Levesque, Rene

Short, balding, cigarette-smoking leftist Quebec political leader not to be confused with anyone in any major 1990s Quebec political movement. Levesque wanted Quebec to separate from Canada because he believed that English Canada was getting all the bonbons, was suppressing Quebec culture and the French language–and that it would continue to do these things. To refute his claims, Ottawa has had a bonbon hose down Quebec’s throat ever since and Quebec culture now has a better chance of surviving globalization, Disneyfication and the New Conservative movement than anything comparable in English Canada. But it isn’t all good news. The ideas about cultural autonomy that energized Rene Levesque have about as much to do with the Quebec separatism of the 1990s as Che Guevara’s ideas about socialist revolution have to do with the Cuba of the 1990s. Quebec’s current leadership seems determined to put a high percentage of Northern Quebec under water in order to gain membership to the U.S. Northeast Power Grid , and the leaders themselves want to take long paid vacations in Paris and New York under the pretense of attending G-7 and U.N. conferences.

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