During an election campaign, words pop up and stick, days after they’ve been dropped like little bombs. In this regard, the past week has been a busy one.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
At random: the RICHES of GND who do mileage on the troubled feeling that Quebecers feel about money and wealth, the INTELLECTUALS of François Legault, those who, from the top of their literary salons, judge RAM lovers and third link… An old trick of an old politician to oppose the real world to the emulators of Ovide Plouffe.
However, I will focus on the VIOLENTS, the PM’s unfortunate amalgam of immigration and violence. The sentence was pronounced at a press briefing in Victoriaville: “Quebecers are peaceful, they don’t like chicanery. They don’t like extremists, they don’t like violence, so we have to make sure we keep it as it is now. “It does seem that immigrants create a deleterious social climate…
I am the daughter of an immigrant. My father came here fleeing a poor and broken Italy, hoping for something better. All his life (he died nine years ago) he worked hard. At night, in the evening, on weekends, he wanted his daughters to be raised in French. Humble, poorly educated, he valued the education he had not benefited from. He knew nothing of the subtle mechanics of class transgression, but did everything to make it work. He spoke French with laborious words, but was convinced that Quebec would become a country.
New, often more exotic waves of immigration are no different. They want the best for their children, know that the first generation will make sacrifices for the second to flourish. Immigration is a bereavement, integration: a rebirth.
The violence is in the silences, the renunciations, the pain of the parents, in the very process of immigration, a definitive cut with the world before.
Violence, it is in this subtle way of not making room for you when you try, gropingly, to embrace your new culture, between your grueling jobs, your impossible shifts, your shabby accommodations. You don’t have the codes, you make yourself look weird, people think you’re too swarthy, you eat strange things. Immigrants sacrifice their lives, try to emancipate their children and try to protect them from their suffering. They are literally split in two: they want to bequeath their inheritance, but to make it more discreet to free the young people.
Isn’t there also a bit of violence among Quebecers: a people who love each other very little and who flirt with behaviors of symbolic self-mutilation? A people who are morbidly doubtful, who let themselves sink in at times, who neglect their language, but who demand that immigrants learn it in six months?
If Quebec liked itself a little better, it would not see the Other as a threat, but as a contribution. Even to the second generation, this sentence about the violence inherent in immigrants hurts. She oozes insinuation. “Clean steps…”
Did M Legault escape it? Not much. There is mistrust of the Other among part of his electoral base. But if it’s a strategy, it’s amazing. Since he will be in the majority, this kind of divisive politics is useless. On the contrary, it should rise above the fray, change the mistrust of many towards immigrants, and give them a furious desire for our distinct culture.
Above all, candidate Legault prevented us from having a real calm and balanced discussion on immigration thresholds, which is nevertheless necessary, here as elsewhere. How to find a balance between the culture of the host country and the improvement represented by new cultures?
In Quebec: how to negotiate this deal in a country that is not one, drowned in English-speaking North America? How can we move forward together when the new ideological paradigms make Quebec, this society among the most welcoming, a colonizing people, even read on Twitter, “an old Quebec, rancid and gone”?
There is all this in the unfortunate sentence of François Legault. Everything to comfort certain voters in their prejudices, everything to antagonize immigrants, to discourage some of them, yet hopeful, enthusiastic and eager to see their children succeed in a peaceful Quebec.
My father knew misery, violence, was taken prisoner of war. He came here to find peace. He bequeathed us good values and the love of this country. He saw himself as a modest, as a smuggler. It would be his daughters who would “succeed”. He is no longer there to respond to the PM. He wouldn’t have yelled at him; he was not “violent”. But he wouldn’t think less…