It was the turn of the members of the Parti Québécois to meet last weekend to discuss “future” and “content”. The future is a particularly loaded word with regard to the PQ since, of all the provincial parties, it is the only one that is in real agony. René Lévesque may have himself predicted the death of his party, such a decline within a party that was so important in the history of Quebec never ceases to surprise. In nine years, the PQ has gone from 31.95% of voting intentions (2012) – 25.38% in 2014, then 17.06% in 2018 – to 13%, according to a Léger poll unveiled last Thursday.
The hour is serious for the PQ. But we’re going to have to do more than point the finger at Justin Trudeau’s “post-national” Canada to get out of the mess. Whatever the leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, says, the fundamental problem of the party is not the “omerta” surrounding sovereignty. It is because the current formation does not have much to say – apart from the reactivation of a calendar (deadly) referendum.
It is as if the PQ does not understand the role he himself had played for 25 years.
First, we underestimate what the referendum failures have inflicted on us as a psychological injury. I take as proof the many interviews that I conducted on Quebec nationalism recently. For all those who believed in the “model society” of which René Lévesque spoke, there remains a taste of ashes in the mouth. It’s hard to lose, for anyone, but it’s even harder, as sociologist Gérard Bouchard says, when you yourself participate in your own defeat. It is still difficult to measure all the discouragement and disillusion that result from this failed encounter with history.
This is also why PSPP’s invectives against the federal government are so unconvincing. The problem is not primarily in Ottawa – although, of course, it can be criticized for a lot. The problem is that we didn’t know how to jump aboard the train when no one was preventing us. Too many francophones – the very ones we thought we could count on, on October 30, 1995 – chose not to budge, chose, to paraphrase another early independence activist, Jean Dorion, what they were already rather than what they could have become.
The problem of the PQ today is that, rather than aiming high, to design a generous, ambitious plan, open to diversity and to the world, like the initial project, it is constantly looking for culprits. We therefore take up old refrains: “it is the fault of the federal government” (read: multiculturalism) and “English”, not to mention the new faces of Turks: immigrants.
The PQ is obviously no longer talking about putting immigrants in line with Quebec values or even more widely prohibiting the wearing of religious symbols, as it did when it came to filling in 2012. For René Lévesque’s party, the prize to pay for such conservative positions (we also know what Jacques Parizeau was going through) is far too high. And then, he has already taken the blow during the last elections, suffering “the worst defeat in its history”. Since then, the PSPP PQ has been content to support the nationalist conservative policies of the Legault government with their lips. A sleight of hand that no one is fooled and which makes the PQ message a kind of mush for cats, always cutting it a little more to its left, immigrants and young people, in addition to preventing a frank fight against the CAQ in the next elections.
This poisonous bet, although conceived with the best intentions – to promote secularism and gender equality – is the real elephant in the room. Since the crisis of reasonable accommodation, the PQ, borrowing the approach adopted by the ADQ leader Mario Dumont in 2007, has also started talking about “us”. The time of minorities had lasted long enough, it was said, it was necessary to put the French-speaking majority back at the center of the national narrative. The CAQ then took up the same torch, with great success.
We can understand, of course, the need to reassure francophones about their future. But even the members of cultural communities should have been reassured about theirs. All the more so since, during all this time, Quebec society has continued to diversify. The inevitable result, recalls the historian Pierre Anctil, of the application of Law 101. By integrating the children of immigrants into French schools, we not only ensured the francization of young foreigners, but we paved the way for a society. increasingly multicultural.
“I am not sure that Lévesque’s generation understood the scope of the gesture at the time,” he adds. That in the long term, it is the Quebec identity itself that would be transformed. “
What the PQ today does not seem to understand is that the young people who are turning their backs on it now do not do so out of disinterest in sovereignty. They do it because the project proposed to them is not sufficiently “inclusive”. Whether they are native French speakers or the sons or daughters of immigrants, cultural diversity is the reality they know and want to maintain. Yes, they want to live in French, but not necessarily according to a single model. More than anything else, it is this cultural diversity that sets the present day apart from the rest.
Notice to political parties who believe in the future.
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