After the second protest in the last two weeks following a provincial summit on higher education, everything about Montreal's current spring weather seemed to have year-old Maple Spring undertones to it, including violence, arrests and injuries. The plight of student debt, post graduation underemployment, and rising housing costs are all unarguably quite legitimate burdens faced by my generation. Will free tuition as demanded by the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ) and its followers solve these zeitgeist conundrums? Unlikely.
Over the years, Quebec has earned a reputation as being hostile to business due to persistent anti-business policies. As a consequence, Montreal has declined as a hub for major corporate headquarters. With a lower concentration of large corporate headquarters, the city loses out on many economic benefits. The government of Quebec should take seriously the long term decline of Montreal as a major corporate hub.
Sometimes when you want to know how prudent a political party will be with the taxpayer's dime, it doesn't hurt to consider how prudent they are when it comes to spending their own dime at party headquarters. Compared to their counterparts in other provinces, the B.C. Liberal party spends like there's no tomorrow. And it's spending that increasingly points to something ominous: election campaigns that never end.
As the FLQ was a product of the Quiet Revolution, recent attacks seemed to have been sparked by the Parti Québécois' electoral victory on September 4, 2012. Anglophones must now constantly worry about full Nelsons and biological attacks wherever they go, whether it's on the metro or in a hospital, or wherever else the next attack might take place. While the PQ's Anglophobic and xenophobic policies do not help the current situation, they are not solely to blame. If this trend is to stop soon, those who have engaged in targeted violence towards linguistic groups must be made an example of and suffer the full extent of the law.
If Pauline Marois' government decides it wants to lead Quebec out of Canada, to my mind she's simply following the logical path that has been laid down (intentionally or not) by our Federal leaders over the past 145 years. If it turns out Quebec wants a divorce we should grant it and move on. It seems evident there wasn't much of a family to begin with, and we don't seem to want to start building one now.