The October 1, 2018 provincial election in Quebec recorded a historical result. The centre-right Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) won an amazing 74 of 125 seats. The Liberals were reduced to 32 seats. The very left-wing Quebec solidaire, with 10 seats, came ahead of the Parti Quebecois, which was reduced to 9 seats – one of their worst results ever. The results of the provincial election in Quebec on April 7, 2014, had also been somewhat unexpected. It was a huge win for the Liberals, led […]

Historical Context The problem of center-periphery relations in a society, and of how a geographically extensive country extending beyond the confines of a city-state, is to be effectively governed, are some of the most pressing problems in political theory. One of the failures of the Ancient Greeks was that they found it difficult to extend their political units beyond the city-state. One of the reasons for the prominence of Athens was that the surrounding area, Attica, had been forged into a quite unified entity, a […]

(This article is partially based on an English-language text that appeared in Polish translation under the title, “Tendencje separatystyczne w Kanadzie.” (Separatist tendencies in Canada) trans. Olaf Swolkien, Nowe Sprawy Polityczne (New Political Affairs) (Wolomin, Poland) no 30 (2004-2005), pp. 77-81.) Canada was founded as a State by the act of Confederation in 1867 (formally known as the British North America (BNA) Act, which was passed by the Parliament of Westminster in London) — out of the union of four pre-existent historical regions — Ontario, […]

Mark Wegierski asks, can there exist a Polish-Canadian identity with declining Polish language knowledge in Canada?   In the statistics of the Canada Census, over the last few decades, the percentage of persons of Polish descent who claim knowledge of the Polish language, is not particularly large (around a third). Indeed, it can be seen that knowledge of the Polish language is declining among the generations of Polish descent born in Canada. In my opinion, this places the Polish-Canadian newspapers, most of which appear almost […]

It could be argued that, over the last five decades, the Canadian Right has conclusively failed to articulate a “counter-ethic” to the now-prevalent “Liberal idea of Canada” and is now on the fast track to extinction in the Canadian polity. The origins of the decline of the Canadian Right can be traced to the battles from 1963 to 1968 between Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson and the staunch Tory John Diefenbaker (who was Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963), and the initial burst of “Trudeaumania” […]

Based on an English-language draft of a presentation for the 2013 Conference of the Polish Association for American Studies (PAAS) (Eating America: Crisis, Sustenance, Sustainability) (Wroclaw, Poland: University of Wroclaw, Department of English Studies), October 23-October 25, 2013. The paper was accepted for publication in The Polish Journal for American Studies, vol. 8 (2014), but additional work on the paper, necessary for publication there, was not completed because of unforeseen personal circumstances. Green or ecological/environmentalist ideas, which are sometimes instantiated by capital-G Green parties, are […]