Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Quebec's Political Shift

A little while ago, when the Quebec "nation issue" was dominating the debate in the House of Commons, NDP leader Jack Layton came up with an interesting way to keep the country united.

He said since Quebec was generally a left wing province, the best way to keep it in Canada was for the rest of the country to adopt socialism.

Well there are a lot of things wrong with that line of thinking but here's one big problem: Quebec is actually moving to the right politically.

Consider: in the last federal election, Quebec elected ten Conservative MPs, Quebeckers are receptive to the idea of alternatives to government-run health care and two of the three main political provincial parties are to the right of centre.

If this trend keeps up, maybe Layton will next argue the best way to keep Quebec in Canada will be to adopt libertarianism.

No, he probably won't do that.

4 comments:

Monkey Loves to Fight said...

I would say there has been a shift to the right so much as more Quebecers are paying attention to parties on the right so those who were always right leaning are now voting for parties on the right. I suspect most who voted Conservative last election were Conservative in 2004, they just saw the party as irrelevant so didn't vote for them.

In addition the Liberals although centre-right are a federalist party, so if you are a federalist it is either the Liberals or ADQ. It must be tough being a left leaning federalist in these days, just as being a right wing separtist must also be tough.

Anonymous said...

"He said since Quebec was generally a left wing province, the best way to keep it in Canada was for the rest of the country to adopt socialism."

Yeah, 'cause it really worked well in keeping the Soviet Union together or uniting the two Koreas...

Monkey Loves to Fight said...

Ace - Quebec is arguably the most left wing jurisdiction north of the Rio Grande River and there is no doubt Canada would be more conservative (although probably not as conservative as the United States) if Quebec separated.

Anonymous said...

For once, Miles I actually agree with you on the point that we would be more conservative w/o Quebec.

The fact is that the more socialist Canada becomes, the more Quebec wants to separate (WW2 until now). As taxes and the power of central govt. has increased in this country, support for separation has consistently gone up.

Not a coincidence methinks.