We are on the evening of March 11, 1996. Four months earlier, Quebec had passed a few tens of thousands of votes to say “yes” to sovereignty.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Political passions are still at their peak. Lucien Bouchard became Premier of Quebec on January 29. He thinks he will succeed where his predecessor Jacques Parizeau narrowly failed. He doesn’t know when or how yet. But that’s his mandate.
That evening, when he took the stage at the Théâtre du Centaur, formerly the Montreal Stock Exchange, he did not come to plead for independence. He comes to reassure the English-speaking community of Montreal, still traumatized by the virtual break-up of Canada.
Also reassure the rest of Canada, Americans and investors. What will be the place of the English-speaking community in an independent Quebec?
They are 400 leaders, chosen in collaboration with Alliance Quebec, who came to listen to the Prime Minister. English-language TV and “Radio-Québec” broadcast the “historical” speech live.
I listened again1 this remarkable 45-minute speech, 26 years later. What is most striking is not so much the solemn commitment of the head of government to guarantee the rights of the English-speaking minority in an eventual sovereign Quebec. This is his very vision of nationalism: pluralist and inclusive.
What is also striking in contrast is the extent to which François Legault has not yet taken the trouble to clearly articulate a vision of nationalism in which this minority finds its place.
Is it only for the CAQ or potentially CAQ electorate?
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
François Legault, then Minister of Education, and Lucien Bouchard, Premier of Quebec, in February 2001
Refusing the electoral debate in English, in the current context, is another way of saying: I’m not talking to you.
As an eminent Péquiste whispered to me recently: it is time for François Legault to make his own “Centaur speech”.
Back to March 1996, in this room full of people with arms crossed, attentive but doubtful, interested but worried.
Lucien Bouchard, who speaks almost exclusively in English, begins by taking note of this concern. “The unthinkable”, that is to say the independence of Quebec, can still happen, and he is working on it, he says bluntly. But the fact that some Anglophones, and the younger generation in particular, are worried to the point of thinking about leaving Quebec is “for me a cause for concern,” he says.
He tells them that he comes from Saguenay, and that he has only been living in Montreal for six years and understands better how much the English-speaking community is part of the “fibre” of the city and of Quebec.
He insists on the “shared values” of the two main Montreal cultures: “pluralism and this shared taste for the culture of the other”. It emphasizes the attachment of Anglo-Montrealers to Quebec, to this completely original meeting place, a “blessed” place.
During his defense of the Meech Lake Accord, intended to recognize Quebec’s distinct character in the Constitution, he encountered much hostility in Canada – in addition to Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jean Chrétien. But he always had the massive support of Anglo-Quebecers for this “beautiful risk”, he says.
Like his predecessors, he made a “solemn commitment” to preserve the rights of the English-speaking community: control of educational institutions, access to health care and social services, to the courts and to government in English. He intends to include them in an eventual Quebec Constitution. For him, minority rights are not exorbitant, but an example to follow.
When he was responsible for official languages in the federal government, he was angry at the meager services offered to Francophones in the West, some of whom end their days without even having access to care in their language.
“Never, ever will anything like this happen in Quebec,” he says. Because the Government of Quebec intends to be an example for “all minorities in North America”.
“When you go to the hospital and you are in pain, you may need a blood test, but certainly not a language test. »
I come back to the Bouchardian vision of nationalism.
“We all know that the nationalism we defend is no longer defined as that of French Canadians, but of all Quebecers. It no longer seeks homogeneity, but embraces plurality and diversity. »
He even attacked the federal government, which wanted to make June 24 a holiday “just for French Canadians”, when it was for all Quebecers. “Welcome to the 1990s,” he says.
We have an official and common language, French, but it is not the only one. “Nothing pleases me more than many bilingual Quebecers can have access to at least two great cultures in their original version,” he adds, inviting the audience to “leave behind old conceptions.”
Because it is now “difficult to find an English speaker who thinks it is impossible to learn French”, just as it is “difficult to find a bilingual French-speaking nationalist who is not happy to practice his English”.
Linguistic tolerance took root in us, but we were too busy [par nos débats politiques] to celebrate it.
Lucien Bouchard, in a speech delivered in March 1996
It then announces the birth of an era of mutual interest. The end of the era where what English lost, French gained, and vice versa.
The English-speaking community is an “essential component” of our metropolis, it shapes its culture and history, and we should be proud of this crossroads city, one of the most original in the world.
Seems to me that’s just as true in 2022…
The speech was not applauded equally by everyone that evening. Bouchard was still the man through whom sovereignty might come. The more radical nationalists did not taste this “establishment seduction enterprise”, as National Action.
A few months later, before activists on the Parti Québécois National Council, Bouchard was clear: “Don’t count on me… to violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms or have to resort to the derogatory clause, the notwithstanding clause! I want to still be able to look at myself in the mirror when I get up in the morning. »
To see his immoderate use of the “derogation provisions” of the Canadian and Quebec charters, Simon Jolin-Barrette clearly does not have the same philosophy of morning shaving.
We are at a turning point in the political debate, with the upcoming adoption of Bill 96. The Prime Minister rejects the concerns of the Anglophone community as unfounded. They are however well documented on several subjects. These are not purely theoretical fears, in my opinion.
But whether this is the case or not, the time has come for François Legault to articulate his vision of linguistic living together. To give his Centaur speech.