Ranked choice, without pr incorporated with it, is still just fptp; all the exact same problems are carried over and new ones are added. PR systems (any one of them) are the only ones that guarantees that parliament reflects the vote share. No ifs, ands, or buts. Without ensuring this (where every vote is counted and contributes to parliament -above a minimum threshold), the voting system isn’t reformed.
If you think party lists give leaders too much power, in our current system party leaders just appoint whomever they want to safe seats; outright denying riding associations or delaying them until they are allowed to step in.
Either way in the MMP method of PR you vote for your local representative and the party lists are only used to even out the parties so that parliament seats = vote share, and these two do not drift apart.
A side note as to how strict the Quebecois are on French apparently the Belgian people are worse in regards to Flemish. A case in point, a train announcer was explaining to a reporter that by law they had to switch from French to Flemish when they crossed the border. It wasn’t a question of making announcements in both languages, they had use Flemish from then on. They are very protective of their language.
Speaking of which:
That should be dans la merde
And
That should be Le cœur (or if you can’t get the ligature coeur) and ne connaît though you get a pass on the accents, I always had trouble with those as well.
If the pig is Paris, Kinshasa, or Basse-Terre, yes. In Quebec, it’s “marde.”
There are places in the U.S. where many businesses are monolingual Spanish. Enclaves of every major city and huge swathes of Texas. The majority of San Antonio is a Spanish-only city. It’s the way things are and I don’t consider it a problem, nor do Spanish speakers complain when they inevitably need to learn English by the second generation in order to access professional careers. If Quebec French can’t survive without the government putting its finger on the scale, then why should it? What’s so special about this linguistic situation compared to every place else on the planet that we need to allow the Quebec government to deny people medical care or trample on the civil liberties of minority communities to preserve it artificially? Even if you buy into the nonsense “power” justifications about white English speakers (who have been in Montreal for 300 years and didn’t just show up and colonize it yesterday, btw) the amount of harassment of First Nations people, religious minorities, and immigrants over this issue in Quebec has to be considered unacceptable.
In Belgium, the very ancient—-and bilingual—-University of Leuven/Louvain was forced to split in two and the French half had to move to the French area, founding a new town called Louvain-La-Neuve. The university library was split in two, each campus getting every other book (not sure what they did with encyclopedias and other multi-volume items). Bilingualism is allowed to sprout only in Brussels.
Aha! That would cause some derision if used in France, you can’t even curse properly! More seriously thought, I never had trouble understanding Quebecois French, and I suspect neither would most french speakers. There are some expressions that would not be understood, but that is also true depending on where you are in France.
Back to the topic at hand though. Is it really that surprising a result? All over the world there has been pushback against incumbents, for whatever flavor, persons already in power, means.
What happened to @Hari_Seldon is absolutely irregular. Now, you would not expect anybody to speak English in France, Germany, or Paraguay. However, in Canada I always had the impression that everyone had the right to receive Federal/Crown services in both official languages. OTOH, English is not an official or working language in Quebec, so I am not sure where the line is drawn, e.g. maybe the probability is that nobody will speak English if you walk into a random post office, but there is supposed to be some Post branch around which offers bilingual services? And they should be able to politely refer one to a different doctor…
I was once warned about speaking French willy-nilly in certain parts of Belgium, not that I was planning to, but I do not remember all the details. There was no problem with Brussels, of course. Fun fact: German is the official language in certain parts of Belgium.
The idea that referendum results from 30 years ago are more representative of current opinion than a recent poll because that poll has a small sample size compared to the referendum is ridiculous.The political landscape in Quebec hasn’t been static for the past three decades.
Of the 5 million electors registered to vote in the 1995 referendum, I imagine about half of them will have died or moved away in the last 30 years. Today, Quebec’s registered electorate stands at 6.5 million. Even if all remaining 2.5 million electors from 1995 haven’t changed their opinions since then, what makes you think that those opinions reflect those of the 4 million new electors?
By contrast, an appropriately sampled poll of 1000 people gives a margin of error of ±3 percentage points at 95% confidence. Do you really think this would be less reflective of current opinion than using 30-year-old figures that necessarily exclude an entire well-defined class of electors—a class that happens to make up some 60% of the population?
While I accept that a discussion of bilingualism in Quebec is on topic, and even the OP participated in it, I’m going to discourage the periodic discussion on preferred language status outside of Quebec/Canada. The topic is the recent results in Quebec after all, and I’ve think we’ve had enough comparisons with other nations to establish Quebec isn’t alone in establishing a protective status.
Not banning it, or at least not yet, but if you aren’t making direct comparisons to the current situation in Quebec, it is drawing us away from the topic.
Yes, but outside the tourist industry you still wouldn’t expect to be served in English. I lived and worked there for twelve years and occasionally witnessed entitled foreigners get smacked down by civil servants at the Ausländerbehörde when they foolishly assumed they could register or renew their residence/work permits in English. I had anglophone colleagues risk losing their apartments or bank accounts because they thought they could ignore KYC demands and other correspondence sent to them in German.
Admittedly this situation is not exactly analogous to Quebec, because in the latter you have (more or less) autochthonous communities of English speakers who, at least on a federal level, have recognized language rights. Come to think of it, Quebec also has measures in place for the protection of minority languages (particularly English) though these don’t always accord with those at the federal level, or grant English speakers the same rights and privileges they would enjoy in other provinces.
That’s a perfectly valid question, though again one that refuses to consider thumbprints on the other side of the scale.
As I wrote previously, the situation is not unique to Quebec. Whether or not you agree with them, tough legislative measures aimed at protecting a favoured language have been enacted in many other jurisdictions, including the Baltic states and Ukraine. (You may even have heard about a major world conflict whose origins and progress are bound up with these measures.)
It is a common strategy- when someone wants something that is foolish, you let them have to so that they learn from it. Parents do this with their kids- let them eat too much candy, the kids get sick, lesson learned.
So it is a fun fantasy to imagine letting other people or groups do the same thing. let the Separatist Quebecois leave, and then they will find out how disastrously wrong and foolish that decision was. Do I really want Quebec to leave? Not when I think about it logically. But sometimes when my emotions get in the way = “Let them!!”
Yep. Let them go, and no more bribes.
Good points.
The idea that a poll with a small sample size is really representative is also ridiculous. Come on, we have seen the failure of polling in the USA several times. Sure, things have changed. But how about that election=
The separatist party almost got a majority. How does that match with 71 per cent of Quebecers would vote no to separation?
Okay, old referendums may not longer be valid, I agree. But this recent election is valid. Explain how 71% do not want separation, while the separatist party almost got a majority? I think a failure of polling. But I am willing to hear another explanation.
It is as long as Quebec is part of Canada. The Quebec government does make some effort to provide services in English to avoid blatantly defying the Official Languages Act, but in recent years certain official documents are provided in French only. I believe this includes birth certificates and driver’s licenses, both of which of course can cause problems with US authorities.
Not only that, but the PQ is a well-established party which despite their radical separatist agenda I’m sure includes a comprehensive policy platform. You can vote for the PQ for other reasons while planning to vote “no” on the separatist referendum if there even is one.
.
But then you’d have to count some of the QS supporters who do believe in independence but not with the rest of PQ’s platform or approach to separatism. That still doesn’t get you to 50% of the vote though.
More seriously thought, I never had trouble understanding Quebecois French, and I suspect neither would most french speakers. There are some expressions that would not be understood, but that is also true depending on where you are in France.