1er February, like the groundhog who has just announced the rest of the winter, Justin has come out of his torpor to qualify his vision of Quebec secularism. We don’t know what happened in the Liberal caucus around the appointment of Amira Elghawaby, which is unleashing so much passion, but Justin had a slightly more measured message.
Has he decided to calm a discontent of Quebec deputies of his formation? Did he finally want to tell French speakers here what they have always wanted to hear? I don’t know. But his statement contrasts with his traditional posture on the subject.
I recorded and transcribed part of this surprising speech where he said: “Quebecers are among the most ardent defenders of individual rights and freedoms. And it comes from a place in recent history or before the Quiet Revolution. Quebec was subjected to a religion that did not respect its individual rights and freedoms. I am a proud Quebecer and my defense of individual rights and freedoms comes from the fact that I am in this vein of thought. People need to understand that there are two different visions of what is a secular society, what is a secular society. It will work out when reasonable people have a real conversation…”
After 10 years of telling us that there was only one way to see secularism and that those who did not adhere to his version were showing intolerance, here is Justin talking about the Quiet Revolution and evoking the problematic history of Quebec with the Catholic religion.
He underscores this irreconcilable tug of war between the two visions of cohabitation between religion and state in Canada. Two solitudes that lead to the clash of the founding French and British roots of Canada. between design british which places religion at the heart of its multiculturalist ideology and the desire for a frank separation between the State and the religion of the French-speaking majority of Quebec, dialogue is impossible and we must choose sides.
That’s what Justin did pretty quickly when he entered politics. Remember the debate around the covered-face oath that punctuated his 2015 election campaign. While Thomas Mulcair tried to spare the goat and the cabbage, while Gilles Duceppe and Stephen Harper expressed their disapproval, Justin Trudeau hammered out a clear message. In the country he wants to rule, he had made clear, no one would prevent a woman from taking the oath to the queen with a niqab. Many observers found his gamble risky, but Justin still won the ballot with a comfortable majority. Since then, if there is a subject on which his convictions remain imperturbable, it is that of secularism. Even if he has, in an electoral way, sometimes avoided firing red balls at Bill 21, everyone knows that he does not digest it. It is written in the sky that he is sharpening his weapons and will not hesitate to draw massively on the CAQ project at the appropriate time. This is the Justin we know.
The new Justin who qualifies his remarks on Quebec secularism surprises me enormously. What happened ? Did we witness a simple maneuver of political communication to appease an internal discontent? Has he just woken up and understood that in North America, between American theocracy and British-inspired Canadian secularism where the Queen embodies a kind of representative of God and the House of Lords includes archbishops and bishops , there is this third way, that of Quebec? This Quebec variant owes to the frank separation between the State and the religion adopted in France in the famous law of 1905, but is also very different from it. Quebec is now seeking its own line of consensus, much finer and more minimalist than that of France. We can criticize Bill 21 in its form and its objectives, but we cannot disconnect it from a desire deeply rooted in history.
Quebec is the only nation in America to have deconfessionalized its education system and to cling against all odds to this vision of secularism so decried and demonized in the Anglo-Saxon world.
For 50 years, this unfinished desire for secularization has regularly come back to haunt the political debate here. A discussion which, at a time of cultural melting pot, deeply inconveniences a large part of English-speaking Canada. The pressure is so strong that even French-speaking intellectuals here converted to the multiculturalist ideology get entangled in argumentative gymnastics and contortions to explain to us why what was progressive and avant-garde during the Quiet Revolution must be reviled and prohibited today. today. The vast majority of episodes of “Quebec bashing” are part of this misunderstanding.
But there is one thing that has changed since the election of the CAQ. People no longer allow themselves to be tricked like in the days of Couillard and Charest. Today, Quebec’s offensives are increasingly numerous and powerful. Even if it must be admitted that, in the end, it will not change much. Let’s bet that all these increasingly conspicuous howls against the federal government around living together, the defense of the language and immigration will not make the difference. The dog barks and the federal caravan continues on its way! This is Trudeau’s slogan in the face of Legault’s nationalist demands. Since when can the croaking of frogs in the river keep crocodiles from sleeping? said my grandfather.
Since his election, Justin Trudeau has generously fed the “Quebec bashing” with unqualified statements on living together. So, now that he recognizes that there can be two visions of secularism in Canada, as Guy A. Lepage would say, the killer question: “Why does he devote all his energies to demonizing and wanting to destroy the another vision of secularism when he keeps telling us that it is diversity that makes Canada strong? »