LATEST POLLS in Canadian newspapers Toronto Star and La Presse indicate that the 'Yes' vote may win in the 30 October referendum on self-determination for the mainly French-speaking province of Québec.
Every section of the french speaking population, with the exception of the capitalist class, backs the Yes vote. Canada's french-speakers have lower pay, worse health care, fewer openings for education and training and higher rates of unemployment than English-speaking Canadians. Eighty-five per cent of Canadian french-speakers live in Québec.
Since 1760, Canadian government policies have aimed to obliterate French Canadian reality and reduce it to folklaw. Today Canada is a strong imperialist state, founded on the national oppression of the native peoples and the Québécois. They have been subjected to over 200 years of economic, social, cultural and linguistic oppression and denied the right to self-determination.
Against this long-standing national oppression, the Québécois nationalist movement developed in the 1960s and soon the bourgeois nationalist Parti Québécois (PQ) won the leadership of the movement.
This month's referendum puts the PQ and its allies under great pressure. The PQ favour tying Québec into an EU-type federation with the rest of Canada. An unaccountable Council of Ministers would impose austerity polices which could assure the free circulation of capital and enforce a common monetary policy.
This dead-end bourgeois nationalism opens the door to ultra-right nationalism. The left forces for the Yes vote organise independently. The Parti de la Démocratie Socialiste, within which the Québécois comrades of the Fourth International work, backs the 'Popular Network for the Yes vote', so that the sovereignty of Québec is not just an exchange of one flag for another, but a popular and egalitarian sovereignty, based on solidarity to end exclusion from society.
The Network's key demand is for a Constituent Assembly, 50 per cent women, elected by proportional representation.