Vineon

Thanks for clearing it up, bro. Interesting that a group whose real intentions are to eliminate all borders would paradoxically publicly promote creating new ones. But hey, this all seems to make sense in your head and that's really all that counts in the end. Good story, keep it up.

"You're" not paying him anything. The 'separatists' that vote for Duceppe and his acolytes also work and pay their taxes to the Canadian government. The day you kick them out of the country or refuse their fiscal contribution will the be day you'll have the legitimacy to complain about Duceppe's salary as a MP.

Unless there is something I don't understand, Radio-Canada is nearly pretty much "just for the french". You won't see him on english CBC.

What you obviously arent interested to understand, is that Ottawa gets its money FROM the provinces. It isn't money that magically appears and belongs to Ottawa which in a swing of generosity give to the provinces but money it collects FROM them and then redistributes. The Québécois HAVE paid their share of taxes since the start on those 'investments' you speak of. Now every single province is responsible for the Canadian national debt and should any of them leave the federation, they will take their share of it. If Québec's population equals 23% of the original country, it's a fair bet they'll leave with 23% of the Canadian debt. That however also means that it leaves with 23% of all Canadian assets, for example 23% of everything that was spent in its military. This is how you break an union. Don't put the "west" on such a high pedestal, for decades leading to the oil boom, the prairies were very poor. Yet still today when oil is extremely profitable, it still gets subsidied by the Canadian government. The CN railway to the pacific was paid heavily by eastern Canada. There would have been no west without it. I can even go as far back as saying the union of Upper and Lower Canada had for one objective to help pay Upper Canada's huge debt with Lower Canada's money. Now what would be interests on those tens of decades later? None of this will actually be part of the negotiations. Leaving with our part of the Canadian debt IS "paying back the money invested in the province" because Ottawa pumps its money from its constituant provinces, not from anywhere else.

If any of you paid any attention to what I said, I did mention that a seceding province would take its due part of the Canadian national debt (along with the same % of Canadian assets). It is a simple transfer, not a new debt to the original host country. If Quebec seceded, it wouldn't owe Canada any money, it would simply relieve it of part of its debt. In theory, a seceding province wouldn't be more indebted after seceding than it was before, this 'new' debt was already it's own within the federation. Not a single separatist has ever claimed Québec could secede without taking a chunk of the Canadian debt with it, but this happens to be something Canadians like to believe in their efforts to convince themselves that secessionist aspirations can only be explained by ignorance.

While Québec is a more indebted province than most, it is also one with much more assets following nationalising efforts in the last 5-6 decades. That is worth a lot of money, there was even speculation that selling Hydro-Québec alone could probably be enough to clear the provincial debt. When assets are taken into consideration, that is by comparing net debts rather than gross debts, Québec, even with it's part of the Canadian debt included, fares better than the OECD average. Québec does not receive 8 bils in transfer payments. It receives about this much in equalization, which is only a small part of federal transfer payments to the province. This is an amount on the decline anyway, not due to Québec getting richer but Ontario getting poorer, seeing as the equalization pot is fixed to a certain amount. Every transfer from Ottawa to the provinces and its constituants must be taken into consideration to draw decent comparisons : when Canadian taxpayers injected 5 bils into the Ontarian automobile industry, that is not something you would have noticed in the equalization column. Its certainly not any less Canadian money distributed to only one province. What Québec gets from Ottawa than it doesn't send to it is much, much less than 8 billions a year. A seceding Québec is certainly without an army until Québec can seize its part of Canada's. Until that moment, I frankly can't envision how that is a problem. There is nothing in Québec for the Canadian army to invade, unless they really want to tarnish their great international image. There are no armed rebels to eliminate. Last year's deficit, this 4.2 bils you spoke of, all things considered is a very low one. Unless you failed to notice, the world endured a recession and even resource rich heavy provinces like Alberta scored deficits (their first in I dont know how many years..). In comparison, Ontario's yearly deficit was about 25 bils.. and wasn't Canada's something like 60 bils? Québec is still planning a return to no-deficit budgets earlier than Ontario.

That's retarded. It isn't as if Saskatchewan, Québec or any other province didn't contribute to the federal pot all these years. At the base, the federal gets its money from the provinces, which it then uses to redistributes however it sees fit. No province owes anything whatsoever to the federal government. If a province leaves, it simply takes its due part of the national debt, that is the debt they leave with (along with the same % of national assets).

And I didn't say they were "entirely" defined by the french language but I certainly did imply that they are less arbitrarely drawn than some other provinces'. Yes, the Nunavik is certainly an exception and I did note that. French is also a minority language there as well, for the record, and Québec still considers it part of its territory. Besides, is english even the most spoken language in Labrador? No I've never been to Timmins, nor Sudbury, nor St-Boniface or where any small pocket of french still subsists in Ontario and western Canada. There are also still some Germans in Alsace-Lorraine and in western Belgium. What this all doesn't change, is that the border from Québec to Ontario is probably the least "arbitrarely drawn" border in Canada regardless of small pockets of french west of it and small pockets of english east of it.

And my point was that your knowledge of Québec music hasn't been renewed for a while.

I think it ridiculous to compare Québec sovereignism with secession threats from extremely marginal groups in other provinces. No province has 'tried' anything quite like (or anything even remotely close to) what Québec has under actually elected secessionist governments.

Québec's nationalism is rooted in the french language, which isn't an 'arbitrary construct'. While I'll instantly agree there are french Canadians outside Québec, the large majority of them happen to live there. It is extremely clear to me that borders between say Manitoba and Saskatchewan are infinitely more 'arbitrary constructions' than borders separating Québec from its neighbours. I aknowledge there are anglophones, First Nations and allophones but associating Quebec nationalism, which derives from the french fact, with the Québec territory isn't all that odd. French does more or less stop on the Outaouais river, French certainly doesn't it make it far into American territory. Out east, French turns to Chiac in Acadia, a people which has considered itself distinct from the Québec French since the freaking dawn of this continent. I would say Québec is easily in fact very socioculturally shaped, certainly more so than any other province, at the very least. If there is one arbitrary construct, it is the north.

It's not? I don't think there is something that was ever 'clear' about the 'Clarity Act', which deserves its name as much as le fromage 'Petit Québec'. It's advertised to be about establishing conditions under which Canada would negotiate the secession of one of its consituant provinces but clearly, it really isn't it. Does it explain what is a clear enough question for a public consultation on independence? No, which is a problem considering any question can arbitrarely be deemed 'not clear enough' following a referendum. Does it specify what exactly is a 'large enough majority'? Is it 60%? 70%? Who knows? Just as arbitrarely, any majority can be deemed not large enough. It's as if I told you, heres one thousand dollars, you can get it if you jump high enough. That you try your hardest and beat your own personal record isn't going to help : I had in mind to keep that thousand dollars, however high you get I will decide wasn't enough. The Clarity Act serves the very purpose of forcing a province to remain in Canada. It manages to impose conditions that not only aren't revealed, but don't even actually exist.

The 'undecided' exist very much likely a whole lot more within the federalist %. You do not vote for so deep a change if you are 'undecided', you stick with the status quo. What is commonly heard amongst political analysts in Québec, is that the population is divided between a third that are staunch sovereignists, a third that are undying federalists and a remaining third more or less on the fence.

What the hell is this? This is not what I was asking for. Moreover, there is a figure in there, at 34% (hardest possible question) on whether Québec should separate or not, that you entirely decided to ignore. That % is more in touch with the actual base that always supports sovereignty, regardless of which way the wind blows. You simply should not divide the answer into 3 possibilities. One of them is essentially federalism reform and it has shown to be an impossibility with both the failures of Meech and Charlottetown. What happened in the past in these cases of failure, is a swing from those that seek reform to suddenly support Québec sovereignty. If there was a new referendum held today, the choice would be made between Québec sovereignty and status quo, not between Québec sovereignty, federalism reform and status quo. In a 2 choices polling, the Québécois do favour sovereignty by a 38-45% ratio.

For someone that claims to know anything whatsoever about Québec politics, you sure do a disaster of a job interpreting polling in the province. I swear polls regarding Québec sovereignty are nearly published weekly in the province and never in 30+ years has support for sovereignty been as low as 20-25%, not even when the "hardest question" is asked. Can we get a single source that would corroborate that number?

This is not true any way you look at it. In terms of raw total amount of transfer payments transfered from Ottawa to the provinces, Ontario gets the most. It is also the most populated province, which means we really rather should look at transfers per capita. ... and if we do that, the Maritime provinces and Manitoba (and the territories) receive more federal transfer payments per capita than does Québec, putting it in the middle of the pack.

Utter bullshit. Québec sovereignty support has been hovering within the 38-45% range for decades now. Never, in decades of polling, was "separatism polled at 25%". In fact, this 42.1% is quite in tune with the current support for Québec sovereignty.

And because this music piece is titled 'Vive le Québec libre', I feel obligated to ask if the Québec sovereignty project is one of those 'unoriginal thoughts' you had in mind. If so, perhaps the "real liberation of quebec", as you say, can only become reality once the idea is deemed entirely outdated... and dropped?

What in hell are you talking about.

Perhaps you didn't realize that it was mostly francophone Bloc voters that shifted to the NDP. Or is it that you may perhaps believe these people became staunch federalists overnight? I couldn't find that figure back, which I thought I read on Jean-François Lisée's blog a little while back, nor the poll which he referred to. Figures regarding overall support for sovereignty remaining the same can more easily be found however, regardless of the NDP's performance in the province. It remains there are quite a lot of Québec sovereignists amongst the NDP voters, which is bound to make it uncomfortable for some of their militants.

40% of the NDP voters being Québec sovereignists isn't an extraordinary amount?

I wonder how 'Punked' feels about the extraordinary amount of NDP voters in Québec that actually would support Québec sovereignty. How discomforting must it be to be an NDP member right now.

And "everything he could think of" was apparently a recognition of nationhood (under conditions that Qc can only be a nation within a united Canada, as if that made any sort of sense) that pulls no weight politically and a gift of a "seat" for Québec at the UNESCO, which it cannot use to say or do anything. It was kind of a given that the Québécois wouldn't sell for so cheap.

Interesting. I'm sure it was worded exactly this way. I'm frankly amused this comes from someone keen on accusing others of "rewriting history". (Ah come on now, I get an edit tag for an edit made 3 minutes later?)

2 birds with one stone. Certainly wouldn't mind making a bit of money out of making sure our current language legislation is respected. Something to keep in mind on the odd chance I fly to (or from) western Canada. I haven't had that chance yet. Is it true the Rockies are more beautiful on the Canadian side? Looks like the possibility exists for a paid trip.