There was a lot of talk of pride at the national convention of the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ). François Legault spoke of the two poles of his government, prosperity and pride. Minister André Lamontagne also talked a lot about pride in the finely crafted speech he delivered on Saturday afternoon.
This type of partisan event is bathed in a sometimes artificial enthusiasm — it was in no way so this weekend — which manifests itself in self-congratulations and the cheerleading, the simplistic lines of communication and a particularly exacerbated herding behavior in a party made up of disciplined, or docile, rather than argumentative militants. In this regard, the CAQ surpasses the Liberal Party of Quebec.
This enthusiasm was felt on the floor of the Drummondville convention center: never since Robert Bourassa’s Liberals in 1985 has a Quebec political party been in such a good position on the eve of general elections, which the weakness of its opponents only emphasizes.
In the election campaign four years ago, François Legault also spoke of pride, in contrast to a distant Philippe Couillard, who sometimes seemed to doubt the Quebec people.
After a first term, are Quebecers more proud than in 2018, are they more prosperous? launched the chief caquiste, while obviously giving an affirmative answer to the two questions.
On the prosperity front, it has a positive record, especially when compared to that of the previous government, whose austerity we remember bitterly. Despite the pandemic, public finances are in order, strong economic growth has exceeded that of our neighbours, the unemployment rate is at an all-time low, productivity is up, the wealth gap with Ontario has narrowed , wages have increased, although the surge in inflation, which we hope will be short-lived, has muddled the cards, and with that, the CAQ government has put “money in the pockets of Quebecers”.
More prosperous and prouder, Quebecers should display unfailing confidence. Not so fast: it is counting without the specter of the “Louisianization” of Quebec, brandished by François Legault, in connection with an immigration which would not integrate well into our French-speaking society. It is about the “survival” of the Quebec nation, argued the CAQ leader.
From the beginning of the next mandate, the CAQ government intends to organize a vast summit on the demographic prospects of Quebec and the contribution of immigration. The event would inform the public about this crucial issue in order to build a balance of power against Ottawa. On Sunday, François Legault reiterated a request to which Justin Trudeau had already answered with a categorical no, that of repatriating the responsibility for family reunification, which accounts for nearly a quarter of landed immigrants, and he added the management of programs aimed at temporary workers and foreign students.
As the possibility that the Prime Minister of Canada acquiesces to this demand seems remote, even utopian, a future Legault government will have to work to regain concrete control of the situation with the levers at its disposal, but which it has not not fully utilized.
This return to survival, a posture that was the prerogative of French Canadians after 1840, is puzzling. It is a strategy imbued with resignation, an admission of political impotence. And then the nationalist emancipation movement of the 1960s and following, that of René Lévesque, progressive and forward-looking, had axed this backward-looking survival.
François Legault would have to tell us whether his nationalism is essentially conservative, essentialist and defensive, or whether it is a progressive — existentialist, one might say — nationalism which speaks of the future and is based on the pluralism and interbreeding that already characterize the Quebec nation. When François Legault repeats “that’s how we live in Quebec”, a phrase that is awkward to say the least, and that he adds to it with “that’s how we speak in Quebec”, we can wonder where he goes with his skis. French is certainly the common language, but hundreds of languages are spoken in Quebec, including Aboriginal languages.
The Legault government has already improved things in terms of immigration, whether in francization and support for integration, and the work is not over. But it should come back to Gérald Godin’s mind: immigrants for the most part want to integrate into the Quebec nation and contribute to its living and original culture, of which we can be proud. That’s also being proud.