fisk's comments here are very unfortunate, and no doubt driven by feelings of bitterness by ndp supporters, who were positioned to win the election for months leading up to the vote. strangely, this is no doubt second hand bitterness. this kind of reporting is useful in the line of work fisk usually does, but doesn't lend itself well to an analysis of an election in another country.
it seems like the reporting for the article consisted of fisk calling up a couple of friends in canada.
however, i think that it must also be acknowledged that quebec has developed a nasty nationalist streak in it's politics, but in the context of two important points: first that it is a pragmatic tactic to achieve independence, and second that this tactic keeps getting rejected by voters.
lucien bouchard blamed the loss in the second sovereigntist referendum on "money and the ethnic vote". that's the beginning of this strain of thought, as far as i know, but some others may want to trace it back further. he seemed aware that his vision of a sovereign quebec nation was being thwarted by people that did not have deep roots in the region. while it may be over-exaggerating a single factor at the expense of the importance of others, it is not a spurious observation and there is no doubt some level of truth to it, too.
in fact, there is also some truth to the idea that the federal government - under the guidance of quebec prime ministers - has purposefully targeted quebec for immigration with the purposes of changing the nature of quebec society, to prevent separation.
after the second referendum, quebec clearly started to get a little tired with this one party rule that didn't campaign on spectrum issues. they wanted a debate driven by normal election issues: budgets, services, changes in the laws, etc. so, the separatist forces started breaking up into different political factions. this was very much driven by the body politic, who just wanted a better debate on issues that actually affected them.
when you open things up like this, you have to expect that some bottled up issues are going to get out. there were bent up energies in the quebec nationalist regions that saw people without these multigenerational roots in the region as being responsible for the failure of the referendum. within this, a conservative separatist group - called the adq - started building a kind of collection of ideas about religious immigrants that would eventually be picked up by both the pq (the biggest separatist party) and the liberals (the federalist party).
you have to understand that the legal changes they want to make are purely about assimilation. there's not a racial bias to it, nor is there an exclusionary nature to them. it's about turning immigrants into cultural quebeckers, so they vote in favour of independence. they don't want to restrict immigration to any specific group, they just want to ensure that whomever comes to quebec becomes a quebecker and aligns with what they see as quebec values. should any of these ideas be adopted, i would not expect them to survive independence by very long.
but, canada is a pluralistic society, and so the federal law sometimes gets in the way of these ideas - there have been constitutional challenges. in canada, you can't arbitrarily tell somebody not to wear a scarf and try to enforce it under threat of something.
when the laws are explored over a public debate, the ramifications of them begin to make people uncomfortable - even if they are rational to get to the end point of separation - and they are invariably rejected, even when people admit to agreeing with them - confusing pollsters and policy makers. a few years ago, the pq lost an election over a "values charter" that would have acted as an assimilating force regarding things like head coverings and jewelry. polls claimed strong support for the values charter - yet the party lost, because of it. to support an idea of something is not necessarily to support the actualization of it. "i'd like to tell you to take that off your head" does not necessarily translate into "the law should be able to force you to take that off your head".
we saw the same thing in the last federal election. harper's rhetoric about muslims was pretty gross. public opinion polls seemed to suggest people both approved and realized that they can't actually vote for it.
the nativist streak is there. it has historical reasons. but, it's not xenophobic; rather, it's very strongly assimilating.
it may be a little bit real right now, so it may be easy to lose perspective, but we need to analyze trump correctly, as well. and, le pen, for that matter - although i think le pen is something very different, and destabilizing the region quite intentionally.
my very first comments about trump, before i got lost myself, were that you have to put him in context and understand *why* this is happening. when all the nonsense is debunked, your left with the reality that white people have done poorly in america since the 70s. with the collapse of the unions, the offshoring of jobs, mechanization and the rest, there are really declining living standards. it may not be informed to blame it on mexicans and muslims. but, we can't just leave it at that. the economics underlying this spasm need to be seriously addressed - and a fair bit of it needs to be attributed to nafta. there's other causes, of course. but, you can't do that in print, it seems.
www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-joy-of-canada-delivered-from-stephen-harper-s-darkness-to-justin-trudeau-s-light-a6779106.html
Emdx
> however, i think that it must also be acknowledged that quebec has developed a nasty nationalist streak in it's politics
Ah, yet another outsider that only relies on other outsiders for his information. You just fell exactly into the same trap you deplore with Mr Fisk.
> lucien bouchard blamed the loss in the second sovereigntist referendum on "money and the ethnic vote".
It was not Lucien Bouchard who made that famous remark, but Premier Jacques Parizeau. The next day, Parizeau resigned and Bouchard became premier.
But yes, Parizeau was right. Of course, money would be against us, as in any colonial situation. And the amount of money illegally spent to buttress the “NO” side during the referendum campaign was staggering. For example, whole planeloads were flown to Montréal, courtesy of airlines, at no cost to passengers. This kind of expense squarely fell into the purview of our election financing laws, and it was clearly illegal.
But nobody howled at the “money” part of the comment, because it was a given that money would be against us.
Let’s tackle instead the “ethnic vote”. Historically, immigrants have been used as a tool to minorize us. The expectation was that any immigrant who would come to Canada would become anglicized, and thus would not become part of our community. This was completely true until 45 years ago when the assimilation machine was stopped dead on it’s tracks by Law 101, which simply shut down access to english schools for immigrants.
This is the main reason why Canada hates Law 101, because it almost killed outright the assimilation machine.
What Jacques Parizeau was referring to with the “ethnic vote” is those immigrant communities who blindly vote for what their leaders tell them to, without asking themselves any questions.
Anyone with a brain would acknowledge that such behaviour in a Democracy is pretty deplorable.
Well, we lost by some 50,000 votes, and no doubt a lot more than 50,000 “NOs” were clearly “ethnic votes”.
There is nothing racist in denouncing this, in fact, Parizeau’s remark was clearly a denunciation of the racism that brings about those “ethnic votes”, racism fomented by Canada against Québec’s aspiration for independence.
But again, any minority seeking freedom from a larger country, like the Scots or the Basques are readily labelled as “intolerant”, “xenophobes” and all the unsavoury stuff you hear from Canadian media whenever the subject skirts Québec.
> you have to understand that the legal changes they want to make are purely about assimilation.
As I said before, immigration has been largely been used as a tool to minorize the french and the indians in Canada.
> but, canada is a pluralistic society,
Bollo*ks. It's only “pluralistic” when it suits Canada. And you see it bursting at the seams whenever there are high concentration of immigrants. Why do you think Rob Ford got elected as mayor in Toronto?
We get tagged as “racist” because our interculturalism policies are at odds with the canadian multiculturalism. We have good reasons to reject multiculturalism, because it’s mostly a tool to divide and rule; with immigrants isolated in little cultural ghettoes, it is far easier to manipulate them to keep them subservient than if they were full members of their adoptive society.
Which is what interculturalism does: we only take what we like from what immigrants take here; what we don’t like, we soundly reject and tell immigrants that they better forget about it.
Yes we are assimilationists. Although having immigrants keeping their culture is nice and all that, we don’t really care; what we want is them to take our language first and foremost. Culture will only naturally follow. We do this because we are strictly opposed to segregation and ghettoes; we want immigrants to be full-fledged members of Society, quite unlike the English who are very happy keeping their class system to keep the rabble at it’s place, which is pretty normal for a colonial society.
> In canada, you can't arbitrarily tell somebody not to wear a scarf and try to enforce it under threat of something.
Sure we can. And yet again, you cet carried away with the canadian media misrepresentation about Québec. We don’t bitch against the scarves (fu*k, we wear them ourselves six months a year — during winter, that is), it’s against the face veils we have against. And we’re not the only ones, almost all Europe is up in arms regarding this.
It’s just that the liberal crowd is so taken up in it’s multiculturalism that it stubbornly keeps going into the multiculturalist dead-end, despite the fact that this very subject made the NDP lose the chances at getting in power.
> the nativist streak is there. it has historical reasons. but, it's not xenophobic; rather, it's very strongly assimilating.
Well, yes. But it seems that in Canada, while it's okay to assimilate to the english, it's a no-no to assimilate to the french.
Which is a damn fine reason to get out of Canada.
deathtokoalas
i just want to point out that i'm a french canadian that grew up in the ottawa area. i do appreciate your correction about parizeau - i did misspeak on that point. but, i think you're otherwise demonstrating my points rather than rebutting them.
emdx
As a "french canadian from Ottawa", you have learned early on that your place is subservient to the english, and you clearly show it by your thoroughly colonized positions.
If you want to be french, you're welcome to come to Québec, but if you backstab us, you will be treated as you deserve.
deathtokoalas
i would rather leave ethnic nationalism in the 20th - if not the 19th - century. again: you're demonstrating my points.
to reiterate: the nativist streak is a problem in quebec, but they're not xenophobic. they're assimilationist. it's a very big difference in understanding them from a distance
perhaps the better way to understand quebec nationalism from britain - or the middle east - is to compare it to merkel's recent statements, rather than le pen's. the door is open. but they demand that migrants accept their value systems, should they choose to come in.
--
something else that you'll see floated around by the canadian pseudo-left is this idea of quebec as a victim of settler-colonialism. this is an outrageous narrative; france was of course a participant in settler-colonialism, and the french settlers were fundamentally no different than the english settlers. i'm glossing over a complicated history, but to put the french settlers on the side of the colonized is fundamentally wrong. regardless, i've seen it cited in international sources over the last few years, indicating that the narrative has some traction because it fits into the theories people like.
the actual reason this argument has popped up is due to the supreme court reference case on succession, which claimed that a unilateral declaration would only be valid in the context of a colonial relationship. as no such colonial relationship exists, such a unilateral declaration would be considered illegal and unconstitutional in canada.
you have to understand that context to make sense of the debate, but that's not what gets out of the country.
Emdx
Of course you are (again) wrong.
When the french settlers came, they certainly did not see themselves as superior to the natives; in fact, we actually “went native” and we formed a hybrid european-indian society.
To this day, we carry on several native way of doing things that are rather different from France (like seeking consensus rather than outright imposing one's views).
In all Canada, only the Québec government deals with natives as equals, on a nation-to-nation basis, rather than the “stupid, juvenile savage” way the federal government does. And the results show: in Québec, 80% of natives still speak their language (that’s because law 101 ALSO protects native languages) as opposed to less than 20% in Canada. We also deal with their traditional social structures, rather than the sham democracy that is imposed by Ottawa, and who elects corrupt, unaccountable band councils.
We also let natives administer Justice as they see fit, so, unlike Canada, we do not have a high native jail population.
But you don’t have to take my word for it; go to Moonsonee (or Attawapiskat), Ontario, and ask the Crees who live there if they would rather live in Québec…
deathtokoalas
see, this is skewed so many ways that i don't see any point in bothering. it's political whitewashing. but, as i pointed out, there's a reason for it.
at the start of the colonial period, the various native american groups were broadly more interested in using western technology to defeat their ancestral enemies than they were in defeating the invaders. european powers took advantage of this. but, a big part of understanding how colonialism in north america was possible lies in understanding that they have a very different cultural concept of property rights - the truth is that they didn't really see westerners as invaders because they didn't conceive of themselves as owners of the land. rather, they conceived of themselves as users of the land; it would not have made sense to them to try and stop others from using the land. there were treaties of friendship and land use signed with both early english settlers and early french settlers; neither the french nor the english held to these treaties particularly strongly. today, they're both under the interpretation of the same court system.
despite the complexity of the history, the broad truth is that the various native groups often found themselves aligned with imperial interests against the interests of the colonies. that is broadly true across the continent, and the broadest way to understand the nature of conflict in the period, and continuing to today.
so, for example, you saw the major native groups align with the french imperial interests against british settlers in the seven years war, but then you saw those same groups align with the british crown against american settlers during the revolutionary war. one of the reasons for the revolutionary war was a ban by the british crown on expansion westwards, in recognition of the sovereignty of the existing tribes. and, one of the reasons for the signing of the treaties in western canada was protection from american expansion.
what you're saying about treaty rights is simple nonsense - both in legal terms and historical terms. the single most violent colonial body in the history of canada was the francophone catholic church. there are some french-canadian metis (mixed) groups, but there are also english, scottish and ukrainian metis groups, amongst others.
quebec really needs to come to terms with it's participation in settler colonialism, rather than continue to deny the reality of it.