Yet again:
It might very well be time to give majority government another try in Canada.
This is a notion, new polling data suggests, to which Canadian voters are coming around in growing numbers. And with good reason. The country is now on its third minority government in the past five years, and another election looms. The political climate has rarely been more poisonous, governance more unstable, or Parliament more dysfunctional. But Quebecers, more than other Canadians, have the power to give the country majority stability.
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As noted above, Quebecers more than others have it in their power to break this log-jam, by taking a more active hand in national governance instead of "parking" their votes with an increasingly irrelevant Bloc Québécois. Had Quebecers voted for national parties in the same proportion as other Canadians in the last election, we would have a majority government. The instability of minority times makes the government of Canada weaker, which serves the sovereignists' interests but not the public interest.
The hard truth of Canadian unity, and why Quebecers "park" their votes with the Bloc, is that each of the two solitudes views Canada differently. To anglophones Canada is - save some of the more Balkanized ethnics ghettoes - their country. To francophones, especially in Quebec, Canada is simply a vehicle to advance their cultural interests. If French culture can be better preserved by keeping Quebec in Canada, so be it. If independence - or whatever half-way house euphemism the separatists are using at the moment - looks like a better option, vive la independence!
The Bloc Quebecois is monumentally useless if your political aims is something humdrum, like forming a government. But if the goal is to extort concessions form the rest of the country, by raising the specter of national destruction, the Bloc is wildly successful. Stephen Harper has to run a national governing party. The West wants to scrap the Wheat Board and the Long-gun Registry. The typical Ontarian couldn't tell wheat from cauliflower and is terrified of being caught in a drive-by, while touring the less scenic parts of Toronto. A certain measure of negotiation and compromise is required to run so disparate a group, how much is another matter. Giles Duceppe, the longest serving party leader in Canada, doesn't have to face such wide cultural chasms. He leads a nearly monoethnic one issue, one note party where the internal debate is about when to pick up and leave. The swing voters who alternately support the Bloc, the Tories and the Liberals, aren't Canadians mulling over policy options, but foreigners in spirit trying to get the best deal. Expecting them to put Canada's interests above their parochial concerns is a fantasy.
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