Mad Max Strikes Again! ... Then Slinks Back to the Doghouse

Max Bernier's history of disgrace allows him to be principled with impunity in the pesent.

In the Ottawa Citizen, Gerry Nicholls asks why the normally iron-fisted prime minister repeatedly allows Conservative MP Maxime Bernier to articulate controversial positions not held by the government, as he did recently when he questioned the need for Quebec’s French-language-protection laws. Nicholls speculates the reason is some combination of the fact that Harper secretly agrees with Bernier’s hard line conservative views, that Bernier’s statements appeal to the Conservatives’ base, that ultimately there’s nothing Harper can do to stop him, and that Bernier is simply a courageous guy. All of this is true, but Nicholls curiously leaves out a key element of Bernier’s career, which is that he had to resign as foreign affairs minister after he left sensitive documents at his ex-girlfriend’s house. Since then he’s been relegated to permanent backbencher status, making for a mutually beneficial arrangement whereby Bernier can say whatever he wants and none of it sticks to Harper, because we all know Bernier is unlikely to ever wield significant power in a Conservative government again.

Weighing in on the language debate Bernier has sparked, the Montreal Gazette’s Don MacPherson debunks the idea, put forth by the Parti Québécois, that Montreal is being rapidly anglicized. “But the cold hard statistical evidence shows that Montreal is not becoming more English,” he writes. “And what's the source for this evidence? It's none other than the PQ.” He points to a study conducted by PQ language critic Pierre Curzi that found French usage in Montreal has only declined two percent over the past five years, and one percent over the past ten. People who speak French at home still make up two-thirds of the city’s population. This is hardly the “spectacular regression” of French the PQ claims is happening in Montreal. MacPherson’s piece isn’t a great argument against the province’s anti-English laws because it could be argued that there would be much worse regression if those laws didn’t exist, but it does suggest that the PQ is using scare tactics to further its agenda.