There is something a little childish in the kind of frenzy that seizes the little Quebec political-media world as soon as a French president or prime minister arrives.
Even when there is no referendum on the horizon, the whole point of the visit seems to be limited to seeing whether he will repeat the famous “non-interference, non-indifference”, seek to avoid it or , even worse, to deny it, as Nicolas Sarkozy did, immediately described as an apostate. Even Jean Charest, who could not be suspected of sovereignist sympathies, had found his federalist zeal a little excessive.
Gabriel Attal knew very well that he was going to have to take the exam too. He wanted to show originality by transforming “neither-nor” into “and-and”, that is to say “and sensitivity and respect”, but it is the same thing. Moreover, no one takes offense anymore at what has become a sort of ritual without much meaning. Even Justin Trudeau seemed to “not care” as much as he did about provincial areas of jurisdiction.
Quebecers have long liked to believe that the “neither nor nor” tailored to their needs is in reality a catch-all formula to which French diplomacy resorts almost everywhere it feels the need to spare the goat and the cabbage, as all countries in the world must sometimes do.
President Macron has already used it to characterize France’s position regarding Iraq. It had also been presented as his course of action in Africa. Whether or not this line was followed is another question.
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The youngest prime minister in the history of France, Mr. Attal stressed that he was not born in 1967 when General de Gaulle launched his “Long live free Quebec!” » from the top of Montreal city hall, and that he was only 6 years old during the 1995 referendum. It’s like talking about the Canadian’s last Stanley Cups when we almost always saw him excluded from the playoffs.
In his speech to the National Assembly, Mr. Attal constantly returned to the theme of youth. “I come to express myself before you as a man of my generation,” he said. If the question of the political future of Quebec leaves a large number of young Quebecers indifferent, why would we be interested in it in France?
“The fundamental challenge of my generation is the ecological transition,” declared Attal. This is also what she thinks on this side of the Atlantic and she is not convinced that independence is the best way to address it, even if Canada remains and will remain an oil country for a long time to come. On the other hand, he would perhaps be surprised to note that secularism, which he praised with a vigor that delighted François Legault, is not popular among young Quebecers. Where he sees a “condition of freedom,” they instead see a form of discrimination.
For years, Quebec sovereignists have been in close contact with the French political class. Bernard Landry, Louise Beaudoin, Jacques-Yvan Morin and others have established deep and lasting friendships at the highest level and in all political families, from which the independence cause has benefited immensely and who have been able to counterbalance the pressing interventions of Ottawa .
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On both sides, however, the guard has changed. With the exception of the short-lived minority government of Pauline Marois, the PQ were driven from power for more than twenty years and those who succeeded them strove to give the relationship between France and Quebec a direction decidedly economical. If independence no longer interested the American cousins, France would have been very wrong to seek to accompany them where they did not want to go.
During his visit to the National Assembly, Mr. Attal must have noticed, however, that the two sovereignist party leaders were also the youngest. We also had to explain to him that the other two leaders were once sovereignists, but that they had abandoned their youthful convictions as they grew older. Prime Minister Legault and the interim leader of the PLQ, Marc Tanguay, are certainly sympathetic men, but one might think that Mr. Attal would at first glance feel more affinities with Paul St-Pierre Plamondon and Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois.
In his welcome speech, the PQ leader expressed his desire to see France side with Quebec in the aftermath of a winning referendum, even suggesting that Mr. Attal could then be President of the Republic. . All this remains highly hypothetical, but it is certain that France would still have a capital role to play in the international recognition of an independent Quebec, as Jacques Parizeau had predicted in his “great game”.
Mr. Attal sent a message which will encourage many and worry others, by closing the press conference on Friday with the following sentence, deliberately ambiguous: “Quebec is a nation which has taken its destiny into account. hand and follows his star. » So, but will France follow? More on the next visit.