I admit I hesitated before writing this column. It seems to me inappropriate to shoot at ambulances. The Quebec Liberals are today in such a state of weakness that my first impulse is empathy, having led the Parti Quebecois (PQ) at a time when we were described not as an ambulance, but as a hearse.
I am happy that André Pratte co-leads the revitalization committee of the Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ) with MP Madwa-Nika Cadet (who was a Liberal candidate against me in Rosemont, in 2012). Pratte is certainly the strongest federalist thinker in Quebec. If anyone can find a distinctive intellectual foundation upon which a future leader and a future campaign could build, it’s him.
If this foundation exists. What, in the current political universe, is not certain.
Curious to see in which direction the thinking was going, I read his speech to the general council of the PLQ. He tackled the thorny issue of how much nationalism liberals should display. “Some, both inside and outside the party, feel that we are not nationalist enough,” he admitted, in a burst of lucidity (he was once a member of the group Pour un Québec lucide, by the way). His committee will be attentive to the various opinions on this subject. GOOD. Then he declared: “One thing is certain, however, our history leaves no doubt that the Liberals played a crucial role in the building of modern Quebec. This is beyond doubt.
But what fuel, exactly, in 2023 — or tomorrow, in the 2026 election — will Quebec liberal nationalism heat up? It’s too early to tell. But we were entitled to this beacon: “We are proud Quebec nationalists, but our nationalism is intended to be unifying, inclusive. We reject the nationalism that divides Quebecers among themselves, because a strong nation cannot be built on division. »
There, I winced. I wondered when, exactly, liberal nationalism had not divided Quebecers. In the 1962 election, bearing on the nationalization of electricity, the greatest gesture of economic nationalism in our history? Jean Lesage, René Lévesque and his team of thunder failed to convince more than 57% of Quebecers to vote for them. They were called communists for wanting to trample on private enterprise and put Quebec in debt for generations. Was it when Robert Bourassa passed a law affirming that French was our official language, a crucial step in identity nationalism? No less than two out of three Quebecers showed him the door to the election that followed, so divided was this proposal.
Perhaps the PLQ expressed its unifying nationalism better when it was in opposition. By opposing, for example, the original Bill 101, which was acclaimed by Quebecers? Didn’t then-Liberal deputy Daniel Johnson declare that René Lévesque’s PQ wanted to make Quebec “an Albania with a sash”? (That wasn’t a compliment.)
The naked truth is that no strong gesture of promotion of the Quebec nation is, at the outset, unifying. Each advance was a fight against the forces of the status quo, the PLQ sometimes activating the accelerator with Lesage, sometimes the brake with Couillard, sometimes the accelerator and the brake at the same time with Bourassa.
This is true for almost all progress. We must thank Adélard Godbout for having given the right to vote to women, a proposal which deeply divided the province, offended the clergy and many mediocre white men, according to an expression which, at the time, was not in vogue.
In fact, this divisive rhetoric is a huge fallacy. There is only progress in the fight against an adversary: you have to win, rarely by knockout, most often on points. In a democracy, assembly is the exception and not the norm. On major social issues — end-of-life care, domestic violence, pay equity — we have come together. Others—abortion, marriage for all—were wrung out in hard struggle. Our nationalist, linguistic, identity, secular gains were all in this last category.
True, there are times when the approach, the tone, the rhetoric can seek or create division where it does not belong. The best recent case being Justin Trudeau’s decision to campaign in 2021 for mandatory vaccinations of federal officials and travelers for the sole purpose of cornering conservatives whose stance was more, shall we say, “liberal.” Deputy Joël Lightbound had the courage to denounce this drift.
There was a moment, only one, when liberal nationalism was truly unifying. After Meech, when Robert Bourassa and his party made a formal commitment to give Canada one last chance to grant substantial powers to Quebec, otherwise they would propose sovereignty, a grace period began in which more than two-thirds of Quebeckers were finally united in a common approach to their national future. Too bad it was only a cheat leading to a shipwreck. A book should be written on the subject. Maybe two.
Unless André Pratte and the PLQ want to try this experiment again, I suggest that they leave single parties and other dictatorships with the illusion of unanimity and instead assume that division is an intrinsic condition of democratic exercise, the parties being lawyers pleading their contradictory causes before a jury which decides, by a majority, who is right and who is wrong. And this is very well so.
Father, columnist and author, Jean-François Lisée led the PQ from 2016 to 2018. | [email protected] / blog: jflisee.org