Reading Gérard Bouchard’s text published on January 15, one can only remain perplexed. A founding myth is supposed to mark the moment which is at the source of an outcome: the birth of a nation or of fundamental rights. Gérard Bouchard recalls a few of them: the Plymouth Rock for the United States, the Magna Carta for England and Guillaume Tell for Switzerland.
Plymouth Rock represents the rock on which the first pilgrim of the Mayflower, like the first astronaut on the Moon, set foot in 1620, an initial symbolic gesture that began the process of colonization that would give birth to the American nation.
For its part, the adoption of the great charter, the Magna Carta, in 1215 marks the moment when, step by step, constitutional freedoms come to contain the monarchical power by giving more room to democracy.
As for William Tell, his heroic acts were at the origin, in the 14th century, of the rebellion of the Swiss against the Holy Roman Empire, which led to the unification of the cantons and the independence of Switzerland.
Lower Canada’s Declaration of Independence
The episode of the patriots in Quebec marks the beginning of what, exactly? It is of little use to recall, as Bouchard does, that the fact that “their collective liberation movement was crushed by much more powerful armed forces gives it even more relief. [et que les] militants who gave their lives in this confrontation and on the scaffold or who were condemned to exile come out of it even greater”.
One would think to hear a supporter of the missionary ideal of the past extolling the power of religious and agricultural ideals and their martyrs in the face of American materialism and industry.
We can also only support the values that animated the Declaration of Independence of Lower Canada in 1838: “The will to govern oneself, freedoms, democracy, the separation of state and Church,” etc. But these values have not been embodied in reality. As Chevalier de Lorimier wrote to his children the day before his execution: “Your father’s crime is in failure. »
The birth of English Canada
And if the Mayflower had sunk while crossing the Atlantic, that William Tell fell into the lake when he tried to push the Austrians’ launch away with his feet, and that the Magna Carta was burned in response to the grievances it embodied?
Would these “failures” give more relief to these founding myths, which would no longer be so, for future generations?
Unfortunately, the “unsuccess” of the patriots led, with the Union of 1840, to the birth of English Canada by transforming the British minority into an artificial majority. This first annexation of French Canadians was quickly followed by a more limited annexation with the Confederation.
The two referendums
And it is these first politicians, whose “vision” we venerate today, who appear as the “fathers” at the origin of the founding myth of the nation. canadian.
This is why Quebeckers still have to fight to “govern themselves [eux-mêmes] “, for “freedoms, democracy, the separation of State and Church”, as highlighted – in particular – by the two “unsuccessful” referendums of 1980 and 1995 as well as the Law on the secularism of the State, which raises the ire of the dominant nation.
Quebecers have long internalized the values that animated the patriots. The objective today is to embody them in reality, despite the legal and constitutional restrictions imposed on Quebecers by the federal government in response to these two referendums, namely the patriation of the 1982 Constitution and, above all, , the Clarity Act of 2000.
Thus, we can read, in the preamble of this law of 2000, that it is the House of Commons that has the role of “determining what constitutes a question and a majority sufficiently clear for the Government of Canada to enter into negotiations on the Secession of a Province from Canada”.