure of all the players - yes, we 
> are woefully uninformed about politics north of our border), about 
> breaking up the country?  I know there has been a separatist Quebec
> movement for a long time but I thought it had become a fringe group at 
> best.

Mark Steyn would argue that the separatists are not truly "serious" about 
separating but they have to *pretend* to be serious about it because 
that's how they get all the perks.  Steyn's argument basically rests on 
the fact that a number of countries have separated in the last 20 years 
(e.g. the former Czechoslovakia), and if Quebec really and truly *wanted* 
to leave the country, it should have been do-able by now.  But if they 
did, then they wouldn't have the federal government to kick around any 
more, and they wouldn't get massive funding from the rest of the country 
any more, and so on, and so on ... so a part of Canada they remain.

> Are there really elected officials who are truly interested in seceding 
> from Canada . . .

As per Steyn, we might question how *truly* interested these officials are 
in seceding from Canada, but yes, there are two major political parties 
devoted to secession: one provincial, and one federal.  At the provincial 
level, there is the Parti Quebecois, which ruled the province between 
1976-1985 and between 1994-2003; and at the federal level, there is the 
Bloc Quebecois, which has won the vast majority of Parliamentary seats in 
that province since 1993.  (In fact, in 1993, the Bloc Quebecois had the 
second-most seats in Parliament, which meant that a party dedicated to the 
break-up of the country was Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition!)

The Parti Quebecois has held two referenda on whether or not the province 
should stay in the country, one in 1980 and one in 1995.  The one in 1980 
was supported by 40% of the voters, and the one in 1995 was supported by 
49.6% of the voters ... so Quebec came within one percentage point of 
voting to leave the country.  At the time, the PQ leader complained that 
the referendum had failed because of "the ethnic vote" (an ironic 
assertion, given that Quebec has long demanded that a certain percentage 
of the country's immigrants be settled within its borders, so that it can 
keep up its demographic representation in Parliament etc.; at the time, I 
wrote an editorial for the student paper comparing the PQ to the 
antebellum Southerners who didn't want their slaves to vote but *did* want 
their slave populations to be taken into account when the federal 
government assigned seats in Congress etc.).  Enough people protested the 
"ethnic vote" comment that the premier resigned the next day, and his 
place was eventually taken by Lucien Bouchard, who had founded the Bloc 
Quebecois at the federal level only a few years before.

Bouchard's place as leader of the Bloc, i.e. the federal party, was taken 
by Gilles Duceppe, who remains the leader of that party today.

> . . . and do they have any semblance of a plan for how that would 
> actually work out?

Doubtful.  I vaguely recall that, when someone asked Bouchard how Quebec 
would print its own currency etc., he replied that Quebec already *had* 
lots of Canadian money, and they would just "keep it".

A big buzz-term in the debates of the 1990s -- I haven't heard it much 
lately -- was "sovereignty-association", which basically meant "having our 
cake and eating it too".  They would call themselves independent but 
Canada would still be on the hook for a lot of the infrastructural stuff 
that true nation-states ordinarily look after themselves.

There have also been some interesting debates as to *how much* of Quebec 
would be allowed to secede if, in fact, secession became the order of the 
day.  The province wasn't always as big as it is now; the northern section 
used to be part of the Northwest Territories, and many of the people who 
live there now have no interest in leaving Canada.

Incidentally, the premier of Quebec since 2003 -- since the Parti 
Quebecois lost power -- has been Jean Charest, leader of the provincial 
Liberal party.  Prior to that, he was leader of the federal Conservatives 
-- or, more accurately, he was leader of the Progressive Conservatives, as 
the party was then known.  Yeah, I know, sounds like a contradiction in 
terms, but that's just the kind of wiffly-waffly country we are!

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