Put yourself in the shoes of a member of our National Assembly. You have proof that one of your political opponents lied to voters. You have a writing, a recording, a video, an affidavit, a dozen witnesses. You want to confront the culprit in the house of Quebec democracy, on the debate floor, face to face.
Preparing your intervention, you consult the official list of comments deemed unparliamentary. You are prohibited from asserting that the miscreant committed a criminal act, that he has dishonest friends, that he hatched a scam, did everything to keep the population from knowing about it, was blind. voluntary, that he is a bandit doing dirty deeds in the barnyard, that he has fooled Quebecers, that he hides things (does them in secret or engages in secrecy), that he camouflages or acts in on the sly, that he is complicit (in anything) or in collusion with others or that he circumvents the laws. You cannot say either that he is corrupt, that he is stupid to Quebecers, that he has nerve, disguises or distorts the truth, or even that he expresses half-truths, that he diverts from money, misinforms or shows off, that he wants to cover up an affair or more simply tries to confuse everyone, that he is making up or even that he is in the wrong. And I’m only at the letter “F”.
Specifically, to assert that the member opposite is lying, you cannot, without breaking the rules, say that his remarks are false, are falsehoods, spread false information or constitute false representations, or even that he is intellectual fraud or wants to defraud voters. The heavy irony, likewise, does not come across. No one in the Assembly can be described as a smartass, a jerk, a weirdo, a whitened (aged) sepulchre, an auntie, a Slinky face. I have some, but not the best ones. (I myself, when speaking of two ministers, was forbidden to say “Dupont et Dupond” and “Ding et Dong”.)
During one of his last interventions in the Assembly, the former Liberal Finance Minister Raymond Bachand had just accused the PQ government of having “sabotaged” the development of wind power. Although the word is not one of the 400 prohibited terms, the president ordered Mr. Bachand to use “vocabulary that is acceptable in this House”.
It’s not Raymond Bachand’s style to get out of his depth. Let us say that he calmly expressed the essence of his thoughts: “The vocabulary of this Chamber? I look at very erudite colleagues, it takes a lot of intellectual skill to deal with unacceptable things and say that in words that Quebecers understand, because we have a Tartuffeian lexicon which prevents us from telling the truth here in simple words. . »
Tartuffe. The reference is correct. The character imagined by Molière is the incarnation of hypocrisy. For the great author, “hypocrisy is, in the State, a vice much more dangerous than all the others”. Balzac follows suit: “Hypocrisy is, in a nation, the last degree of vice. » We cannot be in favor of clarity and transparency and subscribe to an endless list of terms that the representatives of the people cannot use to describe and criticize power and its abuses.
All the presidencies of the Assembly in the world try to temper debates and prohibit insults and vulgarity. But neither in the French National Assembly, nor in the British Parliament, nor in the American Congress, nor in the House of Commons in Ottawa can we find such a list. In Paris, the presidency will intervene if there are “insults, provocations or threats”.
In Ottawa, “when deciding whether remarks are unparliamentary, the Speaker takes into account the tone, manner and intention of the Member who made them, the person to whom they were addressed, the degree of provocation and, what is more important, of the possible disorder they caused in the House”. Thus, comments deemed unparliamentary one day might not necessarily be so another day. Over the years, Canadian parliamentarians have specifically refused to adopt a list of banned words. With reason.
Quebec’s tartufferie probably reached its peak last week, when solidarity activist Christine Labrie declared the following: “If our public services are still standing, it is only because the people who are there are doing an inhuman number of overtime, often mandatory overtime, often overtime that isn’t even paid. If it stands up, it is at the risk of the physical and mental health of the people who carry public services on their backs, with precarious positions, at lower salaries than what they could have in the private sector. Three quarters of the people who work in our public services are women. Why does the CAQ persist in exploiting them? »
This last word made the government’s parliamentary leader, Simon Jolin-Barrette, and the president, Nathalie Roy, jump simultaneously, who declared it an “unworthy statement”. Solidarity leader Alexandre Leduc asked Nathalie Roy to “demonstrate in a little more detail why these are unworthy comments”. An excellent question. Butme Roy doesn’t have to explain himself. This is the rule: the words are unworthy if the presidency judges them to be such, period. There is no explanation, no discussion, no appeal possible.
MP Christine Labrie was ordered to withdraw her comments. She refused at first. She received a second warning. It’s like baseball: three strikes, you are expelled (temporarily) from the Assembly. “I am being asked to lie, Mme the President, she retorted. So, I’m going to do it, I withdraw my remarks. » It was by wishing to return to this episode, Wednesday, that Leduc made less phlegmatic remarks than those of Bachand, proposing to Jolin-Barrette to engage in a practice which, usually, takes place in other bedrooms. He was trying to find out whether the ban on saying the word “exploit” applied to private companies, or only to the government. But there is no way to know (except to test it), no forum to discuss it.
This affair clearly illustrates the spiral of linguistic hypocrisy in which the Assembly has become entangled. Simply banning “hurtful comments” is unfair. In an adversarial debate, almost everything can be considered hurtful, since each person’s objective is to shed light on what is objectionable in the other. Democracy is at this price.
At a time when everyone deplores censorship and defends freedom of expression, the Assembly would grow if it abolished its picky and absurd lexicon, if it freed the speech of its members, gave them the right to express themselves clearly and even harshly, while proscribing, on a case by case basis, insults and vulgarity. Because, yes, we owe it to the truth to say of a deputy or a minister that he lies, sabotages, distorts the truth. So let him behave like a smartass.
Jean-François Lisée led the PQ from 2016 to 2018. He has just published Through the mouth of my pencils published by Somme tout/Le Devoir. [email protected].