THERE IS NO INDICATION THAT ANYONE IN OTTAWA IN AUTHORITY GRASPS THE SLIGHTEST ASPECT OF THIS.

lawns and rolled the tennis courts and done the menial work and small farm agriculture for the Quebec Anglostocracy, and the frugality and pecuniary sobriety of the Quebecois, descendants as they are of money-wise Normans and Bretons.

The French-Canadians bought into Canada when that was the alternative to joining the United States, because Canada was the way to preserve their language, religion and the French civil law. (The Québécois could not wait to exchange the draconian severities of the happy to support federalist advocates of Anglo-French co-operation.

Pierre Trudeau led the Quebec federalists and English-Canadian bonne ententistes after the greatest French leader since Napoleon, Gen. Charles de Gaulle, following the famous Habsburg principle of “astounding the world by (his) ingratitude,” converted what was supposed to be a state visit to honour the centenary of Canadian Confederation in 1967 into a brazen invitation to Quebec to secede from Canada. Trudeau was elected federal Liberal leader and prime minister of Canada nine months later, meticulously enacted his program of federal antidotes to separatism, gave masterly direction to the federalist side of the 1980 Quebec independence referendum, and produced the patriation of the Canadian Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which all jurisdictions may ignore in specific cases that trespass in their jurisdictions.

For about 50 years Quebec was subsidized by Danegeld from the wealthier mainly English-speaking provinces through a welter of transfer payments, adding up to perhaps $2,000 for every francophone Quebec man, woman, and child, per year. Separatism, in the triumph of bourgeois French-Canadian prudence over hell-forleather emotionalism, has effectively collapsed.

Philippe Couillard, premier of Quebec since 2014, is the most unambiguously federalist elected premier of Quebec since Jean Lesage, if not Duplessis, and has expressed a desire to complete the Constitution, left dangling by the defeat of Brian Mulroney’s commendable effort in the Meech Lake accord of 1987. The Quebec economy, which has shed most of its resource and cheap labour manufacturing base to become, with subventions, a public sector and white collar service economy, has suddenly become a Canadian centre for innovation and skilful adaptation to the reality that technological advance, for the first time, creates more unemployment