Danielle the Poseuse
Le Québec pour les Québécois, does not translate to Alberta for Australians.
Danielle Smith and her separatist puppeteers like to elevate Québec as a model for their own aspirations. She admires Québec’s provincial police, pension fund and selective immigration. But she conveniently ignores the one big thing that separates Québec and Alberta: Québécois were first among Canadians to adopt environmental integrity as a national project, and they remain its strongest defenders.
Way back in the late 1970s’, the Parti Québécois government turned out the lights on Hydro-Québec’s outrageous scheme to line the St. Lawrence River with nuclear power plants. Concurrently, René Lévesque’s government stopped residential and industrial farmland being gobbled up by Montreal’s relentless sprawl.
If the Alberta government wanted greater sovereignty to legislate above beyond the federal government’s timid environmental protections, I might well vote for it as I did for the Parti Québécois when reporting from Quebec City for the Montreal Gazette and Maclean’s magazine. My motivation then, and would still be now, was the party’s prescience in environmental policy.
In Québec, the separatists narrowly failed in their quest for independence. But they succeeded both in affirming their language and culture and in establishing the primacy of environmental values in developing their society and economy.
So, no Danielle, you are not campaigning in the spirit of Québec’s sovereignty movement. Instead, you want to be free of Canadian law, treaties and courts so that you can further despoil Alberta with foreign coal mines.
To paraphrase VP candidate Lloyd Bentsen’s famous 1988 put-down of his republican rival Dan Quail, I knew René Lévesque. You are no Réné Lévesque.
You are a poseuse — an imposter. You are not a sovereignist: you are a pitiful quisling to foreign authoritarians, including your Australian mining dominatrix and Trumpette bestie, Gina Rinehart.