Montreal and the RdQ: Blanchet’s legitimate concern

We must be concerned about the growing gap between Montreal and the “RdQ” (the rest of Quebec), essentially confided Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet to The Canadian Press. Is he right?

This type of divide exists everywhere, in the West at least. An English philosopher, David Goodhart, already pointed out, at the time of Brexit, that the United Kingdom was no longer disuniting so much according to the nations which compose it (Scots, Welsh, Northern Irish, English), but above all between the “people from anywhere” and “people from somewhere”.

The latter are “rooted in a particular place and “are often less educated”; while people from nowhere are “urban and left-wing, ultra-mobile”.

New phenomena

Certainly, for a long time, in our countries, there have been those who are rooted and those who are uprooted, but new phenomena have accentuated and transformed these two poles.

A French journalist, Brice Couturier, has already proposed a list of these. He noted that an American author, Thomas Friedman, studies a growing gap between “the people of the wall” and “the people of the web” (I would add the “TV people” and “the Netflix people”). In France, “Europeanists” believe that “sovereignists” (in the sense it has in France, namely wanting to defend the components of state sovereignty) are retrograde; while “sovereignists” instead believe that nation-states are necessary for solidarity. “The French geographer Christophe Guilluy contrasts peripheral France with the bourgeois-bohemians of the metropolises,” noted Couturier.

All these phenomena of our hypermodernity are found to varying degrees in today’s Quebec. We can even say that they overlap and widen the Montreal-RdQ divide even further.

“Little Nation”

Added to this are dimensions specific to Quebec.

Unlike the United Kingdom or France, Quebec is a “small nation” in the sense of the author Milan Kundera, that is to say that it always knows itself to be fragile and at risk of disappearing.

In addition, she is semi-sovereign. It evolves in a federation which only partially recognizes it as such, in an equivocal manner.

This poses an additional challenge in Quebec and this is where Blanchet’s call resonates. In the past, we wanted, with a law like Bill 101, to make French a crucible for integration. De-ethnicize this language. Like English in Ontario or the United States.

This system has had undeniable successes (children of Law 101), but is broken down and seems overwhelmed by new trends, such as temporary immigration. Regularly, “people from nowhere” are outraged by any measures seeking to strengthen, or even modernize, this 101 system, as if they constituted affronts to “openness” (even though it is a tool for diversity) . The gap between Montreal and the RdQ is widened systemically by the current Canadian constitution and its laudators and this is where the Bloc is right.

Obviously, we must be careful not to demonize “people from nowhere” as much as “people from somewhere”. They are two sides of today’s world, both have legitimate concerns, but which can become pathological when taken too far.

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