First Marois is guilty for making hard choices to balance the budget, then for not balancing it enough. Make up your mind and avoid selectivly bashing the Souverainiste mouvement while giving a free pass to others.

I say ”not balancing it enough”, because the anexationist Liberal government didn’t change the way they hold the books. So done with your first double-standard. (As a bonus they actually also did illegal stuff, plenty of it. I would have enjoyed them in jail for their systematic frauds and a couple of them, like Tony Tomassi, might indeed go to jail.)

Anexionists liberals didn’t repair the healthcare system, by the way waiting lists got worse.

Also would you please drop the ”think of the children” moral panic about the education reform now that we clearly saw that students from reformed education perform just as well or slightly better when they reach non-reformed upper education? Our made-in-Québec education model works fine. It would be greately appreciated if you kept the souverainiste-bashing at least distantly connected to reality.

She also screwed up the education system royally. Because this is a “Made in Quebec” program, all the books fo rthe education have to be by Quebec authors. As a result, the program is now being implemented at the senior secondary level. The English schools will have to wait for up to 2 years before the books are translated, while the French schools have had the books in their inventories sfor over a year.

Now I regress to her stint as Finance minister. I wouldn’t trust her with my allowance. It seems that 24 billion of debt was conveniently hidden from the incoming Liberal government. She declared later, that they used standard business practices. These are they same accounting tricks used by Enron. So why wasn’t she prosecuted and put in jail.

I like you Acajack, you think clearly. It was a neologism in english for me too, had to look it up. I don’t recognize the legitimity of 1867, which is continuous , on a straight line, with 1837-39. Also, since it’s always better to start from somewhere, I choose to start with Maurice Séguin’s work, where the term ‘séparatisme’ is predominently used to refer to the continuing ideology of the existence of a separate Canadien (later French-Canadian) nation, not a political project per se. One of his masterworks is titled ‘Histoire de deux nationalismes au Canada’; sounds like a tempting read, doesn’t it? It delivers.

When media like Macleans poll Canadians and ask people which province is the most racist/intolerant/xenophobic, people in the 9 other provinces always pick Quebec first by a wide margin (Alberta is usually a distant second). Then, a few columns later in the same article are the numbers where people from each of the provinces were themselves surveyed on racial questions, and Quebecers will generally answer with what one would call racist attitudes in strikingly similar proportions to other Canadians (and sometimes in lower proportions than certain provinces).

Now, you should note that I am not a Quebec separatist looking for examples of stuff like this in order to justify Quebec leaving Canada. I am just relating what I see, hear and read out there.

As for calling off the dogs, I have tried. I’ve been banned a couple of times by the friendly folks at Canadadivided.com and I had a series of funny e-mail exchanges with the leader of Affiliation Quebec a little while back. But in the end, those people don’t need my ridcule, as the ridiculousness of their arguments is already obvious to anyone who reads their material.

It does appear childish to do this it is true. However, perhaps people like AFG wouldn’t feel the need to do it if there weren’t 567,975,567,555* instances in the blogosphere and even in serious media (cf Jan Wong) that strongly suggest that Quebec is the most racist, xenophobic, ethnocentric of places where the election of someone like Kotto is totally impossible (I am actually being polite here, as things are normally much more vitriolic than that), usually accompanied by self-righteous statements of how the Rest of Canada is a multicultural nirvana-land of milk and honey.

I for one would be more than happy to see all of this silliness come to an end. So call off your dogs Anglo-Canada and then maybe we can have a real adult discussion.

*VM, you yourself actually contributed number 567,975,567,556 when you referred to “crazed nationalists” on another thread in this very blog on May 24!

“It’s nothing to be proud of, but… quand on se compare on se console…”-AFG

Yeah, let’s stop doing that please, because it doesn’t help in the slightest.

If you look at it from the point of view of semantics, the word “separatist” implies taking something out of an existing whole. The implication is that the break you want to make is somehow unnatural or artificial.

“Annexationist” has the same undertones, but from the other extreme. It implies that something that already existed legitimately on its own has been forcibly amalgamated with another entity. Once again, the undertone is that the amalgamation of the two is somehow unnatural and artificial.