Bloc Quebecois: Bouchard

Bloc Quebecois Dept: But is he really a national leader? On the face of it, certainly. He's the officially elected leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. In 2011 his New Democratic Party ran candidates in all 308 federal ridings. In 2015 it will run candidates in all 338 ridings. In that sense, today's NDP is quite different from, say, the Bloc Quebecois in the era of Lucien Bouchard, which only ran candidates in Quebec. Bouchard, of course, wanted to destroy Canada, which is why it would have made little sense for him to raise his banner in Barrie, Ont. But I digress, according to Montreal Gazette. You could argue he was driven to it by a resurgent Bloc Quebecois, breathing down his neck. Indeed it was the Bloc's motion, calling for a straight-up repeal of the Clarity Act, that ostensibly prompted Scott's bill. But there's a wrinkle in that explanation: The Bloc currently holds, oh yes, four seats. It lacks official party status. Its new leader is a former Quebec industry minister who lost his own seat in the last election and whose speeches make Gilles Duceppe look like Winston Churchill. This detracts, somewhat, from the sense of an imminent Bloc takeover. "Competent, responsible public administrators" are Tom Mulcair's favourite words in the English language. Ask him about the Habs or the Expos or the price of cheese. He'll squeeze The Words in somehow. He wants you to know he represents Joe Six Pack - not just the mournful-looking twenty-somethings sipping triple espresso and debating Marx in Toronto's Annex or the Vieux Montreal, or elderly veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Here's the question: Why would Mulcair, competent prime minister in waiting, allow one of his MPs - for reasons not apparent or even discernible to anyone whose head is not intimately embedded in the deepest recesses of Quebec's political micro-culture - to resurrect Bouchard's dream? Because that is de facto the result of NDP MP Craig Scott's proposed scrapping of the Chretien-era Clarity Act, in favour of a new version harkening to the NDP's Sherbrooke Declaration, allowing for separation after a vote of 50 per cent, plus one. At a stroke, this proposal breathes new life into the idea that one day, some day, La Patrie can be realized. Why, on earth, would a national leader do that? (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.