Sovereignty would no longer be on the agenda, we repeat here and there. Quebecers would be elsewhere. Where is that, elsewhere? In the debate between left and right? Concerned about the environment? These issues are important, of course, but by what stunting of the mind can we come to believe that they would justify abandoning the national question?
Confined to the status of a semi-free state, the province of Quebec does not weigh heavily in matters that matter. Does he want to be secular in his own way he can’t if Ottawa doesn’t like his way. Its laws to protect French are subject to the approval of a court from another state whose program contradicts its own. Even if he decides to lean to the left, Quebec risks finding Gros-Jean as ahead if Canada becomes infatuated with Pierre Poilievre. As for the idea of being green in an oil state like Canada, good luck! On the international political scene, moreover, Quebec does not exist. If his ideas were the best in the world, we wouldn’t hear them.
And Quebec, under these conditions, would be elsewhere, that is to say that it would be content, henceforth, in indifference, with its small comfort of an annexed nation, while waiting for its Louisianization? I want to believe that this weariness, which is very real, is just a bad time to pass before waking up.
In March 1962, in a talk presented on Radio-Canada television, the great historian Maurice Séguin told the story of “the separatist idea in French Canada”. Six years later, on the initiative of Denis Vaugeois, a disciple of Séguin, the text of the conference was published. Historians since then frequently cite it, but the book, in recent years, had become untraceable.
We must therefore welcome the decision of Éditions du Boréal to republish it, with a preface by historian Éric Bédard. The idea of independence in Quebec (2022, 96 pages) is, as Bédard writes, a real “text-event”. It shows that the sovereignist aspiration of Quebecers is not new, has been part of our national destiny from the outset and is a necessity for our collective freedom.
A dazzling master of clarity, Séguin knows how to go to the essentials in order to undermine the “federalist illusion” which maintains “this good old myth of possible equality between the two nationalities, or better, of the possibility for French Canadians to to be masters in a Quebec that would remain within Confederation.
We may, writes Séguin, “be the best maintained annexed nation in the world”, we remain a “rooming people” in a “house built and owned by another nation”, deprived of the freedom to carry out the renovations necessary for our “integral development”, that is to say “at the same time political, economic, social and cultural”, summarizes Bédard.
For the accountant François Legault, this alienation is a good market because it brings us 10 billion per year in equalization and federal transfers. Sad “carpet merchants”, wrote Pierre Bourgault, these politicians who monetize the dependence of their people. “I don’t want to know if I will be richer or less rich,” said the tribune. I am ready to take the risk, because I have long believed that we too, like everyone else, are capable of taking responsibility, exercising our freedoms and living in dignity. »
Seguin, in The idea of independence in Quebec, clearly explains the two attitudes that have run through the history of Quebec since 1840. The first, associated with the federalist idea, believes that a minority group can be part of a federation, and therefore share its powers, while controlling its life national. “It is the thesis, he summarizes, of the autonomists who believe they can be satisfied with a fraction of independence. »
The second attitude, widespread in Quebec before 1840, but rare after, asserts that “there is no political equality between the majority people and the minority people in any federation” and that this inequality is accompanied of economic and cultural inferiority. Consequently, for the supporters of this school, political independence “is absolutely necessary” to ensure the integral development of a people. “To live, repeated Séguin to condense his theory, is to act by oneself. »
Quebeckers who think they are elsewhere and who say they want to move forward in defiance of their history are mistaken. The alternative, yesterday as today, is clear: it is independence, which liberates, or dependence, which condemns us to a begging for autonomy allowing us, in the event of improbable success, only to to be “a little less not a master” with us, according to Séguin’s just and painful formula.