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The travelling summer fair was already here when the political circus rolled into this town that time forgot, just west of Quebec City. But there were 1,500 people waiting at the local arena for Stephen Harper, a show of strength arranged Wednesday evening by Jacques Gourde, the sitting Conservative MP for the riding of Lotbinière-Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, 30 km west of South Shore Levis, where the party’s national caucus met over the last two days. The former Bloc Québécois member, Odina Desrochers, whom Gourd defeated in 2006, was among the friendly faces in the rural crowd. The road to a Conservative majority...

The latest disclosure came when Radio Canada announced the "Felix" awards for Quebec-generated popular music. A folk-song group calling itself "Mes Aieux" (My Ancestors) had produced what was voted the most popular song in Quebec. It's called "Dégénérations" which (when spoken) could mean either "degeneration," an apt description of what has been happening in Quebec, or perhaps just "generations," a wistful observance of changing times. The words of the song leave no doubt, however, about its message. They recall and extol the old Quebecois, who courageously broke the land and founded French Canada. The song likewise deplores their descendants who...

Quebec-based troops in Afghanistan can't fathom antiwar sentiment back home MARTIN OUELLET August 3rd, 2007 SHAWALI KOT, Afghanistan (CP) - Pte. Francis Archambault says he couldn't believe what he was hearing during a conversation he had before he left Quebec for Afghanistan. "Somebody who's educated, who has diplomas galore, told me there would be no war in the world if people like me didn't exist," Archambault, 23, said in an interview with The Canadian Press. "It really shocked me to hear that from someone who should know better." Archambault and other Quebec-based soldiers in Afghanistan expressed frustration and exasperation with...

I wrote last week that it would take Canada's Liberal Party about two months to live down the disclosure by the Gomery inquiry that its Montreal members had siphoned many millions of dollars in government money into the party's coffers and into their own pockets. I was wrong. It took less than a week. Three days after the Gomery Report documented the party's lavish looting of the funds in the government's "sponsorship program," a poll showed that the party's national support had slipped from 38 percent to 31 percent, only a single percentage point over the Conservatives, who had risen...

There came two declarations last week, from very different and utterly unrelated sources, but containing by implication the same message – namely that the assumptions behind our new society and new lifestyles are not true and therefore do not work. The first came from Lucien Bouchard, who abandoned a federal Conservative government to become a Quebec separatist and now appears to be abandoning separatism to return to conservatism – not to the party, but the philosophy. Bouchard headed a panel of 12 Quebec economists, business leaders, politicians and journalists who issued what they described as "a wake-up call" to Quebec....