Quebec Election Rhetoric Heats Up - The Muck Thickens Earlier this past week the PQ leader attacked the Liberal Leader on the subject of financial irregularities committed by the a member of the Liberal Party faithful of past years. She opened the floodgates and now the muck flies. Once again, everyone is tossing the dirty politics around, and no one is touching the issues - except one which I will touch on later. The Liberal leader defended his position, adding some measure of doubt about the veracity of her family fortune and suggested they both open their bank accounts to public scrutiny. You know where that went. The Quebec Solidaire candidate from St Jerome entered the fray and asked the new PQ hopeful P. Pelideau to confirm or deny the registration of 60 Quebecor affiliates in Delaware, USA, a state considered by many to be a popular tax haven. Amir Khadir the Solidaire party in the Montreal Riding of Mercier described Delaware as a known tax haven for Limited Liability Companies and pointed out the fact that the state has more registered companies than residents. Mr Khadir reported that he had examined the state database and identified companies such as Videotron, Archambeault Investments, Sun Media, and the Toronto Sun. In his defence Mr. P. countered with the intelligence that all of these and the other affiliates listed have operations in the US. He also intimated that Mr. Khadir had little knowledge of how business was run. Prior to their press conference, the PQ leader was. She responded I would say its immoral and they should correct the situation, but I wouldnt remove them from caucus, she said. I saw another report earlier in the week where the leader was discussing the future of language laws in a PQ Quebec. She said that she would be pushing for legislation to make Quebec a unilingual entity, with French the language of daily use. She did say that, when tourists arrive from the US, they would be provided with assistance to communicate. That would mean a battle with Ottawa relative to the Canadian Constitution, established at great expense in order to protect the rights of All Canadians, and to do so at the expense of English Canadians in the rest of the country. That, however would mean a mountain of savings for the Federal Government in printing costs, translation costs -- and it could remove a preferential treatment impediment to promotions for English speaking civil servants in the rest of Canada. English speaking Canada requires a fair percentage of jobs to be filled by bilingual employees in order to communicate with Quebec under existing legislation. As to printing, I wrote millions of words of material for training, speeches, seminars, etc, etc. Every one for these documents had to be sent out to a Translation Bureau to have the material provided in the French Language - for every office in Ontario. I cant speak for the other provinces and territories, but I believe it would be the same. Shutting down a deparment, or at least severely decreasing the staff, plus getting rid of all the extra paper work would certainly produce huge saving and also increase efficiency and effectiveness of the entire civil service staff of English Canada by speeding up response time in completing projects. Of course, Francophone would be unhappy, losing an edge in the advancement que. Mr. Pierre Elliot Trudeau, a legend in our time, shot down by PQ single minded ambition. Well folks, if that sort of thing happens, I suspect that a whole lot of things will evaporate from Quebec society. Students come to Quebec Universities for the Quality of their curriculum - not to learn to speak French. You cant make the kind of marks needed to distinguish yourself if you dont arrive ready to communicate. You dont learn to live in a world community, unless you can reach out - understand, and be understood, in a world market. To live under a rock means to stifle progress, but, if that is truly the direction the province is travelling - good luck, or should I say Bon Chance.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 00:26:40 +0000
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