08/23/2012
From: A Reader In Canada [Send Her Mail]
Is anybody there following the interesting developments in Quebec?
Tasha Kheiriddin: In Quebec, xenophobia is alive and well, National Post, August 16, 2012
Racist or not? When it comes to the Quebec election campaign, remarks made this week by a variety of politicians provided considerable fodder for debate, and considerable distraction from the real issues — health, taxes and corruption — that voters actually want their elected officials to talk about.
First, Coalition Avenir Québec leader François Legault lambasted young Quebecers for being interested in living “the good life,” unlike children in Asia whose parents all want them to become engineers, and have to stop them from studying lest they make themselves sick. When he was attacked for this remarks, he retorted that the fault lies with Quebec parents, and that they should review the values they are transmitting to their children.
Mr. Legault’s comments bring to mind similar views expressed in 2010 by then aspiring-Toronto mayor Rob Ford, who remarked that “Asians work like dogs.” Those observations were understandably not well received by members of the Asian community in Toronto, and Mr. Legault’s remarks were similarly panned, notably in Quebec’s social media.
But Mr. Legault stood by his comments. He then tried tying them to economic issues, remarking that “we can’t continue to live above our means, have the highest debt, have the same social programs, and an average income that is lower than others. At some point we have to be realistic, it doesn’t compute.”
On that score, Mr. Legault is right: Quebec has bred an entitlement society several generations old, the most recent product of which is the student “movement” that opposed a $350-a-year increase in tuition fees that would still leave students with the lowest university costs in Canada. Mr. Legault didn’t need to compare Quebec kids to their counterparts in Asia to make this point: He could have simply called out their own self-interested folly.
His remarks pale in comparison, however, to the xenophobic tone of those made by Parti Québécois ledaer Pauline Marois, and worse yet, the mayor of Saguenay, Jean Tremblay.
On Tuesday, Ms. Marois unveiled her party’s desire to implement a “Secular Charter” which would ban the wearing of any religious symbols by government employees. With, as my colleague Chris Selley tartly notes on these pages, one notable exception: Symbols of Christian faith, such as the cross which hangs over the Speakers’ Chair in the National Assembly. In other words, a crucifix necklace, good: hijabs and yarmulkes, bad.
The irony is that the Quebec civil service is almost uniformly white, Catholic and French already. According to statistics compiled by Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations in 2008, only “5.3% of the Quebec civil service is made up of people other than French Canadian, while ethnic minorities, anglophones and Aboriginal peoples make up more than 20% of the Quebec population.”[More]
By James Fulford writes: We haven’t been following it, but thanks to Peter Brimelow having written the (still) influential book The Patriot Game: National Dreams and Political Realities, we already know what to think about it.
The air of shock from Ms. Kheiriddin and other commenters is caused by them forgetting, or never having realized, that the Parti Quebecois has always been a racial nationalist party, like the BNP, the True Finns, or the Vlaams Belang.
Quebec is the only place in North America, where a political candidate will declare, while running for office, that he is of pure blood. (The expression used is “pure laine Québécoise”, which means just that. )
However, when the PQ directed their racial animosity against white, Anglo-Saxon Canadians, the racial nationalism, however hateful in, say modern Austria, was somehow invisible, and not hateful at all.
But thanks to Trudeau’s globalist, federalist immigration policy, monocultural Quebec, which has never enjoyed being part of an English country, has been invaded by the Third World. In a post about Canada’s abolition of capital punishment at the beginning of the immigration age, I wrote, referring to
the race riots that happened recently in Montreal, in what the Globe And Mail calls a "downtrodden" immigrant neighborhood. Before modern immigration, Quebec was a distinct society of two kinds of white people who almost got along. Then came mass immigration.
And if Canada really, really, wants a multi-racial, multi-ethnic country where all expressions of nationalism are banned, then they'll be better off letting Quebec go.
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