Sociologist Micheline Labelle, considered by many to be one of the greats of this profession, died a few months ago. Several dozen colleagues and friends gathered on June 15 to celebrate his memory. I will leave it to others, more competent, to say to what extent she marked Quebec university life in a career spanning nearly sixty years in the fields of anthropology and sociology. I simply want to pay tribute to this woman of spirit and heart whom I had the privilege of meeting.
An academic whose work was marked by implacable rigor, she was also a woman deeply engaged in incessant battles, in particular for the independence of Quebec and secularism.
This rigor which characterized her was not without bringing something like a certain roughness to her relationships with others. On the occasion of this meeting, Daniel Turp, president of Intellectuals for Sovereignty, Roch Denis, former rector of the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), and Luc Brunet, his cousin, spoke in turn of this trait of his personality, causing a few smiles in the room…
Micheline Labelle was a woman with a strong character, it is known. For a woman who had great rigor, reading in The duty of June 10, the results of a survey indicating that 73% of Muslim women would like to leave Quebec would undoubtedly have provoked great anger among her. In the following days, specialists criticized the methodology used by Professor Nadia Hasan for a survey whose results were presented to federal elected officials. I’m sure she would have called me to tell me she was working on a rejoinder for the paper, asking me to proofread it and give her my opinion. Which she did regularly for several years.
A convinced and deeply committed independentist, she has held the strength of the IPSO since the creation of this movement on June 21, 1995, organizing numerous conferences and intervening publicly as soon as she saw the federal government invading Quebec’s areas of jurisdiction.
Also in 1995, she signed a text with Guy and François Rocher in which it was stated that “we have the firm conviction that the obstacles to full and complete integration into the common public culture of Quebec could not be removed other than by accession of Quebec to sovereignty which, moreover, would put an end to the ambiguities of the current policy for managing ethnocultural diversity. The issue of citizenship would be posed in much clearer terms to eventually eliminate the false dichotomy opposing Quebecers and members of ethnocultural groups.” Holder for several years of the Research Chair in Immigration, Ethnicity and Citizenship at UQAM, she was able to see the desire of the federal government to intervene financially, politically and ideologically in university circles in Quebec.
Like Guy Rocher, she did not want any epithet, “open, healthy, fair, positive or inclusive”, for example, to be attached to the word secularism. When one day I told her that the expression “open secularism” had been used for the first time in 2008 by Pope Benedict XVI, during a conference at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris, it struck her, because it pope never presented himself as so open during his pontificate… Two years earlier, this same pope had denounced “the invasive secularism in Canada”. He could have specified: in Quebec!
Roch Denis was right to say that Micheline Labelle “had a lot of ambition, but first and foremost for the causes she served more than for her own fame. She feared and repelled those who claimed to serve in order to serve themselves…” Having done her doctoral thesis on Haiti, she had forged close ties with this community. She also participated in training activities in unions on subjects that were close to her heart.
Accused of being a “strong head”, she was kicked out of the Basile-Moreau college by the rector, Sister Marie-Laurent of Rome, in 1956. The latter, a few years later, would be a pillar of the commission. Parent on education.
This strong head will be missed by his colleagues and friends. But it is also the entire Quebec society which will now have to deprive itself of its interventions, always relevant and supported, on questions which concern us more and more, such as the independence of Quebec, secularism, racism, immigration and inclusion.