Con arguments

Government of Canada

From United Empire, to United Dominion, to United Canada.

Note only is the federal government denying the very existence of the Québec political nation since 1867, event though its origin goes back to at least 1791, it is also shamelessly using Quebecers' own tax money to finance its coast-t-coast nation-building project and fight Quebec's conflicting national aspirations.

• The Constitutional File and the Unity File
• Who Were the Fathers of Confederation?
• Canadian Unity Council
• Canadian Heritage
• The Centre for Research and Information on Canada
• Canadian Unity
• Great Canadian Questions
• The Council of Canadians
• Operation Dialogue

Québec Bashing

Ignorance is Bliss?

Favorite targets

• PQ Leaders René Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau, Lucien Bouchard, Bernard Landry
• Free thinker and social democrat Yves Michaud
• Conservative Catholic nationalist Lionel Groulx
• Quebec's national symbols, its flag, its national holiday
• Quebec's intitutions, its representative democracy, its language policy, its immigration policy, its economic policy
• Quebec's worker movement, its unions, its solidarity

Techniques

Political warfare in its modern incarnation...

• Demonization
• argument from repetition (argumentum ad nauseam)
• Appeal to fear (argumentum in terrorem)
• false dilemma
• Straw man
• Appeal to authority (argumentum ad verecundiam)
• Appeal to the majority (Argumentum ad populum)
• Personal attack (argumentum ad personam)
• False analogy
• False attribution
• Faulty generalization
• Fallacy of the single cause
• Red herring
• Etc.

Useful Patriots

• Diane Francis
• Howard Galganov
• Bill Johnson
• Mordecai Richler

Examples

Newspaper articles

• Quebec Liberated Itself Into a Backwater by James P. Pinkerton in Newsday, July 31, 2001
• The St-Jean-Baptiste parade by Graeme Decarie, The World Today, 27 avril 1999
• Quebecistan, Delisle, Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!, Jane Wong

Websites

• Quebec Exposed
• Mr. Dowling's Electronic Passport
• Wednesday-Night.com - Separatist Notes
• Fighting Quebec Separatism
• Canada is a Real Country!

Late denunciation

• "Some Racist Slips about Quebec in English Canada Between 1995 and 1998" by Maryse Potvin in Canadian Ethnic Studies, volume XXXII, issue 2, 2000, pages 1-26
• Bashing Québec fashionable in anglo media, by Michel David, The Gazette, Friday 21 April 2000
• Oh Canada, Oh Quebec, Oh Richler, Globe & Mail, June 26, 2002
• The Black Book of English Canada, by Normand Lester, Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 2002, 296 pages ISBN 077102259X
• Jean Charest, Stephen Harper

Orangeism

Yes, that thing still exists...

• British America Orangeism
• Orangenet.org: Canada
• Canadian Orange Historical Site
• Irish Secret Societies in Mid-Nineteenth Century Rural Quebec
• Orangeism - The Canadian Scene A Brief Historical Sketch
• The Daily Orange: Quebec Secedes from Planet Earth *

• = Putting aside the superiority complex issue and the grammatically incorrect French, we find this one quite funny. ;-)

See also

• Myths and fallacies about Québec