12 days until E-day, and armchair political activist are scouring the archives at a frantic pace, looking for any mud they can sling at their opponents.

This lovely video apparently came from the latest attic shoe-box to be opened.  It is now hitting the streets in Québec with a thud (I actually think the thud sound came from when it hit the concrete after being kicked out of the attic window like a soccer ball).

Oh boy.

Listen… I myself have “highlighted” to separatists and others, face-to-face, how the British did have a laissez-faire approach (albeit a strategic one) to enable them to better govern in centuries past.

I have also highlighted how it was not bad, and how, given the circumstances, it actually may have turned out for the best in the sense that it left very solid foundations upon which a lot of good stuff was later built (thus on the scale of brutal barbaric conquerors, given the Québec-British context, it is wholly incorrect for people in Québec and elsewhere to lump the British in the same category as the Spanish conquistador’s conquest of the Aztecs — which unfortunately some people do more than you would think).

However, I’m not sure I would have quite worded it the same way as Kenny (in fact, I am categorically telling you I would not have).

The little leap of historic context I would have perhaps taken to describe our current context, at least for Kenny, apparently warranted a huge leap.   His leap is so large, in fact, that he is trying to bridge too grandiose of notions as one big event (the British came, conquered, had a love-in, and boom 2015 arrived).

Over the course of centuries, it is always a “course of chain reactions” which leads to final outcomes.  Yet Kenny made the leap from the initial event straight to the final outcome, but almost completely neglected everything in between (which were the actual events which have led to today’s context and society).

Ooops.

T’is election season, and it’s coming back to haunt him.

Here is the write-up for it in the Huff Post Québec from which I took the above video (along with another video in which Kenny speaks more to his thoughts on multiculturalism):  L’empire britannique a bien intégré les colons français à l’époque de la Conquête, selon le conservateur Jason Kenney 

As an aside:  Interestingly, the Conservatives have led what appears to have been a very successful economic and Niqab-bashing advertising campaign in Québec in the last few weeks.  The catch phrase of their TV and radio advertisements:  “Au Québec, on est plus conservateur que l’on pense” or “Au Québec, nos valeurs sont plus conservatrices que l’on pense”.   (“In Québec, we’re more conservative than you’d think”, or “In Québec, our values are more conservative than you’d think.”

In Québec, every time a politician (regardless of political stripes) makes a statement based on their record or the record of their opponents, the Rad-Can reporter Denis Martin Chabot (who I actually knew from when he was a reporter in Edmonton) does a television and print segment which quickly verifies the veracity of politicians’ statements.

The segment is called “Qui dit vrai?” (Who’s telling the truth).  Sometimes Chabot will do several of these segments a day.  Let’s say a politician states “We will create tax incentives for industry X because they have lost 322,000 job in the last 6 years”.  Chabot will then quickly research the facts.  He will come back to the public within an hour or two to either confirm the figures thrown around, or to declare that the figures were twisted and manipulated.

People in Québec are lapping up “Qui dit vrai?”, and they are apparently putting a lot of confidence in it.   Of all the political leaders who have been caught with their pants down with twisted numbers, Harper has been caught the least.  Harper stays on script (nonstop), and he gives numbers which can be backed up (whereas Trudeau and Mulcair have been caught in the nuances of their numbers more than a few times — to the point that, over the last several days, the latter two have almost stopped citing figures in French, rather than risk having them intensely scrutinized by Chabot on TV, the radio and the internet).

I believe this may be having an effect in Québec, especially on the front of giving economic benefit of the doubt to the Conservatives.

The poll numbers for the Conservatives in Québec are going up.  Polls in the last few days have shown they’re getting close to the 1/3 support mark.  That’s huge.

What this suggests to me is that the “attic clean-outs” in Québec, like the one above, will likely only intensify in the next few days.  It will be interesting to see what other tid-bits Conservative opponents will drag out, and if it will have an effect on what has been an otherwise very successful niqab-bashing political campaign in Québec.