Oddly obsessive: political division

[redbird]

I was looking at the BBC News website yesterday. Their story on today's Canadian elections had links to all the major parties (and even the Green Party of Canada [1]). I noticed that the URLs were all of the form $party.ca except the Bloc Quebecois, who are in .org. Makes a certain sort of sense. For no obvious reason, I clicked the Bloc link. To my surprise, tucked in among all the French was a pointer, en anglais, to an English summary of the party platform.

The BQ platform has several items, each of which talks about a reasonably sensible goal like making sure that everyone gets health care, or the importance of the St. Lawrence River, and then ends with an out-of-the-blue assertion that sovereignty would help with this goal.

Not only does this make little sense for some of the policy positions--in particular, I can't see how an independent Quebec would be in a better position to convince Ottawa to protect the St. Lawrence River and shipping thereon--but I think they're misjudging their audience. I don't know what the chances are of Anglophones, and specifically those who aren't comfortable reading the French-language material, voting for the Bloc, but those who do are likely to be doing so because they like specific policies, or because there isn't a viable NDP candidate in their riding, rather than because they're in favor of Quebec independence.

[1] Who are not what Europeans, or even most North Americans, expect a Green Party to be.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Someone summarized the local (for the riding) candidates last time on LJ, and said "And X, the Bloc candidate, who clearly isn't going for either the Anglophone or the No-Frames vote..."

The Bloc would be a perfectly nice party if it wasn't for the sovereignty stuff.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

>local (for the riding) candidates

do candidates "for the riding" advocate for public transit or what?

[redbird]

It's what we'd call a district here in the U.S.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

It's what they call a "constituency" in Britain.

I'm not sure it is the same as a "district" in the US, because I'm not at all sure how similar anything is in the US to what I'm used to in a parliamentary democracy.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I don't think the Bloc want anglophones to vote for them. If enough Francophones do, though, they're set. Set to be a nuisance in the House of Commons, that is, because there's no way they could ever form the federal government.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

The Bloc pretty much exist as a cudgel to use against the federal government. Seperation is almost incidental to their platform.