Editorial - Just because the federal Liberals are having a national unity crisis is no reason the rest of us have to have one.
The latest mess developed because Liberal leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff has proposed reopening the Canadian Constitution to recognize Quebec as a "nation" within Canada.

That idea is as stupid as it sounds. It was proposed by Ignatieff to get his flailing bid for the party leadership on track again. The purpose is to attract support from the Quebec wing of the Liberal party, which also wants the rest of Canada to recognize Quebec as a nation,

The other major Liberal leadership candidates have accused Ignatieff of political opportunism at the expense of national unity, but their positions aren't much better.

They say they recognize Quebec as a "nation" within Canada, but don't favour re-opening the Constitution to make this explicit. Right.

All this comes courtesy of the same political party, remember, that single-handedly revived separatism in Quebec because of the corrupt way it ran the federal sponsorship program.
The sponsorship program was former Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien's panicked response to almost losing the second Quebec referendum in 1995 to the separatists. His "solution" was to spend millions of tax dollars displaying Canadian flags and logos in Quebec.

The idea was absurd. How, after all, could Canadian flags and logos appease Quebecers if they wanted to separate?
But the sponsorship program turned out to be worse than useless, literally.

The Liberals were so corrupt in the way they ran it, funnelling millions of tax dollars to Liberal-friendly ad firms in Quebec, basically for doing nothing, that Quebecers were outraged when the wrongdoing was exposed.

And that, more than anything else, re-ignited separatist sentiment in Quebec, along with the Bloc Quebecois, whose influence had been waning ever since their referendum loss in 1995.
Anger over AdScam, as the sponsorship scandal became known, also drove the Liberals to third-party status in Quebec behind the Bloc and the Tories in the last election.

Based on this appalling record, our advice to any Canadian who wants to preserve national unity is simple. In the next federal election, don't vote Liberal.