Is Harper splitting up Canada?

As half-naked students protest in chilly Montreal, displeasure at the prime minister’s conservative politics is reviving Quebecois separatists.



Sandro Contenta, Global Post:

Harper celebrated his anniversary with a speech vaunting policies he said will “sustain the economy of tomorrow.” Many in Quebec beg to differ. They see an attempt to remake the country into an austere capitalist bastion, where the interests of Big Oil trump environmental concerns, where “tough on crime” means soft on gun control, and patriotism involves reverence to the British monarchy.

It’s a version of American Republicanism meeting the European welfare state. The difference is that in Canada, the clash involves a province the federal government estranges at the country’s peril — one that has already held two referendums on independence, the last one, in 1995, coming within a few thousand votes of making Quebec a separate country.

Quebec’s independence movement grew out of the so-called Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, a period when the province’s French-speaking majority shook off cultural domination of the Catholic Church and economic domination of the English-speaking minority. Since then, support for sovereignty has rarely dipped below 40 percent, and politics have been decidedly left of center. Two examples are government subsidized day care services for only $7 a day, and the lowest university tuition in Canada.

For almost two decades, Quebecers sent left-wing separatists with the Bloc Quebecois to parliament. Then, in the May 2011 federal election they suddenly gave most of their seats to the federalist New Democratic Party, which has socialist roots. Conservatives won only six seats in Quebec, but formed a majority government by capturing Ontario and the Western provinces. And the clash of visions began.

Harper abolished the national registry for rifles — a database set up after a gunman killed 14 female students at the University of Montreal in 1989. Quebec strongly opposes the move and its government has gone to court for the right to use existing federal data to set up a provincial “long-gun” registry. The federal government wants the data destroyed.

Harper has also made development of the Alberta tar sands — massive deposits of mainly US-bound bitumen oil — his economic centerpiece. His government has dismissed concerns about greenhouse gases created by mining the “dirty oil,” and pulled Canada out of the Kyoto international treaty on global warming. Quebec responded with an Earth Day march last month that saw 250,000 people denounce such policies.

Needles to say, Harper’s fascination with the British monarchy — restoring the “royal” designation to Canada’s air force and navy, hanging the Queen’s portrait in federal buildings and celebrating her diamond jubilee — doesn’t go over well in Quebec. It’s a province where license plates read “je me souviens” (I remember) — a reference to England’s 1759 victory against France in a battlefield near Quebec City, which turned Quebec into an English colony.

The most bitter fight is over Harper’s new crime law, which imposes minimum mandatory sentences and gets tougher with young offenders. Quebec’s government, which prefers to stress rehabilitation and a more lenient approach to young offenders, has been scathing in its criticism.

Peter White, a key adviser to past Conservative prime ministers, warned Harper in a biting public letter that his neglect of the province will lead to the “de-Canadianization of Quebec” and possible independence. 

Harper’s majority government has only been in power one year. Already, many fear his greatest legacy may be the break up of the country.

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