The day after the October 3 elections, I had an appointment with my dentist. He’s a good man, my dentist. Originally from a Middle Eastern country, he was already well established in his country, with his own firm, before political upheavals led him and his wife to make a draconian decision: sell everything and emigrate to Canada.
He’s a good man, my dentist. He arrived here with his knowledge and his experience, loaded with diplomas, but he was told that he would have to resume a significant part of his studies. Leveling up, it seems. He did it. Willingly.
He is a good man. He integrated into his new society while remaining what Godin described in 1985 as “Quebecois plus”: “He who has two lives, which accumulate, which do not cancel each other out, which are added […] people who have lived two lives in the same space of time, whereas we only live one! »
He is a good man, my dentist, and he has integrated into Quebec to the point of voting for the CAQ since the very beginning, in 2012. This party which seemed to best represent a sort of “normal” Quebec, demanding , but not too much, accepting both Canada and the laws of the market, advocating a secularism that seems to him to be acceptable living together. We probably don’t have the same point of view on Bill 21, but our exchanges have always been marked by a welcome and real respect for each other’s arguments.
He’s a good man, my dentist, but that morning he was expressing a restrained, dull and very palpable anger. He had risen in the face of this contemptuous speech with regard to immigration. He felt challenged, targeted in his heart of hearts, in his convictions. And with a wave of his hand, he informed me that he had voted blank, before gently stinging me to freeze my mouth. He will no longer vote for the CAQ. For sure. The wound is sharp.
From memory, and mine can go back to the 1960s, never had a government gone so far in a divisive discourse on immigration and on shaping a visceral opposition between Montreal and the regions.
François Legault won his bet: he provoked, succeeded and completed a recomposition of Quebec nationalism, under a defensive, provincial and conservative discourse, where the nation is constantly in danger, threatened with extinction or “Louisianization”. Statements shocks rain.
Some people ask this question: can we “dare” talk about immigration, the reception threshold, the capacity for integration without falling over it? Sure. But never with false and hurtful terms like those that have been heard. Disregard is unacceptable.
Political calculation
Quebec was built and developed, as elsewhere too, through strong immigration, which has, for the most part, and particularly since Bill 101, integrated into society, as “Quebecers plus”. (thanks, Godin). We have colors, facial features or hair that differentiate us and yet we find ourselves speaking with the same accent, and referring to the same meeting points. Amazing and beautiful at the same time.
So, that a prime minister associates “immigration” with “decline of French”; that he qualifies the proposal to receive more immigrants as a suicidal project for the nation; that one of his ministers launches into a fiery tirade to tell the regions that immigrants are all going to Montreal and that “80% of them do not work, do not speak French, or do not adhere to values of Quebec society”; and while his sovereigntist stooge, stuck in a quiet disintegration, lowers our reception capacity to the lowest possible level (35,000 people) and associates an increase in immigration not only with the “decline of French”, but also to a possible aggravation of the housing crisis, here are all the ingredients of our divisions.
And Montreal. Ah… Montreal… This metropolis that looks down on the regions (“The people of Montreal must stop looking down on the people of Quebec and Lévis”).
What is behind all this, if not the net political calculation of fueling disinformation on immigration, lowering us to a cautious nation, always under siege, and making people believe that Montreal is the cradle of all these dangers? ? It won’t always last, in the regions as elsewhere, but it will last for a few terms, won’t it? This is the short calculation that these kind of politicians make. We are there.
This reductionist discourse is accompanied by other things: a growing distrust of state policies, and a rise in libertarian discourse. Here, as elsewhere, we are at this crossroads. I still hope that a significant part of our population and young people in particular will aspire to a different world, based on diversity, on understanding and respect for this diversity. We have everything to gain, even our emancipation.