Date of publication: June 11, 2022 • 3 hours ago • 5 minutes reading • 26 comments Photo by Ryan Remiorz / The Canadian Press
Content of the article
Almost the entire Canadian political community is now falling asleep in a crisis of federalism. Quebec Bill 96, to which all five federal political parties in Canada have agreed without a single concern, unilaterally amends the Constitution of Canada and abolishes English as an official language that anyone has an established right to use in all offices and premises. federal government workshops and federally chartered companies and institutions in Quebec. The whole basis of the 1981 constitutional reform, including the patronage of the amendment mechanism and the proclamation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is the establishment of Canada’s status as a formally bicultural country. English is the main language for more than 75 percent of Canadians and about 18 percent who prefer to speak English instead of French in Quebec, Canada’s second most populous province. Bill 96 also promotes the steady decline of English as the language of instruction in Quebec public schools. It is a clear cultural oppression of the English-speaking population of Quebec and the bilingual Quebec, and an outrageous insult to 90 percent of Canadians outside of Quebec, whose main official language is English.
Advertising 2
This ad has not been uploaded yet, but your article continues below.
Content of the article
The system of balancing payments from the most affluent provinces and paid to those with per capita incomes below the national average was devised in the mid-1950s as a method of reaffirming the constitutional importance of the federal government after Prime Minister Maibés had forced The Federal Government of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent to recognize the equal right of Quebec (and other provinces) to calculate income taxes. Since then all the provinces have claimed this right. Although Quebec has prudent financial management and is marginally less prosperous per capita now than the average of other provinces, it continues to receive direct cash transfers from other provinces of $ 1,562 in 2020 for each of its more than 8.5 million citizens. Quebec. Many of them come from Alberta, which has been disadvantaged by the current federal government’s war on the province and its oil and gas industries. The balancing payment type also allows the Quebec State Hydroelectric Authority to discount electricity costs for Quebec, essentially to the detriment of the provinces contributing to the balance of payments.
Advertising 3
This ad has not been uploaded yet, but your article continues below.
Content of the article
Dissolution of large countries into their component parts has become relatively common in recent decades. The disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not entirely the failure of communism: the secession of 14 constituent democracies except Russia was precisely a rejection of the Russian domination of the many ethnic groups in which Russia, under the Romanovs and under the Communists, claimed own. At the same time, Czechoslovakia broke up into two parts, Yugoslavia was divided into seven independent countries (Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Northern Macedonia). Part of Indonesia seceded and there seems to be a majority in favor of Catalonia seceding from Spain, although the Spanish central government prevented such an initiative, albeit with some difficulty and not necessarily permanently. With the rise of Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland and the disputes between the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and the European Union over trade arrangements and borders between Ulster and the Republic of Ireland, the secession of Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom and its accession to the Republic of Ireland is again a possibility. There will obviously be a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, the liberating struggles of the Armenians and Azerbaijanis and the resentment of the Turkish Kurds are roaring, but the national governments that have been undermined cannot be compared to the political ones.
Advertising 4
This ad has not been uploaded yet, but your article continues below.
Content of the article
Canada is distinguished by the fact that it has devised its own political institutions, unlike most decolonized countries, and the result is that, since 1867, it is the only intercontinental, intercultural, parliamentary confederation in the history of the world. It is a system of governance of greatness and imagination and it is a system that has stood the test of time as one of the oldest democracies in the world that operates continuously, along with the United Kingdom and the United States. And in the meantime, the United Kingdom lost the vast province of 26 of the 32 Irish counties now in the Republic of Ireland, and just two years before the Confederation of Canada, the United States was reunited after the election of President Abraham Lincoln. chose to describe it as an uprising, which took four years of a terrible civil war in which some 750,000 people in a population of 31 million were killed and large parts of five separate states were crushed into rubble and burned to ashes.
Advertising 5
This ad has not been uploaded yet, but your article continues below.
Content of the article
In the life of the Confederation of Canada, France had a Bonapartist empire, a brief civil war, three democracies, a dictatorship that was a satellite of Nazi Germany and a government in exile, a pure Nazi occupation, and two provisional governments. Germany had a proliferation of smaller states, an authoritarian monarchy, a crude and disarmed democracy, a total Nazi dictatorship, a military occupation of four powers, a division into two rival countries, one of which was a Soviet-dominated communist republic. of the last 30 years. Japan has evolved from a feudal hermit kingdom to an authoritarian and war-torn monarchy, military government and occupation by the United States, and to the prosperous constitutional monarchy of the last 70 years. The upheavals and transformations of China, India, Italy, Russia, Spain and most of the countries of Eastern Europe, Arabia and Latin America are notorious. A challenge to Canadian federalism therefore has many precedents.
Advertising 6
This ad has not been uploaded yet, but your article continues below.
Content of the article
The federal government should seek the support of all three opposition separatist parties to suspend any transfer payments to any province that does not recognize the full and equal rights of both founding cultures and should make it clear that both are official languages. will continue to be used in all federal government workplaces and in federally chartered companies and institutions across Canada. Under its long-agreed constitutional jurisdiction, the federal government document must run everywhere in the country. What is happening now in Quebec is the beginning of the end of our 155-year-old Confederation and everyone in Canada should know it. Quebec should not be allowed to spit in the face of the majority of its fellow citizens and oppress its English-speaking minority, while happily pocketing nearly $ 13 billion a year as a free gift from Anglo-Canadian. We have a country, with or without Quebec. National Post
Share this article on your social network
Advertising
This ad has not been uploaded yet, but your article continues below.
NP Posted
Sign up to receive daily top stories from National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc. By clicking the subscribe button, you agree to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our emails. Postmedia Network Inc. | 365 Bloor Street East, Toronto, Ontario, M4W 3L4 | 416-383-2300
Thank you for your registration!
A welcome email is on its way. If you do not see it, check the junk folder. The next issue of NP Posted will be in your inbox soon. We encountered a problem with your registration. PLEASE try again
Comments
Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but political forum for discussion and encourages all readers to share their views on our articles. Comments may take up to an hour to monitor before appearing on the site. We ask that you retain your comments regarding and with respect. We’ve activated email notifications — you will now receive an email if you receive a reply to your comment, an update on a comment thread that follows, or if a user follows the comments. See the Community Guidelines for more information and details on how to customize your email settings.
