Is Harper encouraging separation with his new stand on Quebec

With Conservative leader Stephen Harper's announcement today that if elected, he would give Quebec more independent control - possibly allowing Quebec to have it's own national hockey teams among other "national" roles.

Aside from the obvious blows to Canada's national hockey team this move would cause, there are several reasons why this is a bad idea.

from cbc.ca

• Revising and tightening all procedures related to issuing contracts and using public funds.
• Giving greater independence to the ethics commissioner and increased powers to the auditor general.
• Creating an independent and objective parliamentary budget authority.
• Ensuring that all governmental institutions – including foundations – are subject to full audits by the auditor general.
• Reforming federal political party financing along the lines of the model established in Quebec by René Lévesque.

While some of his ideas such as the tigher control on funding to prevent another scandal would do some good to prevseparationtion, letting Quebec make one step towards seperation is a bad idea, once we seed the idea we never know where it will go!

Of course, I do think it's time for Canada to have equal representation across the country with seats being assigned to population and nothing else. I don't think Harper will do much to this front as he's scared of losing Quebec support.

I will have the final part of the Vancouver debate within the next couple days, I just have had way too much stuff on my plate and it's made the back burner!