The National Assembly sits for its last question period of the spring session, Friday, June 16, 2017 at the legislature in Quebec City.
“Je me souviens” — I remember — is Quebec’s motto. But when history is inconvenient for current purposes, the province’s political class ignores it.
This week, the Parti Québécois’s national council rejected a resolution in favour of having at least one cultural minority on each of its riding executives. Even that modest objective was unrealistic, since minorities are scarce outside the Montreal area, and minorities who support the PQ even scarcer.
The resolution was a watered-down version of a recommendation in a report by Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, an adviser to PQ leader Jean-François Lisée, on his province-wide consultation on how to “renew” the party.
The report acknowledged that the PQ has a “deficit of trust” among minorities, but minimized both the seriousness of the problem and the party’s responsibility for creating it.
It implied that the mistrust had arisen only in recent years, and that the PQ’s only faults lay in its neglect of minorities and its ill-fated proposal of a “charter of values” opposing Muslim religious practices in particular.
It also pointed a finger at anti-PQ propaganda and the failure of minorities themselves to integrate into the majority.
The values charter was not an aberration, however. From the PQ’s founding nearly a half-century ago right up to today, its trademark has been identity politics pitting the French-speaking majority against minorities.
Its primary objective is based on identity: to give francophones a national state in which they would be masters in their own house.
Throughout its history, the PQ has spoken of minorities as threats against which the majority must be protected.
And only last year, Lisée’s opportunistic embrace of identity politics put him over the top in the PQ leadership election
The PQ, however, is not alone in refusing to face its own responsibility for problems it blames on others.
When federalists outside Quebec either refused Liberal Premier Philippe Couillard’s recent invitation to a “dialogue” leading to constitutional negotiations or simply ignored it, they were criticized in this province.
But whether it’s in the document containing Couillard’s invitation or in media commentary, such as an editorial in La Presse translated in the Globe and Mail, this province’s political class has offered no reason to hope that constitutional negotiations would succeed.
Just as arrogantly, it has scarcely acknowledged the reason for the constitutional “taboo,” let alone proposed a way to eliminate it.
That reason is the real threat of Canada’s destruction at the hands of a Quebec secessionist movement revived by an inevitable failure of constitutional negotiations on the conflicting demands of this province and every other interest in the country.
Federalists in English Canada remember seeing this movie, even if Quebec’s political class pretends it doesn’t. Those federalists are still traumatized by its ending, in the secessionists’ near-victory in the 1995 referendum.
Contrary to what Brian Mulroney, the prime minister who led those negotiations, told La Presse this week, no serious person in English Canada claims the present Constitution is “perfect.” Rather, it’s that the risks of attempting to improve it far outweigh the chances of succeeding to correct its flaws, which even Couillard admits have not stopped Quebec’s development.
In the last negotiations, federalists used the threat of secession as what the late political scientist Léon Dion called a “knife at the throat” of the rest of Canada. Not only did that strategy ultimately fail, the very existence of the secessionist movement in Quebec now works against this province, by keeping the rest of the country away from the constitutional bargaining table.
As long as there is even a weak secessionist movement in Quebec, the knife will remain. The only way to get rid of it is for this province to renounce, effectively and permanently, its claim of a right to secede from Canada.
For the foreseeable future, however, that’s something all of us can forget.
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