Populism in Quebec

The French-majority Canadian province of Quebec has just elected a right-leaning populist government in favour of cutting taxes and immigration levels. The relatively new Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), soundly defeated the Liberals and the Parti Québécois, two parties that governed since 1966. It won or is leading in 74 of the province’s 125 ridings (60%), compared with 32 for the Liberals and 10 for the Parti Québécois.

The new government consists of an informal coalition of federalists and former separatists and its victory represents a strong indictment of Quebec’s political establishment. It can also be seen as a nod to the populist movements seen across Europe and elsewhere, but the CAQ’s broad-based populist nature is not exclusively right-wing. This is evident from its adoption of policies across the spectrum, including limiting emigration, cutting taxes, boosting public daycare programmes, and in favour of carbon-pricing and pro-choice on abortion.

New EU problems for African passport holders

With already the weakest passports in the world, things started to look up for African countries in 2018, with a grandiose scheme to introduce a continent-wide e-Passport. This will allow African Union passport holders to enter any of the 54 member states without visas.

But this week the EU warned that tough new visa requirements will be introduced targeting the source states that are responsible for hundreds of thousands of economic migrants illegally entering Europe each year. Unless they cooperate to readily re-admit their own citizens who have been refused asylum by EU countries, stricter conditions for processing visas applications from African countries will follow. These include Mali, Senegal and the Ivory Coast. 

New visa restrictions will include longer processing time, the length of validity of visas issued, higher fees and exemptions for diplomatic passport holders. The latter will surely hurt the travelling bureaucratic elites of Africa and should have an immediate impact and encourage offending states to re-admit their own citizens. 

Justin Trudeau calamatous Indian diplomacy

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just came back from an eight-day trip to India. The general perception is that Trudeau probably wishes he never went, following a disastrous experience which caused unmeasurable harm to the strong diplomatic ties between the two countries. This ranged from Trudeau getting involved in domestic Indian and separatist Sikh politics, to his outlandish ethnic outfits for each occasion, to being snubbed by Prime Minister Modi until the last day. It was followed by a diplomatic storm with Trudeau accusing factions in the Indian government of sabotaging his trip and a damning response by the Indian government. Trudeau certainly won't be seen anywhere near India ever again, adding to his equally disastrous visit to China a few months earlier.

A bit of historical perspective: In 1958 when Canadian PM John Diefenbaker visited India, officials debated the pros and cons of whether he should go on a tiger hunt, and they concluded that one of the cons was that the "Prime Minister could be eaten by tiger." After Trudeau's visit, the prevailing sentiment is more likely to be that in the latter’s case, being eaten by a tiger would have been a big pro.