By the end of the election campaign, the editorial team of the To have to will offer an analysis of the main commitments of political parties on themes that concern all Quebecers. Today: international relations.
“All politics is local famously said, after others, the late Tip O’Neill, elected Democrat to the American Congress in the 1970s and 1980s. However, “local” does not mean “small”. Inflation, the housing crisis, the fight against climate change, immigration, bloodless health systems and the exit from the pandemic crisis are all related issues that are global in scope. If the climate and globalization in all their states force us to see it, our electoral campaigns continue despite everything to suffer from a kind of insularity that our politicians — not only ours, moreover — do not often make the effort to exceed.
Hence the question: the role of Quebec on the international scene, who talks about it? The PQ leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, has touched on it a few times by evoking the influence of a possible sovereign Quebec. But that’s about all. Sadly, however, that the place and responsibilities of the Quebec state in world affairs are not more naturally part of campaign speeches.
The Legault government did not give the impression during its mandate of having a great appetite for the active promotion of the interests and national identity of Quebec in international bodies, wherever it can. Major drawback: the exceptionally immobilizing and disruptive effect, for more than two years, of a certain pandemic. But that does not prevent us from seeing that, fundamentally, Quebec’s international policy has continued to shrink under this government, in the sense that today it is centered more than ever on the development of trade relations — on the creation of ” jobs paying”. The register is not that of a René Lévesque steeped in openness to the world.
The international policy document published in 2019 and titled Quebec: proud and in business all over the world! is illuminating in this regard: above all, it is a question of intensifying “Quebec’s economic diplomacy” and “undertaking an unprecedented economic shift”. Everything else is juxtaposed there — political action, culture, French, the environment. And that’s how Prime Minister Legault apparently only has an environmental conscience insofar as it is a question of making Quebec, with hydroelectricity or with the sector of lithium ion batteries in Bécancour, a leader. world of the “green economy”.
It’s good, but there is better. Quebec’s role must not be reduced to a one-way market logic.
Hence another question: does the Gérin-Lajoie doctrine, the cornerstone of our international policy since 1965, still apply? One can doubt it, given the declawed nationalism that has become the trademark of the government of the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) vis-à-vis Ottawa. Here is a government that yelps loudly, but does not bite.
The implementation of the doctrine, according to which the fields of jurisdiction available to Quebec in the Constitution (in health, education, agriculture, environment, etc.) apply by extension to its international relations, has frayed over time, under the battering of English Canada and its media, which have never accepted that Quebec has its own voice. And who will never accept it.
In the 2000s, he stood in their way, former Prime Minister Jean Charest (2003-2012), whose uninhibited international activism in favor of Quebec was notorious, even to the point that he received praise from Bernard Landry and Jean-François Lisée. Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s.
Development of ties with France and Europe, place of Québec at UNESCO, holding of the Sommet de la Francophonie in Québec in 2008, multiplication of multilateral and bilateral ties with the American federated states by means, in particular, of the emblematic climate agreement with California… Charest will have sought to broaden the scope of the Gérin-Lajoie doctrine in international institutions and forums.
In addition, the proud Legault could, in the political context which is ours, take an example from this fiery federalist. The opportunity is all the better for Quebec to assert itself internationally as Canada’s foreign policy is undecided, to say the least. With regard to the promotion of French, we should, among other things, strengthen our ties with Africa and know how to take advantage of the breach opened up by France’s loss of influence in the Francophonie.
While waiting for the Grand Soir, it would be useful if Québec solidaire, whose platform promises to make Québec “a leader in international solidarity”, and the Parti Québécois, whose program proposes “a Québec that takes its place in the world” l independence came, push the CAQ to more international ambition. In these matters as in others, and for having succeeded so well in demonstrating the relevance of the sovereignist project, the “PSPP”, if elected in Camille-Laurin, would be a valuable asset.