Not much is heard from the federal conservative leader these days. He is letting some of his conservative MPs take the heat. He can let his Quebec lieutenant, Pierre Paul-Hus MP, tell the House of Commons that his conservatives support the bigotry of the Quebec government. This is not what Poilievre has been saying but he obviously wants to have it both ways. He wants English Canada to think he wants fair treatment for Anglophones in Quebec, while Quebec voters think he backs their National Assembly’s bigotry.
It reminds you of Prime Minister Mackenzie-King’s stance on conscription in the Second World War. It was something like ‘conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription.’ It did not work for the war-time prime minister and it would hardly work today.
The problem in Quebec today is that the CAQ government of François Legault has gone overboard in restricting English language use, to match its religious bigotry. This is just getting even as far as many seniors and farmers feel but the world has passed them by. It is the young people who think it is silly. The Legault government has annoyed them by restricting their access to, and use of English. They consider it to be sophisticated to speak both English and French. They want to travel the world and experience what it has to offer. They are not impressed with just the Francophonie with its world population smaller than that of the United States of America.
What the Legault government does not realize is that they are hurting the long term economic prospects of their own province. They have already hurt the prospects of Montreal as being a world city. As a bilingual city, Montreal had many opportunities to become the dominant Canadian city in world shipping and banking. Losing that position to Toronto and Vancouver was a process heightened by the Quebec péquistes. The Legault government is just accelerating building a wall around Quebec.
It seems to me that if I was a prominent member of the Trudeau cabinet and an MP from Quebec, I would look for speaking opportunities at Quebec universities and lay it on the line to the students. The Legault government is trying to deny them full access to the world. And that quisling Poilievre would aid Legault.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
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