Hearing François Legault talk about immigration as a threat to the nation on Sunday, you might have thought for a moment, closing your eyes, that it was a Heritage Minutefeaturing a speech from the beginning of the last century.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
I thought of Henri Bourassa. Not the boulevard or the metro station, but the politician and founder of the To have to whose discourse on the French-Canadian nation threatened by the peril of migration still has echoes today, as can be seen in the excellent documentary by Francine Pelletier Battle for the soul of Quebec1.
“The truth is that the steady increase in foreign immigration, from the British Isles or elsewhere, far from being a cause for congratulation in Speeches from the Throne, constitutes the gravest peril which threatens the future of the Canadian nation [française] writes Henri Bourassa in an editorial entitled “The peril of immigration”, published on the front page of To have to July 28, 1913.
More than a century later, Prime Minister François Legault associates immigration, which depends on federal power, with an existential threat to French Quebec. “It’s a matter of survival for our nation!” “, he said.
According to him, if Quebec does not urgently repatriate full powers in immigration and does not obtain control of the family reunification program, “it could become a matter of time before we become a Louisiana”.
Of course, the French language, a minority in North America, will always have to be defended in order to survive the steamroller of English. But the Quebec-Louisiana parallel is lame to say the least, as several observers have already pointed out.2.
Proportion of French speakers in Louisiana: 1.84%.
Proportion of French speakers in Quebec: 93.32%.3
Not insignificant difference between the two: in 1921, Louisiana banned the teaching of French in its public schools and made English the only language of instruction. While in Quebec, it should be remembered, it is precisely the opposite: Bill 101 adopted in 1977 and updated by the CAQ government fortunately obliges children – including the sons and daughters of immigrants like me – to attend French-language school until the end of their secondary studies.
What is just as disturbing as this grotesque parallel according to which immigrants, even if they send their children to French-language schools, condemn the Quebec nation to its disappearance, is the very real parallel with a conservative nationalist discourse that smacks of xenophobes of an era that was thought to be over.
A speech that sadly reminds us that the election season is often also the season of scapegoats. Why talk about the climate emergency, health and education when you can create a diversion with such a convenient imported scarecrow?
We will not be fooled by all these immigrant grandmothers in search of family reunification who risk, with the blessing of the federal government, coming to sing lullabies in foreign languages to their grandchildren to better “Louisianize” Quebec. …
In Battle for the soul of Quebec, historian Pierre Anctil recalls that for Henri Bourassa, any form of immigration was problematic, because it changed the balance of power between English Canada and French Canada. “It is on these bases that, for many decades, French-Canadian nationalists until the Quiet Revolution fiercely opposed immigration and diversification. Me, I see it in a straight line with certain things that we see today, the same kind of speech… ”
More than a century later, the context has changed, of course, notes the historian. But the resistances are fundamentally of the same nature, based on the same notion of French Canada at the beginning of the last century.
A French Canada that cannot integrate immigrants and that must establish increasingly clear identity beacons to protect itself against foreign intrusions.
Listening to the Prime Minister’s speech immediately after seeing Battle for the soul of QuebecI had the impression that this “straight line” of which Pierre Anctil speaks is made up of the curious zigzags of a train that rolls backwards and falls behind a mixed Quebec society, more and more open to immigration .
As if you had taken the orange line of the metro from the city center thinking of going to the Côte-Vertu station.
And you suddenly hear: “Next station: Henri-Bourassa”.
However, you have not taken the wrong platform. It is the electoralist train which, all of a sudden, got into the wrong century, rolling in the opposite direction of history.