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Chris Selley: Does PSPP realize how unpopular he is?

The Quebec premier shows signs of Mark Carney-style overconfidence, just with much less voter support

You may have read about Quebec Premier Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s “new strategy” for sovereignty, and you might have thought, “Hang on, this sounds a lot like the old strategy” — namely, pick fights with Ottawa and pitch the slightest federal-government resistance as an intolerable affront to all Quebecers. But this time, as influential nationalist Quebec commentator Joseph Facal argued in an extraordinary encomium to PSPP (as St-Pierre Plamondon is nicknamed) in the Journal de Montréal, the approach is “uncompromising.”

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So PSPP simply outright refused to attend this week’s Canada-EU meeting in Montreal. Because that would “compromise” Quebec’s sovereignty, in Facal’s view at least, and draw attention to the appalling reality: Quebec is part of Canada. To oversimplify: Hardcore sovereigntists tend to think nothing’s worth “sitting at the children’s table” of the federation along with all the other, lesser provinces. More strategic sovereigntists, and softer nationalists, tend to argue along the lines of, “if we’re not at the table, we’re on the........

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