When you are in politics, where the horizon hardly extends beyond the next election, it sometimes becomes difficult to distinguish compromise, which facilitates victory, from compromise, which sacrifices the essential.
“A great day for French,” declared Prime Minister François Legault after the adoption of Bill 96. Above all, he must congratulate himself on the outcry in the Anglophone community and in English Canada.
Even if the provisions of the “new law 101” remain quite insufficient to halt the decline of French, the anger of Anglophones, belatedly shared by the Liberal Party of Quebec, and the disapproval of the country appear in the eyes of a majority of Francophones as all signs that they are heading in the right direction.
The feeling of security that the impression of being able to dictate the rules of the game can provide dispenses with considering the more decisive means that the survival of a French society in North America would require and makes it possible to rationalize the lack of collective audacity that caused the defeat of the “yes” in 1995.
Although it provoked slippages among representatives of the Anglophone community that sometimes bordered on delirium, the debate on Bill 96 did not have the galvanizing effect among Francophones that passage of Bill 101.
In an essay he has just published under the title The nation that was not self-evidentAlexis Tétreault, doctoral student in sociology at UQAM, evokes the new “mythology of normality” which would have replaced the traditional “mythology of vulnerability” in Quebec political consciousness.
The Constitutional Act of 1791 had for a time given the illusion that the Conquest would not prevent the former New France from pursuing its development in a more or less normal manner. After the crushing of the patriots and the Act of Union, the awareness of their vulnerability and the fear of assimilation never ceased to inhabit the imagination of their descendants.
It is always this desire to escape the fate predicted by the Durham report and to develop a political space where their majority situation would allow Quebecers to regain this normality that largely inspired the Quiet Revolution and the independence movement.
Despite the constitutional coup of 1982 and the failure of the 1995 referendum, Alexis Tétreault observes the maintenance “of a hegemony of the majority imagination and of the new mythology of normality which is, to say the least, unaware of the danger of minoritization-assimilation”.
His mentor, the sociologist Jacques Beauchemin, had expressed it in the following way in A quiet resignation “By dint of not disappearing and maintaining themselves, French Canadians and, after them, the Quebecers of the Quiet Revolution ended up integrating the certainty of their survival. »
It is no doubt fortunate that Quebecers no longer live in constant fear of disappearing or in the impression of being “born for a small loaf of bread”, but this new serenity should not translate into unconsciousness. The reduction in the demographic weight of Quebec within Canada and that of Francophones within Quebec are unavoidable realities.
“Will this sense of eternity last as this demographic stability and this rhetoric out of step with Canada’s demographic and political trends crumble?” asks Mr. Tétreault.
Francophones willingly accept, are even happy to live in a diversified society and accept, to this day, that it falls within the Canadian federal framework. It is still necessary that the rules of living together be compatible with the survival of this “minority majority”, which also walks the fine line between compromise and compromise.
Even what Prime Minister Legault considers “reasonable”, which could also be described as minimal, is called into question. Federal Justice Minister David Lametti has confirmed that the Trudeau government will join in challenging Bill 21 on secularism in the Supreme Court, and it’s only a matter of time before Bill 96 finds himself in court.
It is clear that the great debate on immigration, which Mr. Legault announces for his second term, will provoke another confrontation, which could be even more dramatic. An imaginary security has never protected anyone. Whether they like it or not, Quebecers will one day have to have the courage to look things in the face.