Wednesday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Martin Patriquin offers up the definitive response to the pearl-clutching over Nycole Turmel's Bloc membership (italics in original, bold added):

(H)ere’s the wee nuance that seems lost on the rest of the county, and one that is particularly important in the case of Turmel: the members of (sovereigntist) parties, whether they are on the left or the right, endorse this supposedly bedrock belief to varying degrees. The Bloc is/was made up of people like Jean Dorion, former president of the endlessly entertaining Société St Jean Baptiste; it’s also the former home of Jean Lapierre, who after co-founding the sovereignist party went on to be a cabinet minister in Paul Martin’s “home of the Clarity Act” Liberal government. Many, many members of the Bloc, along with the Parti Québécois and Québec Solidaire, are happy to live with Quebec’s current status as a province within a larger country. It’s a fact that vexes hardcore sovereignists and federalists alike.

And let’s have a look at Nycole Turmel’s record, shall we? First off, she was a member of the Bloc since 2006, long after BQ leader Gilles Duceppe had transitioned the Bloc from its original sovereigntist shock troop status to a hazy lefty bastion that, while ostensibly sovereignist in message, was more concerned with “defending Quebec’s interests in Ottawa.” Exhibit two: Turmel was member not of Parti Québécois—which is decidedly less whimsical on the issue of Quebec separation—but of Québec Solidaire, a left-first party whose own co-leader told me last year that “we are caught in the prison of the national question.”

Finally, and it’s amazing how few people have clued into this headsmackingly obvious point, but Turmel willingly ripped up her Bloc Québécois membership card to run for a dyed-in-orange federalist party. That alone should be evidence enough that her sovereignist credentials weren’t quite Parizeau-calibre. If anything, Turmel’s (temporary) ascension to the head of the party, like the NDP’s overwhelming victory in May, is proof positive that detaching the left from the sovereignist movement isn’t as impossible as it once was. How far we’ve come.

- Bill Tieleman points out that Canadians are poorer than they think by comparing soaring utility costs to stagnant wages.

- No, it's not news that right-wingers see deficits as an excuse to slash public services rather than having any actual interest in addressing them. But a reminder can never hurt.

- Nor is it particularly surprising that they're fully dedicated to ramping up a needless security state, and that cost evaluations and public consultations are no object in the effort.

- Finally, it's well worth joining the effort to share what looks to have been one of the few redeeming stories to come out of Anders Behrin Breivik's anti-left and anti-Muslim rampage.