This week in Quebec: referendums, corruption, and terrorism

The pundits weigh in on the 40th anniversary of the FLQ crisis, ongoing graft allegations, and the possibility of mandatory referendums every 15 years.

Quebec is an enigma for many English-speaking Canadians. In the interest of making our two solitudes a little less lonely, here are some columns on things going on in la belle province these days.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the October Crisis, and unbeknownst to the rest of Canada, which remembers the FLQ as a band of terrorists, in Quebec “conspiracy theorists have done their best … to try to turn (the FLQ) into innocent, well-intentioned freedom fighters,” according to a Montreal Gazette editorial. And unfortunately “Quebecers who were not alive at the time have no way of knowing what a massive whitewash effort this is.” The Gazette reminds us that the threat of separatist terrorism is not dead, pointing to the Jeunes patriotes, who wanted to blow up tanker trucks in Montreal after 9/11. This column doesn’t do much to bridge the gap between anglophones and French-Canadians, actually.

The Toronto Star’s Chantal Hébert weighs in on Michael Fortier’s recent suggestion that Quebec hold mandatory separation referendums every 15 years, saying it “falls squarely in the harebrained category.” Fortier says regular referendums would allow politicians to focus on other problems the rest of the time, but Hébert argues that just as “fixed-date elections have ended up extending provincial campaigns from a few official weeks to a few actual years, fixed-date referendums would result in plebiscite politics being the order of the day for most of the time.”

Many pundits are still up in arms because Parliament voted to denounce Maclean’s last week for its article that called Quebec the most corrupt province in the country. Noting that no one has found a single error in the article, the National Post’s David Frum says we’ve been flung back to the old days when by English law the truer the allegations against government, the guiltier the accusers. “If you said the king was an imbecile, when he was not an imbecile, that would be bad. But if you said the king was an imbecile and he actually was an imbecile — that would be very, very much worse.”