At my neighborhood grocery store, meager portions of withered white fish, wrapped in cellophane and wedged in the hollow of black trays, display an injunction in bold letters: “Let’s avoid waste: 30% off.” On the eve of stinking up the bilge due to expiry, this delicacy needs to be consumed as soon as possible. Otherwise it will be discarded. It’s the trash or you. So make up your mind. Start by pressing down on your foot to see if your mouth opens.
In society, almost at all times, the injunctions that warn against losses do not call into question the way in which profits are made. So, what does the overbidding of packaging matter in the waste equation? Even in the organic food section. Broccoli and celery, sold at double the price, are presented there as elsewhere in individual packaging, with a lot of plastic, cardboard and stickers. This makes it possible to underline in broad strokes that one must pay for one’s faith in a better world, including at the cost of such contradictions. Alas, it’s not tomorrow that the grocery store will proclaim, loud and clear, the uselessness of bagging even your lemons before paying for them.
Why do I always have the feeling of being taken for an overpacked vegetable in the middle of a supermarket every time I hear Dominique Anglade speak? For months, the leader of the very provincial Liberal Party has been increasing the use of elements of language supposed to promote the growth of emotions in anticipation of the election harvest. No matter how much I listen to his chants, I never manage to forget that the Liberal Party, from Alexandre Taschereau to Philippe Couillard, via Jean Lesage and Robert Bourassa, has always practiced spinal tricks to satisfy the great capital. However, times have changed. In terms of voting intentions, this old party of the owners no longer even collects 10% among Francophones, who account for 79% of the population. This is to say how much the old packaging no longer packs. So, Dominique Anglade undertook to change it.
How many times have we heard, in recent months, Mr.me Anglade assert that she wanted a mix of ideas? These words, she constantly has them in her mouth. But no matter how much she chews them again, no nourishing juice is drawn from them. Is she trying to talk about ecology, social justice, health crisis? It is always rather painfully that it does so, never going beyond the forms of an expected discourse, without this being part of a consequent reflexive rooting on the role of the oligarchs, the twisted dynamics of institutions, the ‘History entrusted to the hands of a few, of laissez-faire with regard to the great fortunes as much as of the climate crisis.
In 2018, when she was Minister of Economy, Science and Innovation, Dominique Anglade declared without choking that “the reality is that if we were able to get people out of poverty today is that there is a system that still worked”. The future of the poorest has in fact never been the subject of the concerns of this political system to which Ms.me Anglade, except when those risked threatening the immediate future of the wealthiest. The gap between rich and poor continues to widen. All the reports say so. The new packaging now offered by Mme Anglade to give the appearance of good political health to his party can not change anything: this system is sick.
While affirming, without flinching, that she will be Prime Minister following the next general election, here she is indicating that she is ready to welcome with open arms former candidates from Québec solidaire or the Parti québécois, provided they show a “progressive” label, she specifies, while affirming that she wants to go “beyond labels”… What does it mean, to begin with, to be progressive in this old party of money, a party where Mme Anglade wore the hat of figure minister at the time when more than a billion dollars flew away on the private wings of Bombardier while the most down-to-earth public services were slashed?
Even Éric Duhaime, often a formidable sayer of anything, also affirms that he will present, in the next general elections, just like Mme Anglade, former candidates of Québec solidaire! Why bother to join a thing and its opposite, while claiming to want to transcend them, if not to try to delude oneself? Québec solidaire, is this the new key to accessing a realm of ideas in which we would secretly wish to see our own judged? In view of the by-election in Marie-Victorin, Éric Duhaime knocked on the door of the house this weekend. He showed up without a mask. Wearing one would have helped him though. It was cold. And in the exercise of such a policy, since when do we drop the masks?
Political parties have long accustomed us to waltzes capable of making you dizzy. Mme Isn’t Anglade the former president of the CAQ, this curious hybrid creature of François Legault, himself a former PQ minister? Gaétan Barrette moved from one party to another, as did Marguerite Blais. So many words and egos, obviously interchangeable, govern the political surface that no one is surprised to see ideas flow. How much longer will citizens want to be served such more or less fresh fish, on the pretext that such is life within the parties?