BY CELINE COOPER - Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois deserves credit for weathering a tumultuous few months of MNA defections, calls for her resignation, and underwhelming public support. Recent polls show that the PQ has rebounded. If a spring election were called, there are solid indications that Marois could hold her own against both François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec and Jean Charest’s Liberals.
This renewed success can be attributed, in large part, to Marois’s capitulation to the party hardliners on a number of issues, including a promise to lower the voting age to 16, implement citizen-initiated referendums and ramp up the push for independence.
To that last end, Marois has assembled a new committee on sovereignty – a committee made up entirely of white francophones and mostly men. Of the 12 politicians, union leaders, intellectuals, artists and actors in the group, only three (including Marois) are women.
If the Parti Québécois’s dream of a future independent Quebec looks anything like this committee, it may be in for a shock when it wakes up to reality.
According to committee member Daniel Paillé, leader of the Bloc Québécois, the group’s job is to “convince a majority of Quebecers of the soundness of sovereignty.” Given this mandate, I think it is fair to shine a spotlight on who has been chosen to represent and define the parameters of the PQ’s “national project.” It is also important to highlight who is absent from the table.
Over the next few decades, Quebec society will be redefined by massive generational shifts, economic uncertainty, immigration and globalization. If the PQ comes to power and follows through on its promise to hold another referendum, you can add constitutional and political upheaval to that brew.
Quebec’s low fertility and high mortality rates mean that immigration is essential for sustaining our population growth over the next 20 to 30 years and beyond. This reality will hold whether we remain in the Canadian federation or not. As in other Western societies faced with similar demographic shifts, the social fabric of Quebec will look, sound and behave very differently in the not-so-distant future than it does today.
Countries all over the world are competing for human resources and global talent. If Quebecers choose to hold a third sovereignty referendum, this province will face serious economic and social challenges in recruiting and retaining Canadians from other parts of the country and immigrants from other parts of the world. It is dishonest to pretend that Quebec will be immune from these pressures. As the PQ and its committee embark on the task of updating an existing 148 studies on sovereignty, the impulse should be to engage with new ideas and new people, to see opportunity in a new and diverse demographic, to tackle the difficult, exciting and complex challenges that will define the 21st century.
Instead, the Parti Québécois seems almost pathologically obsessed with the past. The PQ’s L’Atelier website (atelier.pq.org), for example, features an imposing picture of René Lévesque in Uncle Sam-like pose ordering citizens to get politically active. The slogan “Maîtres chez nous: Phase II” – a throwback to the cri de coeur of the Quiet Revolution – is the title of the PQ energy and resource independence project being led by Daniel Breton. I have been told the idea here is to highlight the party’s consistency, to show that the PQ has stayed true to its roots and is committed to fighting for what it has always fought for: a sovereign nation where the peuple québécois are in control of their own destiny.
The PQ’s strategy for success appears to hinge on reassuring the dominant francophone majority that it is the party that represents their history, values and interests better than any other. The composition of the committee on sovereignty reflects this inclination.
Yet many will recall the icy chill that swept Quebec when PQ leader Jacques Parizeau dropped the “money and ethnic votes” bomb on the evening of the 1995 referendum. Since then, concentrated efforts have been made by nationalist intellectuals, politicians, institutions and citizen groups toward transitioning from an ethno-linguistic conception of “nation” to a civic, territorial understanding premised on an intercultural model that advocates French as the common public language and the site of cultural convergence. Over the years, Quebecers have invested genuine emotional labour in grappling with what it means to belong to or identify with the Quebec nation, particularly as it intersects with questions of language and ethnicity.
One would think that the members of this committee – including Jean-François Lisée, who was Parizeau’s adviser at the time of the 1995 referendum – would remember this chill at a visceral level. Instead, they all seem genuinely puzzled by the fact that anyone would see the committee’s uniformity as a problem. “Nothing stops us from adding other representatives with other points of view or from cultural communities,” Marois was quoted as saying.
Real civic engagement involves more than “adding” “other” points of view from “cultural communities.”
I question how much sound political innovation Marois’s committee on sovereignty can collectively generate.
***
Twitter: Celine Cooperis a Montrealer and a PhD candidate in sociology and equity studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.