quebec punditocracy

Vincent Marissal, who has always struck me as an eternally cynical fellow, today shows why politics, especially of the type we’ve seen over the last week, is an inherently cynicism-inducing practice. He notes how Stephen Harper’s has often depended on the Bloc Québécois’ support to pass crucial legislation, and whose very tenure as prime minister has been thanks largely to the very separatists he now decries. “Mr. Harper says Bloc MPs have the right to sit in the House of Commons, but must be isolated because they are counter to the ‘real’ interests of Canada,” Marrisal writes. “Coming from a prime minister who has survived his first throne speech in 2006 and a budget in 2007, this is frankly dishonest.” (DMA would also like to point out that the Conservatives bragged very loudly about the Bloc’s support of its measures, back when it was politically expedient to do so.) On the other side of the bench, Marrisal rains on Bob Rae who, for the sake of wanting to lead the Liberal party, endorsed a coalition led by Stéphane Dion. “[Rae] has held onto his dream of leading the party, and doesn’t have the grace to cede his spot to caucus favourite Michael Ignatieff.”

Opinion is a fleeting thing in these fluid days of the Otta-brouhaha™. This morning’s columns, some of which raised the doom-and-gloom spectre of a full-blown ‘national unity crisis’, seem rather quaint since Michaëlle Jean acquiesced and gave parliamentarians a six-week holiday. Still, as Le Devoir’s Michel David points out in a prescient column today, today’s prorogation “only postpones the inevitable” and, at the very worst, only extends what David calls Stephen Harper’s “dangerous game” of flogging the national unity issue for political gain. “When passions arise, nuance disappears,” David writes. “The words ‘separatist’, ‘Québécois and ‘Francophone’ quickly become synonyms. It only takes one instance during a pro-Conservative rally for a bunch of fanatics to stomp on the Quebec flag, like what happened in Brockville in 1989, to put fire to gunpowder.”

This is the first installment of DMA’s daily roundup of Quebec’s leading columnists, which will continue through this coalition business.

La Presse’s Patrick Lagacé wanders off to Calgary to do his boss’s bidding–that is to say, find out if Western Canadians are mad. His answer? Yessum. “If they were Québécois, Albertans would probably be en tabarnac,” Lagacé writes today. He chats with Alan Hallman, Ralph Klein’s former campaign manager, who unloads on the coalition government plan with great quotable gusto. Interestingly enough, it isn’t Gilles Duceppe’s merry band of separatist agitators that irritates Mr. Hallman the most. Rather, it is that the spectre of a Liberal-led coalition government looks and smells just like a return to Trudeau-era government intervention (National Energy Program, still a bone in Alberta’s throat after 28 years) and rampant Central Canada favouritism.