Tag Archives: Quebec

Just In: Trudeau Prefers Separation to Harper: David Krayden

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By David Krayden

Canadians have found out, Justin time. OK, nobody likes a wise guy or a pun so excruciatingly bad that it hurts, but aren’t you beginning to wonder which planet or political miasma Justin Trudeau is inhabiting these days? In his latest attempt at dominating the national news, Trudeau mused that since the country had been taken captive by right-wing extremists, that it might be time for Quebec progressives, in that unique land of liberty, equality and fraternity, to carefully weigh their options: “I always say, if at a certain point, I believe that Canada was really the Canada of Stephen Harper — that we were going against abortion, and we were going against gay marriage, and we were going backwards in 10,000 different ways — maybe I would think about making Quebec a country.”

Apparently this is not something that he always says. He would not have exceeded his quota of media hits this week if that were so. But what is so jarringly silly about the accusation is just how utterly inaccurate is the sentiment. Clearly the Canada of Stephen Harper and his majority government is doing nothing to address the fact of unrestricted abortion in Canada. It should. Most Canadians are fundamentally uncomfortable with the current lack of any abortion law. A clear majority do not believe that the “procedure” should be publicly funded. But no matter. The “right-wing” Harper government is not going to change that. As for gay “marriage,” the Conservative government kept its promise to social conservatives to have another House of Commons vote and did so on Dec. 7, 2006. The minority government lost the vote. Harper and Justice Minister Rob Nichols have both repeatedly said that the issue will not be reopened.

So that leaves just 9,998 other “different ways” for Justin to consider Quebec secession. Though one suspects that these separatist incentives might be just as fictitious as the first two.

When challenged by Parliament Hill reporters to clarify his words, PET II was defiant: “The question is not why does Justin Trudeau suddenly not love this country, because the question is ridiculous.” Well thank you so much for making that clear, but it is probably more ridiculous to insist that Quebec should leave Canada because of Conservative government policies that have neither been discussed nor implemented.

Yet what is perhaps more indicative of extreme political egoism is Justin’s refusal to use the declarative of “I” and to speak instead of himself in the third person, as if he were discussing Douglas MacArthur’s return to the Philippines or ensuring we understand that every utterance from this political colossus is worthy of the historical record. Has he entered a dangerous political zone of detachment from reality?

Ultimately, Trudeau’s performance this week should not just be about his evident political immaturity or apparent desire to cripple a promising career in federal politics, one that seemed both assured and inevitable as the offspring of a former prime minister. Nor should it just be about the annoyance of a Quebecer once again insisting that a province of low-productivity, high unemployment and high taxes is setting the standard for the rest of the nation. The real question raised is why anyone expecting to occupy high office in Canada could possibly advocate the secession of a province because he disagrees with the current government of Canada – a government that was duly elected in a democratic vote.

Despite Trudeau’s denial, that question does not seem so ridiculous.

David Krayden is the executive director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies, an independent, not-for-profit institution dedicated to the advancement of freedom and prosperity through the development and promotion of good public policy.

 

Orange Crush Becomes NDP Crushed: David Krayden

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By David Krayden

Members of the decidedly withering Bloc Quebecois caucus would probably be the first to acknowledge, with exuberant pride, their Gaullist ancestry, meaning a family tree with its roots in present-day France.  But what the BQ has never lacked – and what really has fuelled its political history – is just plain gall.  The report this week from La Presse, that former BQ leader and defeated Member of Parliament Gilles Duceppe paid his party’s general manager with House of Commons funds – up to $100,000 annually for seven years – is just another example of how this traitorous party has no business conducting the nation’s business; no reason to occupy seats in the House of Commons except to advance a separatist agenda while collecting a pay cheque and furnishing a pension that are provided by the very country that they are so desperately trying to destroy.

It is difficult to imagine another country where a separatist party can not only sit in the federal legislature but has the mind boggling nerve to spend public money on its private agenda.

There are still four of these misplaced Quebec MPPs taking up space in the House of Commons – one less member than required for official party status – so they will not be paying anyone 100 grand a year with public funds but we will be better off when the last of Bloc head is retired.

Writing the cheerless history of the Bloc is a journey through outrageous entitlement.  Let this latest installment in the BQ Story be the final chapter.

At least there was unanimous party condemnation of the arrangement, with the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP agreeing that this was not public money well spent.  When it comes to criticizing the Bloc, it has been difficult in the past to rouse any sort of emotion approaching outrage, disgust or disapproval from the NDP.  For left-thinking socialists, the trough of tolerance for “progressive,” language-embattled Quebec is deep.  The NDP reserves its contempt for anything or anybody standing in the way of its social reengineering project; it could never quite accept the existence of the Reform Party for instance, as if Preston Manning and his fellow MPs should never have shaken up the ideological status quo in Ottawa.

Perhaps the NDP has discovered a growing antagonism towards the BQ because the effervescence of the “Orange Crush” that seemed so perky in Quebec in the last election has gone flat.  According to a CROP poll this week, this post-election burp has reduced the NDP from 53 per cent support last June to just 29 per cent today.  Though the Conservatives are in second place with 24 per cent, the Bloc is not far behind with 22.  Thus the fight for the hard left vote in Quebec has been defined and, if these numbers remain relatively constant, the next election contest should prove to be a tightly contested four-way fight.

Surely, the NDP did not really believe that it could reelect the entirety of its Quebec caucus, this curious assortment of MPs, many of whom never dreamed of sitting in the House of Commons, and at least one of whom never even bothered to campaign. But it will certainly aspire to repeat this electoral phenomenon and it will strive to outdo the separatists in promising Quebec all manner of special status in Confederation and increased protection of its language, culture and way of life – one that includes massive government spending, higher unemployment than the rest of Canada, low productivity and the highest percentage of part-time workers and absentee employees on the continent.

Whether Quebec votes for soft or hard separatism, it is time that the province joined the rest of the country in the economic realities of the twenty-first century.  Many in Quebec are cognizant of this reality and some of the best conservative thinking resides in that province.  Listen to the economic thinking of Quebec MP  (and former foreign affairs minister) Maxime Bernier and you might be listening to one vying for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party.  Hopefully, in the next election, instead of sending 59 MPs to warm the seats in Parliament, they will choose free-enterprise alternatives who have come to Ottawa to get on with the nation’s business and work for a Quebec that is free, prosperous and equal with every other province.

David Krayden is the executive director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies, an independent, not-for-profit institution dedicated to the advancement of freedom and prosperity through the development and promotion of good public policy.

If Britain can reduce the size of their Parliament, why can’t we?

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ChristianGovernance eletter – September 15, 2011
By Tim Bloedow

It should come as a shock, but a very pleasant one, to learn that a modern democratic country is planning on reducing the number of politicians, instead of increasing them. That is the plan in Britain, according to the article below. They expect to be able to save £12-million a year by eliminating 50 seats from the House of Commons.

In Canada, instead, we are planning to increase the number of federal politicians to reflect population growth in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. What we should be doing is reducing the number seats in Quebec and Atlantic Canada… But we can’t because those provinces have a constitutionally guaranteed minimum number of seats in the House of Commons: another example of the kind of rationalization and compromise that was involved in the founding of Canada. Canada has never had perfect representation by population whereby each electoral district represents approximately the same number of people. We never will without a huge increase in the number of Members of Parliament and the costs that would go with such a move. As the National Post article below on Canada’s plans to increase seat numbers reports, “each Prince Edward Islander’s vote is worth three votes from B.C. on a representation-by-population basis.”

The National Post is weighing in on the issue, targeting particularly the socialist party’s self-serving demands for more seats in Quebec. They note in contrast to Canada that, in the United States, the House of Representatives always contains the same number of seats, but the number of Congressmen from any given state changes based on their population relative to the whole country. Prior to the two articles below on Britain and Canada is an analysis ChristianGovernance published in April 2010 comparing the amount of political representation between Canada, Britain, America and Australia.

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One MP for every 107,000 Canadians – Is that enough?

In November 2007, a study was performed to determine the amount of political representation in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Figures today might be slightly different, but probably not by much.

Canada’s House of Commons gets larger from time to time as the number of electoral districts is adjusted to accommodate demographic shifts. Other formulas also play into the calculation. The number of politicians – the amount of federal representation – never gets smaller. This means that it costs ever more taxpayer dollars to fund the federal government.

In November 2007, the British population was listed as 60.5 million, and Britain’s lower house was made up of 650 Members of Parliament. Australia’s population was a little over 21 million people and their lower house contained 150 politicians. Canada’s population was identifed as 33 million and our House of Commons included 308 MPs. America’s population was reported as 303.3 million people and their House of Representatives contains 435 politicians.

These figures translate into per capita political representation at the federal level of one politician for every 93,211 British citizens, one politician for every 107,065 Canadians, one pol. for every 140,933 Australians and one politician for every 697,413 Americans.

If Canada was governed proportionately with the United States on the basis of population (an essential mark of true democratic representation for most Western political theorists today), then we would have less than 50 Members of Parliament in Ottawa. This begs the question, “What benefit does Canada derive from the 250 “bonus” politicians – with their staff and office budgets – that taxpayers fund? What serious arguments exist to justify such heavy political representation in Canada?

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The Daily Telegraph – September 13, 2011
Lib Dem ministers face fight to save seats in smaller Commons
By James Kirkup

SENIOR Liberal Democrats will see their constituencies split under proposals for a smaller House of Commons. Chris Huhne, the Energy Secretary, will face a significant change in his Eastleigh seat, raising questions about his future in the Commons. Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, Steve Webb, the pensions minister, and Norman Baker, a transport minister, could also come under threat from moves to cut the number of MPs.

The Coalition has promised to reduce the number of Commons seats from 650 to 600 in 2015, as part of a pledge to “cut the cost of politics”. Ministers say the changes will save £12million a year and make the Commons fairer by standardising the size of constituencies, giving them all around 75,000 voters.

The changes will force some sitting MPs to fight one another for newly created constituencies. Mr Cable could find himself facing Zac Goldsmith, a Conservative, when their seats – Twickenham and Richmond Park in south-west London respectively – are largely merged. Mr Huhne’s seat in Hampshire will be “significantly reconfigured” with many of its voters moved into a new Hedge End and Hamble seat. Mr Webb’s Thornbury and Yate seat in Avon is also effectively split in two, while Mr Baker’s Lewes seat in East Sussex is largely merged with Conservative-held Brighton East.

The Boundary Commission for England is setting out its first proposals today for redrawing English seats, reducing their number from 533 to 502.

Keep reading here.

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National Post – September 15, 2011
Editorial: Putting politics before democracy

In the United States, the House of Representatives always has 435 seats. As a state’s population rises or falls, so does the size of its congressional delegation. But not in Canada. Here we must always increase the size of the House of Commons to make room for more seats from the fast-growing provinces, in large part because our Constitution guarantees Quebec 75 seats in perpetuity, no matter how small that province’s population becomes relative to the national total.

That protection is not good enough for Quebec, though, or for its new NDP MPs. After more than 20 years of being badly underrepresented in the Commons, Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta are set to receive a total of 30 new seats before the next federal election. But several NDP MPs and leadership candidates claim that is unfair. They are demanding more seats for Quebec, too, even though Quebec is already the most equitably represented province in the country.

According to a 2010 study by the Mowat Centre, a public policy think-tank at the University of Toronto, “the distortions in the Canadian House of Commons are far worse than in the legislatures of the United States, Australia, Germany or Switzerland. The reality today is that 61% of Canadians are underrepresented in the House of Commons” and all 61% live in the country’s three richest provinces.

Each Prince Edward Islander’s vote is worth three votes from B.C. on a representation-by-population basis. Saskatchewanians’ votes are worth 1.39 of the national average, while neighbouring Albertans’ are worth just 0.92 – a 50% discrepancy. Ontarians at 0.91 votes per resident and British Columbians at 0.9 are the most underrepresented voters in Canada. Indeed, according to Mowat Centre research, Alberta, B.C. and Ontario are so grossly underrepresented that they are among the five worst-represented states or provinces in the industrialized world.

It is far from healthy in a democracy to have the three provinces that contribute the most money to the federation continually at a seat disadvantage relative to the largest consuming provinces.

Quebec, on the other hand, is very fairly represented. There are 1.01 votes per resident there. It would be almost impossible to make things more equitable. Still, that hasn’t stopped Quebec commentators – and particularly NDP leadership candidates – from crying foul over the Tory government’s plans raise representation from Ontario, B.C. and Alberta to nearer the oneperson, one-vote standard.

Keep reading here.

Quebec’s excepton to egalitarianism is its war on freedom

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National Post – August 24, 2011
Class system a possibility for Quebec journalists
By Graeme Hamilton

MONTREAL – Who hasn’t experienced the mild annoyance of being passed over in favour of someone whose credit card is shinier or whose airline ticket is pricier?

Soon, if a Quebec government proposal to award professional status to journalists goes ahead, it will be reporters’ turn to grumble as their elite-status colleagues jump to the front of the line.

Quebec’s Culture Minister, Christine St-Pierre, announced this week that she is pushing forward with a plan to create “a new model of regulation of Quebec media.” Public consultations on the project will be held across Quebec this fall.

Key to the plan would be legislation establishing the “status of professional journalist” in order to distinguish those committed to “serving the public interest” from “amateur bloggers.” It is proposed that state-recognized professional journalists would enjoy unspecified “advantages or privileges” not available to the great unwashed.

Keep reading here.

Socialism’s best Canadian daycare experiment is a failure

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Maclean’s – July 18, 2011
Is subsidized daycare bad for kids?
A surprising new study says Quebec’s $7-a-day daycare is leaving children worse off
By John Geddes

In public policy, few subjects are as sure to spark fierce debate as child care. Prime Minister Stephen Harper portrays a stark divide when he talks about his Conservative policy of giving parents $100 a month for every child under six, and how he scrapped the previous Liberal government’s plan to pour billions into deals with the provinces to expand subsidized daycare. “We took money from bureaucrats and lobbyists,” he says, “and gave it to the real experts on child care, and their names are Mom and Dad!”

If daycare advocates have lost the battle in Ottawa, at least for as long as Harper is in power, they’ll always have Quebec as a beacon of hope. Starting in 1997, the province implemented a low-cost universal child care policy along the lines of the European model. The number of subsidized daycare spaces in the province soared to 210,000 last year, from just 77,000 in 1997. Nothing like it has been tried anywhere else in North America.

But now three Montreal researchers have studied the Quebec experiment, focusing on how the rapid expansion of $7-a-day daycare seems to be reflected in Quebec kids’ scores on a school-readiness test. Their findings are potentially explosive. “In summary,” they write, “the effects of the program are found to be negative for five-year-olds and less convincingly negative for four-year-olds.”

The study, entitled “Quebec’s Childcare Universal Low Fees Policy 10 Years After: Effects, Costs and Benefits,” is co-authored by Université du Québec à Montréal economists Pierre Lefebvre, Philip Merrigan and Francis Roy-Desrosiers. They look at the main goals of Quebec’s daycare policy—allowing more mothers of young children to work outside the home, and enhancing prospects of success in school for kids, especially those from lower-income families. On letting more moms enter the labour force, the program has been a smashing success, dramatically boosting their participation rates.

The paper is far more contentious, however, when it turns to how children are affected by Quebec’s incentive for parents to put their kids in care at a younger age and for more hours each week. The data comes mainly from a massive, ongoing Statistics Canada project called the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. The NLSCY tracks the progress of thousands of young people: its latest stage, for example, looks at 35,795 children from less than one to seven years old, and youths from 14 to 25. Such a deep data pool allows researchers to make broad comparisons among groups.

Read the rest here.

Another expensive gaffe courtesy eco/state-ist fanaticism

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Maclean’s – July 25, 2011
Trouble in Bixiland
The bike-sharing program hits a speed bump amid questions about management and its business model
By Martin Patriquin

It is as Montreal as a two-cheek kiss, a made-in-Quebec success story that has garnered both awards and lucrative contracts around the world. Yet the Bixi bike-sharing system, best known for its sleek two-wheelers of the same name, is plagued by lack of administrative oversight, questionable management and a business plan that has it teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, with a whopping $37-million debt after only two years of operation.

Such is the contention of a scathing report by the city’s auditor general’s office, published in mid-June, which takes both the city and Bixi administrators to task for “neglecting or avoiding several elementary management rules,” and the “illegal nature” of Bixi’s initiative to sell the system to cities including Toronto, Ottawa and London, England. And while administrators have hit back—Bixi spokesperson Michel Philibert recently called the report “old news” in an email exchange with Maclean’s—it seems clear now that the beloved Bixi system won’t likely be able to run without a regular injection of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Bixi began life as part of the city’s 2007 transportation plan entitled “Reinvent Montreal,” a wide-ranging plan that sought to coax Montrealers out of their cars, and make Montreal “a bicycling city par excellence,” according to an executive committee decree from that year. The idea of a bike-sharing program wasn’t new—Paris, notably, has had one since 2007—but it was the first in North America, and a pet project of Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay. The “pay and go” idea was developed by Montreal’s parking authority, while Montreal industrial designer Michel Dallaire crafted the bike.

Read the rest here.

Saguenay mayor Tremblay has raised $181,000 for prayer battle against secularists

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July 12, 2011
God’s side lays biblical smackdown on secularists in fundraising for court fight
Canadian Press Newswire

QUEBEC – In this fundraising battle pitting God’s side against the atheists, agnostics and secularists it’s not quite a contest so much as a drubbing of biblical proportions. While collecting money for a legal battle centred on religion, the pro-prayer mayor of Saguenay, Que., has been outstripping his rivals by a 7-1 margin. That gives Mayor Jean Tremblay an almighty financial edge in his court battle against rivals who want to stop prayers at council meetings.

The mayor has already said he’s been getting outside help, with cash trickling in from outside Quebec. The pro-secularism group opposing him has been getting help from unions.

So far the mayor’s side has raised $181,000. His opponents – the Mouvement laique quebecois, or the Quebec Secular Movement – have collected $25,000. But the opposition group believes it still has enough money to fight the mayor in Quebec’s court of appeal. And it is pleased with what it has raised so far. “Our total isn’t quite as impressive as the mayor’s, but it’s the first time in our 30-year history that we’ve raised more than $25,000 through an appeal for donations,” said Marie-Michelle Poisson, president of the group.

Poisson said part of the $25,000 comes from members, while some comes from union groups.

Read the rest here.