Magical Maxime

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 1:42 PM - 40 Comments

An anonymous Conservative explains Maxime Bernier.

“It’s useful in inspiring the base and broadening public debate,” said one Conservative. “He’s mostly harmless, especially since the media knows he doesn’t speak for the government. I love what he’s saying.”

Meanwhile, the NDP’s Thomas Mulcair thinks Mr. Bernier should be ejected from the Conservative caucus if he has expressed an opinion that Mr. Harper disagrees with. From Mr. Mulcair’s scrum on Monday. Continue…

'I speak here as a Quebecer'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 10:59 AM - 41 Comments

Maxime Bernier doubles down on his criticism of Bill 101.

Some people say I am not a “real Quebecer” and are accusing me of “attacking Quebec” simply because I want to be more popular in the rest of Canada. They seem unable to conceive that it’s possible to have a different position than theirs on the basis of fundamental principles.

My position is this: Yes, it’s important that Quebec remain a predominantly French-language society. And ideally, everyone in Quebec should be able to speak French. But we should not try to reach this goal by restricting people’s rights and freedom of choice.

When God and politics collide

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, November 19, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 16 Comments

Photograph by Christinne Muschi

So Tony Blair, former prime minister of the Queen’s England, home of the shoe bomber and the London subway terror bombings, a country riven by tension over a growing Muslim population, walks into a Quebec hall to talk about reasonable accommodation.

Fish-out-of-water daydream? Set-up to a tasteless joke? No. The former British prime minister actually did as much in Montreal last week. Blair, at once a devout Catholic and ex-prime minister of notably secular Britain, has spent much of the last three years promoting the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which aims to show how “faith is a powerful force for good in the modern world.”

“I became Middle East envoy for Israel and Palestine, so that’s been quite challenging. And then I decided to try and bring religious faiths of the world together and create an understanding, so that’s been quite a challenge, too,” Blair, sitting in an ornate red leather chair, said to a crowd of about 400 gathered in a downtown ballroom. “And then I decided to do some work on climate change, so this is probably an indication of Napoleonic delusion.”

Continue…

Just give the man his baguel and no one will get hurt

By Philippe Gohier - Monday, November 23, 2009 at 3:37 PM - 32 Comments

At this weekend’s PQ brainstorming session—don’t call it a convention!—party members spent much of their time debating just how far they should extend Bill 101′s tentacles. As reported by Le Devoir‘s Antoine Robitaille, party president Jonathan Valois even made a strangely personal plea to Montreal’s wretched Anglos, whose doughy delicacies he just can’t resist:

[That French is disappearing] is a feeling many Montrealers share. Sometimes, it annoys us when I can’t buy a bagel in French. It annoys me. And that’s part of daily life for Montrealers.

It’s all true. In fact, that’s why I moved to Toronto. My last apartment in Montreal was just a few short blocks away from both St-Viateur Bagel and Fairmount Bagel, and the stress was overwhelming: O lord, when will you finally deliver Jonathan Valois from the modern-day calvary that is bagel shopping in this godforsaken place?

Thankfully, where I live now, bagels aren’t worth buying in any language. Deliverance at last.

Maclean's Interview: Louise Beaudoin

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 20 Comments

Louise Beaudoin has been at the forefront of Quebec’s sovereignty movement for over 40 years. As a cabinet minister in three Parti Québécois governments, she was largely responsible for the province’s language laws. Now, as a Montreal-area MNA, she is one of the main architects of the party’s new “plan for a sovereign Quebec,” which would use “sectoral referendums” in order to wrestle powers like taxation and culture away from Ottawa.

Q: Tell me about the PQ’s latest plan for a sovereign Quebec.

A: We thought it was time to remobilize the sovereignist troops and relaunch the sovereignty debate. We want to do away with the waiting game. It’s nice to say that we are going to wait for that big night where everything falls into place, but we know this won’t magically happen. So the best way to reignite the debate is this plan that [PQ leader] Pauline Marois has presented. We want to be transparent in what we are doing and what we want. The first thing, of course, is for Ottawa to respect the constitution of 1867, that is to say Quebec’s powers, as well as those that are shared with the federal government, as well as to reclaim certain powers that we think are necessary for Quebec’s development.

Q: In concrete terms, how do you arrive at getting these powers for Quebec?

A: We’ve already started. A year and a half ago we put forward our proposed law on Quebec identity and citizenship. When we get into power we will reintroduce this bill. Continue…

Megapundit: Tell another one, Uncle Gerry!

By selley - Monday, September 22, 2008 at 3:20 PM - 14 Comments

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Christie Blatchford on Gerry Ritz; Doug Saunders on the Eurabia hypothesis; David Olive on uniting the left; John Ivison in northern Ontario; Rosie DiManno and Peter Worthington on Afghanistan; Scott Taylor on Canada and the Caucasus; Konrad Yakabuski on Justin Trudeau; L. Ian MacDonald on what Jean Charest’s up to.

On the issues
Behold: all the things we’re not talking about!

The Toronto Sun‘s Peter Worthington is not impressed by the “tomb of silence” in which the Harperites have sealed all matters military: notably, committing to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011 and replacing the outspoken Rick Hillier with Walter Natynczyk, who seems more shy about vocally “standing up for soldiers and reviving our combat character”—both of which, in Worthington’s view, seem to make the Prime Minister “nervous.” The army needs at least “an additional brigade,” he argues, and ideally to double in size, but recent events lead him to fear that “lethargy is again taking over before the military rebuilding job is done.”

“The yearning for peace in Afghanistan hasn’t dwindled,” the Toronto Star‘s Rosie DiManno assures us, but “there is growing disenchantment with NATO, which clearly can’t contend with a resurgent Taliban.” American troops redeployed from Iraq might be able to do the job, she argues, but “the whole point of NATO taking over responsibility of Afghanistan—besides justifying its existence post Cold War—was to put a multinational face, earnest and humanitarian, on the mission.” Due to many factors including the component nations’ inability or unwillingness to commit enough troops to combat duty, DiManno seems more or less ready to call that mission a failure.

Continue…

"I think they're quite proud of being Anglo Québécois and not just another Anglo from Minnesota."

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, September 8, 2008 at 11:15 AM - 13 Comments

Recently, one half of Deux Maudits Anglais spoke with Angry French Guy (real name unknown) who writes a spiffy little Quebec issues blog from somewhere west of Atwater Avenue in Montreal. As the quotation above his blog suggests (bless you, Chuck D) he is about as angry as we are goddamned – that is to say, very. He recently recounted a lovely yarn that smelled of 1970s-era language politics: a Montreal car dealer who refuses to translate his website into French. Nice guy that he is, Angry wrote him a note in his impeccable English. Much hilarity, and a complaint to l’Office québécois de la langue française, ensued.
Continue…

In praise of the open-face sandwich

By selley - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 1:13 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Rosie DiManno on Afghan politics; Terence Corcoran and Greg Weston on immigration reform; James Travers on access to information; Jonathan Kay on Selwyn House.

Backlogged and gob-smacked
It’s not as easy to process 900,000 backed-up immigration claims as you think!

“There must be better ways to tame an unruly bureaucracy” at Citizenship and Immigration Canada than to hand unprecedented control over immigration to the minister, Terence Corcoran argues in the Financial Post. Bill C-50, which proposes to do just that, leaves the system vulnerable to “arbitrary political power and abuse,” he argues, and he doesn’t even understand how it’s going to solve the backlog. The big questions still need to be answered, he insists. Why issue temporary worker permits to people whose skills we need, and permanent status to hundreds of thousands whose skills we don’t? And why are we admitting no more immigrants today than we were in 1992?

Sun Media’s Greg Weston has discovered another “rather significant glitch” in the government’s plan to wade into the backlog and pluck out the people we need: “officials tell us there is nothing in their computers to distinguish the doctors from the ditch-diggers.” Continue…