After she announced her intention not to run again in the next election, I went back to listen to Catherine Dorion’s famous first speech in the National Assembly. I remember how much it touched me, in 2018, when the future former MP for Taschereau said it. Four years later, his cry from the heart is still as topical, if not more so, while his portrait of “Modern Times” appears even darker than it was before the global pandemic which upset several pillars of our capitalist societies. And this is even more true when we look at the news of the last few days.
In front of the photo of Jean Charest, former Premier of Quebec and candidate for the nomination of the federal Conservative Party, holding a sticker promoting the potential of the exploitation of Newfoundland oil and gas, a friend sighed in saying that “it’s really hard not to be cynical these days. Personally, it was when I was listening to Steven Guilbeault defend the Bay du Nord project at the microphone of the Première Chaîne on Thursday morning that I cringed. “I’m not angry, I’m disappointed”, as my mother used to tell me at a time when I was learning from my first mistakes.
That same day, I brought together a few of my young Gen Z colleagues to sound them out, for a project, about the current economic climate and how it affected their aspirations. At 34, I no longer belong exactly to “the next generation”: I have reached a point where I feel and experience things differently from the younger people with whom I work. The older ones too. However, I share exactly the same feeling of helplessness as the first in front of several aspects of “adult life”, particularly access to property. In the greater Montreal area, my fiancée and I have been dancing, without success, the waltz of quick visits and one-upmanship for the past few months. A veritable dance of death that enormously mortgages our mental health.
On this subject, the liberal leader Dominique Anglade spoke of a rupture of “social contract” with the younger generations last week: “go to study, go to work, and then you can fulfill your dream which is to buy your own house “. Beyond the real estate overheating which undermines the chances of the youngest to “succeed in life” (my dreams are still bigger than the simple fact of repaying a mortgage), Mme Anglade failed to mention the place of the environment in this social equation. That did not prevent my young colleagues, in the meeting mentioned earlier, from pointing out the inconsistency of such a path: what’s the point of working hard, buying a house, having children and saving for old age when in 2050, the world will be – literally – on fire? And we don’t even talk about the war and the missiles which, today, are killing children and innocent people in Ukraine… Horrible.
The sum of international conflicts and the upheavals they cause, mainly around food and energy, quickly brings us to a common denominator: the environment. As the IPCC has once again sounded the alarm bell, it is once again clear that as long as economic growth and capitalism are the cardinal points of our elites in defining social policies, cynicism and anxiety will continue to be the ambient feelings of younger generations. Here, when Benoit Charette, Minister assigned to the fight against climate change, affirms that “Québec cannot do more”, he proves to us once again that the next generation is right to feel abandoned.
At a time when there is danger in delay, it is becoming more and more difficult to give meaning to the idea of subscribing to this famous “social contract”: studying, starting a family, buying a house, preparing for retire and work to be able to pay for all that. As much as I am sorry for his departure, as much as I nevertheless understand Catherine Dorion for laying down her arms: the house is burning and, the least we can say, is that the decision-makers are really sleeping in the gas.