It has been a good news-bad news week for Canadian unity. The obvious positive was the key result in the Alberta referendum – 75 percent voting to remain in Canada, only 25 percent wanting to move toward a second referendum on separation.
That outcome looks even better for unity when taking into account polling purporting to show that around two-thirds of those voting for a second referendum were not actually in favour of independence.
An Angus Reid Institute poll reported last week that only 37 percent of those intending to vote for a separation referendum wanted Alberta to leave Canada while 60 percent wanted to “send a message to Ottawa.” An Abacus Data poll found only 32 percent of those backing a second referendum wanted Alberta to become an independent country. Mainly, they wanted a referendum to send a message to Ottawa and/or get a better deal within Canada. Based on those polls, it seems that Alberta separatism remains a fringe movement.
Not all of the referendum-related news out of Alberta was as positive. In addition to the remain-or-another referendum main event there were nine other yes or no questions on the ballot, including four on immigration, aimed mainly at denying services to non-permanent immigrants. All four passed, but hopefully the narrow margins of victory (between 52 and 55 percent) will dissuade Danielle Smith’s government from acting on these draconian – and probably Charter violating – ideas anytime soon.
While the unfortunate outcome on the immigrants’ rights questions tempered the positives in Alberta, for me the real Debbie Downer of the week was in Quebec City where the separatist Parti Quebecois government was taking office with a flourish of frat boy moves designed to create friction with the rest of Canada.
The PQ, under its JD Vance lookalike leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, comes to power with probably the flimsiest mandate in Canadian history – less than 28 percent of the vote (and 18 percent of eligible voters), leaving him four seats short of a majority in the National Assembly. As has been pointed out – but not often enough – this perverse result is thanks to our first-past-the-post electoral system that we should have abandoned years ago.
Plamondon is not letting the flukiness of his victory stop him from trying to provoke conflict and fire up Quebeckers in advance of a vote on separation sometime after Donald Trump is no longer in office. While Danielle Smith has targeted Ottawa and immigrants in her pursuit of power, Plamondon has been going after the British monarchy and immigrants. His anti-monarchy antics have so far paid off.
When he was first elected in 2022 as leader of a three-member PQ caucus he refused to take the oath of allegiance to the British monarch. Maybe because no one wanted to be seen as a defender of King Charles, Plamondon succeeded in getting the legislature to pass a law making the oath optional. The constitutional validity of that move is being challenged in court, but it hasn’t stopped Plamondon from upping the ante.
In advance of Wednesday’s swearing in – through a pledge of allegiance not to the King but to the people of Quebec – Plamondon wrote to Lieutenant-Governor Manon Jeannette, telling her to stay away from the ceremony. His government is “firmly committed to abolishing the monarchy in Quebec,” he informed the Lieutenant-Governor, and in a social media post cheekily added that any savings from abolition will be directed to “addressing the needs of the homeless.”
So the cabinet swearing-in went ahead in the absence of the L-G, with the first cabinet appointment being that of Catherine Gentilcore as Minister of Quebec Independence, as well as Deputy Premier and Immigration Minister. It’s no surprise that immigration would be right up there with independence on the Plamondon cabinet’s priority list.
Throughout the election campaign Plamondon complained that immigrants are overcrowding classrooms, taxing health care and contributing to the decline of French. Although the outgoing CAQ had planned to cut permanent immigration from 60,000 to to 45,000 a year, the PQ is promising to take it down to 35,000 while cutting the number of non-permanent immigrants by one-third.
Plamondon also wants to outdo CAQ on what its friends call secularization and its foes dub xenophobia. Bill 21, enacted in 2019, bars public school teachers, police and other authority figures from wearing religious symbols on the job. Plamondon has promised to extend secularism rules to children by barring elementary school kids from wearing hijabs, kippahs and other conspicuous religious symbols in the classroom.
Critics of Bill 21 argue that it violates religious freedom and equality, disproportionately harming groups such as Muslim women who wear a hijab. The law is currently before the Supreme Court which is expected to soon render a decision on its constitutional validity. Should the court strike down Bill 21, Plamondon will get a hugely divisive separatism-provoking issue to exploit. And now another gift of that nature may be coming his way, courtesy of Danielle Smith and the fallout from her referendum extravaganza.
As noted, Smith received only lukewarm support for her anti-immigrant initiatives, while four others – including Senate abolition and appointment of judges – failed to get majority support. So to help fend off her many post-referendum critics, she has resurrected an old referendum question from the Jason Kenney years. In 2021, something less than 40 percent of eligible voters bothered to vote (by a 61-39 margin) in favour of removing equalization from the Canadian constitution. But Smith has jumped on the equalization war horse and wants to ride it into another battle with Ottawa.
Given the low turnout, the 2021 referendum result was hardly a ringing endorsement for dismantling equalization, and the likelihood that a constitutional amendment would get enough support from other provinces to pass is small. However, Smith wants to change the equalization formula, and that formula can probably be tweaked by the federal government without changing the constitution, or even getting agreement from the Provinces.
Ominously, the possible alteration most frequently cited by experts concerns how low domestic power rates charged by publicly-owned Hydro Quebec reduce the Quebec government’s potential revenues, leading to higher equalization entitlement for the Province. Talk of a new equalization formula looks a lot like a recipe for an Alberta-Quebec confrontation, with the federal government and the rest of the country caught in the middle.
There was rejoicing among federalists this week following the thrashing of the Alberta separatists, a sense that we now are in a much better position to stand up against whatever the MAGA forces throw at us in the months ahead. And we should enjoy the good vibes as long as they last, while remembering that there are two Provincial Premiers in this country whose primary goal continues to be the sowing of division.
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All great points Richard, and as usual brought together with a your flair for seeing the bigger picture (it really is a treat, how you can do that). I’d just like to add my own current hobby-horse — that the media is so willing a collaborator in the schemes of these (let’s call them what they are) blackmailers. Extortionists. They come up with some baseless and obscure threat and the media jump on it as a juicy story. All the way through the Alberta nonsense, I kept screaming at the radio (I’m talking to you, Galloway, Chattopadhyay and AsItHappens) “This thing is a non-thing! It’s convoy-bait! STOP GIVING THEM OXYGEN!” Did they listen? Did they do any research? Did they consult polls or commission any? No — they took the other route — some facts are just too good to check. There’s a word for that in the online world they disdain — clickbait. It took sooo long in the first Trump infection for the news media to start calling him what he is, a liar, grifter and promoter of psychopathic ideas. Finally, they overcame the empty (in that case) habit of reporting-without-comment. Why can they not bring that same awareness, and I would say obligation, into the demagoguery of cockroaches like Smith and PSPP? You are very clear on the gossamer friability of the “mandates” these scammers pretend to have. If you know it and I know it, they know it too.
And now, when they read this, the whole world will know it. About time.
Nice to have you back!!
Good to be back. You make a good point about media coverage. Max Fawcett has a commentary on the subject for National Observer. https://mailchi.mp/nationalobserver/ldzzacrmsg?e=a06e879653. I feel a similar urge to throw something at the radio at CBC reports from Washington that normalize Trump’s behavior.