Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘michaelle jean’

The inevitable result of the petty political squabbling has occurred: Parliament has been shut down to stave off a no-confidence vote that would have been scheduled for Monday, where the opposition was trying to take over the country in what essentially would amount to a bloodless coup.

Looks, it’s quite simple: You don’t have to like who’s elected, but you have to respect the will of the electorate. A power grab “just cause we can” is the last thing that the country needs.

Dion, Layton and Duceppe need to back off from the brink, cool off, and find a way to at least give the Conservative minority government a chance to work. For the good of everyone. Because Harper may have been elected by a minority, but that’s more people than the zero who voted for the proposed Liberal-NDP coalition.

Now that Parliament has been suspended, maybe it’s time to lock all four of them in a room together and force them to work out their issues and get back to the task at hand: Running the country.

“It’s ten years later and still I haven’t a clue” – Collective Soul.

It’s ten years after the last referendum.

The PQ, energized by several years in opposition, is electing new leadership and is gearing up for a post-election victory referendum. We could be less than two years away from the next battle to save Canada.

Where the hell are all the federalists?

The sovereignty movement is ready. Student groups, unions, youth groups, political groups, artists and musicians and businesspeople and rabble-rousers and just about everyone else on the separatist side are organizing. They’re fundraising. They’re unifying. They’re strategizing. They’re recruiting volunteers and getting ready for the fight.

And on the federalist side? Well, we have Michaelle Jean, our new Governer-General, who seems 99% separatist anyway. Besides, nobody cares about her, unless they’re trying to use her to discredit the Canadian government.

The point is, there’s nobody left to fight. There are less Jean Charest fans in Quebec than there are Korn fans in a nursing home. The Federal government is weakened, devoid of any true leadership, and handcuffed thanks to the Sponsorship Scandal.

Grassroots organizations such as Alliance Quebec are so destroyed as to be nonexistent. Only a dozen people showed up to a federalist “rally” downtown last week to commemorate the massive 1995 unity rally that many say saved Canada at the eleventh hour.

I did a Google search looking for websites, citizens’ groups, hell, even a weekly Federalist poker game. Nothing. Nada. Zip. The few links I did find were woefully out of date and mostly defunct. Even the Quebec Liberal Party can’t be bothered to spend two words on federalism on its website (though they were sure to remind us to turn our clocks back this weekend).

And outside of Quebec? The situation is even bleaker. An alarmingly high percentage of Canadians have a “good riddance” sentiment toward Quebec. If they held another unity rally, would anyone come?

It seems incredible to think that only a couple of years ago, we thought Quebec had moved past sovereignty, that it was no longer a “big deal”, and that the threat of another referendum was as laughable as the threat of a hurricane coming to wipe out half of New Orleans. Well, we all know how that turned out.

See, the thing is, I’m not content to sit back and watch my country face the brink of destruction yet again. I value it too much. I happen to think that being Canadian is a pretty wonderful thing… and that keeping this country together is worth fighting for. And if I’m right, there are an awful lot of people out there who feel the same way.

We need initiatives. We need to get organized. We need ideas. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t exactly trust Charest, or whoever his successor will be, to take care of it all for us. I’m thinking it’s time for us ordinary Canadian federalists to get up and do something.

So, at risk of sounding like Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off… “Anyone? Anyone?”

If you’re a federalist and you’re proud of it, clap your hands. Better yet, post a comment here if you want to get involved. Post your ideas. And watch this site for news in the coming days.

It’s the SWIK No Campaign, to be launched right here, real soon. Keep it locked to this station.

Damian Penny thinks that the evidence of Jean’s separatist leanings is fairly convincing and that Martin should have chosen someone “less polarizing”:

Being a former Quebec separatist shouldn’t, all by itself, disqualify you from being Governor-General. But when Jean won’t say how she voted in the 1995 sovereignty referendum, and when her “loyalty” statement contains little more than weasel words about never belonging to “a political party or the separatist movement”, well, what are we supposed to conclude?

For a completely opposite (and more optimistic) view, here’s Josh Freed in last week’s Gazette on how Michaelle Jean can be considered the first “cool” federalist in Quebec – and perhaps could even start a trend:

As long as I’ve followed politics in this province, the fun, cool, party people have always been on the separatist side, while the federalists have been square. Sovereignty attracts all the singers, artists, poets, writers, dancers and everyone else who dresses in black. Federalism attracts business types who look grey.

In Quebec’s 30-year-old Cool War for the hearts and minds of young francophones, the federalists have been massacred. To even suggest in public that you back Canada can get you tarred as a nerd.

So when Jean recently announced she was “proud to be Canadian” and “fully committed to Canada,” she became the first cool federalist I can recall to come out for Canada since, well, Pierre Trudeau. That’s probably why she’s such a threat to hard-line sovereignists. They seem to spend every waking hour issuing documents to show Jean is really a separatist, as if they’ve ever really cared who represents the queen they can’t stand.

I guess they sense that Jean may make it fashionable to be a federalist in Quebec and threaten to close the cool gap.

[ . . . ]

As governor-general, Jean is a great new role model: she’s a highly articulate woman and a Haitian immigrant who became a TV star. She’s in a mixed-race marriage with an adopted child – and she speaks five languages.

She couldn’t be more 21st century unless she was gay, too. And yes, she’s also a great dancer.

Maybe she once drank a toast to independence at a party. Sure, her husband was probably in favour of sovereignty. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, you can’t throw a stone in Quebec without hitting a separatist. Most francophones have flirted with independence at some stage in their lives and many still double-date even if it irks their English-speaking partner.

All that federalists should want is to make it easy for more Quebecers to release their inner Canadian child – and Jean seems willing to be the poster girl.

Who knows? She’s so appealing Jean might even tempt a couple of other trendy Quebecers to come out for Canada, and help make it as fashionable to be a Quebec federalist as it is to be a Quebec separatist.

That would be cool.

Yeah, I’m not so sure… but hey, could happen.

Michaelle Jean, the new appointee for Governer General of Canada, has been generating a ton of controversy since she was named. The attacks stem mostly around speculation that she and her husband have sovereigntist leanings, or that she may have conflicting loyalties because she also holds French citizenship. She’s issued a denial of the separatist accusations, and the latter doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, but her naming has still generated tons of criticism.

It seems a little bizarre that in the entire country, there was not a single candidate who could be found for the job who didn’t come equipped with such heavy baggage. But to me, all those things miss the point.

The thing is, amidst all the speculation and all the attacks, I’ve yet to see why Michaelle Jean even deserves the position in the first place.

Sure, one could argue that the job of Governer General isn’t exactly rife with prerequisites. It’s a largely ceremonial post, one that many Canadians argue should be abolished altogether. But scoff at it or not, it does have its share of demands.

Like her predecessor, Adrienne Clarkson, Jean is a minority woman. She’s also a Quebec francophone. But nobody has told me about a single real qualification that she holds for the job, other than the colour of her skin and the language of her speech. Oh, and the fact that she’s photogenic and has TV experience. But how does that qualify someone to represent our country?

For a purely political appointment, Martin could’ve done better. Much better.