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Political satire may soon become impossible in Quebec, if its politics continues to look like satire.

On Wednesday, I saw a story on La Presse’s website that looked authentic but was so ludicrous that I suspected the site might have been hacked by a clever hoaxer.

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The story said regulation in Quebec had reached the point that the government was proposing to meddle in people’s sex lives.

It said Health Minister Gaétan Barrette was drafting a regulation aimed at reducing the cost to the government of in-vitro fertilization, an expensive treatment now available on demand to anyone covered by medicare.

Under the regulation, the story said, a woman would be eligible for the treatments only after she had failed to conceive by having “frequent” sex without contraception for up to three years, depending on her age.

Forty years after Pierre Elliott Trudeau famously declared that “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” here was Quebec’s health minister saying, “so, how many times?”