Never in nearly 20 years has a Quebec prime minister addressed the assembly of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). François Legault’s stay in Paris was historic in this sense. The opportunity to shine on the world stage, at the summit of the International Organization of La Francophonie (OIF) moreover, the voice of Quebec as the standard bearer of sovereignty and French-speaking cultural diversity. A pressing fight, the urgency of which Mr. Legault nevertheless claims to recognize.
The desire to seize it was well and truly displayed… on paper. However, local partisanship, against a backdrop of leitmotif on immigration, won the day upon his arrival.
During his Parisian press briefings, the Prime Minister drove home the point of this untenable idea of forcing asylum seekers to leave Quebec territory through compulsory travel to other Canadian provinces. Within the walls of UNESCO and the OIF, Mr. Legault certainly called for a consensus – French-speaking, as well as all non-English-speaking minority cultures – against a “worrying homogenization” of the digital space and its music, television or cinema distribution platforms. But outside of these two forums, Mr. Legault’s speech was almost exclusively migratory. His counterparts would be forgiven for misunderstanding the real priority of the Quebec Prime Minister.
However, Mr. Legault’s (official) speech was timely. The OIF has been criticized for years for straying from its primary mandate. The accession of new members again this year – such as Nova Scotia, where barely 10% of the population knows how to carry on a conversation in French – has blurred the French-speaking identity of this otherwise umpteenth international forum. What is more important for the Francophonie than the survival of cultural diversity in the English-speaking digital ocean?
In this sense, François Legault’s proposal to seize the OIF of the mandate to negotiate with the Web giants quotas of French-speaking content as well as an obligation of discoverability of cultural products in French offered the organization the opportunity to recall at the Paris summit all its relevance for the 340 million French speakers on the planet.
Netflix, Disney and Spotify have proven that their hand must be forced and that they will only yield to the weight of numbers. Mr. Legault’s second call for a common front, this time from UNESCO, was just as appropriate.
The protection of cultural diversity in the digital space has been the subject of discussions at the OIF and UNESCO for two years now. While, in markets that are more minority than that of France, viewing and listening to content in French, which very often only amounts to less than 10% of the offer, is already an obstacle course. Now is the time for mobilization, not distractions.
However, rather than exploiting this consensus for the vitality of the French language, which unites Quebec, France and Canada, François Legault preferred to dilute it, for a week, in favor of the pettiness of his political quarrels with Justin Trudeau and their worrying drift.
And while his Minister of Culture has been promising for almost a year to “do everything possible” to act here and enshrine a fundamental right to the discoverability of French-speaking content in the law, Mathieu Lacombe’s legislative proposal is still pending. . Behind the scenes, some are starting to worry that the file is stalling.
Here again, time is running out. The federal government of Justin Trudeau has not been very open to the idea, but nothing suggests that a conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre would be more open – he who describes the federal law emanating from the project as “censorship” of Bill C-11, which imposes an obligation on web giants to discover Canadian content.
This is another missed opportunity for François Legault in Paris, who could have presented himself there in front of the member countries whom he is trying to convince to stand up to the Web giants by leading by example. The CAQ Prime Minister rather sinned through inconsistency.