As my colleague Ian Austen reports, the leader of Canada's separatist Parti Québécois was hustled off stage during a speech after her party's victory in a provincial election Tuesday night when a 62-year-old man opened fire outside the rally, leaving one man dead and another in critical condition.
A Montreal Gazette video report showed the interrupted address by party leader, Pauline Marois, who is in line to become Quebec's first female premier. Before she was forced off stage, the footage shows that Ms. Marois had switched from French to English to assure Quebec's Anglophone minority, “don't worry, your rights will be fully protected. We share the same history and I want us to shape together our c ommon future.â€
CBC News posted raw video online of the premier's speech being interrupted - just after she had said that the future of Quebec would be as “a sovereign nation†- and of the suspected gunman's arrest.
The footage showed the man, who wore a balaclava and bathrobe, shouting to onlookers and the media, in French, “The English are awakening!†as he was led away by police officers. Switching to English, the suspect warned in obscene terms that there would be “payback.†Before he was bundled into a police car, he added: “gonna make trouble!â€
The man was described by the police as a resident of Quebec, but not from Montreal where the shooting took place, The Montreal Gazette rep orts.
Despite the suspected gunman's dark promise of sectarian rage at the election result, which left Ms. Marois's separatist Parti Québécois short of an absolute majority but in position to rule Quebec, there appears to be little prospect of independence for the province in the near future.
As Doug Saunders notes in an analysis of the result for Toronto's Globe and Mail, a poll published last week in Quebec showed that just “28 per cent of voters support full secession†from Canada. That, Mr. Saunders observed, puts Québécois nationalists in a very similar position to Catalans and Scots who are seeking more independence from federal governments but are unable to muster enough support to break away entirely. He writes:
In Catalonia, Scotland and now Quebec, power is held by separatist parties that have little chance of winning a sovereignty referendum in the foreseeable future, but are instead using their electoral mandates to demand i ncreasing devolution of power from the national government.
There's little coincidence in this: In the nine years since the Parti Québécois were last in power, the separatist movements in Canada, Britain and Spain have become increasingly interlinked and motivated by one another's tactics. Their leaders nowadays meet with one another on a regular basis, study one another's slogans and strategies, and celebrate their mutual victories.
