Raging Duff

$539 grand? All that grunting and heaving by those sovereignist jackals Lester and Philpot and the worst Option Canada malfeasance that Judge Bernard Grenier could produce was the cost of chartering a few buses and planes to convey pro-Canada supporters to a federalist rally the week prior to the ‘95 referendum?
The rally that RadCan’s RDI secessionist moles laughingly said was attended by no more than 35,000 people?
This, in a referendum in which the question was a trap, by the admission of its principal architect Jacques Parizeau?
A referendum for which the PQ parliamentary reform minister Guy Chevrette’s own office was accused of orchestrating a deliberate vote-rejection scheme? Ever wonder why the probe never went higher than a few underlings — and why it was accorded the same importance of the illegal votes of a few Bishop’s University students?
Ever wonder why the ballot boxes from the 1995 referendum are still sitting in a Quebec City warehouse, ordered sealed by former Chief Returning Officer Pierre-F. Coté after legal challenges from Alliance Quebec and the Gazette demanded that the rejected ballots be recounted?
Ever wonder how much the PQ spent during that same referendum campaign? First, there was the Conseil de la souvereignite, that secession sales force headed by a couple of Tories turned Bloquistes who spent months touring Quebec, preaching the cause. There were those sovereignty feasibility studies ordered by Parizeau and carried out under the supervision of restructuring minister Richard Le Hir. Le Hir, the former head of Quebec’s Conseil du Patronat, later flipped to the federal cause and revealed those studies and may have cost Quebec as much as $50 million.
Did the nationalist Québécois media bother to pick up on that? Of course not. In Quebecois media circles of that period, sovereigntists wore the white hats and the federalists were dressed in black.
We’re seeing echoes of that in the Option Canada report. Never mind that Lester and Philpot are bought, sold and paid-for lackeys of the secessionist cause. Lester, canned by RadCan for his political activities and Philpot, former head of the Societe Saint-Jean Baptiste, almost forced to quit his PQ candidacy in the March 26 election because of his denial of the Rwandan genocide? Yet their claims that the No spend more than $5 million illegally triggered this latest witchhunt.
Now they’re saying it was justified because it came up with 500 grand in so-called illegal expenses.
Tell you what. Let’s reopen those ballot boxes and have a full judicial recount. If the Yes side takes it, we have another referendum with a question decided by both Quebec and Canada. If the No side wins, we pass a law outlawing sovereignty referendums.
For most Quebecois, democracy is a one-way street that can only lead to independence.
That’s why there’s such an unholy uproar over the Option Canada scandal — and nary a murmer about those many and egregious Yes side transgressions.

Posted by Jim Duff at 6:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

When a product or service no longer sells, an astute businessperson cuts his or her losses and finds a new line.
But not Quebec’s independantistes. Every time the Parti Quebecois loses an election, they find a reason to pretend it’s not because nobody’s buying their two-product line — secession and state socialism. Instead, they blame it on whatever dupe happens to be leading the party. Once they anoint a new messiah, they start massaging the message that it’s time to concentrate on good government, rather than the pot of gold at the end of the referendum rainbow.
This past week's péquiste pony ran true to form. The party's capos knifed Boisclair, then engineered Gilles Duceppe's thwarted hostile-takeover bid that ensured Pauline Marois is unopposed. Marois, no stranger to the disingenouous duplicity required to head this political beast, immediately reverted to the winning-conditions philosophy the same gang had refused to allow Boisclair to consider.
Good government will create an atmosphere favourable to the reinsertion of the sovereignty debate.
What teenage male has't tried a variation on that theme?
The good-government pledge would be hilarious if it wasn't so transparent. This comes from the same folks who, when they were running Quebec, amassed the majority of the $125 billion debt, invested in ruinous projects like the National Library, closed a dozen hospitals and sent thousands of mental patients into the streets. As health minister, Pauline Marois, the latest aspirant to the PQ crown, oversaw the layoffs of 4,000 nurses and hundreds of doctors. As education minister, she engineered the shift from confessional to linguistic school boards, guaranteeing the long, slow death of the English school system.
And yet the polls suggest that Marois would handily defeat either the Liberals under Jean Charest or Mario Dumont’s Action Democratique. The good-government promise is a Trojan horse. The real aim is sovereignty.

Posted by Jim Duff at 3:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

First Rene Levesque, then Pierre-Marc Johnson suggested that the Parti Quebecois put secession on the back burner — and paid a high political price. Now it’s André Boisclair’s turn after proposing the scrapping of Article 1 of the PQ platform....The war between Boisclair and his rebellious troops is intensifying...there’s talk in the party he’ll quit by this summer. Last week, they were talking about moving the leadership review up from September 2008 to next spring or this fall. This week, there’s talk about using a May 26 regional presidents’ meeting in Boucherville to set a new date for Boisclair’s impeachment.
There’s already a leadership fight shaping up — between Diane Lemieux, the youth choice versus Gilles Duceppe who’s watching closely and being briefed by pequiste lifers like Louise Harel. Duceppe’s dauphin, Pierre Paquette, is poised to take over as Bloc head. But Duceppe is too wise to bell the cat. He said yesterday on RDI the situation the PQ finds itself in is both deplorable and difficult — but refused to speculate on whether the leadership review should be moved forward.
A former minister in the cabinets of both René Lévesque and Jacques Parizeau, Dr Denis Lazure said Boisclair is the legitimate leader — a shot at the poisonous backroom shenanigans of Bernard Landry, who’s calling everyone to crap on Boisclair. But as Lazure put it, legitimacy isn’t enough. So typical of the PQ — knifing their leaders for proposing an alternative to an unsaleable option. And when they pop off, the canonization begins.

Posted by Jim Duff at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Damn right Quebec’s special. Tete a Claques can stereotype blacks and mock slavery, and sponsor Bell is just fine with that, because in Quebec, how can racism exist among the Kulturally Oppressed? But when Team Canada named Phoenix Coyotes star Shane Doan captain, our pinhead pols climbed all over one another in their tiny, fist-pumping fury to drag the hapless officials before their Kommons Kangaroo Kourt to shame them into admitting Doan was a politically incorrect choice.
You see, the Albertan committed the heinous crime of maybe saying something nasty about a Quebecois official — in 2005. The NHL absolved him, he insists he never said it and there’s no proof he did, but none of that counts. What counts is that he MAY have said something nasty about French-Canadians and in the Kanada of 2007 where the entire political firmament is wetting itself to elect bodies in Quebec, that must not happen.
Of course the Bloc pushed the motion. What needs to be said about this bunch? A federally chartered political party that depends on the taxpayer’s teat for its sustenance because it can’t raise a dime among Quebeckers. The Bloc’s avowed mission is to sabotage the Confederation, but they all seem pretty darned happy perched up there on the Hill, fattening their pensions every time they get re-elected. If Quebec separated, I suspect they’d defect to Canada if they had to.
The NDP? Jack Layton never saw a politically correct cause unworthy of scoring a little personal face time, no matter how phony he sounds. Jack the Hack.
Then we have the Liberals, a party that stands for nothing and stoops to anything. The only one in the entire bunch with any courage is former Habs goalie Ken Dryden, who tells his fellow MPs they should bug out and leave the playing of hockey up to Team Canada.
Official Language (in Canada, only one language gets a bureaucratic bodyguard and it sure as hell ain’t English) Commish Graham Fraser will administer the whipping as the Team Canada victims are restrained by the whole gutless, inept bunch of mewling morons who have rushed to l’Affaire Doan to prove they’re Quebec friendly.
Good thing there’s a half-day time delay between here and Moscow, where Team Canada just beat Slovakia. The entire team might just be overtaken by the need to defect to Russia.

Posted by Jim Duff at 7:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)