This is therefore the last week of parliamentary work before the next elections. On Friday, we will attend the goodbyes and the press briefings drawing up the balance sheets of each of the political parties represented. Unofficially, this is the day that will mark the launch of the electoral campaign.
It is therefore the end of a parliamentary session unlike any other. It feels like it lasted forever. At the start of the year, we were still confined, our social lives largely framed by restrictive measures. Our actions were still guided by the number of daily hospitalizations recorded, the number of deaths, etc.
Since then, several political events and debates have taken place: the lifting of the state of emergency, the management of the pandemic in CHSLDs, the by-election in Marie-Victorin, the overhaul of the health system, the labor shortage -work, the housing crisis, the wearing of masks, the shootings that are shaking our metropolis, etc. But it is on the theme of identity that this legislature will end. Pride, language, identity, Louisiana, anecdotes, threats…call it what you want. It was the government that imposed this debate on the public square by organizing a congress devoted exclusively to the question.
Survival
When we talk about the survival of our identity as francophone people in an anglophone ocean, this inexorably brings up the question of sovereignty as the ultimate means of protecting, some would say, who we are as a nation. I know it, you know it and François Legault knows it.
And the CAQ march towards sovereignty is underway. Step by step, Mr. Legault brings together the “winning conditions”: a small dispute with Ottawa on family reunification, a divergence with the Supreme Court of the country on Bill 21, let’s add to that the potential challenges to the new version of the law 101, which will also make it possible to fuel the “sacred” fire of the chicane, all while sprinkling assumed and pressed sovereignist candidacies such as those of Caroline St-Hilaire and Bernard Drainville, so that they come to whip the troops of the caucus and the Council of Ministers on the importance of acting “for our survival”. This is the recipe that François Legault concocts for us for sovereignty. A recipe that takes time and patience, ingredients it seems to have in spades.