National Post: PQ power gives rise to ‘Angryphone’ lunacy | Full Comment

PQ power gives rise to ‘Angryphone’ lunacy | Full Comment | National Post

Quebec soaks Canada for $20 billion a year

Psst! Don’t tell the Rest of Canada . . . | Montreal Gazette

. . but they’re subsidizing us Quebecers to the tune of (gulp) $19 billion a year.
At least that’s the estimate obtained by financial columnist Michel Girard of Le Journal de Montréal.
The source of the estimate? This province’s own Institut de la statistique du Québec.
The estimate, Girard wrote on Friday in a column titled Sovereignty in the Red, shows that Ottawa collected about $42.5 billion in revenue from Quebec in 2011, but spent $61.6 billion for this province.
At the time of the 1995 sovereignty referendum, there was a widespread belief among Quebecers that their province was a “cash cow” for the RoC.
Some cash cow.

Quebec, tolerance and the crucifix - The Globe and Mail

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/editorials/quebec-tolerance-and-the-crucifix/article12205442/

As the Quebec Court of Appeal said in the Saguenay case, in which a Quebec resident, Alain Simoneau, objected to a non-sectarian, 20-second prayer and the religious symbols, the “difficult and delicate question” of the state’s neutrality doesn’t require “that society be cleansed of all denominational reality, including that which falls within its cultural history.” The symbols, displayed for decades at Saguenay City Hall, are seen by most people as historical artifacts, the three judges on the appeal-court panel said.
The protection of these symbols should be seen as promoting tolerance and accommodation of religious minorities such as Jews, Muslims and Sikhs. Each community has been involved in flashpoints. The National Assembly barred four men wearing kirpans from hearings on accommodation. The previous Liberal government passed a law limiting the right of Muslim women to wear face veils while obtaining government services.
Quebec shouldn’t try to have it both ways. If the province has a right to exclusively Christian religious symbols in government buildings because, in essence, it has always been thus, Quebec shouldn’t deny to non-Christians the right to wear religious garb or symbols in those buildings. Complete “neutrality” does not exist in Quebec or the broader Canadian context – the very first line of the Canadian Charter of Rights invokes “the supremacy of God.” Like God and the crucifix, accommodation has a long cultural history in Quebec and the rest of Canada.

Poll: Quebecers want strict guidelines on religious accommodation | CTV Montreal News

Poll: Quebecers want strict guidelines on religious accommodation | CTV Montreal News

The Parti Quebecois plans to introduce a charter to enshrine Quebec values after a recent poll suggests there is public support for stricter guidelines on religious accommodation.

The poll, which it commissioned from Leger Marketing, showed the majority of Quebecers think the debate over reasonable accommodation is as important or more important today than it was six years ago.
Francophones are far more concerned about this than are non-francophones, with up to 76 per cent of francophones saying religious accommodations should be enshrined in law -- a viewpoint held by 51 per cent on non-francophones.

Macpherson: A major omission and half-truths in piece by Lisée

Macpherson: A major omission and half-truths in piece by Lisée

But now, the article said, we must accept cuts in services in English to the sick and elderly to help “sustain the critical mass of the French-speaking majority, especially in Montreal,”
What Lisée meant by that, as he has made clear in the past, is that there aren’t enough people speaking French in the privacy of their own homes.
But not even Lisée had the nerve to come out and ask anglos in The Gazette to “empathize” with the PQ’s opinion that there are too many of us.

NDP across Canada must be mourning stunning B.C. election loss: Hébert | Toronto Star

NDP across Canada must be mourning stunning B.C. election loss: Hébert | Toronto Star

Mulcair already has to juggle a double challenge in Quebec where both Justin Trudeau and his reinvigorated Liberals and the Bloc Québécois have to be kept at bay. Mulcair’s effort to bind nationalist voters to the NDP in his home province have so far come at cost to his credibility elsewhere in Canada.

William Johnson: Quebec, land of myth

Quebec, land of myth | Full Comment | National Post

Quebec’s literature has taken up the theme of its historiography: It displays Anglophobia as its most central theme, as I demonstrated in my 1991 book, published in French, Anglophobie made in Québec. Many of the authors who are considered provincial greats, such as Gaston Miron, Jacques Ferron, Hubert Aquin and Yves Beauchemin, are also the most ardently Anglophobic. 

The fact is that France itself was a colonizer — and it kept New France in a state of extreme under-development. No industry was allowed to start up that competed with that industry in France. So, as contemporary observers agreed, New France remained poor while New England grew rich. This, not any Anglo plot, generated the legacy of economic and cultural under-development that retarded French Canadians until the Quiet Revolution.

A new royal commission is needed to demystify Quebec’s founding Anglophobic myth, to shine the light of reason and scientific scrutiny on the dark beliefs that poison the historic consciousness of Quebec’s youths, their teachers and most prominent authors.