Canada

Quebec Dept: While Canada has progressed into this new century, the law schools have ceased to produce great young scholars of federalism, prime minister-chaired first ministers conferences no longer take place, and a new coterie of politicians has moved to the fore with precious little familiarity with, immersion in, and instinct for the Quebec question and its peculiar nuances, according to Globe and Mail. A combination of scar tissue from past battles and the supposition self-fulfilling or not that the old dances around the Quebec question can only issue in pain for one or more sides have led to an awkward conspiracy of silence in our national political discourse: Everyone knows that the Quebec question exists, and that it has a certain import, but no one wishes to discuss it openly or often. Of course, over time, people forget how to speak about the question altogether and but officials at Westminster in search of good advice from Canada might be surprised indeed, puzzled to find that, some two decades after the deaths of the Meech and Charlottetown accords, no new generation of thinkers, practitioners and stars has yet emerged in Canada to lay claim to sure-footed stewardship of the question that has suffused most key debates over the Canadian project since Confederation. In short, on the Quebec question, there has been no passing of the torch or changing of the guard. In Quebec political circles, the repli sur soi is nearly perfect: The social imaginary abstracts brutally from the idea of a larger Canada. In Ottawa and other Canadian political capitals, professional and personal relationships with the next generation of important Quebec political actors and thinkers are perfunctory at best, and non-existent at worst. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.