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When the separatist Parti Quebecois was elected for the first time in 1976 under the fiery leadership of Rene Levesque, corporate Quebec celebrated by packing up its assets and getting the hell out of Dodge.
Today's PQ leader, Pauline Marois, is no Rene Levesque.
She's worse.
While there was always a racist component in Levesque's plan to break up Canada to secure and preserve francophone dominance, it did not have the overt stink of Marois' over-the-top secularism.
No longer is it just Quebec vs. the Rest of Canada for Marois' PQ, she has now drawn an internally divisive line between Quebecers themselves as they prepare to go to the polls next month in the provincial election called by Liberal Premier Jean Charest.
Either they are "nous," as she puts it -- as in "us" -- or they're the enemy of a nationalist Quebec.
What Marois calls her party's plan for a Charter of Secularism is no more than an odious chapter ripped from the book of Marine Le Pen, the fascist leader of France's anti-immigrant National Front.
There is no other way to explain Marois' outrageous plan to prohibit public-sector employees in Quebec -- everyone from school teachers to transit drivers -- from wearing "conspicuous religious signs." If Quebecers buy into this racist-based intolerance, it will be forbidden in Quebec for public servants to wear a Muslim hijab, a Jewish yarmulke, or a Sikh kirpan unless they want to join the unemployment line.
The exception? Why, the Christian cross, of course, and preferably one hanging from a chain around a Roman Catholic and francophone neck.
Couple that with the PQ leader's threat to introduce new legislation within 100 days of taking power that would close a loophole that allows companies to operate in English, and the 1976 post-Levesque exodus of anglophones and businesses to Toronto and the west could end up looking like a trickle.
Even during the best of economic times, corporations are adverse to both uncertainty and risk, and these are certainly not the best of economic times considering all the global fragility.
Quebecers had best realize this, and write off Pauline Marois' PQ as both dangerous and unacceptable.
Quebec's future hinges on it.
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