Graham

Due to montrealais in metaquotes's latest tribute to Stephen Harper:

[Governors General are] constitutional fire extinguishers with a potent mixture of powers for use in great emergencies....Like real extinguishers, they appear in bright colours and are strategically located.
- Frank McKinnon

For those of you not versed in this, which is to say everyone I imagine, as I'm the only person with any particular reason to pay attention to Canadian politics and this caught me by surprise: Stephen Harper of the Conservative party is currently Canada's Prime Minister. He proposed in the budget to cut public funding for the political parties, which would have had the effect of stripping 67% of the funding of his party's two main rivals. Said rivals have decided to oust him in consequence, much to my delight. Harper has apparently not anticipated this event and is having a very large and emotional and public and apparently totally ineffective cow over it and is talking about adjourning Parliament early this year to save his butt.

Inasmuch as my current Canadian political opinions are largely "Ruin to the Conservatives!" this has me giddy with delight. So entertained. This is possibly the stupidest thing we have seen since Joe Clark couldn't count back in 1982.

I’m straight, would be in a heterosexual marriage were I married, and I want nothing to do with the “Yes on 8” bigots.

As someone who still considers himself to be a Canadian despite nearly twenty years spent living in the US, I suppose it behooves me to comment on the recent Quebecois provincial elections, even though CNN (for example) seems to pretend that they don't exist.

We left Canada largely due to Quebecois politics; my father's research lab was being moved to Montreal in one of a long series of attempts at appeasement. My political positions were largely frozen in amber when we left, due to a lack of real information. I rejoiced at the disintegration of the Progressive Conservatives under Kim Campbell, but I was maybe 15 when that happened. My position regarding Quebec was nebulous and poorly defined until the 1995 referendum; the tactics used and the prospect that my home country, with which I still identified strongly, would be dissolved was scary. Particularly telling for me was the rally post election where Premier Jacques Parizeau blamed the defeat on money and ethnic votes; the Quebecois separatists have historically and to this day regarded the Quebec First Nations (think native Americans) as just another immigrant group.

While my personal view of Canada most certainly includes Quebec, and I am willing to defend the idea of Quebec culture as a distinct entity that ought to be preserved, I am strongly negatively inclined toward the idea of some ideologues splitting my country up. It has consumed an enormous amount of energy on both sides of the debate. For nearly thirty years the Parti Québécois and federalist parties have been in a continuous single issue election battle, solely over separatism, and separatism of a very narrow sort; the Quebec First Nations almost uniformly do not want to be governed by the separatists, but somehow Quebec is indivisible even if Canada is not. Little things like governance, incompetence, corruption fall by the wayside because to vote the Liberals, say, out means voting the PQ in. It has been not unlike today in the US where I feel compelled to vote for, say, Dianne Feinstein as California senator even though some of her sops to Hollywood have been utterly repellent, because a vote for anyone else amounts to a vote for Republican control over the Senate. Predictably the governance of Quebec as a province has been shockingly bad.

This week, the incumbent Quebec branch of the Liberal party, which held a majority government, has retained instead a minority position opposed by a new party, the ADQ, and in third place is the PQ. Even though I find the ADQ's policies repellent (they are a reactionary response not unlike the Reformists of old) their mere presence will hopefully lead to saner Quebecois politics and in turn a future for Canada as a whole that does not involve a knife at its throat.