“Each little people is one more Sun/Beauty to the Universe/It is a grave mistake and a great horror/To prick it so that it dies! » — Felix Leclerc Dreams for sale or Third notebook from the same flâneur
A people is like a tree: it takes root in a determined territory, it builds its trunk and its branches through its history and it expresses itself through a common language, which, like great foliage, allows it to breathe energy of the sun and to relate to all that surrounds it.
A people’s common language cannot be separated from its identity as a people, as a nation and as a state. A people cannot live without a common language, but equally, the common language cannot survive without attachment to the nation. This is why, moreover, each nation imprints on its language a color and a life of its own.
What threatens our common language at present is not English as such, but economic and cultural globalization, and the erasure of nations that it generates, in favor of a global digital culture of entertainment and material well-being. What is at risk, especially among a small landlocked people like ours, is the attachment and commitment to a distinct and common national identity and citizenship.
This is why we believe that all efforts to revalorize the use of our common language risk failing if they are not rooted in a reappropriation of our identity as a people, as a nation and as a national State. Giving in to the pressure of anglicization means detaching oneself emotionally and intellectually from our historical identity and our Quebec citizenship.
What we need to wake up and consolidate, if we want to revalorize the use of the common Quebec language, is our identity, in its very foundations.
Now, a people, a nation, a national state is defined and constituted politically by a constitution. And we don’t. We are only made up, as a people, as a nation and as a national state, of fragments of scattered constitutional provisions, inherited from our colonized past, which we have never approved and which do not stick to who we are. The Canadian Constitution of 1982 binds us without constituting us, because it has never been approved by the people or the government of Quebec.
We, Quebecers, are “sans-papiers” — a people without a constitution, a minority province in a multicultural country, lost in the middle of a country and an America that do not speak our language. We have no identity card, no official citizenship, no title deeds: we are subject to the arbitrariness of British common law, we are a democracy without the people, where we do not decide.
The essence of our message is the urgency of giving ourselves, as people, nation and State of Quebec, a Constitution that defines us as we are and as we want to be as Quebecers in 2023.
And in our mind, such a constitution can only be written by the people of Quebec themselves, in their entirety. The Consultation to fuel reflection on the future of the French language, which ended on April 30, must be the result of the best possible and achievable consensus reached by all of today’s Quebecers on the status , institutions and political choices in Quebec.
Consequently, we ask the National Assembly of Quebec to convene, by the 1er January 2024, a non-partisan citizen constituent assembly, representative of the population and the territory of Quebec and entirely free in its deliberations — therefore, ideally, drawn by lot —, mandated to consult the population and propose the text of a first Quebec constitution, where the terms of our political sovereignty and our relationship with Canada and the world will be defined, a text that will have to be submitted as is to a popular referendum before the scheduled date of the next Quebec elections.
My People “not sovereign” / My country “not ours” / My nation “without papers” / I appeal to you! / Dismiss the makers of the elections without pity / Convene the People’s Assembly without delay / Who will write his hand our rights and our choices / The Charter that will guide us / The Constitution that will define us / The papers that will legitimize us / And allow us to tell the whole world, in our language / Who we are and what we dream of.