No, not unacceptable at all, but I’m not sure if my opinion is all that relevant since I live in Quebec and I even voted for the Bloc last election. In fact, it wouldn’t even bother me to have the Bloc actually have seats in Cabinet. To me that fact that the Bloc MPs support independence for Quebec is totally irrelevant, since they cannot do anything about it in Ottawa anyway. Only the Quebec government can do something about it, and none of the main parties running in the provincial election on December 8 want to touch the issue. It seems to me that saying Bloc support for the government is illegitimate because they’re “separatists”, even though it’s impossible for them to pass measures intended to bring us closer to this goal, comes close to establishing a distinction between “tolerable” and “intolerable” opinions. But who’s to say which opinions are tolerable and which aren’t?
As I’ve said in another thread, I’m quite certain some countries have had parties that could be considered as “separatist” taking part in federal coalition governments. I’m absolutely certain this is true for regionalist parties. This is part of how democracy works, and everybody has to make concessions.
Actually, the fact that the Bloc’s agenda is to above all defend Quebec’s interests is in my mind more of an obstacle to them being a part of a federal government than the fact that they’re technically “separatist”. It wouldn’t be an obstacle if the other parties in the coalition were also regionalist parties, but both the Liberals and NDP give themselves a pan-Canadian mandate (and actually hold seats in Quebec, so we can’t even see this as an agreement between Quebec parties and parties from the rest of Canada). But what is certain is that having put his signature on the alliance contract, Duceppe, without losing sight of Quebec’s interests, will have to take into account the needs of the rest of the country as well. Already some Bloc voters are unhappy with Duceppe handing the Prime Ministership to Dion, one of the greatest opponents of Quebec independence. The Angry French Guy is actually saying Duceppe is the biggest loser of this week’s political crisis.
It’s a bit disappointing, actually. The Bloc started as a loose alliance of former Liberals and Conservatives who couldn’t support their parties anymore after the defeat of the Meech lake accord, then became a sovereigntist party designed to defend Quebec’s interests until the day of independence, but now they’re trying to defend Quebec’s interests in perpetual opposition. They’ve tried to pass some legislation, with little success: the cornerstone of their legislative platform for the last 15 years or so has been a federal anti-scab law, which still hasn’t passed. Before the last election, there were a lot of debates in Quebec about whether the Bloc is still pertinent in Ottawa, with many ex-Bloc MPs taking the position that it isn’t anymore. (To be fair, most of these ex-Bloc MPs are now Conservatives or provincial Liberals.)
I guess Duceppe has figured out that if his party is to survive, he has to try something else. Namely actually try his hand at governing. He won’t be part of the actual coalition, but at least he’ll be able to try to influence legislation and actually do something for Quebec and Canada.
They have an explicit agenda of defending Quebec’s interests, while the Liberals are the party of invading provincial areas of responsibility, the Conservatives are scary – while relatively good for provincial rights, they also seem to [post=10522221]be quite right-wing[/post], especially with Harper at the helm – and the NDP is an unknown, and probably nearly as centralizing as the Liberals, as left-wing parties tend to be.
I’d actually kind of prefer they were part of government instead of supporting it off from the side, because it would increase the degree to which they’d be accountable to their constituents for the governance they’d be helping to provide. In my fantasy world they’d morph from being an explicitly Quebec-only party into a national party with an emphasis on devolution of federal powers to the provinces. I imagine they’d remain largely or maybe even wholly Quebec-based, but it would greatly increase their credibility in the rest of the country. I suppose it would also entail abandoning the dream of independence, but that’s seeming inevitable these days anyways.