Last spring, François Legault made obtaining new immigration powers a matter of survival for the Quebec nation. He demanded a strong mandate to negotiate with Ottawa and win his case in order to reject the “Louisianization” of Quebec.
During the election campaign, this immigration ambition shriveled. Faced with repeated refusals from Justin Trudeau, the CAQ leader is now ready to accept that the federal government continue to select 40% of immigrants. His only condition: that Ottawa agrees to define criteria so that a greater number of them speak French. He said nothing about the selection of some 85,000 temporary foreign workers who are on Quebec soil, the vast majority of whom are chosen by Ottawa and half of whom do not speak French. Nor did he mention foreign students, 45% of whom attend English-language institutions in Quebec, while an abnormally high number of applications from French-speaking students, accepted by French-language universities and CEGEPs, are rejected by the federal authorities in a discriminatory manner.
If the caquistes wanted to build a balance of power, the flood of awkward, even inconceivable statements on immigration has done just the opposite. These 80% of immigrants who land in Montreal, speak only English and do not work — mortifying words uttered by an immigration minister who will no longer be — will remain in the annals, a bit like “ethnic votes” of a certain prime minister. The entire Quebec nation is splashed.
The Trudeau government will have plenty of time to continue to send a Caquist government to graze, even if the excessive federal immigration policy harms the interests of Quebeckers, Acadians and other Francophones in the rest of Canada, even if the management of the Immigration Department, Refugees and Citizenship Canada is pathetic, especially for foreign nationals selected by Quebec.
The Quebec nation must be able to govern its immigration. But it is not an assembly filled with so many backbench deputies that one would believe oneself in the Botanical Garden which could influence the central power.
Immigration is obviously not the only file in which the Quebec government occupies a begging position with the federal government. Joining forces with his counterparts in other provinces, François Legault insisted that Ottawa raise the Canada Health Transfer. We cannot say that the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) reinforced its argument by promising tax cuts of 7.4 billion on the first day of the campaign. No longer with the plea of the CAQ leader in favor of profitable federalism and its corollary, equalization payments of 13 billion. We will have to count on Ontario, whose finances are not the most brilliant, to find the right arguments.
What about the third link, for which the CAQ government is asking Ottawa for 40% of the $6.5 billion cost? The Trudeau government has already argued that it only subsidizes public transit infrastructure, the essential part of the third link. And that’s not to mention the federal environmental assessment to which the project will be subjected. During the election campaign, François Legault made it known that his government had no study on this expensive tunnel and that the decision was political anyway. In the eyes of Ottawa, these are certainly not very convincing arguments.
And while François Legault intends to relaunch the construction of dams, now the federal government has given itself the power to block, for the first time in Canadian history, the construction of large-scale hydroelectric power stations on Quebec soil. As revealed The duty last week, such works are now subject to the provisions of the Impact Assessment Act, adopted by the Trudeau government in 2019. The CAQ government did not even speak out against this new intrusion.
By putting aside his sovereignist desires to create the CAQ, François Legault proposed not to wait for the Grand Soir to advance Quebec. In 2018, his party had in its bag its “new nationalist project” containing a list of demands that it addressed to Ottawa, whether in terms of culture, immigration, control of infrastructures, as many demands which, more or less, have remained a dead letter. Now that this nationalist project is obsolete, we must believe that resignation has won over the CAQ. As the candidate Bernard Drainville has well expressed, let’s be content with “the autonomy we have”. Let’s continue, they said.