Friday, December 5, 2008

Au revoir, mon cowboy?

Has Stephen Harper given up on Quebec? Has Quebec said au revoir to the cowboy from Calgary? My friend Rob at the Tyee wrote a good piece about just that possibility (snipped below). Thanks, Stephen Harper, for fomenting separatist feeling in Quebec, just when it seemed to be slowly fading.... and good luck in the next federal election. His Quebec MPs were just thrown under the bus (apologies for being trite, but apparently it's the political phrase of the year).

Has Harper Hurt National Unity? :: News :: thetyee.ca

After years of courting Quebec voters in the hopes of winning that elusive parliamentary majority, Stephen Harper made it clear this week he was done playing nice with la belle province.
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If there needs to be a time out, Milner says, the prime minister and his baffling attacks on "the separatists" bear much of the blame.
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In any case, the events of the last few days suggest Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, a Quebec native whose financial statement kicked off the political/constitutional/national unity chain of events, may have overstated things when he told a reporter earlier this year "the whole Quebec secession issue is gone."
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"Indirectly you're saying that half the French Canadians in Quebec are devil-worshippers. It's not something that goes over well," he said, adding that the prime minister's "incendiary" comments suggest he may have written Quebec off.

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