AND for an expat nothing more than "airing dirty laundry in public"
Prompted by"
Canada in 2014: Separatist issue looms
Editor’s note: Jonathan Kay is Comment Editor of the Toronto-based National Post newspaper. You can follow him @jonkay. The views expressed are his own. This is the fifth in the '14 in 2014' series, looking at what the year ahead holds for key countries.
The biggest challenge facing Canada in 2014? It’s the same one that has threatened Canadian unity since the country’s genesis: the status of the majority-French province of Quebec within Canada’s majority-Anglo confederation. But due to a series of political gambits recently launched by Quebec separatists, this age-old issue now comes with a new and disturbing post-9/11 twist.
Quotes from article on my first reading
-problematic because of the manner by which Quebec’s separatist government is eagerly exploiting anti-immigrant sentiment to further a parochial political agenda.
-turned its demagogic campaign inward, against Quebec residents who dress in an “overtly religious” manner.
-thereby making nonsense of their evenhanded conceit
-Quebec separatists have sought to convince the world that their worldview and Canada’s is fundamentally incompatible. They may finally have succeeded, albeit in the ugliest manner possible
Unquote
The issue here can only be understood by understanding the Continental French (borrowed and adapted in Quebec) attitude towards the domination of the Roman Universal Church in years, decades, centuries past.
We hear the word "secular" in English and most non-Quebeckers understand that means "non-religious" or "without regard for any faith's doctrines", but the Quebec/France meaning is more accurately termed "laicite".
This is secularism PLUS anti-clericalism. The folks with this view as still so steamed up about the perceived (and real) "humiliation" they experienced personally and corporately-as-citizen/residents under the "Ancient Regime" under RC-influenced governments that they want to expunge all influences-in-govt of that Founding Religion - except when/where it's convenient/ beneficial/ useful/ Christmas OR culturally-so-inherent that it cannot be tampered with.
IN ADDITION, and this is where Mr JonKay was being polite/ brief/ simplistic, the PQ party is a socialist party ie No God, the state controls the machinery of labour etc etc.
The PQ are known to be dirigiste, corporatist, social-democratic, syndicalist etc - but this is all masked by their quest for "Separatism" and it's weak sister "Sovereignty" and even weaker friend "Sovereignty Association".
The party holds a (false) hope that by getting the population to "vote 50%+1" for even the weakest of these options, (or even to grant the PQ by that same UNdemocratic margin a "mandate to negotiate" for the weakest of the options) that step-by-step they can assemble the authority, mandate, powers, fiscal oomph to create their dream - a Francophone Socialist state (pure Marxian ie which has never been accomplished - never mind attempting it with French people)
The "Charter" of Values -- NB values are personal/societal choices, Virtues are innate and universal -- is indeed about anti-Muslim pushback and anti-Jewish pushback and anti-Asian pushback and and Caribbean pushback and anti-African pushback AND anti-clericalism. But as Mr JonKay says mainly political.
The success of the PQ's political gambit with it to "fool enough of the people" for long enough to a)get a majority, then b) hold a 3rd vote, then c) get "a mandate to negotiate", then d) cut a deal that the ConFederal apparatchik and pols will approve, then e) get approval of said "deal" within Quebec and then finally f) get pan-Canadian popular ratification is very slim.
While I thank Mr JonKay for bring the Parti Quebecois' Charter Affirming the Values of "Laicite" to the int'l / USA marketplaces, I don't think it is Canada's greatest challenge in 2014, it is not "looming", it is not a "disturbing post-9/11 twist" and I do not think "airing dirty laundry" is journalism.
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