Far be it from me to defend the Canadian federal system and its past. The sooner the French-speaking Quebec people extricate themselves from this regime, the greater their chances of survival will be. But I believe it is important to highlight the fact that the enterprise of erasure and minoritization of the Quebec people since the beginning of the 1960s has been mainly the work of French-speaking Quebecers themselves.
What Paul St-Pierre Plamondon presents as “a Canadian action over time which led to the reduction and gradual erasure of both Quebec autonomy and the place of French in Canada” therefore requires some nuances. If this action was done, yes, within the Canadian framework, it was not necessarily the work of the Canadian “regime”.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau liked to diminish his people. In 1956, already, in The asbestos strike, he described it as an ethnic group. In “Quebec and the constitutional problem”, text written in 1965 and published in 1967 in the work Federalism and French-Canadian society, he writes that “the concept of two nations in Canada is dangerous in theory, and ill-founded in fact.” Rather, he says, he supports the thesis of “a Canadian federalism bringing together two linguistic communities.” This was his vision of his people.
Once on the job, he worked to translate it into legislative and constitutional terms. In response to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission), which proposed the adoption of a bicultural vision of Canada, he opted instead for the policy of multiculturalism; thus the concept of nation is evacuated, the French-speaking Quebec people are no more than one cultural community among others. This was not the vision of the commission, particularly André Laurendeau, but it is that of Trudeau and Frank Scott. Nothing to do with the Canadian “regime”, everything to do with the reductive vision that a French-speaking Quebecer has of his own people.
In 1969, Trudeau passed the Official Languages Act, which, despite appearances, dealt another blow to his people, because it was flawed in its very principle. By putting French and English on an equal footing, this law makes English-speaking Quebecers a minority in need of protection, and French-speaking Quebecers a majority. It thus perverts the meaning of the word “minority” by refusing to consider French-speaking Quebecers as a minority within Canada. Very convenient, because in this way English Canada avoids being seen as a majority oppressing the true minority.
In the eyes of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a French-speaking Quebecer, the French-speaking Quebec people, a minority in fact, become a majority linguistic group from whom a fictitious minority, the English-speaking Quebecers, must be protected. English Canada shares this vision, but it is one of us who gives it substance.
Trudeau’s charge against his people does not stop there. In 1982, he rebuilt the Canadian constitutional order without the agreement of Quebec. There is a certain continuity here: if there is only one nation in Canada, it is within this nation, as a single group, that the constituent power resides, whatever the opinion of its components. Trudeau, the slayer of nationalism when it is expressed among his own people, takes the opportunity to give the other people a powerful means of asserting their own nationalism: the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Not only does he seek to drown his people in the English-speaking whole called Canada, but he does so despite the reluctance of a large part of English Canada. And why not seize this opportunity to restrict the Quebec people’s room for maneuver in terms of protecting their language? Had the French-speaking “majority” not restricted the linguistic rights of the English-speaking “minority”? Of course, this minority applauds, having never accepted the Charter of the French language. The fact remains that the measure comes from a French-speaking Quebecer.
Of course, English Canada contributed to the achievement of these objectives, but who can deny that the instigator was Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the French-speaking Quebecer? And who can deny that their achievement would have been impossible if they had not been supported by almost all of the French-speaking Quebec deputies sitting in the House of Commons? Did they share Trudeau’s vision of his own people? It must be assumed that yes.
And Pierre Elliott Trudeau, as a servant of English Canada, had emulators. His chief stooge, Jean Chrétien, continued his business. The Clarification Act that he had adopted in 2000, with the help of the zealous Stéphane Dion, claimed to hand over to the House of Commons – therefore, in practice, to English Canada – the task of deciding the text of the question to which the Quebec people would have to respond in a possible referendum on their political future and even evaluate the result of this referendum.
Once again, it was French-speaking Quebecers who tried to handcuff their own people to give English Canada control over their future. We do not remember that there was a revolt by French-speaking Quebec deputies in the House of Commons. Rather, it was a large-scale submission.
It is obvious that English Canada is seeking today, as it sought yesterday, to impose its vision of Canada on our people — by decrying the preventive use of the parliamentary sovereignty provision of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, by example. It is also obvious that today he is more and more intolerant towards Quebec, particularly when it tries to defend its language and its identity. We can therefore easily incriminate the Canadian regime.
But let’s be honest, and recognize that, since the 1960s, French-speaking Quebecers have made this regime the instrument allowing them to serve the interests of English Canada rather than those of their own people. And let those who today maintain the illusion of a third political way or of a possible renewal of Canadian federalism perpetuate the practice.