Trailing both the Liberals and the CAQ, with just 22% support in the polls, each passing month sees more of its base dying off. With collapsing support in its youth wing, its hard to see the party renewing itself and with about 70% of Quebecers rejecting sovereignty, the raison d'etre of the party, it is hard to see where the PQ can go.
It occurs to me that if a poll was conducted over Quebec sovereignty in the ROC, a higher percentage of Canadians would support Quebec leaving Canada than the percentage of Quebecers wishing to do so.
Its gotten that absurd.
With sovereignty off the table, the PQ tried to harness Quebec's natural xenophobia, in proposing the Charter of Values, but overestimated the pushback. In that effort, the PQ tried to face-off the Montreal region with the rest of Quebec and surprisingly (or not so) the effort turned into a calamity, chasing the PQ from power and ushering in the current Liberal era of Philippe Couillard.
The latest humiliation comes courtesy of Statistics Canada which reported that the number of Quebecers having English as their first language in Quebec has had a meteoric rise since the last census.
This was of course fresh fodder for the hapless Lisée, a man and a party searching for some relevancy and so the "bad news," of the rise of the anglophone community is 'good news' for a PQ in desperate need of an issue.
The spectre of the evil anglophone community growing at a breakneck pace is a gift-wrapped issue for those who believe that Quebec is being attacked relentlessly by an English horde of barbarians at the gate.
And so like Chicken Little, Lisée has gone to town, declaring that the linguistic sky is falling by characterizing the notion that a growing English community is an existential threat to the preservation of French in Quebec.
He has proposed all sorts of changes calling for a new Bill 201 that would turn the thumbscrews on all aspects of English. He has demanded that no immigrant be allowed into Quebec if they cannot speak French and that a student cannot graduate an English CEGEP without mastering French. He wants to force federal agencies and companies to comply with Bill 101 (they are now exempt by federal statute) and he wants small business' to be subject to language laws.
It was a couple of good days for Lisée, spewing his tough new stance on English on every news channel and radio station that would have him, and there were plenty of takers.
But this all came crashing down today when after complaints by Anglo activists that the numbers Stascan published were nonsense.
In the race to find fault with the English, nobody in the francophone media looked at the Statscan numbers with an ounce of scepticism, a curious case of journalistic laziness. The numbers were so clearly in error that Anglo activists questioned the accuracy almost immediately."Are there almost five times as many English-speakers in Dolbeau-Mistassini, in the Lac-St-Jean region? Has Quebec City gained 6,000 residents whose mother tongue is English since 2011?Today StatsCan admitted that the entire 60,000 increase in the Anglophone community was an error, plain and simple. They botched the calculations.
So say the results released last week from the 2016 census.
But some researchers who study Quebec’s anglophone minority aren’t buying it.
“It defies logic,” said Jack Jedwab, the executive vice-president of the Association for Canadian Studies. On Wednesday, Jedwab wrote to Statistics Canada questioning the accuracy of the findings on language in Quebec." Link
The Anglo upsurge was but a figment of imagination, an error that not only humiliates StasCan but bleeds all over the PQ and Lisée who built a whole new election platform on a false premise.
What fun!
I don't know how Lisée can spin this. Does he retract the anti-English platform based on the fact it was built on a lie, or does he brazen it out and tell us that just the same, the policy is one that the party will continue to support.
The reaction of these Nationalist Quebecois politicians (Lisee and Legault) to the imaginary bump in Anglos is vey telling. Scratch a little under the surface and the hatred runs deep.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right, Philip. As a card-carrying member of the ROC, my support for Quebec sovereignty in another referendum is rock-solid
DeleteI always cringe when I hear anglophones pronouncing the PQ and sovereignty dead especially more than one year before the next election. In my experience things can perk up very dramatically in Quebec with respect to these issues..all we need are a few threts to the french language or some slight from canada or more corruption from the liberals and the pq could jump ahead. Its way too early to count the PQ out. I am still worried that some sort of PQ and QS merger could emerge fort he next election which would be a total disaster for Quebec. I think things are as bad as they will get for the pq now..things will improve for them over the coming yearjust as I believe Trump is at a low point now.
ReplyDeletei agree. identity, immagration, language all look likely to be hot themes when election time comes. pq has the best program on all fronts as far as i'm concerned, but their superitority is especially obvious on this sort of debate.
Deletetake just the latest scandal with all the haitians coming in through the backdoor. plq and qs say welcome to canada come on in we're open, which is a lie cause none of them will qualify for refugee status. then douchebag caq says block them at the border, send them back right away, which is a lie cause canada just can't do that because of its own laws and policies. then fianlly you have a reasonable voice, the pq, that says tell the migrants the truth about their chances of staying, accept them anyways and make sure they are treated correctly, and concurrently get out of the "safe third country" agreement which is the loophole the migrants use. of course he also stresses that borders are a canadian thing, and that processing refugee status claims in canada is a scandalous multiyear process.
so who are you going to vote for complicated? all out liers, douchebag liers, or reasonable people?
p.s. did english media report on the new liberal party candidate tetrault? he was in every possible corruption scandal of the last 20 years and couillard still chose him to run in a quebec city riding. sad but true.
Oh, Couillard will come to their rescue at the absolute last second. He needs a more reprehensible alternative to hang over the English Montreal area. Without one, he won't have free rein to take them for granted.
ReplyDeleteI agree. As I've pointed out on this blog previously, when Pierre Trudeau left office in the mid '80s, support for sovereignty was significantly lower than it is today. Only a few short years later and one humiliation later (i.e., Meech Lake) and support zoomed up, resulting in a near loss to the "yes" side in 1995.
ReplyDelete