[LINK] "Quebec’s fear-mongering PQ bears little resemblance to the party of René Lévesque"

[rfmcdonald]

Writing in the Toronto Star, Chantal Hébert has it right. The Parti Québécois in recent years really has played the ethnonationalist card to the hilt, starting from the manufactured controversies over the Quebec Charter of Values (immigration, religion, ethnicity) and continuing with the most recent hysteria over an alleged flood of Ontarian students set to swing the election.

I only hope that, as the polls seem to suggest, the PQ will lose the Québec election scheduled for Monday the 7th of April.

According to Bertrand St-Arnaud, who rode in to Montreal bright and early on Sunday to sound the alarm, the April 7 election was at risk of being stolen by the rest of Canada. Hordes of out-of-province university students were determined to storm the bureaucratic gates of the election registration offices to sign up to vote for the federalist Liberal party.

In the absence of physical evidence that Canada’s foot soldiers were on the march, I concluded that the minister must be keeping information from the public, the better to prevent a full-fledged panic.

Given how well-versed today’s students are in the ways of Harry Potter, it seemed fair to assume that they had cleverly donned an invisibility cloak to take Quebec by stealth.

How else could any group of the size required to change the outcome of the vote in my inner city neighbourhood manage to go about unnoticed?

Sainte-Marie-Saint-Jacques is a riding where, on a good year, the Liberals place third, thousands of votes behind the PQ and the second-place Québec Solidaire. Two other Montreal ridings alleged to be at risk by the péquiste brain trust have a long and solid Liberal history.

Upon verification, Quebec’s chief electoral officer Jacques Drouin reported that there was no evidence that anything was amiss in any of the five ridings alleged to be under siege. There are marginally more English-speaking students seeking to register than in the 2012 election, but in an election that has turned into a referendum on a future referendum and amidst campus campaigns to promote the student vote, the opposite would have been more surprising.