The Prime Minister and the opposition leaders catch their breath before launching into the electoral arena.
Beyond the corn roasts and festivals that are the charm of our Quebec summers, they will have to take advantage of these last moments of reflection on their future and their respective political projects.
Here are my little suggestions for summer reading to allow them to refine their weapons.
François Legault: The Canadian Constitution
Courtesy and archival photo, Stevens LeBlanc
His Minister of Justice has dangled the idea that the Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms takes precedence over the Canadian Charter. Beautiful mirage.
As long as the green valleys of a renewed nationalism sparkle, it would still be necessary to master the parameters of the negotiations that await it. In this regard, the Constitution remains the framework to which the CAQ agrees to submit by renouncing sovereignty.
Dominique Anglade: Vanish ? by Jacques Houlé
Courtesy and archival photo, Stevens LeBlanc
In this essay, this former federal civil servant argues that at the rate things are going “the majority of French-Canadian ancestry could disappear below the 50% mark during the course of the century”. This speech will certainly outrage supporters of the PLQ. But as Sun Tzu wrote in theart of warit is impossible to win without knowing the adversary.
If Dominique Anglade wants to hope to win back the French-speaking electorate, she will have to understand his anxieties rather than reproach him for adhering to a divisive discourse.
Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois: The left without the people by Eric Conan
Photo courtesy and archives, QMI Agency
Why has the left gradually lost the massive working-class and lower-middle-class membership on which its greatest victories have rested? This is the existential question to which the French essayist Éric Conan tries to answer.
Essential reading if Québec solidaire wants to avoid the excesses of the left and hope to make gains beyond its current strongholds.
Eric Duhaime: The paranoid style by Richard Hofstadter
Photo Chantal Poirier and courtesy
This mythical essay from the 1960s on the propensity for conspiracy that plagues the American right has never been so topical. By exploring “the paranoid style” nourished by distrust and anger, this essay explores the excesses that result from it.
Essential reading for a leader of the PCQ who will have to be wary and ultimately free himself from his conspiratorial wing.
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon: The man in the arena by Theodore Roosevelt
Photo courtesy and QMI Agency, Thierry Laforce
It is among the finest political speeches ever made. An ode to the challenges awaiting the leader of the PQ.
“It’s not the critic who counts… All the credit goes to the one who really steps into the arena, whose face is covered in sweat, dust and blood, who fights valiantly, who makes mistakes, who fail again and again… who better will know ultimately the triumph of success and who, at worst, if he fails, will have dared boldly, and will know that his place has never been among cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor failure. »
♦ As for the heads of the federal scene, I reserve my reading suggestions for them next Sunday.