{"id":8604,"date":"2011-04-02T12:19:16","date_gmt":"2011-04-02T16:19:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=8604"},"modified":"2011-04-02T12:19:16","modified_gmt":"2011-04-02T16:19:16","slug":"qotd-the-nature-of-harpers-slap-in-the-face-to-quebec","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/04\/02\/qotd-the-nature-of-harpers-slap-in-the-face-to-quebec\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The nature of Harper’s “slap in the face” to Quebec"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

I labour over this history to place in context the astounding, even outr\u00e9, comments offered by Canada\u2019s First Separatist, Gilles Duceppe, on hearing of the proposed arrangement — which, I hasten to mention, is merely a $4.2-billion loan guarantee from Ottawa, not some massive outright subsidy. Mr. Duceppe, with a logic that can only belong to a man who gets paid to be a separatist by the government he\u2019s trying to extinguish, called the deal \u201ca direct attack on Quebec.\u201d<\/p>\n

What really bothers Mr. Duceppe and other separatists is that they want to retain Quebec\u2019s monopoly on southbound power sales to the United States — something the Lower Churchill project, including its 1,100 km of underwater transmission cables, would threaten. \u201cBy financing the Newfoundland project, Stephen Harper has given Quebec a slap right in the face,\u201d the BQ leader declared.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s one of the continuing risibilities of the Canadian federation that we cosset and pamper and pay for the separatist faction in the House of Commons, and go along with the pretense that they\u2019re parliamentarians like any other. They are not. They displace the natural balance of the federation. They have a vested interested in seeing the parliament they attend not working. And they leap to any perceived or manufactured imperfection in our system as evidence of dark perfidy or contempt for Quebec. They warp the system. Nowhere do these observations meet with greater validation than these ludicrous comments by Duceppe on the proposed assistance to the Lower Churchill.<\/p>\n

Rex Murphy, “Newfoundland\u2019s three-gigawatt insult to Gilles Duceppe”, National Post<\/em><\/a>, 2011-04-02<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I labour over this history to place in context the astounding, even outr\u00e9, comments offered by Canada\u2019s First Separatist, Gilles Duceppe, on hearing of the proposed arrangement — which, I hasten to mention, is merely a $4.2-billion loan guarantee from Ottawa, not some massive outright subsidy. Mr. Duceppe, with a logic that can only belong […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,25,53,41],"tags":[497,700,479,113,258],"class_list":["post-8604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-economics","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-electricity","tag-gillesduceppe","tag-newfoundland","tag-quebec","tag-stephenharper"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2eM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8604"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8606,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8604\/revisions\/8606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}