TODAY I’m writing not just for Scottish readers but also for French Canadians. This is after I got a call from an old friend, Christian Rioux, who is the Paris correspondent of a paper published in Montreal, Le Devoir. It’s rather like The National in being the only Quebecois daily to support independence – the others are all Canadian unionist. Under UK restrictions, Christian has not been able to get to Scotland himself to cover Thursday’s election. He has to rely on pals from former times to supply him with the local lowdown. What! Has Le Devoir not got a London correspondent? As a matter of fact, it hasn’t. When financial moves were being made to found the paper in 1910, it needed to decide how it was going to cover imperial affairs. French Canadians had by now settled down under British rule, yet still not exactly ecstatic about it. In the Boer Wars, for example, most had supported the Afrikaners as the oppressed underdogs, never thinking to ask about the black