What's Wrong with Quebec?

Parti Quebecois leader Andre Boisclair, while speaking to students in Montreal, said, "When I was in Boston, where I spent a year, I was surprised to see that on [the Harvard] campus about one-third of the students doing their bachelor's degrees had slanting eyes." Is that really a politically expedient way to describe people of Asian descent? And this in the wake of the furor over the Quebec government's decision to (effectively) force a Muslim prison guard trainee to quit or remove her hijab. Then if you go back a little further, we have the small Quebec town of Herouxville publishing new rules in response to the arrival of an immigrant family. BBC News writes:

"We wish to inform these new arrivals that the way of life which they abandoned when they left their countries of origin cannot be recreated here," the declaration reads.

"We consider it completely outside norms to... kill women by stoning them in public, burning them alive, burning them with acid, circumcising them etc."

So what's going on in Quebec? The province has historically been very protective of it's own language and culture, but does that necessarily breed this type of prejudice? Boisclair's comment is inexcusable. I'm not sure his remark is the most offensive racial slur I've heard, but certainly there's no place for that type of comment in an election campaign, if anywhere. Then we have the hijab thing. I can somewhat understand the Quebec government's stance here. They argued that the hijab could be a saftey hazard if/when inmates become hostile. Maybe. I've never worn a hijab so I don't really know the logistics of the thing but from seeing them, I can understand the concern. Finally, the Herouxville thing is so filled with prejudice it reaches South Park-level humour. I mean, one family moves to town and officials feel it necessary to inform them that public stoning, burning women alive, etc are outside of Canadian norms? I've opined before that too many Canadians don't have any comprehension of the world beyond their daily commute, but this is preposterous. I can't help but think that decades of defending Quebec culture has gone too far. Young Quebecors indoctrinated with a distaste for Anglo-Canada seem to have expanded their cultural dislike to all non-Quebecors. I might be blowing this out of proportion, but these three incidents are coming straight from Quebec leaders, so they represent a problem. It's time for the rational moderates in that province to step up.