Jacques Bainville was not wrong. What is curious, he wrote, is not that everything has been said, it is that everything has been said in vain, so that everything is always to be said again.
And if there’s one thing we’ve heard on all the platforms lately, it’s the reminder of how much the Government of Quebec, on the federal scene and in front of the rest of Canada, being told no to everything, all the time, whether it’s health, the environment, immigration, tax filing, language, etc. Looks like he’s in a state of numbness. He bends constantly in front of Ottawa and is dictated without grumbling what to do. Let’s say it again: without deployment of the necessary balance of power, any negotiation is a zero-sum game. Which amounts, for the partisans of a federalism of accommodation, to spitting in the storm or to pushing on the tide in the hope that it withdraws.
Watching the Premier of Quebec go, one wonders how he can settle for so little. The least he could do, as other prime ministers before him have already had the courage to do, is put his fist on the table. There is a limit to everything. The people of Quebec have other priorities than being pushed around.
François Legault is a good devil. He does his best, we hear just as often. Like what numbness has two faces. The inertia of the power in place goes hand in hand with the indifference of a majority of the population. In this uncertain era, aggravated, it is true, by troubling economic circumstances, for many, it is better to be satisfied with what one has. In their minds, it’s always taken.
For the others, for the few separatists who remain, Guillaume le Taciturne could not be denied this time: it is not necessary to hope to undertake nor to succeed to persevere. Pessimistic? No. Because the true pessimist, Hervé Le Tellier reminded us in The anomaly, is the one who feels that it may be too late to be. Let’s persevere.