2005 WorldNetDaily.com
Canadians who for the last 15 or so years have been enjoined to celebrate a Politically Correct Christmas no mention of Christ, Bethlehem, shepherds, angels etc., no wishing people "Merry Christmas" are to be endowed this year with a purely political one.
When the Liberal minority government of Prime Minister Paul Martin lost a confidence vote in the Commons last Tuesday (171-133), this triggered an election set for Jan. 23, with a predictably bitter campaign raging right through the holiday period.
Superficially, the present polls indicate the return of a Liberal minority government. If the vote were held last week, said one poll, the Liberals would get 35 percent of it, Stephen Harper's Conservatives 29 percent, the Socialist NDP 17 percent and the separatist Bloc Quebecois 14 percent.
But the Bloc's 14 percent is all in the Province of Quebec, so the poll in fact portends a separatist sweep of that province. This in turn would foreshadow the election of a separatist provincial government in a provincial election next year or in 2007, and a new Quebec referendum on the separation of Quebec from Canada immediately after that election.
And so, Martin's federal Liberals will now argue, whom would you rather have running the government at Ottawa during this, the third Quebec separatist crisis? Paul Martin of Montreal? Or Steve Harper of Calgary, Alberta, the province least sympathetic to Quebec's aspirations, and therefore least able to rouse support for Canada in a Quebec referendum?
This factor, barely mentioned at the outset of the federal campaign, can be counted on to become increasingly significant if the Bloc's strength in Quebec becomes ever more evident as the campaign progresses. Pointing to the Quebec situation, the Liberals will paint themselves as the only possible saviors of the country. They will portray a vote for the Conservatives as a vote to see the country destroyed.
Nowhere in Canada will this line of argument become more persuasive than in Ontario. The province has 106 seats in the 308-seat House of Commons. At present, the Liberals hold 73 of those 106. In the past, they have held virtually all of them. If they can restore that overwhelming grip on Ontario, they will almost certainly return with a majority government.
To do that they need only emphasize one point. More than any other province, Ontario needs Quebec. That is, it needs a united Canada. It must preserve the status quo.
If Quebec were to separate, this would isolate the four Atlantic provinces from the rest of Canada, certainly a reversal but not a disaster. For the four western provinces, the economic consequences of a Quebec departure would be minimal, for Alberta and British Columbia probably even beneficial. But for Ontario generally, and Toronto particularly, the partial breakup of Canada would be an unimaginable disaster. The central pillar of Ontario 's economy has been its role as the country's financial and economic center. If Canada began to break up, this role would begin to disintegrate and Ontario's economic ascendancy along with it.
All of which will be made abundantly clear to Ontario voters by the Liberals. They will point out the apparent weakness of Quebec's present Liberal government, where the popularity of Premier Jean Charest has reached a doleful low, and the separatist Parti Quebecois has named a new and vigorous young leader. He is Andre Boisclair, a confessed ex-cocaine user and dazzling crowd-charmer who has transformed the aging separatist cause established back in the '70s into a boisterous youth movement that thoroughly frightens federalists. He is also the first acknowledged homosexual to lead a Canadian political party.
Ironically, the Liberals will also point to the damage done to the federal image in Quebec by the sponsorship scandal in which federal Liberals were shown to be helping themselves and their friends to federal funds earmarked to bolster the federal image in the province. This has enormously strengthened the separatist cause, making it all that much more necessary, the Liberals will argue, to maintain Quebec's Martin as prime minister. Thus, Liberal corruption will be converted into an argument to vote Liberal.
Most of all, they will point to a prosperous and gloating Alberta, accepting, even cherishing, the possibility of a separated Quebec because in the surviving Canada, the West would gradually supplant Ontario as the country's economic center.
So this unprecedented Christmas campaign may establish another precedent as well. It could become a campaign whose central issue, scarcely mentioned when it began, became decisive by the time it was over.
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