The debate has been tearing Quebecers of sovereignist and social-democratic tendencies apart for decades: should we favor independence at all costs or insist first on essential social struggles?
The Parti Québécois (PQ) is often associated with the first option and Québec solidaire (QS), with the second. The first says that sovereignty is sufficient in itself, while the second maintains that it is only a means to give oneself the freedom to implement a societal project focused on social justice. The PQ therefore accuses QS of neglecting the independence struggle while QS accuses the PQ of abandoning the left.
On the right, a third group, notably led by Mathieu Bock-Côté, argues that attaching left-wing socio-economic policies to the independence project would undermine the latter. For this group, it is questions of identity, notably language and secularism, which justify the sovereignist struggle.
Against all these readings of the situation, political scientist Michel Roche, professor at UQAC, defends, in The national question, a social question (Liber, 2024, 208 pages), the thesis according to which it is the coupling of the national with the social which nourishes the independence project, while allowing social progress.
Those who, like me, refuse to compromise as much on their sovereignist convictions as on their attachment to social democracy will be comforted by reading this essay, written in clear and elegant prose.
“There is no choice,” writes Roche, “between the “social” and the “national.” Since the 1960s, we have never witnessed a strong social movement while the national movement was weak, including in 2012. This also demonstrates that the strength of one does not weaken the other. »
The recent history of Quebec, as well as that of Scotland and Catalonia, shows that it would be an error to prioritize these struggles in the belief that we would allow the victory of the one that seems most fundamental to us.
Both, the social and the national, advance or retreat together. “Has the weakening of the independence movement, asks Roche, really made it possible to obtain gains in the other battles? ” Of course not.
A specialist in post-Soviet Russia, Roche is a left-wing separatist. His essay aims precisely to remind his ideological family that the sovereignist project is not a matter for satisfied bourgeois people. Proof of this is that Quebec capitalists, with rare exceptions, support the status quo.
To others, and this is his second objective, Roche wants to make it clear that, in recent years, the independence project has lost its feathers each time it has moved away from its bias towards a welfare state of Keynesian type.
In 1996, for example, there was majority support for independence. Lucien Bouchard, however, undertook to clean up public finances under the pretext of creating “winning conditions” for the project. The enterprise was accompanied by a fall in support for sovereignty, which the Charest and Couillard governments then attempted to destroy by directly attacking the Quebec social state.
In modernity, explains Roche, national identity is of course based on the sharing of a common language and culture, but also on a feeling of solidarity nourished by a welfare state which applies universal redistributive policies, all in a circular logic: national feeling invites socio-economic solidarity and the latter strengthens national feeling.
In Quebec, this conjunction was in full swing during the Quiet Revolution, where we witnessed a rise in independence sentiment and social struggles for justice at the time of the creation of the welfare state. In 1995, the Yes side flirted with victory, particularly because the option appeared liberating in the eyes of the working classes shaken by the Canadian neoliberal shift.
The federalist forces, notes Roche, are well aware of the link between the social state and Quebec identity, hence their repeated encroachments in Quebec’s areas of jurisdiction which relate to social policies. To weaken Quebec identity, Ottawa is reducing its unconditional transfers to the provinces and imposing itself in these areas that create solidarity.
For Quebec to succeed in separating itself from a Canadian state which has nothing progressive in it, the sovereignists must convince the young and the ambivalent to join them and, to do so, work towards the restoration of Quebec welfare state, which would also take charge of the environmental issue, without giving up on the defense of French Quebec. The nation and solidarity would gain.