The Minister of Culture and Communications, Mathieu Lacombe, seemed to be taken aback after learning through the media that the Trudeau government had reached an agreement with Google without him himself having been consulted, or even informed. “I sent letters to the federal government, which didn’t even take the trouble to respond to me, can you imagine,” he declared, indignant, in an interview with Duty.
Come on, everyone knows that in Ottawa, we are far too busy to pay attention to the whining from Quebec. Either way, the answer will be no. So why waste time responding? Additionally, an explanation should be provided. It would never end.
We will not do Mr. Lacombe the insult to think that he is surprised by this cavalier attitude. Last February, he already complained that Ottawa had remained deaf to his request for a “mandatory and official consultation mechanism from the Quebec government” in the application of Bill C-11, which aimed to regulate the broadcasting online.
It was not yet born when Robert Bourassa put “cultural sovereignty” on the agenda in the early 1970s. Mr. Bourassa never specified what this notion would imply concretely, but the general idea was to provide Quebec with the powers necessary to preserve its identity, which would allow it to fully flourish within the Canadian federation and avoid the risks of separation.
In its “New project for the nationalists of Quebec”, published in 2015, the Coalition Avenir Québec preferred to use the term “preponderance” more modestly, but the spirit was the same. After having operated effectively for 50 years and passed the test of two referendums on sovereignty, this simpleton seems to still have a bright future ahead of it.
Mr. Lacombe had the opportunity to familiarize himself with the equally illusory “third way” at the time when he was active in Action Démocratique du Québec. However, unlike others, we cannot accuse him of having renounced his convictions. Within the Coalition Avenir Québec, he continues – convincingly, it must be admitted – to demonstrate that this path is dead end.
If this is any consolation: he is not the only one to come up against the federal wall. Regardless of the area concerned, almost all of the demands formulated in the “New Project” of 2015 were rejected one after the other or completely ignored, the application of the provisions of the Charter of the French language to businesses under federal regulation who have activities in Quebec territory which are an exception.
The government today is very far from claiming cultural sovereignty. In the federal framework, the creation of a Quebec CRTC is simply unthinkable. In the case of Google and the sharing of the 100 million that the Web giant agreed to pay annually to the Canadian media to compensate for the fact that it is starving them, Mr. Lacombe asks more modestly that Quebec have “its say” on what concerns its media ecosystem.
From the outset, he asked for the exclusion of CBC/Radio-Canada, which initially benefited from public funding of 1.4 billion, and the conclusion of an administrative agreement which would allow the government of Quebec to help financially the electronic media, which constitute a private preserve of Ottawa. We can only wish him good luck.
We do not yet know anything about the terms of sharing these 100 million. Who will be entitled to it, according to what criteria? Already, this is an insignificant sum given the crisis the media are experiencing. If the public broadcaster gets its share, the others will only get crumbs. In the rat race that is coming, we risk paying very little attention to Mr. Lacombe’s concerns.
It is precisely about the share that could go to the CBC that the bickering broke out in a parliamentary committee in Ottawa, when the Alberta Conservative MP Rachael Thomas insisted that the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Pascale St-Onge, respond to her in English.
If the prospect of the election of a government led by Pierre Poilievre is not encouraging for the CBC, as he has threatened to cut its funds, we can also wonder what regard the Conservative Party as it has become will have for Quebec specificity.
Certainly, Mme Thomas has shown in the past that she was a free electron totally devoid of judgment, but the leader of the Bloc Québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, was not the only one to see in her behavior “a reminiscence of that good old speak white “, that we hoped for a thing of the past.