A coffee with Louise Harel | The solidarity framework

When the opportunity to meet Louise Harel presented itself, with the release of her biography, I did not hesitate for a second. Louise Harel is a central figure in the post-Quiet Revolution political landscape in which I grew up.

It was at the Première Moisson café in the Maisonneuve market, in the heart of the riding she represented in Quebec for 27 years, that she arranged to meet me. She is already seated with a coffee when I arrive. Neighborhood citizens greet her politely, but let her continue her conversation.

It is not her brand new biography – which presents her as a “controversial” character – which first fuels our conversation, but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that she knows intimately.

Her husband, Edmond Omran, was born in Palestine in 1946. His Arab-Chaldean Catholic family had to flee the Ottoman Empire in complete collapse in 1915 to take refuge in Jaffa, on the edge of the Mediterranean. They were uprooted again during the creation of Israel in 1948. He started a new life in Quebec. Louise Harel traveled with him to the region many times. Experienced Jerusalem when it was possible to walk freely on its walls. Attended the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who negotiated the Oslo peace accords but was killed in 1995 by a Jewish extremist.

In 1998, she was hosted in the West Bank by Samiha Khalil, who had run for president of the Palestinian Authority against Yasser Arafat two years earlier.

Her partner, who works with the Medical Aid to Palestine organization, was in Ramallah during the terrible Hamas attacks on October 7. The couple follows the news very closely. “I am overwhelmed when I get up in the morning and when I go to bed at night,” she told me.

Today, she wonders where the political courage of Western leaders, including those of Canada, has gone. “Requesting a ceasefire at this time should be the minimum! If Western leaders do not have the courage to do this when populations are targeted, if they do not have this courage in a humanitarian situation, what kind of political courage will they have after the end of hostilities and when it is necessary to impose a political solution in the region? », she asks herself.

Reading her biography, we say to ourselves that Louise Harel has every right to teach lessons in political courage to those who follow her. She has been at the head of major reforms throughout her career, including the thorny issue of municipal mergers in 2002.

She was also one of those who paved the way for women in politics in Quebec. When she was first elected as a deputy in 1981, at the age of 34, there were only eight women to hold a seat in the National Assembly. Double standards were commonplace.

Solidarity with elected officials from other parties was crucial. “Today, we are talking about transpartisanship. We didn’t qualify it, but we did it,” says Louise Harel.

“By proceeding with speed”, she was able to help Liberal Minister Monique Gagnon-Tremblay to have the law on the division of family assets adopted in 1989 – against all expectations. “When I presented the bill on pay equity, there were 10 women MPs and it was a crack team. A delegation of 4-5 liberal deputies came to see me. They told me: you helped Monique [Gagnon-Tremblay]we will help you,” remembers M^me Harel, a sparkle in his eye. The law was adopted in 1996.

“Equity was to correct systemic discrimination. I also had the word put in the law, article 1,” she said, thereby shooting a small arrow against the government of François Legault, which, to this day, refuses to recognize the concept of systemic discrimination.

Louise Harel is delighted to see that the new generation of elected officials continues to work together, shoulder to shoulder. We notably reported in our pages in 2020 the extraordinary collaboration between Christine Labrie, of Québec solidaire, Marwah Rizqy, of the Liberal Party, and Véronique Hivon, then of the Parti québécois.

“This transpartisan work was one of the contributions of women to the National Assembly. We think about the objective and we get less stuck in the carpet. The second change is time management. When I arrived in 1981, it was non-stop day and night at the end of the session and there was no consideration for family or parental obligations. There, it’s much better and it suits young men too. Finally, no one can leave political life under the pretext that they are going to take care of their family! », says a mischievous Louise Harel.

In a context where women politicians are united, how does she explain that those who took the reins of a party or the government – ​​the Pauline Marois and Dominique Anglade of this world – did not last long? “Because all the attributes of authority, audacity, power are masculine. These are attributes that we have integrated. Personally, I think I was very combative, but it wasn’t perceived that way. I have always been criticized for my small voice. For not being aggressive enough, for being too gentle. As if it were contradictory! “It’s the whole question of women’s exercise of power that is at issue,” she concludes.