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Liberal Party Leader Philippe Couillard warned voters his chief rival wants to expel new arrivals, and he may not have fully renounced his separatist convictions.

As the election campaign entered the last sprint ahead of the Oct. 1 vote, Couillard was ramping up scare tactics Sunday, saying Quebec is an open and tolerant society, and most Quebecers reject proposals by Coalition Avenir Québec to submit new arrivals to language and values tests.

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“I don’t want Quebec to be known as the place where we turn people away,” Couillard said while visiting Vaudreuil-Dorion. “Quebec has never been like this. It has always been a welcoming place.”

Couillard said no one today could imagine that new arrivals escaping war-torn Europe in the 1940s and 1950s would have been submitted to tests after three years in the country.

“If someone then had been on the docks telling them, ‘You can come today, but within three years you’ll have a couple of tests and if I’m not happy with the results, I’ll send you back,’ where would we be today? All these generations since then have made Quebec richer.”