Yikes!

The Quebec election results are in. The Liberals get 48 seats, the ADQ 41, and the PQ 36. I'm surprised to see Dumont's ADQ with 41 seats, considering that they only had 5 in the last provincial parliament. I had expected, based on no expertise whatsover aside from a poll I glanced at a few weeks ago, that the Liberals would have a strong minority. The ADQ would have enough seats, low 20s perhaps, to make up an informal coalition of sorts with the Liberals. It's good to see the separatist PQ with so few seats. Apparently it's one of their worst showings since their first election. Haven't quite figured out what Dumont's stance on the role of Quebec in federation is, aside from a sense that it's a compromise between federalism and separatism. We won't ask to let us leave, but we hope you'll treat us as if we have. Something like that. The word autonomy is used quite a lot. Spain has a lot of autonomous regions. So many in fact, I wonder if the Spanish president isn't just the mayor of Madrid, but with a fancy title. I've learned a fair bit over the last few years about federalism across the globe, and realized that there are many more models besides the Canadian one, which isn't really inspiring and tends towards a unitary state rather than a federation. So maybe Dumont's ideas deserve a look.

Well, it's getting late so that, though incomplete, is all that I will say for now. Better informed but equally useless analysis and opinion can be found in the pages of our print media.