Le fin de la revolution tranquille

It's election day in Quebec, and while the polls foretell a minority government with the Union Nationale...er....Action Democratique de Quebec holding the balance of power, it's more than apparent that such a result means all of Quebec loses.

Perhaps it was reading too many plays by Michel Tremblay or watching Gilles Duceppe take his opponents to school in the leaders debates, but this page has always empathized with the Sovereigntist cause. Canadians, particularly in the Alberta where I was born and raised, like to believe that Quebec should conduct herself like any other province. Such a sentiment might find a hearing with this page if Quebec hadn't been treated like English Canada's colony from the Plains of Abraham to 1976. Andre Bosclair's comment about service at Eaton's only being in English? He wasn't making that up.

Things started to change around the 1960's when Jean Lesage declared that Quebecers would be "Maitres chez nous" (Masters in our own house) and started creating institutional counterweights to the power of Anglophone capitalists and their sycophants in the Catholic Church. The Quiet Revolution turned up the volume when Rene Levesque and the Parti Quebecois won the 1976 election: for the first time Quebeckers could talk about building thier own nation without fear of being sent to prison like some of them were in October of 1970.

The psychodramatic carousel of accords and referrenda that followed has nothing to do with the fact that over the past few decades, Quebec has been building a nation relatively free of old world influence. It was under Levesque that Quebec took control of its immigration policy, and to the chagrin of "pur laine" Quebecois, declared that a "Quebecker is a Quebecker is a Quebecker", whether they hailed from Mont-Blanc or Morocco.

Unfortunately, the carousel ride has made some Quebeckers a little too dizzy to remember that tradition of tolerance, and are rallying to the anti-immigrant xenophobia of Mario Dumont and the ADQ. There is something seriously wrong when a culture that historically portrays itself as a victimized minority turns around and victimizes another minority, ie. Muslim immigrants. Standing up for the stupidity in Herouxville while pursuing a Stephen Harper - friendly economic platform makes Dumont into something of a Petit Duplessis. Lysiane Gagnon can claim in today's Globe & Mail that Quebec's progressiveness was aways "a myth", but compared to Mike Harris, Ralph Klein, or Gordon Campbell, that myth defaults to the truth.

Here's hoping that strategic voting and vote splitting condemns those furthest on the right (the Liberals & the ADQ) to watching a surprise PQ majority that will have everyone (including a would-be unhappy Stephen Harper) screaming for proportional representation.