Word: canadians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Already an exception among modern and federal structures, the Canadian political system is highly decentralized and moving towards further decentralization. Quebec, for instance, already controls all matters relating to the crucial areas of language, education, and natural resource development, and the province effectively exercises a veto power over federal immigration policies. To be sure, Quebec still does not control certain critical jurisdictions like communications, but there are precedents, as in Germany, for the decentralized licensing of communications facilities within a federal system...
Meanwhile, despite the focusing of political debate on the cultural question, the issue of the economic cost of independence will in all likelihood continue to be decisive. All the polls taken since the P.Q.'s election demonstrate a far higher degree of support for formal independence with close Canadian economic ties and few economic risks, than for a complete break with Canada...
Nevertheless, despite its questionable content, the independentist proposal is very attractive to the strong nationalist element in the province, and particularly to Quebec's youth. Nationalism is an old and prominent ideological component of French Canadian thought that reflects the national integrity and distinctiveness of the Catholic French Canadian population...
Although nationalism itself is as old as French Canada, its vehicle of expression has only recently become the provincial state. Traditionally, the dominant Catholic Church has been a far more important guardian of French Canadian cultural integrity than any government. But with Quebec's historic Quiet Revolution during the 1960s, which freed the state from the control of the Church and produced for the first time in the province's history a modern secular bureaucracy, the focus of nationalist sentiments finally shifted to the provincial government. In so doing, Quebeckers redefined the nationalist question in political and independentist terms...
NATIONALIST SENTIMENT is diffused in varying degrees throughout the French Canadian population. Nationalism has been exacerbated in Quebec because of the persistent confusion between class antagonism and linguistic and national divisions. The English Canadians have historically dominated the ranks of the business elite, so when French workers conflict with management, they conflict with an English management. Class antagonism assumes the form of national antagonism, and reinforces the already present nationalist element...