Pauline Marois just couldn't resist the temptation to go for broke, and transform her government from a minority to a majority administration. The irresistible urge to do so, wrapped tightly in her ambition to remove the province of Quebec from Confederation. With a noted majority of the francophone population of the province supportive of her proposed 'charter of values' -- where all civil servants who insisted on their human right to freedom of religion by wearing visible symbols of their religion while at work, would be fired unless they complied -- she felt certain of electoral victory for a renewed majority government and called a general election after a mere year and a half in power.

She lost her own seat in the voting process, and if that isn't an ignominious defeat, a final repudiation of hers and her party's separation agenda for the province, what is?

One of the leading student union personalities who helped lead an illegal, sometimes-violent protest against the prospect of a raise in university tuition fees which still would have left Quebec students paying significantly less than their peers elsewhere in the country joined the Parti Quebecois in the last election, attracted to the prospect of separation. He too lost his seat.

Another PQ candidate, a professor of sociology no less, at a Quebec university who subscribed publicly to the KKK-inspired slanderous charge that Jews and Muslims acquired funding through taxation of kosher and halal foods to further the political agenda of Zionism on the one hand and jihad on the other, lost her bid for election.

While Pierre Karl Peladeau, Quebec's media mogul who announced his intent to work toward secession, moving from cut-throat business leader to 'principle'-motivated politician, won a seat with the much-diminished Parti Quebecois.

But the leader of the province's Liberal Party, a federalist and advocate for functional and social bilingualism in a fervently unilingual province, ran a dogged campaign stressing the priorities for Quebec of increasing employment levels and coping with the staggering debt and deficit, along with the need for social harmony and inclusiveness, and it was his sane and sober platform clashing with the odiously divisive one of the Parti Quebecois that brought the Pequistes to their knees, and returned the Liberals to power.

Now it will be his priority to steer his Liberal government away from the traditional practices of corrupt alliances between government at every level in the province and industry and to temper the influence of its aggressive unions, while proffering much-needed overtures of reconciliation between the other provinces in the country we all share and cherish.