Please forgive the first-person editorial but my last name is significant to the theme of this editorial.
Most days, I'm happy to be of French-Canadian descent. Although I speak French poorly and I have not done a great job passing it on to my daughter, I'm particularly proud of my family's history in Canada. I'm an 11th-generation Canadian, descended from Nicolas Godbout, who was born in the Dieppe region of France on May 18, 1635 and then came to Canada as a 19-year-old in 1654. Most of the Godbouts in North America are descended from his three sons.
There is a Godbout River in Quebec and, where the Godbout River flows into the St. Lawrence River, there is a town called Godbout on the North Shore.
A distant cousin, Adlard Godbout, was the premier of Quebec during the Second World War and a statue of him stands outside of the Quebec legislature.
Another distant cousin, Jacques Godbout, has won the Governor General's Award for Fiction twice and is considered one of Quebec's greatest living writers.
So when it comes to complaining about Quebec, I feel I'm entitled. It's not Western Canadian alienation and it's not Quebecois intolerance.
It's embarrassment, pure and simple.
I'll say it again - Quebec is an embarrassment to Canada.
The phrase "Quebec political leader" is an oxymoron.
While mayors across Quebec are falling like bowling pins, caught up in a corruption scandal that has spread across the province, and upwards to politicians and bureaucrats at the highest levels, what was the newsmaking vote Tuesday in the Quebec legislature?
Whether the Canadian flag should be on display in the building.
Quebec continues to be a have-not province in Canada, meaning billions of dollars go to La Belle Province each year from taxpayers in Alberta and British Columbia. Yet Quebec continues to see Western Canada as a cultural backwater, unsophisticated and uneducated on the ways of the world. Quebeckers turn their nose up at Alberta for its oilsands, pointing at their more environmentally sensitive hydroelectric industry, neglecting to mention the lands flooded by those dams were stolen from First Nations and that theft led to the birth of the modern aboriginal movement in Canada.
Never mind that oilsands development subsidizes the Quebec way of life.
And what a way of life it is.
Quebec is an economic basket case, a welfare state where the welfare has run amok at the expense of the state. Residents expect the state to take care of them from cradle to grave with no regard for who's paying the bill, as long as it's not them. Post-secondary students held college and university campuses hostage for months earlier this year about unfair tuition increases, even though those increases would have still left them paying the lowest tuition rates in the country.
Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Morois is now the premier, elected on a platform of giving the students everything they want without a plan to pay for it.
Dealing with corruption or improving the economy is clearly not a priority for Marois but removing the Canadian flag from the legislature is.
Fortunately, the PQ have formed a minority government, so the Liberals and the Coalition Avenir Quebec defeated the motion, with CAQ leader Francois Legault stating the obvious: "this is not the time to be preoccupied with flags."
Here's another obvious statement, one my patriotic father will not be pleased with me for.
It's long past time to hold the door open and let Quebec exit Confederation.
And give us back that flag you don't want on your way out.
