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Maybe we're having an issue of translation

You might as well have described the PQ with that last part. The difference being Charest wasn't the one to implement draconian language policies to begin with, he just lets them continue so as to maintain his position. He is an opportunist and I don't like him, but you have to literally ignore the entire history of the PQ to somehow claim Charest is "dangerous" compared to them. They want to tear apart this country. That is the most dangerous political aim of any party in Canada. The PQ have maintained the unrest surrounding the language debate for their "tactical purposes" for decades. Charest is not the source of Quebec's problems, he is just the face of the Quebec status quo begun in the late 70s. Having Charest in power is actually better for the PQ since they can keep heaping all the problems that arose from the implementation of their sovereigntist agenda over the past 40 years on him. Not unlike current Republicans blaming Obama for all the nations ails despite the 8 year period under Bush preceding him

I don't see why the fact that they want an independent Quebec makes them "dangerous". I may not care about Quebec, but I certainly don't care about Canada either. The "dangerously close-minded to somewhat intelligent" ratio is the same within Quebec and within Canada. I mean, Harper has a majority.

Seriously? They haven't even put forward a plan for post-Quebec independence that even touches on reality. I have not yet spoken to a single separatist who will even talk to me about this. Whenever I try to broach this subject they immediately start with the grandstanding rhetoric, which is the extent of sovereigntist intellect. They are greedy teenagers who want to move out and have mom and dad (Ottawa) keeping paying the rent. They want to cut a historic part of Canada out because of their own aspirations of power. An independent Quebec will be a poor and backwards nation. On the international stage it is already hardly impressive, receiving derision from a great deal of the world for its utterly twisted language laws that are used to oppress a significant portion of the population. Lets not forget the overt racism inherent to the PQ and Quebec nationalism in general




Ah I see, now it all makes sense. You don't actually care about Canada or Quebec, which explains why you are intentionally poorly informed on this subject and thus willing to consider the most morally bankrupt provincial party "the least pathetic". I guess if you base your opinion on campaign advertisements they don't look so bad

Because of course the oppression that the majority of the population recieved from the english minority before those laws were enacted doesn't count.
The bill 101 was a neccesity back then and still is today. The 1976-1981 government by the PQ is also historically one the best government of Québec history, bringing much needed reforms in a lot of domains. This is also this "racist" government that oppened the doors to the immigration of vietnamesse refugees , beside having to be openly opposed to the politic of USA by doing this.

I absolutely love how you people parrot "oppression by the English in the past" as a justification for your current oppression. All you are doing is admitting that yes, you are engaged in oppressive politics. Additionally "oppression by the minority" is a gross oversimplification and utterly disingenuous. The most oppressive institution for most of Quebec's history was the church and its lackeys who allowed Anglo-American business interests to milk Quebec. Going even further back, the church was always a huge influence, especially through the feudal lordship of the seigneurial system. Talk about oppression by a minority, how many seigneurs do you figure controlled all of Quebec with an iron fist? And controlled English people for a time, too, before the creation of Upper Canada for them. Furthermore the treatment of workers in Quebec was not all that different from the general treatment of workers elsewhere in the world, and better than if you were not white; if you want to point fingers, point them at the time that it was, and the ethics of capitalism at the time. You sovereigntists also love to honor the Patriotes as some kind of glorious Francophone uprising, conveniently "forgetting" English Canadians were fighting against the British too, right next door. Maurice Duplessis was far worse for Quebec than any Anglophone yet many look back on him fondly

Besides all these obvious facts you Pequistes gloss over or, in the past few years, are attempting to write out of your histories, what do the actions of these hypothetical English bogeymen from the past have to do with me or any of the other ~900,000 Anglophones you guys despise so much for... being Anglophone? If you want to go down that road, you have absolutely no right to the land that is here either, since your progenitors stole this land and massacred the natives. Should the natives therefore be allowed to oppress you?



Why is it a necessity? Because you people from Quebec city and the various rural areas feel threatened coming to Montreal and its West Island and hearing English people *gasp* communicating in their own language?

One of the best? Sure, I guess if driving away businesses and initiating the slide into political and economic quagmire that has been Quebec for the past 40 years is your definition of "the best"

You realize that the refugees coming out of Vietnam would have been from the US' former allies, right? The US absorbed plenty of them, especially Hmong. Quebec was more than happy to let them in because they generally spoke French as a second language.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orkioiWT-zM&feature=related[/youtube]

The PQ's happy hypocrisy becomes more apparent when you consider how they are apparently "not racist" and pro-immigration but their leader was willing to blame "le vote ethnique" for their loss, and work extensively to suppress "les Allophones" (not French or English, generally immigrants) rights to education in the language of their choice. Besides telling Francophones where they can and can't send their children. Infringing on individual rights, much? The PQ insults its own voters almost as much as it does everyone else in this province

Boisclair decided that the PQ would not appeal to nativism or xenophobia and so forth and the ADQ jumped in and made appeals to this crowd who ended up voting for them, and as a result a sure victory became a third place finish. It could be that Bouchard and whoever thought that they would vote PQ no matter what, well, Dumont played to that crowd and the right wing part of the media played to that crowd also and the ADQ's right wing economic positions helped with that media though many if not most of those voters are not economically right wing. The whole Martineau/Facal crowd at Quebecor jumped all over the "accomodement raisonnable" thing and the Herouxville resolution promising not to allow human sacrifices by immigrants (an exaggeration by me but that's really the tone they took)...

Actually Parizeau did not say "the ethnic vote", he said "ethnic votes"... The issue is the question of immigrants essentially coming to Quebec to be Canadians and not Quebeckers, that this is why Quebec governments wanted as much control as possible over dealing with immigration, to make sure their children are educated in French and become more Quebecker and less Canadian in outlook. If you are an immigrant who came in through a federal-run process and from the beginning you wanted to go to Canada anyway because that's the country, it's sort of makes sense that you'd not support the sovereignist movement. I don't think it's a surprise that Quebec independence is about a core nation, the descendents of the French settlers and those assimilated over the following decades into that nation from outside, and Parizeau wanted to boast that 60% of those voted yes, that those who didn't are those who were not assimilated either by being English or they were recent arrivals who came to be Canadians.

Cube top,
Square off,
Eight corners,
Ninety degree angles,
Flat top,
Stare straight ahead,
Stock parts,
Blockhead!

I don't care if it can't be a coherent unit on day one. These things come into place with time. Do you think the United States magically happened to work in 1776? No. What about Canada? There was a slow evolution lasting nearly a century before it became fully independent. This is not an argument.

To be honest, I don't think people in the rest of the world care at all about Quebec, but they hardly care about Canada. What has that to do with anything? Are internal policies directed to please people elsewhere? Should we choose our government to please the Italians? or the South Africans maybe?

Every state is in a state of perpetual redefinition. Canada without Quebec can still be Canada. Should "historic parts" of a country be forced to stay just because they are "historic"? Doesn't it sound circular? With this logic, the Austrian/Austro-Hungarian Empire should not have been dismantled, because Croatia and Transylvania and Bohemia were all "historic parts" of it. That makes absolutely no sense. In any case, many/most Canadians don't care whether Quebec stays or remains.

The point is, I won't be happier as a Quebecer than as a Canadian. I think Canada is about as ridiculous a country as Quebec will ever be. They are both too large countries for my taste.


You are jumping to strange conclusions. Just because we disagree doesn't mean you have to rubbish me instead of my opinions.

You actually think its a good idea to just separate and see what happens without a coherent plan? The situation with the origins of the US and Canada are not analogous to Quebec's sovereignty movement. You're right about it being no argument, because there are simply no realistic parallels. That you and most other pequistes will just poo poo any questions about actual plans besides "becoming a nation" just illustrates how blind you all are to reality.



You have a strange and very uninformed world view if you think nobody in the world cares about Canada, let alone Quebec. Canada's actions are under constant global scrutiny and Quebec's language policies have been condemned many times from outside parties worldwide. When you consider that Canada has been such a contributor to internationalism, you realize that yes, the internal policies of many countries do actually reflect outside opinion. To pretend otherwise is to bury one's head in the sand. If you expect your new nation to be taken seriously and to deal with countries you want, like the US and Canada, and not other second-rate nations with equal disregard for the rights of their own citizens because you have to, you'll have to learn to act like a respectable country. You'll have to build an all new international image not reliant on Canada and where Quebec's internal policies come to the forefront due to it not just being a provincial government. As is, Quebec as a nation would not have much to be proud of



You don't seem to understand, though I think the removal of Quebec from Canada would be tragic for Canada as a nation, Quebec would be the one to suffer more from this. I care more about this province's future than most of you pequistes, apparently, since my concerns are for the well being of its people after withdrawal from Canada and all the institutions within the federal system that support this province. Or should Canada keep supporting Quebec? Do you really think an independent Quebec will magically be privy to all the deals Ottawa has made internationally? And why do you think most Canadians don't care? You keep making a lot of assertions without much substance to back them up



This isn't even a respectable political position, if you think in such trivial terms no wonder you harbor such bankruptcy on this subject



You have not even given me much to disagree with, since you are talking rhetoric and hypotheticals, not concrete facts on why Quebec is somehow better on its own. You have also admitted you don't even care about Quebec or Canada, so I don't know why you even bother being a PQ supporter if you are really so uninterested.

I won't answer specific quotes, I will only say this: Stop saying I said things I didn't. I don't think Quebec is better on its own, I just think your arguments for its remaining in Canada are wrong. In the event that I don't cancel my vote, I would probably vote "no" in a referendum. Don't ever call me a "péquiste", either. I certainly do not support the PQ, I can even say that I despise it. I won't vote for them. This election is a joke anyway. I only think that amongst the various plagues that could fall on us, a PQ government will lead to a lesser catastrophe on the whole.

Ignore the truth about the PQ all you want, blithely ignore the entirety of the big picture, but don't insult your own intelligence by pretending the PQ is somehow the lesser evil. I'm not even sure what you consider "wrong" about my arguments since you haven't even contributed anything non-rhetorical. Your political position is highly trivial and ambivalent by your own admission

The PQ Bluenecks very much are reactionaries. They long for a simpler past, when everyone spoke French and before those evil allophones started coming to the cities and diversifying society.

The better option for less xenophobic separatists would probably be Québec solidaire.

That is a possibility though I don't really like Amir Khadir, their most well known member. He is very anti-Israel and has gone so far as to participate in protests outside of a store selling some Israeli products, demanding people boycott it. Quebeckers really don't want this conflict brought here; other QS politicians have also expressed sentiments favorable of Hezbollah or other radical organizations from the region. I find his rhetoric very distasteful and some of his actions undignified for someone in his position. The reasons I have mentioned for my own problem with him and QS are generally echoed by a lot of the sovereigntists who I see more eye to eye with.

I'm somewhat agnostic on the Israeli divest campaign, but I do see the rationale (Israel is by far the more powerful participant and unilateral changes in Israeli policy could go a long way into settling the conflict). Can't say I've heard much (or anything) about his "pro-Hezbollah" stance. I'm generally more internationalist than your average, isolationist Quebecker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Citizens'_Union

Seems like a good, if peripheral, option this election for the federalist left.