Tagged: Jean Charest
That orange wave in QC? Blame Charest
A Nova Scotian who spent close to half his life in Quebec writes:
Harper’s undoing is Jean Charest.
Quebecers know they are going to throw out the scandal-plagued Charest as soon as they can, but they can’t do this with a strong BQ in Ottawa because it throws the federalist-nationalist balance out of whack.
Quebecers like to balance a strong federalist parliament in Ottawa with a nationalist Assembly in QC, and vice versa. They can’t vote Liberal on Monday because, well, Liberals are screwing up in QC. They also know that Harper can’t be seen to kowtow to Quebec, so they’d rather not have him in power or with too much influence in QC. Also, he’s not sympatico. But electing too many BQ’s when the PQ is destined for power at home is crazy because that gives far too much clout to the separatists. Everybody knows that.
It must have been quite a problem. But then Jack Layton won the French-language debate with smarts, charm and a street-savvy yet credible accent that made Duceppe sound like a fop. And so the orange wave began.
Ipso facto duodenum.
I agree with one caveat: According to some polls, the orange wave in Quebec had begun even before the debates.
Channeling Duplessis
Writing on the US website The Daily Beast, Ottawa patent consultant and occasional Globe and Mail columnist Sheema Khan condemns Quebec Premier Jean Charest’s bill to ban the traditional Muslim niqab. In a stand reminiscent of Maurice Duplessis’s Grande Noirceur, Charest would ban religious veils on grounds they “subjugate” women. Khan, who holds a PhD in physics from Harvard, nails the double-standard at play:
The most vehement reactions against face-veiling have come from women, who have projected their own fears, assumptions, and judgments onto attire worn by a minority within a minority. They think of the bad old days when the Catholic Church controlled women’s lives in Quebec. They pity the present-day lives of women in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. “We will save you from your own foolishness and your own delusional beliefs, for your own good,” they seem to say. “We will bring you to liberation by force. You Muslim women really aren’t independent until you embrace our lifestyle choices.”
In the meantime, they would deny us access to language lessons, hospitals, courts, schools, and public transportation—all services that help immigrants assimilate. But at the same time, they condemn the Saudi religious police for hounding women who don’t dress according to that government’s dictates.
Hydro Quebecwick unveiled
Inter-provincial power grid diagram shows the startling degree to which Nova Scotia is an energy island. This is a big obstacle to the development of local renewable energy supplies like wind and tidal, which are intermittent and therefore require robust interconnection with nearby power porducers and users. The Hydro Quebecwick deal means that any increase in our connectivity with the rest of the world will be at the mercy of the new monopoly owner of the grid, the Government of Quebec.
Premiers Shawn Graham (NB) and Jean Charest (QC) have unveiled the details of the Hydro Quebecwick deal. Quebec gets a monopoly on eastern Canadian access to US power customers; New Brunswick gets a mess of short term pottage and some debt relief, but gets to keep two white elephant dirty coal power plants. This may one day turn out to be as big a fleecing as the one Quebec gave Joey Smallwood 40 years ago.
It’s hard not to see this as a dark day for the rest of Atlantic Canada. Bye bye, Green Grid, a critical element in developing promising renewable but intermittent local Maritime energy sources like wind and tidal. Bye bye, fair access to US electricity markets, an equally critical element in developing those resources.
David Wheeler take note: This is very bad news for anyone anxious for action on climate change in Atlantic Canada. Considering he was blindsided, Premier Darrell Dexter’s response has been appropriately dignified, but make no mistake: this presents his administration with a huge challenge. Like Newfoundland, Nova Scotia’s influence on the national stage has reached such a low ebb that hardly anyone there will give it a thought.
See also: News release. MOU. MOU summary. (All are PDFs.)
