As the Herald’s incomparable Don Braid reported on Friday, there was an extraordinary moment of ecumenical outreach in Alberta last week, as Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, leader of the resurgent Parti Québécois, visited Calgary and pressed the flesh with some Alberta separatists. Plamondon was invited for a “fireside chat” by the University of Calgary School of Public Policy, and rehearsed familiar arguments for Quebec separatism. Quebec never asked for the constitutional settlement of 1982, or for that matter the one of 1867; the French language is, as ever, in precipitous decline on this continent; the federal government, unhealthily dependent on ethnic clientele-building, makes lunatic policy decisions and implements them crookedly, etc., etc.