There’s an elephant in the Canadian room right now that this publication still hasn’t addressed. There’s a new Premier on the scene, and she (apparently) means business. Pauline Marois has spent the last two months saying deliberately shocking things to rile up anglophone Quebeckers and the citizens of the so-called “Rest of Canada” (or ROC, for short). Here are a few reasons why you shouldn’t care.
First of all, Marois and her new Parti Québécois (PQ) government have their work cut out for them. They currently await the results of an inquiry into corruption in Québec’s construction industry. No one doubts the result – the presence of organized crime in Québec infrastructure has been a fact of life for many years, driving up the cost of construction to the point where the provincial and municipal governments of Québec have simply neglected to repair many ailing features of the transportation network. Following the release of this report, rampant infrastructure problems will be front and centre, forcing the new government to deal with them in some way.
Second, when the public demands these expenditures, the government will then, of course, have to find a way to pay for them: the PQ has promised to balance the province’s budget in 2013. Québec’s public debt is already over $250 billion, over 70% of the province’s GDP. With the PQ’s recent (and not wholly unexpected) announcement that its government will stay the much-ballyhooed tuition increases championed by the previous Liberal government, and with Québec’s tax rates already the highest in North America, they will find themselves rather stuck on the matter of how to keep the Ville Marie tunnel from caving in.
Third, some of the more inflammatory statements from the campaign will likely never make it into PQ policy. In the final days before the election, Marois attempted to assuage the concerns of anglophone Quebeckers, telling them that their language rights are not in danger. Emerging from her first Cabinet meeting on September 20, Marois announced that she was making good on several campaign promises, none of which had anything to do with language or sovereignty. Québec’s electorate only gave the PQ a minority government, essentially giving the opposition parties a collective veto on any controversial legislation, which would include calling a referendum on sovereignty or abridging anglophones’ language rights with potentially unconstitutional legislation.
In other words, the new PQ government is just like any other minority government, for the time being: subject to the demands of the opposition and mired in pre-existing issues that distract from the party’s true ideological raison d’être. In 1972, the Obiter Dicta published a story about the FLQ crisis. Sovereigntism has been in the news for the past 40 years, and every once in a while it causes a major stir. Whether or not sovereignty is a good idea is another debate; a debate that, despite the PQ’s tireless campaigning, Quebeckers simply won’t have under this government. They are much too busy with other things, and don’t have enough power.
So, if Pauline Marois wants to take her oath of office without the Canadian flag present, let her. Her government is about to walk into a veritable shitstorm, and I think the ROC can afford her one small mercy.