The Quebec Election

The recent Quebec election, of course, is good news for Canada. If we could only put the issue of Quebec separation clearly behind us, a major drag on Canada’s economy and a major distortion to its political life would be gone.

Does the PQ third-place finish mean the threat of separatism is over? I think there is a good chance it does. Let’s analyse this: with growing immigration, the appeal of the PQ and of separatism rather naturally declines in the big city ridings of Montreal: none so patriotic as the recent immigrant. Meantime, with the rise of a viable conservative party, the PQ will probably be unable to compete in the “pur laine” rural ridings, who are naturally conservative, while the PQ’s social stance is somewhere near the NDP’s.

I expect to see Quebec’s politics rather quickly return to normalcy, which is to say, a competition between left and right, not between federalism and separatism.

Indeed, there seems to be a shift going on in the Francophone world generally: Nicolas Sarkozy leads in the French presidential sweeps, and seems to represent a new conservatism rather more like the Anglophone sort.

A few years ago, the conventional wisdom was that American culture and European culture were drifting further apart. I disputed that at the time. I thought, and think, what was really happening was that something new had been born in the US, a new cultural movement, and, the US usually being in the forefront of such things, the US and Europe were diverging temporarily until the new ideas spread to relatively backward Europe. In the case of Canada—also seen as diverging—I even thought a time limit was indicated by past history. Canada is more or less seven years behind the US in terms of the acceptance of new ideas.

George Bush was elected in 2000, signaling a conservative turn, the triumph of neo-conservatism. That meant a conservative movement should come to power in Canada in about 2007.

It happened a year early.

Now, the conservatism that is now dominant in the Anglosphere—the US, Canada, Australia, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand—is spreading to the Francophones. Europe will probably be a very different place in five years, politically, than it is today.