IMO, pp. 9 &10 of the Léger poll on the QC #chartedesvaleurs are the money slides (in French): http://t.co/aYhGQ8DcXl #cdnpoliSo, I decided to take a look at the slides, using my best French.... well, not hard since numbers are numbers, right, Hugo?
— Jean-Sébastien Rioux (@jsrioux) September 17, 2013
Before getting to them, one thing to keep in context: the way the ridings (districts) are drawn in Quebec, Montreal is under-represented. Combine that with the "safe seats" where the Anglophones have local majorities on parts of the island of Montreal, it means that Montreal is almost entirely irrelevant for provincial campaigns. For referenda, it is different, because then Montreal is a big hunk of votes. And that leads to a real conflict between the short term and long term interests of the Parti Quebecois--the strategies to win elections to run the place compete pretty directly with the requirements to win an independence referendum. So, embracing of the short term here suggests that the PQ has given up on independence.
The other slides address various nuances--such as whether there is a problem, who should be banned from wearing religious garb, etc.
From the standpoint of political science, this makes a heap of sense: when a homogeneous party faces a heterogeneous one, the temptation/logical thing to do is to outbid the heterogeneous one--promise to be the best defender of the group's interests. This would weaken the heterogeneous one and strengthen the homogenous one. Of course, it depends on the numbers involved, but with Quebec having large majorities of Francophones and a majorities of non-religious folks (people who do not wear large crosses, kippas, turbans, hijabs, etc), the PQ is just doing what makes sense for the party.... in the short term.
From the standpoint of political science, this makes a heap of sense: when a homogeneous party faces a heterogeneous one, the temptation/logical thing to do is to outbid the heterogeneous one--promise to be the best defender of the group's interests. This would weaken the heterogeneous one and strengthen the homogenous one. Of course, it depends on the numbers involved, but with Quebec having large majorities of Francophones and a majorities of non-religious folks (people who do not wear large crosses, kippas, turbans, hijabs, etc), the PQ is just doing what makes sense for the party.... in the short term.
The problem is that in the long run that any vote on independence will lose because they need to have cross-over voters for that, and today's minorities are unlikely to do that tomorrow. To be clear, the PQ does not have the Republican problem quite yet--the demographic trends are not as dangerous to the PQ's future chances in part because stances like this will continue to encourage immigrants to move to other parts of Canada. See, xenophobia can work!
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