Whether they are in the PQ or lurking in the Caquist shadow, a good number of independentists believe that Quebec solidaire practices a front sovereignty.
In both the platform and the QS program, independence does not appear until the very end, although it has always been the first objective of the PQ, which will reaffirm it loud and clear at the end of week in Trois-Rivières. It is true that in the polls, a small majority of voters in solidarity support the Yes.
It is perhaps to dispel this unfortunate impression of an imposed figure that the parliamentary wing of QS recently published a set of texts signed by each of its deputies, which explains why, in the field for which it is the bearer – I say, it is important for Quebec to become a country.
Do not be mistaken about the meaning of the title of this collection: What binds us. It is above all not a call for the “convergence” of the sovereignist parties, which the solidarity activists had brutally rejected at the May 2017 congress. On the contrary, each page gives us a better understanding of why rapprochement is impossible.
It was undoubtedly inevitable that the failure of 1995 would cause the collapse of the coalition that the PQ managed to maintain for nearly 30 years, but the federalists had perhaps not realized the full significance of a victory which seemed so tight though.
Recalling the phrase dear to Bernard Landry, “Independence is neither on the left nor on the right, it is forward”, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois said he was surprised that we wanted to propose to Quebecers to achieve it without they know what it would be for. Yet he is too intelligent not to have understood that this was simply an illustration of the proverb that one should not put the cart before the horse.
The parliamentary leader of QS is right to say that the independence project must lead to a better life for the greatest number, but we never imagined how much it could change our lives.
According to the member for Laurier-Dorion, Andrès Fontecilla, a sovereign Quebec could free itself from neoliberalism and capitalist globalization. A multitude of countries that have been independent for centuries would certainly be very happy to know the recipe.
His colleague from Taschereau, Catherine Dorion, is sorry “most of us, adults squared off by the obsession with work and the stupefaction of screens, are handicapped in art”. It is undoubtedly very sad, but could independence really cure us of these terrible evils?
Either way, Canadian federalism is too centralizing, but we must not mix everything up. The MNA for Rouyn-Noranda – Témiscamingue, Émilise Lessard-Therrien, is undoubtedly right to want to “bring power closer to the world”, but it is difficult to see what these “mastodons” that the CISSS and CIUSSS are doing in the debate on sovereignty. “When the captains are in Quebec, they cannot be moved by the staff and the services which are sinking”, she laments, but is it really Ottawa’s fault that they lack empathy?
On the environment, even the PQ would agree with the member for Sherbrooke, Christine Labrie, when she writes that we can no longer “wait for Canada to overcome its dependence on the fossil fuel industry”.
She adds that independence will finally rid us of this deplorable “extractivist vocation” which dates back to New France and the fur trade. In other words, how can we be asked to be proud of our ancestors, who were really just a bunch of exploiters?
From one text to another, the absence of the word “nation” is striking. Rather, they all speak of “the peoples of Quebec”. The only one who escapes is the deputy for Rosemont, Vincent Marissal, former political columnist at Press, which relates an old conversation with Bernard Landry, to whom he stressed that the preservation of culture was “at the heart of the concept of nation”. Fortunately, he recovered quickly, his new family having made him understand the quaint, bourgeois and egocentric character of this concept.
The independence of Quebec can in fact also be that of the “First Peoples”, which is “unattainable within the Canadian framework”. They also have the right to self-determination, but there is no mention anywhere of the integrity of Quebec’s territory. What would happen if our native “sisters and brothers” decided that the Quebec framework was not suitable for them either?
“To dream in politics is to project oneself into a horizon that sometimes exceeds what the opinion of the majority of a given period considers to be possible”, estimates the deputy of Jean-Lesage, Sol Zanetti. According to him, resigning ourselves to too narrow a vision of what is “possible” or “realistic” would be fatal for us. In other words, he concludes, “there is an urgent need to dream”. And there is nothing like leading by example, one might add.