Talking Critic - L.A. Jay

Quick thing about the independence movement. Basically, colonialism and cultural domination make any discourse impossible. Canada has a very high and mighty view of itself and whitewashes (or englishwashes?) most of its history. Nothing wrong with that, everyone does it. Quebec was trying to be autonomous and determine its own fate. Didn't work out, it rarely does (if ever) democratically, but we tried. About the ethnic votes thing, the Canadian government massively opened its immigration and citizenship politics in Quebec to help as many immigrants get the right to vote as possible in the years before the referendum. Obviously, someone who just came to a new country wants nothing to do with political unrest. Of course, what we should have done is convince as many new citizens as possible that the project was worthwhile, not an easy thing to do. Hopefully next time, who knows?

Charles-André Lavallée-Jean

Oh, and that's not to mention imagine that there was a political party dedicated only to supporting a free California federally in your House of Representatives, which at one point was so successful it was the #2 party ("the official opposition" — a position that I know makes no sense to the Americans who only really know two-party rule but actually matters a LOT in how things are done and whether the government actually gets to do whatever it wants or not) in the entire country. We were truly a fractured country in the late part of the 20th century.

And because apparently we Canadians can't stop having very strong recollections of the time of the very strong separatists, I wanted to shed a light on how this feels from the point of view of an anglo-Canadian to what I have to imagine is mostly an American audience: imagine there was a group of people in California who were never really that cool with joining up with the rest of the United States, and in the very recent past—as in, 1970s—terrorist separatist groups kidnapped and killed a representative in California's government, and a foreign diplomat, and there were giant rallies in favour of the people doing the kidnapping. Martial law, with army troops in the streets, was enacted. And in my lifetime, there was a very real chance that the country could have split in two, as Quebec had a referendum to separate that was defeated by the slimmest of margins (50.5% against). The closest thing I can compare it to is Brexit, but IMO sanity prevailed in Canada/Quebec's case. This is all of course from the point of view of someone whose only view on the politics or geopolitical intrigue came from his Franco-Canadian grandfather - a person who refused to speak french during the October Crisis.