I'm confused. Explain further for us stupid Americans.
In the 18th Century the British crushed the French in Quebec and became the owners of North America by right of conquest.
As a side development of this, the American colonies ended up on the road to independence (the taxes levied by Britain on the colonies was to pay for the war which was to ostensibly protect the colonies from French predation).
Anyway, for a large part of the French population in Quebec, this still rubs raw and despite an over representation in Canadian government (We're bilingual in French and English across the country despite the fact French is essentially non-existent outside of Quebec...In Ontario, We have well over 1 million Chinese speakers out of a population of 10 million yet there is no official government service in Chinese, yet with something like 150,000 french speakers we have TWO publicly funded french tv stations and a bunch of radio stations (publicly funded) and of course every government service and publication is in french, all the road signs, etc.)
So this french population (which is also associated on ethnic/ancestral lines...if you just came to Quebec from Algiers, you wouldn't really be Quebecois despite your mother tongue being French) wants to be a sovreign nation. The big argument is what the exact form and definition of this nation would be. A full seperate political entity, or a special province that has it's own control over immigration and international affairs, or just some token "recognition" that they're "special".
It's bad for the country anyway you slice it. Canada is already too fractured because of our insane addiction to this multicultural bullshit instead of building a cohesive nation with a common culture (health care and hockey are not a culture, but apparently they are the defining characteristics of Canada. Also "not being America". )
What the Conservative Party did last night was introduce a motion in the House of Commons recognizing the Quebecois as a distinct nation within a united Canada.
It didn't:
Define "Nation"
Define "Quebecois" - In French, Quebecois usually refers to the ethnic group composed of the decendents of the original French settlers. The people of the province of Quebec are Quebeckers, but the motion did not refer to them. On the good side, this makes it less easy to use as a building block to argue for the separateness of Quebec the province as a political unit. On the bad side, this now introduces "specialness" on ethnic lines. Not cool.
The Conservatives did this because another party, the Bloc Quebecois (which is the party that represents this ethnic group) was going to introduce this motion. The conservatives have a few important members of the House in Quebec that would have to support this Bloc motion. Also the Liberal party does too. The end result would be that this could have cause major problems for the ruling party and may even have lead to a collapse of parliament and another election (we just had one in January).
Rather than doing what previous governments have done and fight this motion, and let it go to the polls if necessary, the Conservatives thought they could steal the BQ's thunder by putting out their own motion. I think instead this played into the BQ's hands. The Conservatives have been shown to be incredibly naive and cynical leaders. I'm frankly ashamed at how green they've been as a Conservative myself. I probably won't be voting with the party at the next election.
