The author is a professor of literature in Montreal, editor-in-chief of the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and The prose of Alain Grandbois, or reading and rereading The Travels of Marco Polo (Note bene, 2019).
“The words in both cases are the same, but the question is who interprets these words and what is the purpose of the exercise”, explained Justin Trudeau in an attempt to justify before the Rouleau commission the invocation by his government of the Emergencies Act, even though the Canadian Security Intelligence Service determined that the occupation of downtown Ottawa by anti-sanitary protesters did not constitute an attack on “national security” .
However, the Emergencies Act stipulates that it can only be invoked in a “crisis situation caused by threats to the security of Canada” and that the expression “threats to the security of Canada […] within the meaning of section II of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act”.
In these circumstances, Justin Trudeau’s line is strongly reminiscent of that of the character of Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland. While the latter explains to him that, when he “uses a word”, this word “means exactly what [qu’il a] decided that it must mean”, Alice retorts that “the question is to know” if he has “the right to give so many different meanings to the words”. Humpty Dumpty’s answer is as famous as it is terrifying: “The question is who has the power, that’s all. »
Since laws are only made of words, learning from our Prime Minister that the “same” words can have totally different meanings depending on “who [les] interpreter” is therefore disturbing to any Canadian citizen, since it is this sophism that allowed the government to invoke an emergency law when neither the letter nor the spirit of the said law seemed to justify it. This is why, on this specific point of the legality of the invocation of this law by the Trudeau government, many of us will be curious about the conclusions Judge Rouleau will reach when he submits his report, expected by 20 next February.
If words still have meaning
However, beyond this legal question, Justin Trudeau’s remarks are also indicative of a crisis that today affects common language and the words we use. It is quite obvious that if everyone uses the “same” words while claiming the right to interpret them in their own way, we will no longer be able to understand each other, and that will end, de factoto any social dialogue and to any possibility of agreement.
This crisis which affects the meaning of words is manifested in particular by the increasingly frequent recourse to hyperbole, by the use of outrageous words, which strike the imagination, but which do not fit well with the situation in which we want to report.
Justin Trudeau’s testimony before the Rouleau commission provides further proof of this. He thus listed the threats that the demonstrators posed, according to him, to national security: “There was, he declared, the militarization of certain vehicles […] children were used as human shields […] there was ideologically motivated violence, risks of triggering [sic] lone wolves. »
The words used by the Prime Minister are dramatic, but they are also clearly exaggerated and out of touch with reality. There was (fortunately!) in the streets of Ottawa neither real “violence” nor “lone wolves”; going to demonstrate with your children does not make them de facto “human shields”; and I don’t know what this “militarization” of vehicles refers to, other than perhaps the fact that several trucks and vans were decked out in maple leaf flags.
Height of horror, he concluded: “We saw grandmothers surrounded by trucks in residential streets”!
Like him, I fully sympathize with the residents of downtown Ottawa, who have had to deal for almost a month with arrogant protesters, blocked streets, constant and exasperating noise, not to mention the exhaust fumes. Every day they had to curse the incompetence of their governments, both municipal and provincial, and wonder where their police were and why they didn’t just enforce the laws; because finally, if it is legal to express your dissatisfaction, it is not legal to block streets or to park heavy goods vehicles anywhere and anyhow. It is this lack of reaction from the authorities, their inability to enforce the laws, which has resulted in Canada being able to pass for a republic of bananas.
If I use this expression, it is because the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland presented before the Rouleau commission as proof of a supposed attack on national security the remarks that the head of a large Canadian bank had held with him a few days earlier and which apparently contributed to the government’s decision. This big boss told him that in the United States, Canada “was spoken of” as a joke” and that an investor had confided in him that he would not invest “a penny more” in a such a “banana republic”.
In terms of misused words, we can point out, however, that Minister Freeland, the banker and the Wall Street financier have difficulty understanding this expression, which specifically designates an apparently sovereign state, but whose governing bodies in fact obey the sole will of the big local bosses and foreign investors!