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Finance Minister Carlos Leitão’s description of the Coalition Avenir as a party promoting “ethnic-based nationalism” may seem inflammatory, but low-level ethnocentrism is certainly present at varying levels across the political spectrum in Quebec. It is a problem worth examining.

It might be uncomfortable to acknowledge, but all nationalism excludes, at least on occasion, even the Liberal Party’s nationalist-federalist hybrid governance. CAQ Leader François Legault is not a promoter of ethnic nationalism in the style of the supremacist political movements experiencing a resurgence in Europe and the United States, if that’s what Leitão was suggesting.

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But Legault and many Quebec politicians have promoted intolerably ethnocentric policies, those that disregard minority perspectives.

Evaluating levels of prejudice in a society is imprecise science. Because Quebec is so culturally unique in North America, there is an abundance of armchair sociology practised on oft-misunderstood Quebecers. But, as Don Macpherson noted recently, a widely accepted starting point would be that nationalism among Quebecers is typically “based on language and culture, rather than ethnicity.”