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Originally Posted by Slava
Well this is why these issues should be discussed and brought to the forefront. Rerun posts this thread as a way to suggest that the Liberals are morons and this will surely topple them from any former hopes for governance. The reality is that this is a very important issue, and for a lot of the reasons that you've identified.
So here's the catch. Quebec wants more power and less strings attached. They want federal money and no oversight. Hate to break it to you captain, but so does Alberta and every other province or territory. In fact the squabbles between Alberta and the feds are evident even today where they have a similar ideology and agree on a lot of issues. This is why the province is opening an office in Ottawa (the the chagrin of the federal government). There are federal and provincial issues and basically it all comes down to a power struggle on certain points.
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Nope I get that, but at that point in the discussion Canada as a nation needs to redefine the concept of confederation as a whole and not give one region distinct rights and abilities over an other region. In otherwords if your going to give Quebec these nation rights within Canada you almost have to give those rights to all of the other provinices and territories because lets be frank, outside of Language, all of the provinces in this country are fairly distinct.
the easiest thing to do is to pare down the Federal government to cover national interests only and act as a coordination point for the provinces, but to remove themselves from health care, and internal provincial concerns involving resource management, trade and other areas.
Leave the federal government in charge of defense, cross provincial transpoirtaion concerns and thats about it. Let the provinces handle all taxation all social programs etc.
And leave Canada as a cooperative alliance of individual mini nations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
EAs for some of the comments about "how can they ________?" Its pretty simple in a lot of ways. They can use the Canadian dollar as currency for example by just....using the Canadian dollar as currency. There is no real way to stop them, and its a non-factor. That's how Iceland could contemplate this as well. I doubt that an independent Quebec would (with pictures of the Queen and the constant reminders of Canadian greatness in general), but there's no reason it couldn't be done. It's true that they couldn't use our passports and things like that, but we've actually seen this play out peacefully before. Vaclav Havel who was a principal in the "velvet revolution" in the former Czechoslovakia managed to orchestrate a separation that was peaceful and other than the constant beat down the Slovaks endure in various sporting events from the better looking and more talented Czechs, its really not a factor!
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I get that they can use our currency, heck if the American's decided to tommorrow they could adopt the Canabuck. But Quebec also wants to continue to have access to the bank of canada, all of our trade treaties etc. If Quebec were to fully seperate the first thing that would have to happen is to exclude them from Nafta til they negotiate in, remove their ability to access and mandate federal government institutions like the bank of canada and not let them use Canadian Embassies etc.
If you want to really halt the call for seperation you almost have to show Quebec that they can't stand on their own, and if they do seperate that's what they're going to have to do after paying to leave.
But they can't be a wishy washy nation of convienience.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
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(In case it needs to be said, the shot against the Slovaks is a joke...although us Czechs are clearly better looking and more talented!)
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Funny I was talking to a bunch of Slovaks and they said that the more handsome and talented people are on their side.