The Liberals were reduced to Quebec’s first minority government since the 19th century, a new if somewhat goofy “conservative” party is the Official Opposition, and the Parti Quebecois – the separatists – were pushed into third place and below 30% for the first time since 1970. On the last point, I was struck by the politically correct torpor of much of the post-mortems : reams of analysis without any discussion of whether the PQ leader’s homosexuality had been a liability. Andre Boisclair was a fetching young gay who admitted to doing coke – not back in his student days (as David Cameron did) but while he was a government minister (which is certainly what it would take for me to get through Quebec cabinet meetings). But the minute the gay cokehead became party leader all the papers (French and English) wrote that this demonstrated how Quebecers were the coolest, most relaxed, most progressive folks in North America. Maybe on the island of Montreal, but not in the rural hinterlands, where Quebecers are prone to all the various “phobias” that so distress the liberal mind. I was struck by the number of lifelong separatists who simply resented being subject to Queer Eye For The Separatist Guy and, even by the standards of the ever lamer bluff of Quebec “nationalism”, couldn’t buy the idea of a gay hedonist as their founding father. There’s something a bit feeble about the media’s refusal even to discuss this except through vague evasive allusions to the difficulty M Boisclair had “connecting” with Quebec voters.
Ha! Classic Steyn
“who admitted to doing coke – not back in his student days (as David Cameron did) but while he was a government minister (which is certainly what it would take for me to get through Quebec cabinet meetings)”
Mark Steyn seems to have boldly gone where no MSM has gone before. To even allude to the fact that Quebecers might not have voted for the PQ because it was led by a homosexual coke head would be tantamount to a hate crime. I can just imagine the frothing over at rubble.ca on this (if they even get to see it).
Just absolutely astounding that CTV, CBC, Global all portray the election as a “WIN” and “MANDATE” for the Liberals. Three words:
Whiskey
Tango
Foxtrot
Just think, if a gay coke snorter failed anywhere else, the media would be telling us endlessly that he was a victim of bigotry and prejudice.
but it’s quebec; the media just looks away, fingers planted in ears…la la la.
Perhaps the rejection of Boisclair, along with the hijab/burka thing is a reality check. Quebecers seem to be sticking a steely fork in the multicultural beast.
Who’d have thunk it.
Quebec election may be just matter of demographics. Aging population tends to look at more practical alternatives, rather than theoretical or idealistic. The idea of Quebec sovereignty had its real great chance in 80s and 90s, now it has petered out somewhat; though not dead by any means.
Gay issue no big deal, but admitting/outed coke use not good for votes.
“Just think, if a gay coke snorter failed anywhere else, the media would be telling us endlessly that he was a victim of bigotry and prejudice.
but it’s quebec; the media just looks away, fingers planted in ears…la la la.”
I don’t understand your point. Is it too PC for your tastes to mention the prejudices, or is it too PC for your tastes to ignore them? Are you praising the QC media or scolding them?
Much as I admire Steyn, I don’t think the PQ loss is due to the ‘inadequacies’ of Boisclair. Just as I don’t think the Liberal loss is entirely due to Charest. I think it’s a deeper infrastructural change in Quebec that goes beyond the personalities of the leaders.
As I’ve said, the PQ and Liberals are two sides of the same coin; they both advocate a welfare state socialism, run by a top down central gov’t in Quebec City. The only difference between them is the source of their funding. The Liberals use the federal trough, the Separatistes use god and the angels.
What has happened in Quebec is a rejection of this welfare state centralism and an emergence of a new political mode that empowers the people. And, that sets up Quebec as a component in a full national, Canadian federation – within a decentralized Canadian federation.
The original BNA act set up Canada as a decentralized federation, with major powers given to the provinces. This is a correct model for a nation with such a vast territory and now, with its increased population. The 1950s, 1960-80’s saw an encroachment of these powers by a centralist Ottawa govt. This actually contributed to the rise of Quebec separatism.
Now, what we are seeing with Harper, is a return to decentralization. This includes, vitally, a rejection of Trudeau’s disastrous model of a binary Canada of Quebec and the ROC.
Harper is moving us to a decentralized federation which includes ALL provinces, including Quebec. Dumont’s alignment with Canada fits Harper’s model perfectly.
And, yes, this model also rejects Trudeau’s multiculturalism, which sets up people in groups, defined within a closed and old cultural identity, each separate and isolate from the other, and as such, at cross purposes to each other. Harper’s model is to define everyone as Canadians. Not as members of a multicultural group. But as Canadians. His focus is on the working family – regardless of their ethnic past – as Canadian.
The MSM are part of the old Trudeau centralism, with its division of the country into Quebec and the ROC, and its division of the population into isolate cultural groups. Harper and Dumont are rejcting this – it’s an enormous change – and like a breath of wonderful sea air.
Gay schmay;who cares. Its the multiculturalism achmed.
I watched some of the commentary after the ADQ went from 5 seats to 41 seats. While I was watching one female Quebec voter came on to say…”Montreal looks like the Middle East and I do not want to live in the Middle East.” I think the Quebecois have realized that unless they concentrate on birthing up their population they will not be assimilated by “Canada” from without but from pushy muslim immigrants from within.
I bet there will be a pure laine $2,000 baby bonus, $250/child/month/month day care subsidies and other knockupafrog incentives within 6 months.
I’m rooting for Quebec!!
Stephen – now that that over can we get our 3 billion back? John Charest just handed it over to the safe sep. group as a tax refund.
signed
the ROC.
Embarrassing, totally honest question that’s confused me since Grade 2 and no one has answered to my satisfaction:
Once upon the time there was a Battle on the Plains of Abraham. The English beat the French. So, we keep giving them money and stuff why exactly?
I’m not joking.
Well, the English beat their army and their government but I don’t recall a genocide?
As well, if I remember correctly, the Quebec government did not sit down as supplicants when they agreed to confederate.
I normally like reading your comments but I get tired of the whole Plains of Abraham bullshit.
This is soo unfair,… if you’re a french gay cokehead who built a career around trying to kill Canada.
Or maybe admitting you were sniffing up the stuff the mob sells while on duty can be detrimental to ones career.
there was no battle on the plains of Abraham, it was a misunderstanding between insurgents and occupying troops. once both of the head representives were hit by less than friendly fire the uprising was over. I would hazard a guess that its not even discussed in the classroom anymore.
what I always wondered was , why did he leave the fort to confront Wolfe on open ground.
maybe he went out to beg for equalization payments.
Multiculturalism was crafted to make the French culture more palatable in the rest of Canada. It’s the bilingual policies that tie into it at massive costs to all of us.
As far as other ethnic funding goes, it’s a sham which does nothing but discourage assimilation and weaken us as a cohesive society.
I’m thinking that ballot box stuffing helped the Pillsbury Dough Boy pull out this election. He didn’t deserve to come back and do diddly squat.
What happened, Kathy, is Trudeau, who set up this country into a binary division between Quebec and the ROC. Before – it was ten provinces and the territories. Then, came Trudeau, who divided us up by linguistic identification into two ‘equal’ parts. Yes, equal – that’s official bilingualism and our Charter of Rights is primarily about this official binarism.
Harper is taking us out of this binary frame which merges all the anglophone provinces into one, and sets up Quebec as Other. And then, sets up this binarism as adversarial. One against the other.
Harper is taking us out of this and back into the original BNA federation of equal provinces. The fact that Quebec is heavily francophone will no longer be structurally relevant. It will operate within its own jurisdication – and each of the other provinces will do the same. No more ROC. Decentralization means that each province has power over themselves.
There’s still bilingualism to deal with – a useless, costly waste, but, the way I see it, when this ‘devolves’, Quebec will operate in its own way as unilingual, but will interact with the other provinces as bilingual. It has no choice, because of its location in N. America. After all, most Europeans speak several languages and don’t bemoan any loss of identity because of that (except for France of course).
I think that decentralization, since it will remove the adversarial framework set up by Trudeau, will instead, open up Quebecers to being more engaged in constructive collaboration with non-francophones and will see themselves as not only Quebecers but also as Canadians.
I’m thinking that ballot box stuffing helped the Pillsbury Dough Boy pull out this election. He didn’t deserve to come back and do diddly squat.
Would you want a gay coke head running your province? Your new Country? You can pass all the laws you want but I no more accept homosexuality than I ever did. I am a Western Separatist but I sure as hell wouldn’t vote for a Western Boisclair for that very reason. Quebec separatism is not dead.
For all it’s faults, one thing that Quebec has shown is that it will stick up for its own culture. The language laws accomplished that goal. Now that there is a ballsy new leader like Dumont a stone’s throw from the Premiership, we can only hope that Quebec will set an example for the rest of the country and keep their Muslims in check. It’s high time to curtail the immigration and free movement of these time bombs faster than the lefties can say xenophobia. It will be just the first step, as the list of internal threats is long, but an important one in restoring the culture of Canada to what it is supposed to be.
molarmauler, maybe you will get tired of the crusades bullshit as well.
ET, you seem to give lots of unearned gratitude to Mr. Harper. This is the guy who said Quebec is a nation. I’m still waiting for him to do something conservative.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Exactly !! WTF are the MSM doing ?? Are they so far gone, no turning back thing, they have no choice but to pull-out-all-the-stops and go for broke ?? Going broke anyways ??
[deleted. That type of comment was uncalled for and is unwelcome here. – ED]
Hey, I used to live in the Yukon, run by a former heroin trafficker, so a gay coke-smeller isn’t that odd to me.
Only Jack Layton could take the Quebec result and claim it means Canadians want MORE social programs.
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=459bab77-8363-4d28-9a50-c7a0c697c303
“”I’ve listened to what ordinary Quebecers are saying during this election and it seems to me a lot of them are saying that they feel that governments are not paying attention to the needs of their families and they’re upset about it and they want to send a message that they feel like they’re getting left behind.”
Although ADQ is generally seen as a party to the right of centre, speaking to reporters Monday afternoon, Layton said the sentiment among Quebec voters that is fuelling support for the ADQ could auger well for the NDP.”
M. Hawkins – no, you are wrong. Harper did not say that Quebec is a nation. He said that the Quebecois are a nation within a united Canada. If you cannot tell the difference – I can’t help you on that.
The reason Harper did that, was because of Ignatieff of the Liberal Party and Duceppe of the Bloc. Ignatieff put forward a motion, to be voted on at the Liberal Leadership Convention, that ‘Quebec is a nation’. That’s Quebec, not Quebecois. This was a bombshell; if the aspiring leaders of the Liberal Party voted against this, they’d be in big trouble, each and all, in Quebec.
BUT, Duceppe had to step in; he couldn’t be seen in Quebec, as allowing the Liberals to define the nature of Quebec. So, he put forward a Motion in the House that ‘Quebec is a Nation’. Harper had to move.
Harper put forward the motion in the House that removed the territorial definition and focused only on the people. This is actually a 19th c. definition of ‘nation’, which focuses on the people not a territory. He changed it to Quebecois rather than Quebec. And he added, within a united Canada.
First, he consulted with Bill Graham, interim leader and Layton – to check that they would support this motion. It passed; Duceppe was outfoxed; Ignatieff’s agenda fell apart. And, Quebec remains part of Canada, as do its people, the Quebecois.
Plains of Abraham question-answer, ornamentalism.
To the Hanoverian elite, James Murray, Guy Carlton, the concept of ‘race’ was not intertwined with the idea of ‘colour’. Race was a description, not so much of colour differences, as of social distinctions. The English lower classes were, to eighteenth-century eyes, as racially different as were Africans or Asians. Thus the English nobiblity, embodied in Murray and Carlton, had much greater affinity with the French seignury, in Quebec, than with the riffraff Protestant English merchants moving into Quebec after the conquest. The Quebec Act ended the need for a Protestant allegiance, guaranteed free practice of the Catholic faith; upheld the continued use of Civil law and most importantly, ended the population transfer set out in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The rest, as they say, is history.
EyesWideShut has it right.
Konrad Yakabuski at the Globe;
“No Quebec election campaign has focused so viscerally on identity — on what it means to be Québécois — since the watershed 1976 vote that first brought René Lévesque and the sovereigntists to office.
Enter Mario and the debate over reasonable accommodation.
Mr. Charest, the kind of risk-averse politician who would never resort to action when inaction would do, chose to ignore the issue. Men banned from prenatal classes to avoid offending Muslim women? The windows at the YMCA frosted over to shield the eyes of pubescent Hasidic Jewish boys from the girls in step class? An isolated village council bans burkas, except on Halloween? The Premier’s silence was deafening.
[. . .]
Mr. Dumont’s position: “We can’t defend the Québécois identity with mushy words that no one understands. We can’t defend the Québécois identity with one knee on the ground.”
That was in November when the ADQ was at 12 per cent in the polls. The rest, as they say, is history. And history is what happened last night.”
“The English beat the French. So, we keep giving them money and stuff why exactly?”
It’s to apologize for the sneaky way we won that battle,climbing in the back window like a thief in the night!
dmorris,
Ye Gods man, don’t you recall the phrase “All’s fair in love and war”? You sound like a lieberal/dipper/democrat who thinks they should tell the taliban what we are doing next and when we want to leave. Oh, wait, that’s been done by the new York Times already.
The mere fact that they got re-elected-even as a minority- suggests that you can fool SOME of the people, ALL of the time. (It worked in Oinktario-why should it fail in Queerbec?)
‘Always nice to see my thoughts lined up with Mark Steyn’s!
I commented to my husband last night, while the CTV and CBC pundits, looking dour, downcast, and grumpy, nicely slid around Boisclair and any mention of his responsibility for the stunning losses of the PQ, “Why the H*ll are they only talking about Mario Dumont and Jean Charest and no mention of Boisclair, his homosexuality, and drug-taking?”
Of course, it was a rhetorical question. The pc postulators would NEVER mention any of Mr. Boisclair’s peccadildos…er peccadillos… Being “conservative” (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) with “family values” is a dreadful, whereas kinky sex and taking illegal substances is not.
I’d put the dots that Mr. Steyn connected together, too, and was stunned–well, not really; what did I expect, after all, looking at who had put the commentary together?–that the post mortems were so lopsided, myopic, and inadequate.
These lacklustre, post-election conversations are a direct result of a bunch of entitled liberal lefties talking only to each other, reading only one another’s copy, inviting only like-minded people to their parties, etc..
And I don’t think they have any idea just how pathetic they look, how yesterday’s dinner they are.
* Burp *
If leftists are claiming Dumont is Québec’s J.M. Le Pen (an outrageous and slanderous view), then I’m in favour of Mario. The Left here claims, in a pronounced nasal whine, that Monsieur Dumont is a racist, sexist, xenophobic, islamophobe.
With that many bages of honour, the guy MUST be doing something right.
Did Boisclair’s sexuality have anything to do with the result? I don’t know, but it was strange that following Mr Boisclair’s election night defeat-speech he seemed to have difficulty finding even one guy to stand beside him on the podium.
Marie Malevoy ( I hate her!) was there as well as Rita Dionne-Marsalis ( as rail-thin and dessicated as ever) and several other women. The hugged André and kissed ‘im, but from what I can tell didn’t suckle him. It was only after a few minutes that they succeeded in convincing ONE guy to stand with them.
Yep! There is a sucker born every minute.
He lucky fella looked VERY uncomfortable; the pained expression on his face screamed: “I’m not gay, I’m really, REALLY not!”
Boisclair is a pretty boy ( as am I!) and all pretty boys bring out maternal instincts. As a gay person I can tell you the guy is constantly surrounded by a coterie of fawning, middle-aged faghags….desperate for fashion tips.
Is Quebec’s separatist movement finished?
Quite possibly, but wasn’t the ending just so gay?
Separatism has (had?) very little to do with culture, oppression or language.
The movement arose as a symptom of Montréal’s economic decline vis-à vis Toronto. That’s what the maple syrup boils down to.
The city, though, has found a new economic niche, a new economic vocation and with that a renewed sense of pride and self-worth. We are once again moving forward.
Yes, Montréal now specialise in two-hour lunches, sex tourism and formula 1 car-racing where half the women present expose their breasts!
And all this barely an hour from the U.S border!
http://marginalizedactiondinosaur.net/?p=33
Damm that Steyn beat me by an hour and 10 minutes, LOL.
Maybe I need to move east.
I’m not sure that Boisclair’s sexual orientation is the main reason Quebec voters don’t like him. There is a perception among Quebecers that he lacks maturity and judgment (for instance, last fall he participated in a televised skit which parodied Brokeback Mountain and made fun of George Bush and Stephen Harper. Some Quebecers thought it was funny, but the general consensus was that it was juvenile, stupid and insulting.)
Add in the fact that Boisclair comes across as arrogant, elitist and extremely thin-skinned.