I was a priori, like many citizens of Quebec City, somewhat upset by the idea of a demonstration of trucks on Parliament Hill on Saturday, February 5, especially after the one in Ottawa and all the inconveniences it continued to cause many citizens of the confederal capital.
But what was my surprise, that afternoon, beyond of course the deafening concert of car horns and the untimely purring of engines, to discover, very close to Parliament, thousands of demonstrators who — Canadian flags, of Quebec and even patriots floating in the wind under the cold February sun – simply came to say “that enough is enough” and that we had to put an end to sanitary measures. And obviously, it wasn’t just people from the far right who were there, or even tattooed truck drivers taken by Rambo-style thugs and come to do battle with the authorities. No, it was neither more nor less the people of Quebec: young people, many young people, entire families, children, middle-aged people, retirees, ordinary people, as we say here.
But of course with a very simple political narrative (that of individual freedom and putting an end to health measures) and which, as such, could be (and was) easily taken up or recovered by anti-vaccines or even by the right. hard à la Éric Duhaime. But from there to reducing all the demonstrators (and the fed up they echoed) to antivaccines or troublemakers without a legitimate cause, there is a step that many have tended to take. A step which, however, risks missing the point and making us forget this basic question: why this undeniable popular manifestation of social exasperation was launched by the right and did not was it not the fact of the left, which has always made a point of defending the popular classes against the arbitrariness of the powerful?
Because if, beyond the delirious rantings of the conspirators, the enemy on which we must concentrate our forces is of course, as Minister Duclos said, COVID-19 and not health measures, the fact remains unless the way in which health measures were implemented in Quebec is part of the equation and also has to do with this popular fed up that we are discovering today as well as with this thirst for freedom ensuing.
Become this “salt of the earth” again
This is what, throughout the pandemic, it has been so difficult for the forces of the left in Quebec (and here I am thinking of QS) to make people see: on the one hand, the need to protect an entire population from a dangerous pandemic, in particular by resorting to mass vaccination; and on the other, the need to denounce without ambiguity the ways of doing things imposed by Prime Minister François Legault. Because the latter, while refusing to learn from the repeated neoliberal cuts in health care, has only reacted piecemeal, improvisation, without relying on front-line staff (nurses ) or the actors of the environment, preferring authoritarian, bureaucratic and paternalistic ways, favoring the status quo and the maintenance of paralyzing institutional hierarchies as well as repression, while opting for perpetuation, to the detriment of the redeployment of preventive and community medicine , of a deeply reductive biomedical health model.
And, almost two years later and once the drama of the CHSLDs in the spring of 2020 had been absorbed, it was the curfew and the brutal ban on festive gatherings on the eve of New Year’s Day 2022 — symbols par excellence of these policies. — who set fire to the powder. For many people it was too much, but not… for the left, either so timidly or so politely that, having lowered her critical and protesting spirit, she missed the boat in this affair, thus leaving the whole field free on the right.
Isn’t that the lesson to be learned? For the left to be able to defeat an ever more dangerous right and right-wing populism which serves as its borrowed clothes, it should learn to become once again the “salt of the earth” that it knew how to be in the past, by no longer being afraid to put oneself in tune with the exasperations and legitimate fears that run through society and, consequently, by not hesitating to openly oppose those responsible for the “established disorder” of today . It is only at this price that it will be able to regain the legitimacy it had acquired in the past and become again, in these times of pandemic and multiple and recurring crises, this ferment so necessary for the birth of the new society. which we need so much today.