Ding, dong!

If you don't live in Quebec, you probably aren't familiar with our ongoing political saga, which has roots going back more than 300 years to traditional rivalries between the English and the French. This occasionally plays out in interpersonal relationships, but more often plays out primarily in the media, with politicians front and center. It's a very Manichean thing. For all intents and purposes, we only have two political parties: the bland, laissez-faire, but generally inoffensive Liberals, and the dynamic, activist, socially forward-looking but somewhat loony Parti Québecois (PQ).

The provincial Liberals tend to cruise along, offending no one by doing nothing much of interest, until people get fed up with the lack of vision and the lack of action (e.g., to investigate one of the most corrupt construction industries in the world, bar none) and vote in the PQ. The PQ beat their collective breast for a while, settle in to do some very good things (e.g., they were responsible for implementing a system of alimony collection that resulted in one of the world's lowest deadbeat dad proportions, they put in a decent $5 per day daycare system for working parents). Unfortunately, they have two major liabilities:

The first (the elephant that is always in the room when anglo Quebecers gather) is that their vision, for nearly 40 years, has focused on separation from Canada to create a sovereign state. In its benign form, the threat is typically used as a lever to extract more concessions from the federal government, with little or no real desire to separate. It's standard power politics, and it's generally played well, with grudging respect on both sides. I have a strong sense that Réné Levesque, our provincial premier, was a soft separatist, and that he spoke a far tougher game than he was really playing, but that's neither here nor there. I never knew the man, and haven't gone looking for any of his private documents to get a sense of what he was really thinking. But in its more malevolent form, sovereignty really is a serious, no holds barred, effort to secede from Canada. Which wouldn't be so scary if it weren't for the second liability.

That liability is an institutionalized racism and xenophobia that leads to somewhat ludicrous measures, like the recent secular value charter that recently departed premier Pauline Marois attempted to introduce. The short form is that the PQ had the very laudable goal of enforcing the separation of church and state in such a way that the nonreligious (secular) majority would never have to fear that a government official would be applying pressure to them (or judging them) based on their religion rather than based on the legal context of the situation in which the interaction with the government occurs. As one of the key implementation measures, the government hoped to ban the wearing or display of any overt religious symbols, such as a large crucifix or the keepah (yarmulka) worn by observant Jews. Or, more sinisterly, the headgear worn by Muslim women. One can only imagine that Sikh turbans would soon be targeted, not to mention the payets (long locks of hair) grown by orthodox Jewish men.

The long form is where this gets interesting: First, the government noted that there was no need to remove the giant crucifix from the Quebec National Assembly, since that is cultural heritage, not a religious symbol. The Christian majority, most of whom don't wear any kind of headcovering indoors, have little to lose from a law that would prevent Jews or Muslims from wearing a head covering. And so on. And it's not like there are hordes of non-francophone religious extremists trying to bring down the government from within. The most recent statistics that I've seen (from 2013, published by the CBC) suggest that fewer than 1% of Quebec government employees are English, even though we make up almost 8% of the population. "Ethnic" workers account for a larger 7% of government employees, but most of them are francophone, so perhaps they're less offensive somehow -- so long as they aren't wearing a keepah or chador.

In any event, we recently survived a provincial election in which Pauline Marois, outgoing premier, was a major force for demagoguery and raising tempers and anger among ethnics and fear and mistrust of ethnics among the majority for no good reason other than that she hoped it would rally the faithful around her. To my tremendous delight, she not only lost the election badly (giving the Liberals a solid majority), but also lost her own seat in the national assembly. I (not a word of a lie) danced a jig when the election results were announced. And I keep hearing a refrain running through my head: "Ding, dong, the witch is dead!" Hence the title of this post.

It's not like I expect great things from the liberals, but status quo is definitely better than demagogues stirring up ethnic hatreds and resentments all over the place purely to win votes. So thank you, Madame Marois, for underestimating the good will of the people of Quebec so badly. I hate to think what might have happened if we had had a competent, effective premier behind this program.