” He said it ! He said it ! It was the young Robert Bourassa who stamped his feet in July 1967, when Charles de Gaulle launched his “Vive le Québec libre!” I had an identical reaction, in my living room last Monday evening, when Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois declared that the voters of Saint-Henri–Sainte-Anne had just elected an “independence deputy”.
GND believed perhaps to satisfy the wish expressed the previous week by the facetious PQ Pascal Bérubé. He had challenged him or his candidate to pronounce before the end of the campaign the word “independence”, hitherto inaudible among local solidarity. But the rules of this contest may have required the word to be spoken before the polls were closed.
I did not understand why the PQ were so angry that the solidarity candidate Guillaume Cliche-Rivard distributed a unilingual English leaflet during his campaign. René Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau and the author of these lines have all produced for the Parti Québécois (PQ) some written or audiovisual documents in English. However, we made sure of one thing: to mention that our party wanted to make Quebec a country. Mr. Cliche-Rivard omitted this detail from all the versions, French and English, of his tracts, and I am told that he was voiceless on his proposed separation in the candidates’ debates (in which the Coalition avenir Québec [CAQ]following its scandalous tradition, refused to participate).
Should we conclude that Québec solidaire (QS) thus conducted a “campaign more liberal than the Liberals”, as the PQ leader declared? This verdict, taken up on TVA by the former Liberal minister Gaétan Barrette, seems to considerably annoy those in solidarity, oddly put on the defensive the day after a very decisive victory on enemy ground.
Picky journalists wanted to get to the bottom of this case. Independence, one of them asked on Tuesday morning, “was that a winning theme for you in that constituency? “ The solidarity parliamentary leader, Alexandre Leduc, played fair: “Ben. We wanted to do a positive campaign, based on the issues, a field campaign. The only logical connection between the question and the answer is that, for QS, independence is not an issue, is not positive, or both.
In their defense, they cannot be accused of having hidden the Quebec flag in the partial. They never use it, in any event, anywhere. Unlike the Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ), which even proudly displays it on its logo. More surprising in Saint-Henri–Sainte-Anne was the choice of the lectern for the last press briefing. The word “Quebec” had disappeared from the poster, in favor of only “solidarity”.
Where does this reluctance to assume not only its separatist identity, but its Quebec identity, period, come from? One of my favorite solidarity MPs, Ruba Ghazal, enlightened us on this point in the recent podcast of Génération Oui. Asked about her independence belief, she said she “hated to the highest degree” the type of speech “when we talk about the Quebec nation, when we talk about Quebec, the country, history”. She reads “between the lines” a reference to the only “real” Quebecers, the descendants of the settlers of New France.
In a scathing response, former MP and now Parti Québécois spokesperson Méganne Perry Melançon concluded that Ghazal seemed to be “allergic to the word ‘nation’, to our desire to be part of a story, to celebrate the great adventure Quebecer on the continent”. Isn’t the collateral victim of this anti-nationalist posture the very idea of independence? “Ask yourself the question, why can’t you convince even half of your own electorate to support independence?” Perhaps it is because you slander some of the separatists. Because you hate their talk. »
The not very artistic vagueness maintained by QS on its separatist identity can be deleterious for the separatist idea while being profitable for the growth of QS in liberal territory.
Former NDP leader Tom Mulcair explained to Qub Radio this week that he personally knew several New Democrat activists who were very involved in the solidarity campaign, but who never, ever, would support sovereignty. They simply don’t believe, he explains, that QS is truly pro-independence.
However, he is, one only has to read his program. There is no question of holding a referendum on independence, but of electing by universal suffrage an assembly responsible for adopting a sovereignist constitution, then put to the vote. If QS forms the government, it may mean that 55% of Quebecers will have become sovereignists in the meantime. This means that 45% of the members of the assembly will be federalists.
It’s like giving 100 people the task of designing a law on the right to abortion and inviting 45 anti-abortion delegates. A planned failure. How will QS do to bring about a separatist consensus in its assembly? Through a process that scholars of both political science and behavioral psychology call the somewhat technical term “wishful thinking”.
This is perhaps why New Democrat federalist militants can militate in a party whose independence strategy guarantees the maintenance of Quebec in Canada.
It is certain that the success of QS in a former Liberal stronghold will draw the attention of the Politburo to other Liberal spoils in Montreal, Laval and Gatineau. The descent into hell of the PLQ will certainly push many of its voters, especially young non-francophones, to look elsewhere for a new political home, which could be QS. As long as we leave independence and fleur-de-lis, perhaps even the word “Quebec”, in the closet, it can work.