When François Legault founded the CAQ, a majority of Quebecers responded. Because the new party especially allowed sovereignist and nationalist Quebecers who had fallen into post-referendum depression to find a way out.
In the mind of François Legault, it was through economic success that Quebec would give itself the means to assert its neo-nationalism. We had to become as rich as Ontario, he told himself.
A rich Quebec, thought François Legault, would allow us to affirm our new identity. We would then have the means to defend our language and to negotiate with the government in Ottawa greater powers so as not to depend on it with regard to immigration, in particular.
In fact, all the sovereignists disappointed after the two referendum failures were attracted by the vision that the CAQ proposed, but which, in retrospect, appears to be simplistic and naive. As for the nationalist Quebecers, they were looking for a way out of their collective discouragement.
- Listen to Denise Bombardier’s column at the microphone of every Monday and every Friday, live or as a podcast on :
Trudeau and Canada
Like François Legault, they underestimated Justin Trudeau, whose identification with Canada has always been stronger than that of his father. To a certain extent, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his Quebec politician friends, all brilliant, somewhat cynical intellectuals, treated English Canadians with haughtiness, even with a form of hidden contempt.
But times have changed. Justin Trudeau is an actor more at ease on a political stage than theatrical. Her seduction has the efficiency of a laser. Especially since he is like a fish in water with the woke ideology, synonymous for him with progressivism, openness and rejection of obsolete values from before his birth.
Justin Trudeau will no longer stamp his feet in front of the “ridiculous” ultimatums of a Quebec still imbued with a narrow-minded and vengeful nationalism in his beautiful eyes.
Its future relations with Quebec have just been brutally revealed. Justin Trudeau found in the Initiative of the Century, this lobby of high-flying financial leaders who propose a Canada of 100 million inhabitants in 2100 thanks to the contribution of immigration, the escape route.
Whatever his Minister of Immigration said yesterday, this is a way for him to resolve once and for all the inclinations of a Quebec entangled in its myths and suffocated by its dusty history.
- Listen to Denise Bombardier’s column at the microphone of every Monday and every Friday, live or as a podcast on :
Assimilation of Francophones
Justin Trudeau, who is doubtful that he read the Durham Report published in 1839, seems to have adopted the recommendations of the British lord to accelerate the process of assimilation of French Canadians into Anglo-Saxon culture. However, postnational Canada with 100 million inhabitants at the end of the century will no doubt be an atomized world with a fragmented culture, where there will remain only isolated individuals speaking a patois that will be described as “little French”.
Is the Quebec nation, or at least what is still left of it, capable in a last nationalist outburst of rebelling against a destiny that condemns it to die without pain, without revolt and without dignity?
So with spring, let’s take to the streets of the towns and villages of Quebec to save our honor and to shout out loud our desire to live with respect for our collective identity, which is being diluted… annihilated.