The Bloc members persist in demanding full powers for Quebec in immigration. But party activists, meeting in congress, on Saturday rejected two proposals that would have linked the absence of these powers for the Quebec government with a threat to “social cohesion”.
“We can’t afford that,” decided the MP for Longueuil-Saint-Hubert, Denis Trudel, at the microphone of the committee room which was debating the resolutions at the party convention in Drummondville.
The elected Bloc members are well aware of the risk that this choice of word will bring them bad press. “Immigration is not a problem. It is the lack of how to integrate them into the government that is the problem,” Mr. Trudel later explained to the Duty.
Two resolutions proposed to stipulate, in the Bloc Québécois program, that “when a nation does not have all the powers in matters of immigration, this situation represents an obstacle to social cohesion”. Both were rejected by activists, who were determining on Saturday which proposals will then go to plenary on Sunday to find out their ultimate fate.
François Legault had argued, during the election campaign last fall, that non-Francophone immigration and the decline of French risked threatening “national cohesion”. All the opposition parties in Quebec, including the Parti Quebecois, denounced these remarks by the Quebec premier and leader of the Coalition avenir Quebec.
Full powers required
Anxious to avoid suffering the same fate, the members of the Bloc Québécois therefore avoided falling into the same debate.
They also endorsed a proposal – which will be formally debated on Sunday – calling for “Quebec to obtain the repatriation of full powers with regard to temporary immigration programs”. The Bloc’s program already calls for “full powers in the area of immigration”.
The Bloc members also prioritized a second resolution calling for the “volume of immigration, excluding refugees” to be set to “respect Quebec’s reception and integration capacity”.
They endorsed another opposing “illegal immigration and those who use it to weaken Quebec”.
At the start of the day, the leader of the Bloc, Yves-François Blanchet, had argued in his speech to the troops that a good integration of immigrants goes through education, health, childcare services, art and culture. . “All of this is the jurisdiction of Quebec,” he insisted, also claiming full powers in the matter for Quebec.
A helping hand from chef Blanchet
The chief had also taken care in his speech to insist on being welcoming. “What is a Quebecer? Someone who lives in there, ”he said, showing a map of Quebec to the screens installed on stage behind him.
Only, Ottawa should let Quebec manage the thing on its territory, he hammered. “And we will be able to better receive more new Quebecers, argued Mr. Blanchet. And we would be able to make them happy in French, in a nation whose Bloc Québécois has forced the federalists to recognize unconditionally that it is the Quebec nation, that it has a single common language, a single official language, and so on. ‘is the French. »
Some 350 Bloc Québécois delegates are meeting in convention in Drummondville this weekend to establish the policies that will form their next electoral platform. The fixed-date elections predict that the next federal election will be held in the fall of 2025, but many agree in Ottawa to predict that the elections are likely to be held in 2024 instead.