They love the idea of Scottish independence in Quebec. And they hate it too.

The Canadian province - or, officially, “nation within a united Canada” - has been divided, sometimes bitterly, on its own constitutional future for decades.

So it’s no surprise that its newspapers, split between sovereigntists and federalists, Canada’s equivalent of nationalists and unionists, report the Scottish story in very different ways ahead of Tuesday's provincial election, with one recent opinion poll suggesting the separatist Parti Quebecois will return to power, but without enough support to push through a referendum on independence.

Take Le Devoir. This Montreal broadsheet has championed Quebec’s Francophone culture for a century and is a bastion of thinking sovereigntism.

It it hugely upbeat on our referendum. Scotland, it reckons, would turn into a Nordic nirvana after the vote. According to one headline we would be “a Scandinavian social democracy with Queen Elizabeth II as a bonus prize”.

Le Devoir reported earlier this year: “Unlike Quebecers who live just 30km from the American frontier, it isn’t hard for Scots to imagine what their country would look like once independent. They only need to look across the North Sea to contemplate Denmark, Norway or Sweden. Or Finland and the Netherlands.”

Moreover, Le Devoir is pretty confident about our country’s financial future. “The economic survival of an independent Scotland is rarely a matter in debate nowadays, especially since the discovery of North Sea oil.”

Contrast this rosy picture with the misery predicted for an independent Scotland from Canada’s English-language The Globe and Mail.

“If Scotland became independent tomorrow, it would immediately become one of the European leaders in homicides, hard-drug abuse, obesity, cancer deaths and alcoholism, and would have rates of poverty and chronic disease far higher than any of its neighbours,” said the Toronto-based Canadian national.

“In other words, Scotland is a very expensive place to administer,” it adds, before using UK Treasury figures showing higher per-capital public spending north of the border than south.

The Globe and Mail suggests a new Scotland would have a budget deficit of 13.4% of GDP (a figure derived by ignoring oil revenues) and then suggests the fiscal situation could be even worse “if separation hurt GDP”.

The paper does go on to say that North Sea oil could reduce Scotland’s deficit. But it adds: “Independence would make Scotland a single-resource nation that would be spending all its resource revenue within its own economy. This is not a recipe for prosperity.”

The tone of both articles will be familiar to Scottish readers. We have all seen some on one side of our own debate assert Scotland will enjoy effortless Nordic well-being, while those on the other paint a picture of post-independence apocolypse.

But both brands of story - I am told by people who know better than me - resonate with Quebecers and other Canadians too.

Why? Because these are exactly the kind of arguments thrashed out over Quebec's own sovereignty debates over the last three decades or so.

Quebecers have fought two referenda on “sovereignty” over the last three decades. The second, in 1995, was widely seen as ill-tempered and marred by allegations of dirty tricks. Media groups took clear stances on the issue.

So are they now almost automatically reverting to type when trying to cover our referendum? It would appear so. I am tempted to say Scottish independence is being fought as a proxy war in Quebec - but I am happy to be corrected if this is a bit of an overstatement.

But the language on Scotland is quite strikingly bitter - and firmly seen through the prism of Quebec politics.

Why are Quebec politics so robust? Aisla Henderson, of Edinburgh University, reckons it may be because, unlike in Scotland, there is no full consensus between either side of the debate on whether Quebec is a “nation” or not.

“The language used on both sides can be more nationalistic than in Scotland,” she said. “Perhaps because language - whether French or English - has historically been so important part of politics.”

The Globe and Mail, in the same article where it declares Scotland an economic, social and health basket case - explains all the pre-referendum positioning through what happened in the province.

“Scotland creeps toward a Quebec-style constitutional crisis,” it announced in its headline before referring to Alex Salmond, “the Scottish separatist leader”, saying he began his campaign with a “Modified Lévesque Opening”, while UK premier David Cameron responded with the Dion Gambit (the paper namechecking two politicians on either side of the sovreignty debate).

Papers on both sides of the Quebec divide (although politics in the province, it should be said, splits more than two ways) have noted interest in Scotland in their independence argument, especially over the machinery of referenda, and the niggles over wording and constitutuional law.

But they also note a reluctance by Alex Salmond to speak of Quebec. Montreal’s La Presse, for example, this month stressed how coy the SNP leader was on the subject.

So did Le Devoir, which offered a reason for the first minister’s reluctance to wax lyrical about Quebec: it is because the nationalists lost in Quebec, albeit only by a whisker.

Moreover, the Canadian referenda, according to one Canadian study cited by Le Devoir, were the only ones of their kind carried out anywhere in the world ever to go the way of the No camp.

Quebec sovereigntists, meanwhile, look set to make a return to power in provincial elections next week. Here, too, old hands spot similiarities with the Scottish situation. The Parti Québecois, according to seasoned watchers of local politics, are fighting on administrative competency, not independence.

* Thanks to Edinburgh-based Quebec journalist Paris Gourtsoyannis, Edinburgh University’s Ailsa Henderson, and Aberdeen University’s Professor Michael Keating for help with this blog. All mistakes are mine.