François Legault delivered a strong, essential, poignant speech, even yesterday, to come to the defense of the Quebec nation, attacked, as he says himself, during the debate in English of the current federal campaign.
He was right to do so, and also right to use Robert Bourassa’s phrase, saying in his own way that whatever we say, and whatever we do, Quebec is a nation entitled to defend its identity, its language, culture, values. He recalled, in other words, our fundamental right to national existence.
However, he went less far than Robert Bourassa, in 1990, who also recalled our right to decide our future, in other words, our right to self-determination, in other words, our right to independence.
Yet he should have.
Because what happened during the debate in English is not an isolated event, but a revelation of what English Canada thinks out loud about us, if we take the trouble to listen to it.
In English Canada, the racist character of Quebec society is taken for granted, and the discriminatory nature of the laws ensuring the defense of French and secularism as well. In fact, English Canada sees our pretension to form a nation as a form of ethnic supremacism.
In the federation, our fate is that of a folklore minority renouncing our status as founding people and submitting to the ambient multiculturalism which sees in any affirmed national culture an expression of systemic racism.
English Canada also unabashedly exploited the indigenous cause to challenge our status as a founding people.
We must not forget either that the 1982 regime Canadianized and mentally Trudeau the new arrivals and limited their integration into the historic Francophone majority. The accelerated transformation of Quebec’s political landscape and the proliferation of liberal protected counties bear witness to this.
François Legault should therefore have gone further.
He cannot be satisfied with big speeches, no matter how deep they are.
He sees clearly, because he has the eyes to see it, that our existence as a people in the federation is subject to a permanent process, which inhibits the expression of our identity and destroys our way of perceiving ourselves, forcing us to justify in permanently our right to exist.
What does he say in the face of the demographic collapse of Quebec in Canada, and of francophones throughout the federation and in Quebec itself?
Does he really believe that an increasingly minority can control its destiny in a federation which despises and scolds it?
The nationalism of which he masters the rhetorical codes can only be rhetoric. Beyond the circumstances, which by definition fluctuate and vary, Quebec is condemned to always fight to the last energy for choices that are nevertheless minimalist affecting its survival as a people in the federation.
We can return the famous formula, because whatever we say and whatever we do, Quebec, in the Canadian federation, is condemned to ethnic stunting, to demographic dissolution, to political marginalization, to historical erasure.
Does François Legault really imagine a national destiny in Wokanada? Does he sincerely believe that the people of Quebec, as a whole of Canada, can flourish, make their choices, decide for themselves, ensure their linguistic and cultural survival, and define their own model of integration to ensure that those who will join him really take the fold of the historical French-speaking majority?
Is it not time, in other words, that François Legault began to consider, in one way or another, the possibility of Quebec independence and to work to reconcile Quebecers with this idea?
Deep down, he probably does. But it’s time to walk the talk. Before it’s too late.
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