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