The Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ), barring an unexpected turn of events, should easily win the elections on October 3. It nevertheless has a problem which, by extension, is that of Quebecers: its nationalism without separatism is certainly in phase with the majority feeling, but it is doomed to hit a wall.
Without the knife to the throat of the federal government that is independence, the national affirmation advocated by the CAQ is totally declawed and looks like a mirror to the larks. While François Legault reassures nationalist Quebecers by reassuring them that he shares their national concern, the room for maneuver of the Quebec nation in defining its present and its future does not increase one iota. Legault says he wants a Quebec with more freedom of choice in Canada, but if nothing changes in his approach, he will do nothing but continue to say so.
This shoddy nationalism, which sings patriotic songs while warning everyone that it will not go further than what the constitutional status quo allows, recalls, in less elegant, the identity hiccups of the political scientist Léon Dion (1922 -1997), who would have turned 100 this year.
Dion, wrote political scientist Olivier Lemieux in a superb portrait of the thinker published in 2016 in the magazine Mens, was the most brilliant defender of the third way. This option refuses both the constitutional status quo and independence in order to better propose a reform of Canadian federalism ensuring the durability of the French fact and, we would add today, the freedom of the Quebec nation to choose its model of management of cultural diversity.
A supporter, therefore, of an asymmetrical federalism, Dion could say he was comfortable being Canadian, while specifying, in an essay published in 1987, that “if my hope were to be disappointed, like many others, without doubt, I would revise my own political positions, and I would not hesitate to commit myself in the end to the path of independence”. He was willing, he added, to trust, but not to be fooled.
After the failure of the Meech Lake accord in 1990 and at the time of the federal offers leading to the Charlottetown accord in 1992, Dion found himself at a crossroads. In an interview at The Press in September 1991, he reiterated his wish that Quebecers obtain, “without having to achieve independence, the constitutional, legal and political security that they demand”.
According to him, the only way to achieve this is to leave “the knife of independence under the throat of English Canada”. Without this threat, he insists, Canada will never move. When the journalist asks him what he will do if it fails, Dion, well aware that an inconsequential threat is not a threat, replies that he will advocate Quebec independence.
As we know, the Charlottetown accord, which Dion found unsatisfactory, will fail, and the timorous political scientist will not have the audacity to carry out his threat. In 1995, in an essay published a few months before the referendum, Dion deflated and even went so far as to affirm, summarizes Olivier Lemieux, “that he would not opt for independence in the event of a constitutional status quo”. The third way, he persists in repeating, is the only valid option.
We can think so. One can believe, in fact, that asymmetrical federalism, which would recognize a special status for the Quebec nation within Canada, is the most logical and reasonable option. However, the problem, the big problem, is that this option, in present-day Canada, does not exist and that we do not see the day when it could be reborn.
To cling to it, like Léon Dion yesterday or like François Legault today, amounts to producing smoke while knowing that there will never be a fire; it is to put on patriotic clothes to passively witness the national decline of Quebec engendered by the status quo; it is to proclaim, with a tremolo in one’s voice, that we fear the Louisianization of Quebec and that we intend to fight it, but refuse, in the same breath, to extend the application of Bill 101 to the college network, a a measure that is nevertheless necessary to at least delay the sinking. To plead for the third way, today, is to say without doing.
Léon Dion presented himself as a tired federalist — later, jokingly, his son, the Liberal Stéphane Dion, was described as a “tiring federalist” — when he was, basically, a “tireless federalist”, noted Michel David at the time of the death of the political scientist. A disappointed sovereign recycled into a soft nationalist for a chance to gain provincial power, does François Legault have better to offer Quebecers than a constitutional surrender à la Léon Dion?