Politics of Quebec

The politics of Quebec are centred on a provincial government resembling that of the other Canadian provinces, namely a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. The capital of Quebec is Quebec City, where the Lieutenant Governor, Premier, the legislature, and cabinet reside.

The unicameral legislature — the National Assembly of Quebec — has 125 members. Government is conducted based on the Westminster model.

Political system

The British-type parliamentarism based on the Westminster system was introduced in the Province of Lower Canada in 1791. The diagram at right represents the political system of Québec since the 1968 reform. Prior to this reform, the Parliament of Québec was bicameral.

Lieutenant Governor

Premier

.quebec

.quebec is a new GeoTLD and Community Priority Application that was proposed to ICANN's New gTLD Program by PointQuébec, a non-profit organisation. The organisation aims to improve the businesses, culture, tourism, and online identity of Quebec and the Quebecois through the .quebec TLD. According to the PointQuébec organisation, .quebec will allow all Quebecers to register their domain names under .quebec.

PointQuébec's application for the GeoTLD was approved, and was delegated to the Root Zone on 16 April 2014. The application was supported by the Quebec National Assembly and other cultural, technical, and economic institutions in the city. It received "substantial financial support from the Québec government", and is a not-for profit organisation. The organisation will verify legitimate registrations via statements of intent through a post-verification registration system. quebec officially launched on November 18, 2014.

Along with TLDs such as .cat and .africa, .quebec and other new TLDs fall into the new category of GeoTLDs. The issue of new top level domains in general and .quebec in particular has been discussed at various ICANN-Meetings since 2005.

Quebec

Quebec (ⁱ/kwᵻˈbɛk/ or /kəˈbɛk/; French: Québec [kebɛk]) is the second-most populous province in Canada. It is the only Canadian province that has a predominantly French-speaking population, and the only one to have French as its sole provincial official language.

Quebec is Canada's largest province by area and its second-largest administrative division; only the territory of Nunavut is larger. It is bordered to the west by the province of Ontario, James Bay, and Hudson Bay; to the north by Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay; to the east by the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the province of Newfoundland and Labrador; it is bordered on the south by the province of New Brunswick and the U.S. states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York. It also shares maritime borders with Nunavut, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia.

Quebec is Canada's second most populous province, after Ontario. Most inhabitants live in urban areas near the Saint Lawrence River between Montreal and Quebec City, the capital. Approximately half of Quebec residents live in the Greater Montreal Area, including the Island of Montreal. English-speaking communities and English-language institutions are concentrated in the west of the island of Montreal but are also significantly present in the Outaouais, Eastern Townships, and Gaspé regions. The Nord-du-Québec region, occupying the northern half of the province, is sparsely populated and inhabited primarily by Aboriginal peoples. The climate around the major cities is four-season continental with cold and snowy winters combined with warm to hot humid summers, but further north long winter seasons dominate and as a result the northern areas of the province are marked by tundra conditions. Even in central Quebec at comparatively southerly latitudes winters are very severe in inland areas.

Quebec (AG) v Canada (AG)

Quebec (AG) v Canada (AG) 2015 SCC 14 is a Canadian constitutional law case concerning the federal government's ability to destroy information related to the Canadian long-gun registry pursuant to the federal criminal law power.

Background

In 1995, Parliament passed the Firearms Act, which required long gun owners to register their guns. The Supreme Court found that the Act was intra vires the federal criminal law power. In 2012, Parliament repealed the requirement to register long guns through the Ending the Long-gun Registry Act (ELRA) and sought to delete the information in its registry. The province of Quebec, wishing to create and maintain its own long gun registry, requested that the federal government share the data it had collected about Quebec long gun owners. When the federal government declined to share the information, Quebec argued that section 29 of the ELRA, the provision disbanding the long gun registry, was ultra vires the federal government.

At trial in the Superior Court of Quebec, the trial judge found that section 29 was unconstitutional as it violated the principle of cooperative federalism given that Quebec had take part in "gathering, analyzing, organizing, and modifying" the data in question. The trial judge required the federal government to share the information with Quebec.