Tasha Kheiriddin - Quebec stole the political spotlight again this week, with a slew of stories which range from the eye-rolling to the outrageous — depending on where you live and pay taxes.
On Monday, former Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe found a new job, as a columnist and commentator for the French CBC. Cue the fury in English Canada; has Mr. Duceppe not taken enough money from the country he purportedly wants to break up? Presumably his House of Commons pension wasn’t rich enough, or maybe he wanted to share more of the wisdom that cost his party 43 of its 47 seats in the last election. Whatever the reason, it was short-lived; Wednesday afternoon, Duceppe quit before ever taking to the airwaves.
Then, in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Quebec Premier Jean Charest was briefly — and falsely — declared dead of a heart attack. Hackers planted a phony story on French-language newspaper Le Devoir’s website, which made the rounds of social media for a few hours before the entire site had to be shut down. Mr. Charest laughed off the incident, but while he is personally very much alive, his party isn’t exactly the picture of good health. Neither is the Opposition Parti Québécois; indeed, both are facing new threats from two separate quarters which surfaced in the past few days.
The first is the theoretical merger of the Action Democratique du Quebec (ADQ) and the recently formed Coalition pour l’Avenir du Quebec (CAQ). Independent MNA Eric Caire is the latest voice calling for this marriage of convenience: Polls show it would clobber both the Liberals and the PQ in the next provincial election, which must be held by 2013. At the Liberals’ youth convention this past weekend, Mr. Charest dismissed this possibility, retorting that ADQ leader Gerard Deltell would have to surrender his political principles for this to happen. (Of course, Mr. Charest failed to mention his own seamless transition from federal Conservative to provincial Liberal in 1998, when power beckoned in the form of the possible Premiership of Quebec. Hmm.)
Then on Tuesday a new separatist group, Le Nouveau Mouvement pour le Quebec (NMQ) published a manifesto entitled “Breaking the Impasse.” Signed by 80 Quebec separatists, and initiated by former Parti Québécois organizer Jocelyn Desjardins, who quit the PQ in April, the document accuses the PQ of being “used and confused.” The status quo represents “a perpetual retreat for the autonomy of Quebec.” PQ leader Pauline Marois dismissed the new group as simply one among the 50 or so existing separatist movements, but they still managed to get airtime and plenty of media attention.
The backdrop to these “juicy” stories, sadly, remains the same. Montreal overpasses continue to shed slabs of concrete. Hospital waiting lists stretch to the horizon. Twelve percent of high school students drop out before graduation — the highest rate in Canada, and twice that of the lowest, B.C. The provincial debt creeps ever upward, standing today at $239-billion. And so on, and so on, and so on.
Living as I now do in Ontario, I miss a lot of things about Quebec, but not its wilful blindness. Quebecers, and even more so their leaders, have an incredible ability to use “the national question” to distract themselves from the real question: how to deliver priorities such as infrastructure, health care and education. Sewers aren’t sexy, but separatism is. This unfortunate reality means that all the players seize on the issue, whenever it crops up, and use it for their own devices.
Good governance has to stop taking a back seat to promoting separatism. It is the fundamental job of elected politicians, trustees of the public’s funds. Until Quebecers and their leaders finally figure this out, they will continue to ride the nationalist rollercoaster, distracting themselves with rhetoric and what-ifs, fiddling while the province burns.
National Post