David Frum weighs in on the whole Triumph the Insult Comic Dog controversy. (Except that he refers to Triumph as a talking dog puppet.) Frum has a very special angle though (though it doesn’t involve Weapons of Mass Destruction.) And what is his very special contribution?

French Quebeckers and Quebec suck. (And they steal!)

We wish we could say that we are making this up, but… sadly, no! Indeed, Frum goes so far as to lie which, granted, is par for the course we guess:

It is illegal to post an English-language sign in the province of Quebec.

No, it is not:

Reacting to these events, Bourassa, in 1993, introduced Bill 86, which allowed English on outdoor commercial signs only if the French lettering was at least twice as large as the English.

The use of english on outdoor commercial signs is highly regulated, but it is not “illegal to post an English-language sign in the province of Quebec.” So can someone please email Mr. Frum? To be so clueless (and Canadian) should be a crime.

Yet Frum continues:

A Quebecker has held the prime ministership of Canada for all but 18 months of the past 36 years. And over those same 36 years, Quebec has received C$201 billion more from the federal Treasury than it has paid in. (Over those same years, the province of Alberta paid in $167 billion more than it received back.)

Frum knows, but most of his readers likely don’t, that the only thing keeping the liberals in power of late is (or rather was) the division of the conservative vote between the Conservatives and the Alliance. Frum is pissed off about Quebec’s influence in Canadian politics, but his annoyance is misplaced:

The Quebec-based Liberals have held power in Canada for all but 31 of the past 108 years ? a better record than either Mexico’s Institutional Revolution Party or the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

You might think (and again, his readers are unlikely to know better,) that the Liberals remain in power only because of their support in Quebec. Oh really? Sadly, No!

We report, you comment. We should add that Frum’s comments are also a reaction to a developing scandal of kickbacks and funding for Canada’s Liberal Party. As for the Liberals’ dominance (and the presence of a Quebecker in the PM’s office,) we don’t think it should be too much of a mystery to wonder why French speakers in Quebec are unenthusiastic about electing a PM that doesn’t speak their language (Jean Chretien being a notable exception of course.) You may not like it David, but the blame doesn’t lie along the St-Lawrence river.