Québec election: Anti-immigration sentiment propels CAQ to landslide

Ed. here. Normally we don't cover regional/local politics, but yesterday's election in the province of Québec has implications for all of Canuckistan, so we pressed our National Sports Editor, Poor Len Canadien, into service to analyse the result. Over to you, Len.

Tank youse, Hed. Hier soir au Centre Bell [Len? Len! The election, Len. Not the hockey game! Ed.]

Oh... yeah... Well... Four years and two days ago, François Legault led his fledgling Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), theretofore barely a blip in the polls, to a surprise victory over the Québec establishment, winning a majority of the seats in the Assemblée Nationale to form a new government.

The CAQ government made good on his promises, passing a number of controversial laws, including Bill 21 on the secularization of the state, which bars public school teachers and government officials in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols, including headgear. The law also denies fully veiled Muslim women access to health care and other government services. 

The very first major piece of legislation passed by the CAQ on coming to power drastically reduced the number of immigrants admitted to Quebec, and requires them to provide evidence that they have learned democratic values and Quebec values.

Last May, M Legault's government passed into law Bill 96, which reinforces the primacy of French, "the official and common language of Québec", making it the only official language of la Belle Province.

All these measures were condemned by English-speaking federal and provincial politicians, the lickspittle media and all progressive thinkers, including Prime Minister Blackie McBlackface, as reactionary, xenophobic, divisive, discriminatory, anti-immigrant, chauvinistic, and (of course) racist. But the Québécois approved overwhelmingly, and the CAQ was almost universally predicted to win a second term in Monday's election.

So last night's result came as no surprise. The only shock was the extent of M Legault's re-election triumph. With most polls reporting (as of 0100 today, EDT), the Coalition Avenir Québec had bagged 89 seats (out of 125) in the Assemblée Nationale, 13 more than they started with, and close to the contemporary record established in 1989.

Both Radio Canada and TVA predicted a CAQ majority within 10 minutes of the closing of the polls at 2000. The only question for the rest of the evening was who would form the official opposition and how many seats would be left for the other three parties. In the end the once-mighty Liberals retained the title with 21 seats, six less than they had when the legislature was dissolved.

It is noteworthy that the Liberals, led by a Woman of Colour who grew up in Haïti, slipped to fourth place in the popoular vote, behind the Parti Québecois and socialist Québec Solidaire. That they got so many seats is due to the concentration of their support in Montréal, where their candidates were elected in predominantly English-speaking, Jewish and immigrant-majority ridings. The Liberals failed to elect a single candidate outside of the Montréal-Laval region. One commentator said (repeatedly), "There are  now two Québecs."

At the outset of the campaign, Premier Legault proclaimed immigration a key ballot issue. He implored voters to give him a clear majority so he would be in a strong position to demand the federal government cede to the province all but exclusive control over immigration. In a speech to the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal, M Legault said it would be "suicidal" for the Quebec "nation" to increase its intake of immigrants since they are responsible for the decline of French.

This followed earlier remarks in which the Premier associated immigrants with crime and violence, and suggested they were a threat to Quebec values. CAQ Immigration Minister Jean Boulet was forced to apologize after stating in a radio debate, "80 per cent of immigrants go to Montreal, do not work, do not speak French or do not adhere to the values of Quebec society." 

M Legault responded by saying M Boulet had "disqualified" himself from the position of Immigration Minister if the CAQ retained power. Note the careful wording. M Boulet remained the CAQ candidate in the riding of Trois-Rivières, which he won handily, and will probably remain in cabinet, just not in the immigration portfolio.

This photo, of Mounties welcoming "asylum-seekers" (fleeing the racist USA!) at Roxham Road, near Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle QC, illustrates perfectly the unfettered mass migration which Québécois reject. Since 2017, thousands of these "refugees" have crossed the US-Canada border illegally at this "unofficial" point of entry. 

A recent Radio-Canada investigation revealed that the Just In Trudeau's ultra-woke government has spent half a billion dollars on infrastructure and services at the border crossing, to accommodate these illegal aliens in the name of "diversity". 

Québec Conservative Party leader Eric Duhaime (whose party won 0 seats in yesterday's election) condemned illegal immigration and raised the idea of building a wall along the border. Imagine that! M  Duhaime’s rejection of illegal immigration is shared by the vast majority of Québécois outside of Montréal. 

Over the last 15 years, as more and more "refugees" who cannot and will not be assimilated into Québec society have flooded into the province, people have become fed up with unreasonable accommodations being made for religious and racial minorities. 

Call it "white supremacy" or "nationalism" or whatever you like, but the people of Québec, like those of France, Italy and even the American heartland are uniting against multilingualism, multiculturalism and the New World Order. There should be a lesson in that for politicians in TROC (The Rest of Canada). Whether they, especially Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives, will wake up and smell the coffee remains to be seen.

Québec to require immigrant wannabes to pass values test

The government of the Canadian province of Québec announced yesterday that it will require immigrants seeking permanent residency to pass a values test to ensure they understand and respect its new secularism law, the provincial government said on Wednesday.

The measure is being implemented by the Coalition d'avenir Québec (CAQ) government of Premier François Legault as part of the plan to make the province totally secular, as promised during last fall's election campaign, in which the CAQ won a majority of seats in the National Assembly. The CAQ -- a nationalist, centre-right party -- ran on a platform which included cutting immigration to the predominantly French-speaking province, in order to protect its distinct identity within the Great No-longer-white North.

The new government was quick to pass Bill C-21, a law banning public employees in positions of authority wearing religious symbols such as Muslim hijabs and Jewish kippahs to work. The values test is intended to make sure that potential immigrants understand that law and its implications, M Legault told reporters on Wednesday. "I think it's important in Québec", he said, "because we are a nation, we are a distinct society, we have our values, we have our charter."

Bill C-21 has been roundly condemned by left-wing human rights activists, both internationally and in the rest of Canaada as infringing on "minority rights", especially the rights of the, errr, Muslim minority. A recent poll showed that over 70% of Québéclois support the law, but what the majority thinks is, of course, irrelevant. During this month's federal election campaign, the leaders of all the federal parties except the Bloc Québécois (the federal version of the provincial Parti Québécois) and Maxime Bernier's People's Party of Canada spoke out against C-21. Strangely, though, none of them went so far as to show support for a court challenge against the law. Mr Socks, however, said he'd think about it.

Premier Legault described the test as similar to one that exists at the federal level, where individuals applying for Canadian citizenship must pass a test on Canada's history and laws, among other topics. An individual must score at least 75% to pass the new Québec test that covers "democratic values and the Québec values expressed by the (Québec) Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms," the government's official publication said. The test will apply only to economic immigrants and their families, not "refugees". So if you cross the open border with the USA illegally, you can keep your hijab or turban on.

Footnote: The green, white and red flag seen in the picture above is not one of the many Arab flags using those colours in a pattern of horizontal bars. It is le Drapeau des Patriotes (avec Le Vieux de '37). I leave it to interested readers to find out what the flag symbolizes. Any resemblance to the Confederate Battle Flag is purely coincidental.

Right-wing party ousts Liberals in Québec

Walt here, back home after five days touring (not tearing) through les Cantons de l'Est du Québec. It's good to be back in a place where I don't have to think before I speak [or write! Ed.]. How I envy people like my guide, Poor Len Canayen, who can switch effortlessly from French to English and back again.

Another person who can do that is Chantal Hébert, a columnist for the Toronto Red Star and regular guest on the "At Issue" segment of CBC's The National. Around the middle of September, in the middle of the Québec provincial election campaign, Mme Hébert told Agent 3 that immigration to la Belle Province and the resultant anti-immigrant backlash was a non-issue in this election. She called it "the dog that didn't bark."

The issue was raised by the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) led by millionaire businessman François Legault, who promised that his party would cut the number of immigrants coming into the province from 50,000 to 40,000 per year. And it would force them to take an assessment of their knowledge of the French language and of Québec values within three years in order to obtain a Quebec Selection Certificate, which they need in order to get permanent residency from the federal government.

Those vows brought M Legault into conflict other provincial party leaders. The Liberals predictably accused him of not respecting diversity and stirring up divisions. The Parti Québécois accused him of not going far enough.

The lamestream media dismissed the idea of a values and language test as a warmed-up version of the proposed Charter of Québec Values which (they told us) cost the Parti Québécois the provincial election of 2014, won by the moderately progressive Liberals. There's no anti-immigrant sentiment in Québec, they told us. Québécois are just as tolerant as other Canadians, who, as is well known, love immigrants, espeically the bogus "refugees" and asylum-seekers who are crossing the border between Vermont and Québec illegally, at St-Bernard-de-Lacolle, at the rate of over 1000 per month, assisted by the Mounties who carry their bags and direct them to the welfare office. It was to that part of Québec -- the Eastern Townships -- that we went to gauge the sentiment of real habitants, not the chattering classes of Montréal.

In our travels through the ridings (electoral districts, for our American readers) of Brome-Mississquoi, Orford, Sherbrooke, Granby, Saint-François and Mégantic, we saw lots of signs and posters for the CAQ, some for the other parties (notably Québec Solidaire in Sherbrooke) and very few for the Liberals. The people we talked to -- no taxi drivers or media types! -- were surprisingly unemotional, but pretty sure that change was coming, in the form of a CAQ government.

Why? Not because of the economy, which several told us was doing well enough, under the Liberals, but because of "the values thing". No-one actually said "Québec aux Québécois!", but that was the underlying sentiment, as I read it. That part of Québec, sometimes called l'Estrie, went solidly Liberal in 2014. It contains the largest percentage of anglophones (English speakers) outside of Montréal's west island, but even they seemed in the mood for change, so much so that we couldn't even start an argument, let alone get some bets down!

So... it came as no surprise to Poor Len and yr obdt servant that the CAQ swept l'Estrie and virtually all of Québec, apart from the aforesaid west island. There are 125 seats in the Québec Assemblée Nationale. Final count (as of this writing, subject to a couple of recounts): CAQ 74 (a comfortable majority); Liberals 32; Québec Solidaire 10; Parti Québécois (the former separatists) 9. Turns out the dog that didn't bark chose to bite instead!

As with the American election of 2016 and the Ontario election of this past June, the pollsters and meeja pundits got it WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! They were so sure, right through mid-day yesterday, that the "divisive" CAQ, led by a millionaire businessman (cf. Donald Trump and Doug Ford) couldn't win, that their wildest prediction was that the Liberals might be reduced to a minority government.

The looks on the "experts"' faces reminded me of nothing so much as the long pusses displayed by Joy Behar and all the rest on American TV on The Night of the Trump. I hope someone is putting together a highlight reel showing the moment when the CBC realized the CAQ was going to win. It was at 8:19 PM EDT -- 19 minutes after the polls closed. Just In Trudeau and federal Liberals take note -- YOU'RE NEXT!