Define the word nation.
Heard the media in Quebec couldn't resist asking Harper one of those "do you love your country" queries. Seems these guys still don't get it.He wouldn't bite. Even tweeked the noses of the separatists by insisting that St Jean de Baptiste Day was around long before the PQ decided it should be a "national" hoilday.
Here's the money quote from Harper
“This Fete nationale was being celebrated long before the Quiet Revolution (in the 1960s) - and even before Confederation,”
I got a bit of a laugh over that, but something else kept nagging me about it in a way that wouldn't let me put it to rest.
Then that old sense of deja vu hit me about two hours after I heard about this. Years back when the country was in the midst of its constitutional crisis and we where told in no uncertain terms that if we didn't give Quebec a special constitutional recognition the country was doomed. The elites feel over themselves to advocate for this. Dare say most if not intially half of the politicians out there where in a common front to get it signed, sealed and delivered. At first anyways, then folks started to read the blamed thing and as with most grand plans, the devil was in the details. One of those tasked with reviewing the document was a young Reform MP by the name of Stephen Harper.
Yeah, that Stephen Harper.
He picked through the Charlottetown Accord, and came back to his boss, Preston, to offer a cognitive oppostion to it. Most notably that its bad for the business of federalism to make one province more equal than the others.
And thats what it was about Harper's comment that stuck. He's going after the separatist threat in a way they can't counter.
All the symbolism they've co-opted from the federation is about to be reclaimed by Harper and Co. The startegy as best I can figure at this point, is to say that Quebec is part of Canada because without Canada, Quebec would not exist. Its the same logic he used when he came up with his private members bill C341. If you don't know what that was about, its the bill Dion co-opted to come up with the Clarity Act, though a watered down version thereof.
My best guess right now is that in the future session of parliament we should expect Harper to come up with an amendment to the Clarity Act to do three things.
- Put in those things that the liberals took out of C341 when they co-opted it, thereby reclaiming it as a conservative piece of legislation.
- Divide the liberals yet again.
- Most importantly, rankle the separatists.
One things for sure, if Harper is going to get Quebec to finally sign the constitution, you can bet he won't be saying anything about it.
My gut instinct says that he can achieve this without selling the farm.
I got my fingers crossed.
posted by gimbol @ 8:33 PM
2 Comments:
Quebec – Harper's Achilles Heel:
Did Harper really understand Quebec when he rolled the dice, flew to Montreal, and tried to cajole the nationalists into supporting the New Tories?
We know that he planned on a Western Provinces – Quebec Axis as the power based designed to bring him to a majority government. We know that he deliberately tailored an ambiguous message to Quebec before the election. We know that support for the New Tories increased and he won ten seats.
But we also know that Quebec nationalism is a quagmire for the unwary, and that his new support is shallow and based in two areas only at this stage, as shown by these snippets from the National Post:
"Results from the Jan. 23 election which brought the Harper government to power show that outside Quebec, the vote shares of the major political parties did not change dramatically. But in Quebec, the Conservatives more than doubled their vote share to 25 per cent in 2006 from nine per cent in 2004. The Liberals, meanwhile, attracted just 17.3 per cent of the vote about half of the 33.9 per cent they secured in 2004.
''The real story of the 2006 Canadian general election is what happened inside Quebec,'' Maioni contends.
Although support the Conservatives remains relatively shallow inside Quebec, the party's electoral success represents a potentially significant change in the province's political landscape, Maioni believes.
In winning 10 Quebec seats, the Conservatives relied upon two main sources of francophone support: the Quebec City region, known as an 'enigma' ''for its vacillation of the sovereignty question and for its fickle voting pattern'' and rural parts of Quebec known as the 'bleu' heartland."
To build on that support, she says, Harper will have to show in concrete terms that ''open federalism'' is meaningful. Otherwise, francophone voters are likely to return en masse to the Bloc Quebecois.
''In the context of Quebec, unless (the Conservative party) uses those levers of power to deliver on specific promises related to Quebecers' quest for recognition and autonomy,'' she predicts, ''it will like be unable to dislodge the BQ.''
"In other words, Harper's overture to Quebec in the form of open federalism has enormous consequences, both for the future of his own party and that of the country.
If the prime minister's overture eventually disappoints Quebecers, it will help to establish the winning conditions for the Parti Quebecois and for another referendum while relegating the Conservatives, once again, to the margins in Quebec."
The question facing Harper now is simple: Did he miscalculate?
Signs that he might have:
• the swift distancing which Charest put between him and Harper with respect to Harper's gutting of Kyoto;
• Harper's fumbling response to whether Quebec is a nation, and his reluctance to even talk about the issue.
You opened Pandora's box with your West-East axis, Harper. Let's see you now try to close it ..
Maybe, but until the oppostion parties can present an unambigous policy statement on anything its hard to argue for a change in government, or for the liberals to present themselves as the federalist option.
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