René Lévesque looked at us mockingly the other night. His oversized photo is projected on the oval pavilion of UQAM. He seems to wonder what message walkers are getting from the information panels that unfold in front of him summarizing his life and work.
The reproduction of an essay he produced when he was 13, titled Why remain French?, caught my attention. In particular this extract: “We are threatened, not by love at first sight, but by slow and underhanded penetration. In the face of this danger we have no other defense than the struggle, and the struggle for life. »
The young Gaspesian had clearly identified the problem: the absence of love at first sight. The decline of French, like global warming, may have been scientifically predicted for decades, unless there is a salutary electric shock, our political elites let things go as if time were not against us.
Our Prime Minister gave us a masterful demonstration of this. Last spring, François Legault seemed to have been struck by a flash of lucidity when he declared that it was necessary at all costs to repatriate federal powers in immigration: “It is a question of survival for our nation. We can quibble and remind him that he currently has powers that he refuses to use for the selection of immigrants, including temporary ones, but he seemed aware of the extent of the danger.
Since then, he has made us the dance of inconstancy. Because he cannot find the words and the tone to explain that massive non-French-speaking immigration is mathematically an accelerator of decline, he sulks and swears that he no longer wants to broach the subject. And because he was rightly told that even if he got 125 MPs, Ottawa was not going to give him the powers he was asking for, he decided, in the middle of the campaign, not to ask for them anymore. We had not seen such a deflation since the closing ceremony of the International Balloon Festival of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu.
It wasn’t the only possible answer. He would have had to make a firm commitment to hold a referendum on the issue, without a favorable response from the federal government after a year, then to table a constitutional amendment creating a legal obligation to negotiate. In short, he could have shown muscle, strengthened his balance of power, used the levers available within this federation from which he does not want to leave.
Faced with the difficulty, François Legault instead demonstrated that he lacked the energy, strategic skill and leadership to lead this fight. He prefers to focus on closing the average wealth gap with Ontario. Thanks to Legault, at the end of the century, a Montreal pop singer could sing: Yes we have lost our old French, aim at least, we are as rich as Ontario! »
Since the CAQ will be postponed to power on Monday for four years, the adoption of additional measures, even timid, to slow down the decline will depend on the balance of power between the CAQ deputies and ministers who are truly aware of the danger and the others, who prefer denial and who believe that with the Act respecting the official and common language of Quebec, French (PL 96), they have already given.
This tension, as we know, has existed for four years. And there is no doubt that without the constant pressure on the language issue from the PQ members, Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette would never have succeeded in delivering his entire language reform, however partial it may be.
In this existential battle, there is obviously nothing to expect from the PLQ, which no longer even wants to demand a real knowledge of French from students in English CEGEPs. Nothing to expect from QS, voluntarily blind to the devastating linguistic impact of its proposal to welcome up to 800,000 immigrants in 10 years without asking them to learn French before coming. Nothing to expect from Éric Duhaime, who wants to abolish PL 96 and develop a new law “by discussing with the English-speaking community”. news flashÉric: she wants the withdrawal of Bill 101 and full bilingualism.
This is why the election of a good number of members of the Parti Québécois is nothing less than indispensable. Yes, I am from this political family. Yes, you can call me biased. But did you hear anyone other than Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, in this campaign, show himself to be both lucid and determined on the language issue?
To get us out of decline, the other chefs are counting on tender grass, honey, soft music and the return of dictations to the French-speaking primary. As if reversing the heavy trend towards our erasure did not require, as René Lévesque knew at 13, a struggle for life.
On the set of Everybody talks about it, summoned to name the best premier in the history of Quebec, Dominique Anglade answered Jean Lesage, whose main team member was Lévesque. The other four named the founder of the Parti Québécois. But which of them today would have the will to shake up reality – and to face the storm – with Law 101?
Only Paul St-Pierre Plamondon showed how much he mastered the file and felt the urgency, offered solutions, dealt with the subject using the right tone and the right words. He started the campaign with a strong headwind Fiona Where Ian. He ends it pushed by a favorable breeze that he himself generated by the quality of his remarks and his personality, by the connection he was able to make between his ideal and the deep need that the nation has to regroup and relaunch.
I am not saying that PSPP is René Lévesque. No one will ever be. But I say he is the only one of the five major party leaders who has inherited some of his political DNA. Above all, I affirm that at this linguistically somewhat murky moment in our history, PSPP and its party are, like the memory of the greatness of Lévesque, indispensable to us.
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