Daniel Johnson, the father, Prime Minister of the Union Nationale, liked to say that “every Quebecer is a separatist for at least one hour a day”. Lise Bissonnette, of Duty, asked 30 years later Daniel Johnson, the son, leader of the Liberal Party of Quebec, if dad was not a bit right. Ultra-federalist, the man was thus projected far outside his comfort zone. But a mixture of filial loyalty and political lucidity compels him to say that indeed, there was a fiber, perhaps. You could count on him not to shoot it.
When Lucien Bouchard was Prime Minister and before the 1998 election was called, he was invited to a private dinner by the cream of the Quebec business community. These pillars and financiers of the Quebec Liberal Party offered him public support for his re-election if he promised not to hold a new referendum on sovereignty, which he refused. “In any case, pleaded one of the guests who was publicly very involved in the No in 1995, with you, the PQ, we lose all the time. »
The pronoun “we” used in this sentence by this person had a clear Freudian quality. Had he himself voted “yes” in the secrecy of the voting booth? Had he defended Canada hoping that this “we” would win all the same?
In recent political history, we once tested the upper limit of Quebecers’ hidden independence watchmaking. In the year following the failure of Meech – therefore Canada’s refusal to recognize even Quebec as a “distinct” character – up to 67% of Quebecers said they were ready to leave, a figure which reached 72% in a poll internal Créatec produced for the PLQ. Two conditions were then met: a real anger against Canada and the almost complete disappearance of federalist voices in Quebec, the PLQ having then adopted a deliberately equivocal position.
The impression that has emerged from the evolution of public opinion since that time is of course a clear decline in the desire for sovereignty below 40%, but above all a strengthening of a robust federalist majority, of more than 50%.
A recent Environics poll for the Confederation of Tomorrow puts a lot of slack back into the gears of our internal national clock. Rather than forcing respondents to choose between the two poles, sovereigntist and federalist, the pollster gave them full latitude to express their indecision and ambivalence. Among Francophones, the favorite posture is “between the two” (25%), tied with “none of the two” (25%). If we add the 9% who do not even know if they are for, against, between two or neither, that gives 59% of wandering Francophones in the no man’s land of the national future. (The others? 18% “mainly federalists” and 22% “mainly sovereignists”.)
Why is this good news for separatists like me? Because that means that the ground is loose for 60% of French people. That nothing is fixed. That we are always in the realm of the possible. Even better, the situation is exactly the same as in 2002, with the study asking the same questions and getting basically the same answers.
But what happened after 2002? The Sponsorship Scandal — revealing that, since the 1995 referendum, Ottawa had tried to force-feed us Canadian identity at high volume while fattening friends along the way. A scandal which, in 2005, brought out of the swamp of opinion a peak of support for sovereignty reaching 62% among Francophones, 54% overall. Unfortunately, the separatists were not in power to take advantage of this wave. But the lesson remains: Quebecers can get out of ambivalence and uncertainty. It is not a permanent state with them.
By observing the evolution of these figures over 20 years, we can, as colleague Pierre Fournier did in News, shine the spotlight on the empty half of the glass: while the young people of 2002 were 25% sovereignists, they are no longer so, in 2023, only 12%. The half-full of the glass is equally interesting: in 2002, the over 55s were only 18% sovereignists; they are now 28%. The main thing is elsewhere: today, 64% of people under 35 are in the Grand Marais, like 67% of people over 55. Politically, the Coalition avenir Québec has pitched its tent at the epicenter of this colossal ideological marshmallow.
I am less concerned than the average bear about the ability of separatists to mobilize young people at the time of the referendum meeting, because we starred in this same film in 1995. The reports on the disaffection of young people (and artists) were legion a few months before the vote. But the more the political temperature rose, the more they were at the rendezvous. I believe that the similarity between the experience of the young adult becoming independent and that of the Quebec nation leaving the Canadian home is such that, in the heat of the referendum, the connection is made by itself.
Twenty years ago, I criss-crossed Quebec with a conference entitled “Why sovereignty is probable”. If I were doing it again today, I would call it “Why Sovereignty Is Possible”. And when people, often a little older, approach me at the supermarket to ask me if they will see independence in their lifetime, I answer them: do you exercise?
A historian analyzing the evolution of things in an independent Quebec in the next, say, 50 years, should in my opinion choose the 2022 election as a turning point. This is the moment when the Parti Québécois is not dead. The moment from which we stopped predicting his death and began instead to wonder about the extent of his future growth.
This is essential for two reasons. First, in the dry years for sovereignty, the PQ is the pilot flame of our political water heater. It can go for hours without you needing it, then suddenly this little flame feeds a whole boiler room. Without it, all showers would be freezing. Then, everything happens as if the long mourning of the failure of the 1995 referendum had to go through a phase of rejection, as if the very existence of the PQ embodied the permanent reproach of the last time when “we” said no . This atonement seems to have come to an end, and to give way to a new phase, to a rekindling.
Obviously, two conditions are necessary to achieve a great change. The existence of a political will, first, the emergence of a favorable situation, which occurs thanks to us or in spite of us, then. And to those who admit to me exercising and insist that I enlighten them more about our future, I reply that for the most part — the economic situation — we are at the mercy of the unpredictable.
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