Posted on 11/30/2002 5:10:00 AM PST by nypokerface
QUEBEC CITY (Reuters) - Quebec's Parti Quebecois government is set to revive its separatist agenda, with the creation of a fund to promote the province's independence from Canada.
Premier Bernard Landry said on Friday the fund will be announced at the party's annual convention this weekend in Quebec City, as the Parti Quebecois gears up for a provincial election, expected next June.
The fund will be made up of contributions from citizens, and donations are expected to be tax deductible, Landry said.
The premier hinted he had killed plans to use public funds to promote the party's core separation policy, judging this practice was "immoral and illegal".
"It will be done is such a way that nobody will be able to criticize it in any shape or form," he told reporters.
The 64-year-old Landry also said the Parti Quebecois had decided to follow the federal government's example in better promoting its political agenda.
Ottawa has been very active in recent years using public funds to promote national unity in the wake of the 1995 referendum on Quebec secession, which separatists lost by only a razor thin margin.
"It (our plan) will be exactly like what the government of Canada does in the same circumstances," Landry said.
The Parti Quebecois's shift back to its core policy comes as two new opinion polls show it mired in third place behind the right-wing Action Democratique and the centrist Liberal Party, after eight years in power.
Friday's polls suggest the Action Democratique and the Liberals are neck and neck in the run-up to the elections.
On the issue of Quebec's separation from Canada, one of the polls showed 61 percent of Quebecers opposed independence while 39 percent were in favor.
The Parti Quebecois has lost two referendums on the issue, in 1980 and 1995, and Landry has said there would another by 2005 if conditions were right. Both the Action Democratique and the provincial Liberals oppose any further referendums.
Landry, convinced that time is on side, named Deputy Premier Pauline Marois as chief electoral organizer on Friday, in a move aimed at bolstering both the party's morale and profile.
Marois, who was first elected in 1976 and is the main contender to replace Landry one day, said the task will be huge.
"I want to make this battle and I want to win it," she told reporters at the legislature.
Marois said her main task will be to boost the motivation of the rank and file members of the party and find strong candidates in the French-speaking province's 125 electoral districts.
She argued the Parti Quebecois's re-election for a third term was possible, despite its low standing in the polls and its image of having gone stale.
"We are capable of getting back the confidence of Quebecers," she said.
The name was FLQ, Federation for the Liberation of Quebec. They were around from 1963-70.
From 1963 to 1967, the FLQ planted 35 bombs; from 1968 to 1970 they planted over 50 bombs. By the fall of 1970 the terrorist acts of the FLQ cells had claimed 6 lives.
See more here.
We don't want the Maritimes. They're fairly poor, and elect these crazy socialists to parliament.
The economy in Montreal has tanked in the last 30 years. They have gone from being the engine of Canada's economy to taking a back seat to Toronto.
It's bad enough that all of them except Maine already have Massachusetts.
QUEBEC CITY (Reuters) - Twenty-five years after its stunning first election win, the separatist Parti Quebecois is again the government in this French-speaking province but it is also in disarray as most polls show Quebecers are no longer interested in breaking away from Canada.
The Parti Quebecois shocked Canada and the world on Nov. 15, 1976, when it won the Quebec provincial election with 41 percent of the vote and seated 71 members out of 110 in the provincial legislature.
The PQ's election sent shivers through the English-speaking establishment. More than 100 corporate headquarters left Montreal -- at the time Canada's largest city -- and census figures show that more than 400,000 English speakers moved out.
But within the left-leaning PQ, euphoria reigned. Its charismatic leader, Rene Levesque, moved quickly to implement social reforms and a tough new law imposing the use of French in most facets of everyday life.
Twenty-five years later, the party has lost two referendums on secession from Canada and polls show that it is poised for defeat in the next provincial election, set for 2003.
Political analysts say the party is going nowhere and could implode if it fails to give some leeway to its leader, Premier Bernard Landry.
"We have gone from euphoria to total collapse. This is a party of baby boomers that is now old-fashioned," said Michel Vastel, an influential columnist at the Quebec daily Le Soleil.
Vastel stressed that Landry was stuck between a rock and a hard place, facing both staunch separatist party members and a population opposed to Quebec's independence. Polls show that some 60 percent of Quebecers would reject secession from Canada if a popular vote were held on the issue.
"It is a party that is refusing to change. They are badly stuck because there will be no other leader after Landry. If Landry fails, the Parti Quebecois will blow up," Vastel predicted.
He said that Landry will have no choice but to build bridges with the nationalist wings of the opposition Quebec Liberals and Action Democratic Party to gather support and hope to win the next provincial election. Separatists have been in power this time around since 1994 and opinion surveys indicate the Liberals of Jean Charest are currently leading by 10 points in surveys of voting intentions.
Quebec Deputy Premier Pauline Marois told Reuters that she was in favor of putting the issue of another referendum on independence from Canada on the back burner.
"At this stage, people have their minds elsewhere. Talking about a referendum would be absolutely counterproductive," she said in a interview. Separatists have vowed to hold a referendum on separation by 2005, if conditions prove favorable.
Other political analysts feel the Parti Quebecois will not have much to celebrate when it gathers for an anniversary convention this weekend in Quebec City.
"The anniversary will be undoubtedly tinted by some nostalgia ... If the independence dream remains the foundation that unites separatists, it is a dream that is slowly fading away with the party's raison d'etre," said Normand Girard, a veteran political analyst at Le Journal de Montreal, Quebec's largest tabloid.
I was under the impression that the Liberal Party was a bunch of communist wannabes that are responsible for the mrornic welfare state and thiurd world cesspool that Canada has become. With such a bias I guess we know where the authors stand.
Typical commie mentality. Let's keep on voting until we win. Maybe they ought to import voters from Miami's condo commies brigade to vote. After all, they gave a lot of chads to Gore.
That's assuming les Quebecois, among whom I proudly number many relatives, are smart enough to avoid Socialism. And Now for the big AND, they also have to sharply curtail Muslim Immigration.
Perhaps this is news to you, but Quebec is swarming with bad Muslim Mothertruckers from all over the francophone Muslim World! As long as one speaks French, and gulps down the odd brioche from time to time, les Froggies everywhere can tend to overlook slight breaches of etiquette, like dynamiting women and children, as long as it is done with the proper gallic panache, and not in one's home quartier.
Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Senegalois, Cote d'Ivoriens: all have a lot of fundamentalist bad boys who have taken OBL's shilling and drool at the prospect of getting down here to blow something up, and then pop back to Montreal for their welfare check.
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