I took my Canadian cousins to Ronnie's on Saturday night. They had a good time. Ronnie was sufficiently impressed with my cousin Kris to give her a t-shirt bearing his pub's logo. He even told me that he thought Kris had her head screwed on right.
My cousin Reghan, who is verbally combative and is living in Alberta, Canada got in an argument with this big man Francois from Quebec. Francois is a separatist.
I listened in and hearing Francois's complaints about the federal government having too much power, the lie of Canada being bilingual and Pierre Trudeau being an idiot, I told him that he sounded like a french version of a Reform Party member (I was a member at one time). I asked him what he thought of official bilingualism and he told me that the problem was that people did not think positively about it. It turned out that he felt that free education and free healthcare were the essence of a government everyone could believe in.
Reform in Western Canada was a small government movement. I see it could never appeal to the East past Ontario which while hating the federal government did not want it to shrink in any meaningful way. As long as they feel the government has to micromanage everything, there will never be a satisfactory constitutional arrangement in Canada and the fires of regional separatism will always burn.
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