Brown-John: Quebec and values

Pauline Marois, Quebec’s independentist premier, seems to have a modest knack for opening her mouth before her thoughts are entirely in order.
A couple of weeks ago in a Le Devoir interview on her government’s proposed Charter of Quebec Values, she observed that — in her view — Britain’s problems with civil unrest and bombs in the streets were a product of that country’s “multiculturalism.”
In her apparent obdurate dislike of the British, she conveniently ignored, naturally, a spate of mailbox bombings, kidnappings and even murder associated with an early version of Quebec’s sovereignists in the late 1960s and early ’70s. She alleged that France’s secularism while “not perfect” was preferable to Britain’s multiculturalism.
Interestingly, and according to an independent research entity — which assesses immigrant integration into specific countries — the United Kingdom actually ranks above France. On a multi-based index known as the global Migrant Integration Policy Index (2011), the highest score being 100, the UK received 57 points and France 51. Canada’s ranked 3rd at 72 points behind Sweden (83) and Portugal (79). The U.S. stood at 62.
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