The debate on the third link, over the years, has become overloaded ideologically, as if we were no longer talking about a bridge or a tunnel, but about a social project.
On the right, it becomes the symbol of the right of motorists to circulate freely.
On the left, we see it rather as a harmful project, in an era that should convert to public transport.
It is however necessary to approach this project from an additional angle, rarely mentioned, but often whispered.
Quebec
This is what I would call the theory of the second metropolis. We will sum it up like this. Montreal is a lost city for Quebec, and more particularly, for French-speaking Quebec.
Demography obliges, it is called to separate from it. Moreover, Montreal is increasingly rejecting the rest of Quebec, as evidenced by the election results. Minds that want to be lucid consider this situation irreparable. The partition should be recorded.
It would then be important to give Quebec the means of a true national capital, also becoming over the decades the metropolis of French Quebec. This implies major works, so that Quebec has the necessary infrastructure for its next vocation. The third link then becomes the symbol of this collective redeployment.
In a few decades, the Quebec people would operate a withdrawal towards their founding city, ceasing to maintain the illusion of a French Montreal.
But through this, on the scale of history, our people continue their territorial regression.
North America was initially largely French, thanks to the spirit of adventure of the great explorers.
After the English Conquest, our territory was considerably reduced. We had, for a time, the hope of projecting ourselves across Canada. Terrible delusion. Everywhere, our people were anglicized there.
And we finally rebuilt ourselves on the territory of Quebec, where we form a demographic majority.
But the XXIe century announces a coming setback, with the loss of Montreal, conquered by multicultural Canada, with the means that are those of our time.
Note the parallel between our territory and the evolution of our name as a people through the centuries.
We were first French, before becoming Canadians, then French-Canadians, when Anglophones appropriated the reference to Canada.
We then became Quebecers, to become masters at home.
- Listen to the Mathieu Bock-Côté and Richard Martineau meeting broadcast live every day at 10 a.m. via QUB-radio :
Territory
But today, they are once again trying to dispossess us of our name, by creating the myth of a bilingual Quebec, where French is only one language out of two, and multicultural, where the historic French-speaking majority is only one community among others. We therefore tend more and more to define ourselves as “French-speaking Quebecers” or simply as “Francophones”. Until the next symbolic mutilation. One day, we will no longer have a name.
Coming back to the third link. Technically, this project is probably necessary. But behind this gesture of power hides a fundamental renunciation.
We are no longer mobilizing our collective energies to reconquer our metropolis, but to build ourselves an honorable fallback base.
What will we be left with, in the end?