In his first novel, You’ll love what you killed, where talent vies with rage, Kevin Lambert longs for something to disappear. “I dreamed of your end every night. I will work your destruction,” he wrote. “You will finally find yourself in the dustbin of History, surviving only at the bend of a sentence that is too long, badly written, in a repressed paragraph, perhaps cut in the edition, a stupid footnote , a reference to another work, out of print, untraceable. »
The object of Lambert’s annihilationist ire is the town of Chicoutimi. Notice, she changed her name. Is there a link with the book? Do your research. The hatred he has for her, however, testifies to the importance that the city has in his eyes and in his life. She obsesses him. If the worst attitude we can adopt towards someone or something is indifference, relentlessness is, on the contrary, the very expression of the weight we give to what we vilify.
Which brings us to the treatment given these days to the Parti Québécois by its three rivals in the National Assembly. If the PQ were weak (say, only three deputies), at the end of their life, carrying a project that mobilizes and interests almost no one, especially not young people, unable to keep their old castles, we would understand that there would be no danger in allowing these political bedridden to hire attachés to prepare the files of deputies who speak in a vacuum. We would let them ask questions every day that no one listens to and to which we answer with the tender smile of the natural caregiver.
Strangely, the exact opposite occurs. The amount of political energy deployed by the CAQ, the PLQ and QS (which former NDP leader Thomas Mulcair calls “the cartel”) to maximize the marginalization of what remains of the PQ deputies leaves you speechless. Basically, in terms of the operating budget and speaking time during question period, the final offer, approved by the three non-PQ parties, means that a Liberal voter weighs 10 (cents or questions), a solidarity voter 4, a PQ voter 1, a Conservative voter zero.
This calculation assumes that we are concerned with the democratic principle, the number of votes cast, and not just archaic rules that disregard the existence of voters. This boded well, because one of the participants in the negotiation, Québec solidaire, had made the refusal of these archaisms a spearhead since its creation. The solidarity negotiator, Alexandre Leduc, disabuses us on this point: “in the sharing of speaking time, the sharing of budgets, me, in all the negotiations that I made with my counterparts, I never I used the argument of the percentage of vote”. Yet it was the only and most powerful argument to roll back injustice.
Why did the PQ leader sign? Because the CAQ let him know that, without a signature, he would get half as much money and the right to speak, would be personally considered only as an independent deputy without the right to ask questions of the Prime Minister, without security and without a car function. The other members of the cartel lived very well with this blackmail. In politics, this is called exercising your balance of power. In everyday life, we would speak of signature extortion.
The commentary had established that unless there was one question a day for the PQ, the agreement would be shameful. As a result, the political formation that would offer the PQ to obtain the question per week that it lacked was in a position to reap the applause of the gallery for its magnanimity. It is therefore very significant that neither the Liberal Party nor the party whose name contains the word “solidarity” wanted to seize the opportunity to claim this credit in public opinion.
We can only conclude one thing. The gain obtained by putting everyone—CAQ, PLQ, QS—the foot on the political lifeline that could feed the PQ was for them greater than the loss of credibility that this combined pettiness was going to generate. There is of course the time factor. The indignities committed during the first months of the mandate will soon be forgotten by the electorate, whose memory is remarkably short, and they will be largely compensated, according to this calculation, by the seizure of political space taken from the PQ during the next four years. .
However, the cartel also sends a strong signal to voters: we are so afraid of the Parti Québécois that we are ready to look like bullies to contain its potential. This column is deliberately titled “Les péquistophobes”. Phobias, you know, are irrational fears. But perhaps the opponents of the PQ are using reason after all.
Perhaps they believe that the decline of French, the federal arrogance towards Quebec, the Roxham road, Charles III, the questioning, tomorrow by the Supreme Court, of the laws on secularism and on the language, the eternal return of Quebec bashing, in short, that the addition of these factors opens up to the independence project and to its only credible bearer, the Parti Québécois, a potential for growth that they fear above all else. It is true that in the summer, the PQ was at 8% in voting intentions, falling. True that in the last Leger poll, it was 18%, up.
One thing is certain: during the campaign, by his firm but respectful attitude towards his adversaries, by his refusal to take the oath to the king, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon earned a reputation in public opinion as a true, elegant and honest man. The great spectacle of the smallness that the other party leaders have just delivered by trampling on their promises of collaboration and their commitment to democracy offers an even greater contrast and highlights a PSPP apart, out of the ordinary. Perhaps they come, reluctantly, to do him a great service.
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