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It’s easy to dismiss Finance Minister Carlos Leitão’s attack this week on the “ethnic-based” nationalism of the Coalition Avenir Québec party as a sign of desperation on the part of a Liberal government threatened with defeat in this year’s election.

When Leitão gave up a comfortable living as a respected economist to enter active politics four years ago, he said it was to oppose the divisiveness represented by the former Parti Québécois’s proposed anti-hijab “charter of values.”

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But that didn’t stop him from voting last October for the Couillard government’s own contribution to that divisiveness. That’s Bill 62, the “bare-face” law that, if upheld against a current court challenge, would deny public services to a tiny minority in Quebec of Muslim women wearing facial veils.

And it’s debatable whether the CAQ’s nationalism is, as Leitão said in an interview for the West Island edition of the Montreal Gazette published on Wednesday, based on ethnicity.