Once a month, The duty challenges history enthusiasts to decipher a current theme based on a comparison with a historical event or character.
We risk being accused of bias when we write the biography of a man loved by all. Almost all the people I interviewed for my research — around forty — remember Gerald Godin with emotion. I looked hard for discordant opinions, among his political enemies or, worse still, among his allies. In vain. Of course, he was not a holy man. Anyway, even Saint Augustine stole pears in his youth, so…
Marc Laurendeau told me that while preparing a radio documentary on the Parti Québécois (PQ), he realized one thing: “The model to which everyone referred, all those interviewed, was Gérald Godin. » In other words, he embodied what the independence movement had been most generous towards others, towards immigrants, towards “strange people”, as they used to say at the time.
Since the 1990s, and particularly since the 2013 charter of Quebec values, Quebec politics seems to have lost its luster in these areas. Before the last general election, political columnist Josée Legault said it bluntly: “The government is missing a major player. He is missing a Gérald Godin. » Well, was he that extraordinary?
Dropout
His life, in broad strokes: Gérald Godin was born in 1938 in Trois-Rivières. He lived his youth less than 64 meters from the house of Maurice Duplessis. Dropout from classical college, he became a journalist at News writer. Because he turned out to be a very intelligent guy, he got noticed and moved to Montreal, where he was found notably at the NFB, at Radio-Canada, at Free city and to Bias.
The changes are dizzying: in a few years, from 1958 to 1963, Godin went from lazy federalism to assertive independence; from articles on aqueduct problems in Trois-Rivières to interviews with all of Montreal’s elite; from ethereal and clumsy poetry to poems in joual. In 1962, he formed a couple with the singer and actress Pauline Julien, a union which would become for many the living incarnation of Quebec on the move.
In 1976, the journalist and new communications professor at UQAM found himself a candidate for the Parti Québécois against Prime Minister Robert Bourassa, in his riding of Mercier. It is a sort of revenge for the man interned during the events of October. Against all expectations, the economist is beaten by the poet. The latter will be a deputy until his death. In the meantime, he was Minister of Immigration and Cultural Communities (1980-1985). He died in 1994 from a brain tumor, which plagued him for ten years, despite impressive remissions and periods of rehabilitation which still arouse admiration.
Deputy miracle worker
Saint Gerald: this is the nickname given to him by his friend Jogues Sauriol. After the recurrence of his cancer in 1989, and because of his furious desire to heal, Godin had something of a miracle worker. His constituents touch him, discuss God with him. The man is something of a miracle.
Thirty years later, are those who claim to be Gérald Godin, like his successor in Mercier, Ruba Ghazal, only endowing themselves with an idol made of local fabric? Has Gérald Godin become the hero of the “radical left”, to use the words of the current leader of the PQ?
One thing is certain, Mathieu Bock-Côté already wrote, in May 2015: “To hear some people talk, one might believe that Gérald Godin was the only open nationalist in the history of the Parti Québécois. We repeat his name in an incantatory manner, as if he had indicated a path that we could never leave. »
What can we say about this? First, the PQ “left” the path traced by Godin a long time ago. This was already the case during his lifetime. In 1993, Jacques Parizeau declared that sovereignty could be achieved without English speakers and allophones. Godin, indignant, then claimed that his leader had just “scraped” 15 years of efforts to get closer to cultural communities. “It is up to us,” he added, “to make comments adapted to the reality they experience. »
Pragmatism
Godin’s legacy is not that of the naivety or idealism of the poet lost in politics. As minister, Godin knows what he is doing. Certainly, he is a humanist, but he is less reckless (in the sense of making humanitarian decisions without talking too much with the Prime Minister beforehand) than his predecessor, Father Jacques Couture. He also has a particularly strong interest in economic immigrants.
Also, the man, so close to the unions in the 1970s, was one of the most virulent ministers during the state employees’ strike in 1983. He even proposed, to the council of ministers, to dismiss teachers. The dreaming poet has dropped his lyre for quite some time.
This is not a question of doing the accounts. Still: can we say that Godin is an authentic politician? Yes. As I could affirm, after having studied and read him for years, that he was truly sensitive to the realities of the people in his constituency. That he was driven by the idea that it is the immigrants who will revive the idea of the country, without however deluding themselves about their massive support for the sovereignty of Quebec. Perhaps he was waiting for a twist in history or the magic of words. As he said himself, while he was still minister: “I think that immigrants are poems in Quebec. »
Human dignity
If Godin is important today, it is perhaps for two reasons. First, it reminds us that the relationship with the past does not involve its peremptory refusal. He never denied his origins. Her openness to the world has its roots in Trois-Rivières, with her Haitian uncle Adrien Georges, but also with the missionaries who recounted their travels to the students of the Daughters of Jesus.
It was not through his own travels that Godin had his intuition of the open sea, but in a school on rue des Ursulines. For Godin, a young conservative who became a member of a popular and unorthodox left, ruptures certainly exist. But man’s political, social, intellectual and artistic changes have never been about denials. This is a rare occurrence.
The second reason became apparent to me more recently. To do this, perhaps it was necessary to live in the context of debates on immigration and on everything which seems, at least for some, to be part of the end of Quebec civilization and, while we are at it, of civilization in short.
Perhaps I also had to come across this interview with Minister Gérald Godin in the Radio-Canada archives on the show Impactsin January 1984. Robert Guy Scully then speaks with his interlocutor about undocumented immigrants, which at that time numbered between 50,000 and 200,000 in Canada. Question from the host: “Do you think that rich countries, like Canada, will have to, perhaps suddenly, tighten their borders against poor countries? » Godin rejects the idea, believes on the contrary that we must not slow down mobility and that we must take advantage of the extraordinary vitality of all those who move around the world, with or without papers.
It is not so much this answer, which one would have guessed, that is striking. This is the minister’s tone. Gérald Godin does not seem like a man under siege. It does not give the impression that doom will soon befall Quebec. The minister answers questions in a relaxed but serious manner. Of course, the numbers (“plumbing,” he says) come to his thinking very quickly; Gérald Godin was no more airheaded than any minister. But these considerations still come after humans.
What is surprising in this interview is the benevolence of the minister rather than the tension to which we are accustomed today. Nowadays, it is not uncommon to hear a prime minister during an election campaign, when questioned about the integration of immigrants, come out, point blank, that Quebecers do not like violence and that “we must make sure we keep it the way it is now.”
A Minister of Immigration can say, during this same electoral campaign, that “80% of immigrants go to Montreal, do not work, do not speak French or do not adhere to the values of Quebec society.” After the elections, the new Minister of Immigration (the previous one was transferred to the Ministry of Labor) declared about Roxham Road: “It solves absolutely nothing to propose [le] close. » She is overcome on her horse and declares, a few hours later: “Roxham, it has to close. I said it last week: Roxham, done with it! We have had enough of this incessant flow of asylum seekers returning irregularly. » Basta, yes.
Godin could not imagine, in January 1984, on a Radio-Canada set, all the challenges that future governments would face. The migrant crisis and that of climate refugees, among others. But these are historical phenomena similar to all those that Godin studied in the evenings in the library of the National Assembly, of which he was one of the most assiduous users.
If Gérald Godin is so important today, it is because he had the intuition that historical phenomena come or go, but that human dignity remains. Rather, it must remain intact, everywhere, 24 hours a day, in Mercier or elsewhere. It was his belief. And I don’t see why this would no longer be possible today.
To propose a text or to make comments and suggestions, write to Dave Noël at [email protected].