Also does anyone else know of a political party in any democracy to go from being king of the hill so to speak and then collapsing within a matter of months? Is is something particular to Quebec political movements.

I know other parties go up and Dow, and some parties decline over time, but not in such spectacular fashion as the Bloc and the PQ.

Also how will the collapse affect federal politics. Will it entrench the NdP strength in Quebec. Or what?

A former cabinet minister from the Diefenbaker cabinet told me quebec thinks with its heart, but votes with its head.

What Quebec really wants is to be separate without leaving home. It is also a society which expects government to play an active role in social servcies (as in the old days when the Cathoiic bishops were virtually in coalition with the goevernment.)

Superficial change in thinking has cause parties to rise and suddenly vanish for decades int he province. But nothing much has changed.

Will the NDP survive this? Mp. because the old NDP is already gone. Quebec is intensely inward looking, and probably the most racist province in Canada. It wants control over all the major factors that affect it. It wants to live in our house without being subject to any reles (rather like Alberta.)

The parties change. Quebec doesn't.

the tories in saskatchewan did exactly that, alex... when grant devine was their leader, they were absolutely wild.  they spent money on stuff that still makes me shake my head in wonder, and got the province into a debt that i will never live to see paid off. 

they went into the provincial election that year looking pretty good, but got MOWED by the NDP... when the new government finally got a look at the place, it was abyssmal... i still recall the new finance minister, i belive it was janice mckinnon actually, getting up at a press conference and saying 'its pretty much as we feared... we have nothing left here.  our credit rating will soon be gone because the former government mishandled the books so badly.' 

then many of the former MLA's of the province found themselves under criminal investigation for mishandling their government funds, and more than a few wound up in prison.  many of them are now completely penniless, as well they should be.  they lived pretty high off the taxpayers for 8 years.

needless to say, once all that came to light, the provincial PC party was utterly decimated.  it pretty much vanished, and for awhile there were only two parties in saskatchewan, the liberals and the NDP... finally the conservatives came back as 'the saskatchewan party'... they are currently in power, but the NDP was in charge for decades after the devine tories left.

their legacy is still felt in the province, too... at one point, grant devine (the former leader of the tories) tried to win the sask party nomination for his riding, down in estevan.  the sask party wouldn't even let him run for it... they refused his application outright.

In 1991, the Social Credit Party in British Columbia went from having 47 seats in the provincial legislature (a majority) to having 7 seats. By 1995 there was only one representative left in the Legislative Assembly. This collapse was due to a number of factors including a series of scandals, an eccentric leader and some bad policy decisions.

Things have changed in Quebec. The fall of the Union National lead to the PQ. While many things about the two parties stayed the same many things did change, and much of hose changes affected the rest of canada.

For one Quebec went from being almost a theocracy, into a province that completely rejected organized religion. Quebec become the first place in canada and in the world to bar discrimination based on sexual orientation, after the rise of the PQ . This eventually lead to it happening elsewhere in Canada and gay marriage.

Albeit the PQ were just as racist as the UN.

Today the two most poplar Quebec politicians are an Anglo ( muclair of the NDP) and an allophone and an immigrant who heads the QS. Could this mean the people are rejecting race based politics and embracing change. Muclair does not even try to pretend that he is a francophone, like so many Anglos have done in the past. If race based politics disappear from the Quebec scene what will it be replaced by?

Btw race based politics still dominate the rest of canada. Only three non Europeans have ever been elected as Premiers. A man of South Asian descent,in BC and two men of Arab descent in PEI. Today the only government lead by a person of non European descent is in PEI. hardly a major break through. Even he is half Scottish ( I know since we share great grandparents)

If Quebec rejects race based politics surely this will change the rest of Canada.

Quebec hasn't dropped race based politics. Mulcair, to me great disappointment, got elected precisely because he did NOT criticize race-based politics. And Layton has followed the same path.

Quebec never abandoned the church. It simply embraced a new one in the PQ. Nor has it been particularly reform minded. It accepts state intervention more readily than most other provinces because it is accustomed to a theogratic context in which such intervention was expected.

The old traditions are still there. Those who have the money send their children to private schools - and they become the leaders. The private schools are subsidized by the state. Public schools are much improved. But iin Quebec it's still the private school diploma that counts.

The class structure is so pronounced that Leandre Bergeron in  his Petit manuel d'histoire (half badly understood marxism, half racism, all bad history) had to invent a new race which he called Canayens. They were working class French;. He did it because he had to show a true Quebecois as socially and economically exploited. (He didn't bother with the fact that  anglos were a large portion of the bottom of the middle class.

It's the only book I have ever read which has a major error of fact in every paragraph. So it became a university text.

I agree that race based politics has not disappeared. But what is happening now could lead up to change that would reflect both a rejection of race and reflects that more and more people are rejecting the blame the Anglos for our problems. I suspect that if this happens it will also mean an end to the private school system as part of a turn against the so called elite. btW Pauline !arois represents the ultimate of hypocrisy in this regard. Super rich herself, and supporting more subsidies for the private schools, all the while blaming people on welfare for the economic problems of quebec.
When in fact the people most responsible are the elite who own most of the province and dominate all of the current political parties. It is this class of people that the people are turning against. What they will turn too is another question, but it seems to me that if one rejects the elite, than the only alternative today, are politicians that are immigrants and Anglos, and those from the north. While anglos like Muclair have traditionally been able to work with the Franco eleemosynary, immigrants and northerners are largely excluded. Plus once Muclair and Anglos understand that the elite have been rejected ( if that is what is actually occurring) they will exhibit more independence form the political class of elites.

i keep hoping that jean charest will join the federal conservatives again... i am sure he'd have no trouble beating harper for the leadership of the party.

ah, i can always dream....

Yes. You don't mess with Jean.

Being a politician Muclair had not rejected race base politics. Because that is the system. Otherwise he would not be elected. What I am hoping through is the recent changes in Quebec, indicated by the collapse of the PQ, Even in the face of massive unhappiness with Charest, is indicative of the rejection of the existing ruling class of people wh, who deflect from their own privilege position in society ( even to the point of using taxpayers to support them,) by using fear against Anglos and immigrants. The elites are not changing, what is changing is the acceptance by everyday people in Quebec of the political mythology and ongoing narrative that supports the elite staying in power.

Since I was 18 people have said to me, in Quebec That I was not typical of Anglos. However even while I agreed with them I pointed out that their understanding of what Anglos were was false n general . In fact that people like parizeau, Marois, were the rich and well to do who were using the Anglo myth to protect their privilege.

I still don't see the NDP as much of a signal of change. It is winning votes by making separation easier and legitimate, and by accepting widespread discrimination and even racism in Quebec. I see that as a terrible slike backwards for the NDP - but no serious change in Quebec.

I tend to think of the vote for the NDP to be a symptom. Muclair, and others were elected essentially because they were the box " None of the Above,: because everyone  "Above " were selling the same myth. True Muclair did not reject this narrative, but people like the Carleton University student who was a single teen Mom, (attacked by the elitist media for taking a vacation in Los Vegas, and the MP from Drummondville ( a man in his fifties who had never made more than 40,000) attacked for proclaiming "I;m rich I'm rich after being elected  

If people who live on 40,000 start identifying with each other, franco, anglo or allo, rather than with others based on race or language than things will change.

I also tend to believe that Politicians are not so much as leaders, as followers, who rush to be ahead of the crowd.

Why are we being forced to pay for an elite private school system which takes all the best teachers and resources from the public system, and yet we do not have a doctor (25% of Quebecers) and all of the elite do have doctors?

This is what people are starting to ask.

I'm not at all sure they're starting to ask that.  I think it more likely the Bloc has worn out it usefulness. So they're looking to the NDP as one that might be useful for their purposes.

The NDP did nothing to interfere with Quebec's racism and discriminatory laws, nothing to challenge its separatists and their assumptions.

If the same thing happens to Charest, maybe I'll become a believer. But not yet.

Chantal Herbert as a column in the Star tomorrow. http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1014596--hebert-in-q...

She too sees a seismic shift in Quebec politics. As each day passes the collapse in the PQ and Liberals is irreversible.

She compares the collapse of the PQ and sovereignty in general to be as big and permentant a shift as the one that lead to the decline of the Roman Catholic Church.

I don't doubt that the PQ is dead as a separatist party. But both the PQ and the Liberals can survive as persecutors of the English (sorry, defenders of the French).

We may well find that Charest will survive the next election. The PQ is the one more likely to crash.

And nobody, including the NDP, will lift a finger to protect those English who still live in quebec.

except the average French speaking Quebecer who rejects the blame the anglo myth and realise the only way things will get better, is by holding their own elite responsible for their decisions. 

It may or may not happen, but for the first time in my lifetime, I see some hope.

It's a pretty wiidespread myth, one that's believed by millions right across this country.

You can say that for sure.   it extends even to English speaking Canadians and . Much as self hating gay men bought into homophobia, many Anglos have internalised the rich oppressive anglo myth. 

it's a myth because for one most anglos are not anglo. They are English speaking descendants of people who were oppressed by the English. and 2 they are not privileged as a group in Quebec.

Latest crop poll says NDP is up 10 points since the election  to 53%. While the Liberals are down 4 points since the election to 10 and the Bloc is down 7 points since the election to 16. The Tories are holding firm at 18, which with the fall of the BQ places them second.

 One thing that is interesting is even if none of the politicians reject race based politics it is certainly true that Quebecois have. for the first time in History  support for the two leading parties, the NDP and the Cons are the same among allophone and Francophones and Anglophones. Meanwhile almost all of the disappearing Liberal support is Amongst Anglos, and all of the BQ support is found with Francophones.

Do you think this is just a coincidence or do the matching of the Franco and Anglo, and allo support for the NDP and Cons indicate that they have abandoned the federalist/nationalist debate and embraced a political debate based on on economics  as the most important.

Until; verv recently. I would have bet on the Liberals provincially. Anglo-Quebeckers, in particular, hung on to them as if they were different from the PQ thought, in fact, the Liberals did more damage to anglos than the Pq  did.

If the NDP is so strong provincially, it had better get some political veterans in there. They're going to need some people who know what they're doing if they're not going to burst like a bubble.

seriously... quebec is a financial MESS. 

although i respect chantal hebert and usually take her thoughts on quebec politics as pretty much the way it is, i can't help but disagree with her assessment that separatism is dead.... if that is what she is indeed saying in that article...

i don't think that the dream of sovereignty in quebec will ever die.  all it will take will be a leader as charismatic as lucien bouchard to get separatist fervor all whipped up again and there ya go.  sure there is no possible way that quebec could afford to exist outside of canada, i have never seen any of the separatists proclaim anything other than very pie in the sky types of ideals.  reality has NEVER been a strong suit for those guys.

William Johnson (who I often disagree with on other issues is declaring that the myth is dead .http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Quiet+Revolution+over/4990984/story.htmlAs the Québécois begin celebrating at sunset Thursday their "Fête nationale," the recent political fireworks exploding in Quebec point to the end of the era that began 51 years ago called the Quiet Revolution. That elated sense that all is possible, all will be better, has evolved into fear that the more things change, the more they stay the same - or get worse.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Quiet+Revolution+over/4990984/story.html#ixzz1QVLtleWE

Also two of the headliners at the fete national celebration in Montreal were English speaking Miontrealers. Rufrus Wrainwright and his sister sang a melody of their mothers (Kate McGarrigle) songs, they sang in English and no one booed. 

Personally I believe political veterans were the problem with the system. I put more hope in an amateur who does not know what they are doing, but does understand that making 150,000 dollars a years makes him rich.

Quebecers cannot escape their lobster trap until they achieve a second quiet revolution whereby they recognize the truths of history rather than tribal myths, the rule of law rather than the reckless presumption of secession on demand, and their obligations towards their fellow citizens rather than anglophobia. Then only, at last, they can be free.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Quiet+Revolution+over/4990984/story.html#ixzz1QViY0m2P

It's very hard for me to be rational about this. I was heavily involved for over twenty years in the struggle against Quebecois bigotry and discrimination. I saw laws deliberately designed to drive anglos out (and passed by both liberals and PQ. It consumed years of my life and, most distressing, I watched Canadians across the country sitting by with their faces hanging out while most of the community I was  a part of was destroyed.

I have no wish ever to see Quebec again. And not much wish to see the rest of Canada, either.

I shall be very slow to believe that either Quebec or Canada has changed.

I can understand. it was banging my head against a rock when I challenged the myth. howevr at least with me people did accuse me of things. I mean as a construction labourer/bricklayer with a learning disability, Queer, and than AIDS activist who fought all my life to be proud of who I was, I found it incredible that people wanted to make me feel bad for being an English speaker.

Sometimes I thought I was alone, and it was always a joy to read your columns and hear you speak, because I knew there were progressive non reactionaries like you could see the truth like I did. There were also a few voices like your that gave me hope.  I also had the advantage of turning 18 around the time of the first referendum. Which is one of two reasons I believe I have kept my optimism, even when it did not seem reasonable. people my age and younger would listen to me. People of your generation would just dismiss me as a "stupid anglo" And older anglo progressive would dismiss me for not understanding things.  But I knew the younger generation was different.

i also knew I was not stupid like others said, I knew I was not evil or any of the other things they said about gay people, and those of us with AIDS, so it was easy to see through the lies about anglos. 

Also I have the rather rare experience of having people tell me in my twenties that I had no hope of living to 30. I had an illness that no one survived, and others said I should accept that. I did not and was lucky enough to survive longer enough for a successful treatment. Proving anything is possible, so we must nevr give up hope.

Its still sad , because everyone I knew died. Much as the anglophone population was decimated by what happened in politics, all my gay friends died from AIDS. Today I see a rebirth. It was hard to do so for so many years.

However even through people like you fought and spoke the truth for so many more years the anglophone community was devastated, they might have just moved, but loosing community members and children who moved can be just as difficult as loosing them to death.

I consider people like you to be like Moses. Fighting for 40 years, never to see ahis goal, and only to experience loss and struggle . Moses never got to live in the promise land,  but without him his people would never had.   It is sad. 

One of my students died of AIDS. He had been my marking. It happened so quickly, a matter of weeks. My daughter worked in Africa for a year. She spoke of roads, lined for mile after mile with makeshift graves.

I expect to return to Montreal radio for a brief, telephone visit on Friday afternoon at CJAD.

Tell us what time it is. We can get Cjad on the net I believe.

It should be about 3 on July 1. I expect to get a note from then soon. The show host is Dan Delmar.

 A new group of PQ members have broken with the PQ and have started a new group, which hopes to become a new political party.

The PQ in my opinion is unlikely to ever win an election, with it's members breaking of to participate in many different types of political parties, Left to right, hard core separatists to lets delay separation. We might see 5 or more quasi separatist, parties which will divide the vote.  

Now we just need some more choices on the federalist side.

MONTREAL — A new Quebec separatist group emerged on Tuesday, brandishing a manifesto entitled "Breaking the Impasse" amid turmoil in a movement that seeks to split province from the rest of Canada.

The New Movement for Quebec (Nouveau Mouvement pour le Québec or NMQ) is a scion of the Parti Quebecois, the torchbearer of the francophone province's separatist movement since 1968.

The new party was formed by mostly ex-members of the Parti Quebecois disaffected with the party's leadership and its "outdated" secessionist plank.

I guess that like most people Quebecois are becoming more worried about staying afloat than in seeking challenges.

Hébert: Quebec’s ‘Yes’ to NDP lost in translation 

Given the context, to retroactively portray Layton’s party as a fallback vehicle for Quebec nationalism amounts to rewriting election history.

That rewriting excises the inconvenient fact that the voters who gave the NDP its sweeping Quebec victory on May 2nd already had a road-tested nationalist option on the ballot in the shape of the Bloc.

And then, no constituency in Quebec is more staunchly federalist than its anglophone minority.

Layton hails from that community.

So does Thomas Mulcair, the MP who was the Quebec face of the NDP until May 2nd.

In the aftermath of the 1995 referendum, Mulcair who then sat as a Liberal in the National Assembly was particularly vocal in pursuing the notion that the ruling PQ had rigged the vote in favour of sovereignty.

The reality is that those who ran for the NDP in the last campaign and the vast majority of those who voted for them did so not to revisit the debates of the past but because they wanted to move on.

Many wanted to resume contributing more directly to Canada’s federal life to help craft a progressive alternative to the Conservatives.

A survey commissioned by the now-defunct Canadian Unity Information Office a few years ago revealed that a majority of Quebecers refused to identify themselves as federalists or sovereigntists.

Large numbers of them want out of that particular box.

it seems that a reporter from Le Soleil was able to hear a la Jay Leno  a recent meeting of the PQ caucus. thus we are privy to the thoughts of a dying party, and a of a political movement.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/09/01/pq-fuming-after-caucus-drama-exposed/

“The population has to start loving us,” said another, adding if nothing changes, the PQ could be reduced to four or five ridings. There are currently 46 PQ members in the national assembly.

Another PQ member deplores the image of a divided party which has emerged over the last few months and his feeling of being powerless to change it.

He says it’s urgent to give the people the impression the PQ is in fact, able to succeed at what it set out to at its foundation: make Quebec into a sovereign nation.

Danielle Doyer is quoted as saying she’s surprised people on her staff have not already quit.

i think that what is happening in the PQ is simply the inevitable result of a party, and a social movement, without leadership.

imho, all it will take to unite and win will be another person with the charisma and leadership skills of lucien bouchard, and they will all come together again.

if it is true that it is only in the storm that the real captains emerge, then we should be seeing someone any day now...

any day....

 still waiting...