Stirrings of Sanity in Strange Places - Québec?!
By Skanderbeg Posted in Archived — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I know that everyone in Washington is pre-occupied with more "important" matters, but one should always note when there are apparent stirrings of sanity in out-of-the-way places.
Sanity has been a scarce commodity in recent years with regard to just about anything involving Canada, and the bottom of the sanity-canoe has been the province-nation (or nation-province - whatever) of Québec.
Read on . . .
Funny though. Québec had a provincial election yesterday, and the results were rather stunning. The provincial parliament has 125 seats, and the ruling Liberal party took a precipitous drubbing, going from a clear majority of 74 seats all the way down to a plurality-but-minority of 48 seats - a shocking loss of 26 seats, or more than a third of the seats that they held.
(N.b. - Attention wonks - the story behind that link is hog-heaven for hard-core wonks.)
The biggest gainer was the new ADQ party, which seems to defy classification. However, the CBC story cited above notes this aspect of the campaign:
The Liberals were caught off guard by the ADQ's rise in popularity. Dumont's party came up from behind and gained favour with voters in several key ridings, which responded to the congenial leader, and his common-sense message that includes tax cuts and child-care credits.
(Emphasis mine.)
I don't know about the "child-care credits" thing, but for a party anywhere in Canada (let alone in Frenchly socialist Québec) to gain a lot of ground by campaigning on tax rate reductions is both very surprising.... and also very heartening.
The other big loser was the separatist Parti Québecois, which lost 9 seats and fell to 36. This shockingly has put the PQ into third-place position in the provincial parliament. As the indispensible Canadian (and Québecois) Mark Steyn has noted here, all of the post-election commentary has carefully danced around what might be the real underlying reason for the PQ's stark fall to such a low position. (Social conservatives in particular should follow that link and read Mark's "point 2" closely.)
Canada could have had French culture, British politics, and American know-how. So, looking across that border, we should take any good news that we can get....
Then we could invite the western provinces to join the USA.
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
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The CIA has better politicians than it has spies - Fred Thompson
century.
The Quebecois American, is happy for the ancestral homeland.
Dumont, who would be best described as a libertarian in the United States, advocates a child care credit. In American English, this means he supports a tax credit for any family that does not put their child in a government day care center. This will break the government day care system that the Separatists established years ago.
Other things the ADQ supports are a flattening of the tax code, lower taxes in general, debt reduction, and an one percent reduction yearly of total government spending. Most importantly, he wants to eliminate the completely government ran healthcare system and replace it with a mixed system.