Jonathan Kay: Scotland shows Quebec what an intelligent and mature independence movement looks like

Good piece contrasting the approach by the Scottish nationalist and the PQ:

Quebec’s modern sovereigntist movement has been around, in its modern form, since the 1960s. Yet to this day, its leaders (including Parti Québécois Premier Pauline Marois) are fantastically vague about what sort of “independent” country they want. Extraordinary claims — Quebec will keep the dollar, and, oh, yes, have a seat on the Bank of Canada — are casually made and then forgotten. The question of how the most per-capita indebted province in Canada will pay its way (including its share of the Canadian federal debt) while forsaking the $16-billion that the rest of the country sends its way every year is entirely ignored.

In Scotland, by contrast, such meat-and-potatoes questions about what will happen in a newly independent nation are the meat and potatoes of this year’s campaign — and are explored in great detail in a lengthy text published by the Scottish government entitled Scotland’s Future — Your Guide to an Independent Scotland. As Jonathan Freedland writes in the March 20 edition of The New York Review of Books, the 649-page document “is short on the rhetoric of self-determination, long on the quotidian details of self-government. In a ‘Q & A’ section, the third question — after ‘Why should Scotland be independent?’ and ‘Can Scotland afford to be independent?’— is ‘What will happen to my pension?’ There are few rousing calls to Scottish pride or the spirit of Bannockburn, their place taken by information on postal services and the administration of drivers’ licenses.”

Jonathan Kay: Scotland shows Quebec what an intelligent and mature independence movement looks like | National Post.