For sure, there's a bit of good and a whole lot of retarded in there. I agree with the idea of clearly enunciating and reinforcing a social commitment to man/woman/otherwise equality in rights and essentially every other aspect one might care to think of. But when religious symbols are mentioned, yeah it's a dumb load of crap. I'm all for the government being religion-neutral, but to me, a religion-neutral government doesn't say "don't wear your religious stuff", it says "eh, we don't care what kind of hat you're wearing".
I gotta correct your context, though, Mongrel. That whole thing with being the party of pure Québecers and such, yeah, no that's not really in the debate. I can see it might appear that way from the outside, especially to people for whom Québec is off the radar a lot of the time. But, and I'm not just saying that to be defensive of my homeland's government (hell, I voted Québec Solidaire), but ethnic nationalism doesn't really come into play in a major way. In fact, when one says "ethnic nationalism" in Québec, that's still basically white Christians (practicing or not), and these guys are just as pissed as anyone else today.
The deeper context is, there have been several highly-publicized cases of religious discrimination/segregation towards women in the last decade or so. Stuff like orthodox Jews in Montréal demanding that a local gym shut their blinds when women exercize near windows, or a Muslim community demanding separate times set aside in public pools, some periods exclusively for Muslim men and some exclusively for Muslim women. There's been a lot of debate for a while about whether, as a society, we have to put up with that sort of thing, and yes that debate has been exploited politically by the major parties. And it is that reckless, clumsy exploitation of an otherwise fairly legitimate debate that has spawned the Charte des Valeurs today, not the debate itself.
Now, are there actual racists, xenophobes, and other such degenerates in Québec? Yes. Definitely, there are, I wouldn't say otherwise. My mother is kind of one. I've told you guys before how I was accosted by an idiot who though I was a Jew and went on an embarrassing (to him) screaming tirade. But I still don't believe the PQ is trying to appeal to these people here, or if it is, it's not close to being the entire picture. They're trying to settle a question that needs to be settled. It's just that they're doing it in a really fucking shitty way, a way that is certainly gonna look pretty damn racist to anyone looking in from the outside.
