Sarah Scott,
Southam Newspapers
Alliance Quebec is organizing a protest march Friday in front of Premier Lucien Bouchard's Montreal headquarters to complain about the thousands of ballots that were illegally rejected in last fall's referendum.
"Each of us will be telling you, 'Don't mess with my vote!'" Alliance Quebec president Michael Hamelin said in a speech yesterday directed at Bouchard, who was not in attendance.
The Alliance is demanding a full investigation of the 85,000 rejected ballots. It wants to know how many were illegally thrown out and why.
The federally funded lobby for English-speaking Quebec is not satisfied with the investigation by Quebec's Chief Eletoral Officer Pierre F. Côté. Last month, Côté said he will charge 31 voting officials appointed by the Parti Québécois with electoral fraud but added the investigation found no high-level plot to steal votes and subvert democracy.
That report, according to an Alliance resolution approved yesterday, "manifestly misrepresents and trivializes" the extent of vote fraud.
Hamelin and the Alliance did not address Côté's other major finding - that the giant pro-Canada rally just before the referendum "undermined" democracy because federalists did not fully account for the costs, especially the cut-rate plane and bus tickets.
Hamelin told reporters that issue is separate and pales in contrast with the vote fraud.
Côté's investigation did not determine how many votes were rejected illegally because only a small sample of the rejected votes was examined.
But human-rights lawyer Andrew Orkin told the Alliance over the weekend that his research suggests that as many as 64,000 votes could have been illegally rejected - more than the federalists' slim margin of victory.
The rejection of thousands of votes "is an absolutely shocking distortion of democracy," Hamelin said. "Next Friday our communities will mobilize to tell the premier that will not be tolerated."
The protest will be held in front of Bouchard's office in the Hydro-Québec building on René-Lévesque Blvd.
In other business, the Alliance avoided a divisive debate on partition by tabling a youth-commission proposal that would allow federalist regions to split from a sovereign Quebec.
The proposal responded to the popularity of the partition option among many English-speaking Montrealers, but it angered off-island anglophones who said their communities would be sacrificed because they would remain in an independent Quebec.
Instead the Alliance approved a proposal saying the federal government should approve Quebec independence only if the question is "straightforward," if a "substantial majority" of Quebecers vote Yes, and if Quebec separates according to the terms of the Constitution. That would require the approval of all provinces plus Parliament to let Quebec go.
Hamelin told reporters a "substantial majority" could mean a two-thirds vote, but the issue was not decided by Alliance delegates.
The Alliance also endorsed a resolution to soften the rules of Bill 101, Quebec's French Language Charter, on the bilingualism of institutions.
At present school boards, municipal bodies and health and social-service institutions are allowed to function in English and French if more than half their clientele is English-speaking. The Alliance thinks that rule should be changed so any of the instiutions can function in English and French if they want to.
In his speech to more than 175 Alliance delegates, Hamelin acknowledged that a substantial percentage of English-speaking Quebecers "expect to leave the province within the next five years," mainly due to political uncertainty.
But at the convention, "people here talked about fighting the bureaucrats and standing up for Canada and getting on with their lives," he said.
"They talked about old battle waged and new ones looming on the horizon. But nobody suggested we should just quietly slip away."
The Montreal Gazette
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