While the PQ leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, has recently become even more locked into his promise to hold a referendum on sovereignty whatever its chances of success, it is important to remember that beyond ideals and good feelings, politics proves implacable for people incapable of learning lessons from the past.
Should we insist for long on the fact that a referendum success is currently very improbable, if only because Quebecers have clearly demonstrated during the pandemic that they prioritize security over freedom? A new defeat would sink them collectively even more than the previous two.
The denial of Canada French
The main lesson to be learned from the past is THE reason why the assertive approach resulting from the Quiet Revolution not only failed, but made the situation substantially worse: this approach was too far from what “ordinary” Quebecers really wanted, and of what they probably still want today.
What Quebecers really aspired to was not independence, but a relationship with the rest of the country that was no longer based so much on a British Conquest that they had suffered two centuries earlier and on which Canada that they had historically brought into the world – this is a crucial point – remained structurally constructed.
The Quiet Revolution had nothing anti-Canadian at the start, essentially wanting to be a modernization and an affirmation of Quebec within Canada and not outside of it.
But starting in the late 1960s, too many elites and intellectuals mistook their desires for reality. They acted as if Quebec had begun in 1960, as if there had not previously been, for more than a century after the failure of the Patriot Rebellion, a French Canada that was too reactionary and too colonist for them. taste so that we keep something.
It is this shameful denial of this past full of accumulated energy and power which made all these beautiful people forget that the Quebec resulting from the Quiet Revolution remained too deeply Canadian to ensure the success of the sovereignist adventure.
This allowed Pierre Elliott Trudeau, re-founder of today’s Canada to our detriment, to use the lost referendum of 1980 to divert for his purposes the enormous energy wasted in a sovereignist ideal which achieved nothing. His solemn “I understand you” to Quebecers before the 1980 vote would result, unfairly for the people from whom he came, by a reduction in the powers of the only government controlled by a French-speaking majority on the continent.
Which would open the way to this limitless Canadian multiculturalism which is killing us little by little, as Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon rightly reminds us.
We are the founding people of Canada
It is also not possible to change the increasingly unhealthy dynamic structuring the relationship between Canada and Quebec if we forget that Quebecers are the basic Canadians in terms of identity, that they are them – and they alone – who constitute the founding people of Canada historically.
A Canadian at the start is a Canayen, a resident of the St. Lawrence Valley who speaks French. It was this way for most of Canadian history, almost 200 years, from the late 17th centurye century – in Versailles, New France was called “Canada” – until the end of the 19th centurye century. During these two centuries, the only ones to call themselves and to be called by others “Canadians” were the ancestors of today’s French speakers.
And the natives in there? When the British arrived in 1763, they were confronted with former Canadians living alongside “Indians” who would never have thought of calling themselves Canadians. The first inhabitants of the country are paradoxically the most recent Canadians in terms of identity, the Oka Crisis having contributed, at the beginning of the 1990s, to this late Canadianization of Native Americans.
For almost the entire history of the country, the latter were excluded from the national community, confined in reserves set up by the federal government – not by Quebec -, an odious system with analogies with apartheid in Africa from South.
If Quebecers are reluctant to leave a Canada where they are increasingly marginalized and despised, it is largely because of these things.
More than a third defeat causing it to lose even more freedom and power, Quebec’s priority should be the fight against delusional multiculturalism and for French, as well as the constitutional recognition that it constitutes a distinct society within from Canada.
Instead of painting himself into the corner as he seems to be doing, Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon should keep at least the possibility of changing his mind on his referendum.
*The author has just published the essay More freedom than ever to the United Publishers.
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reference: www.lapresse.ca