MONTREAL — At the same time as his party prepares to deploy a new sovereignty campaign, a Quebec cabinet minister says the Quebec-Canada relationship is on the rocks as never before.
“We are a couple in its final phase,” Jean-François Lisée said. “We speak less and less. We are no longer even angry. We have passed that stage.
“We are indifferent. We are indifferent to each other.”
The minister responsible for international relations, Montreal and the anglophone community, Lisée made the remarks in a speech to students at the Université de Montréal as part of sovereignty week.
It was quite a different audience from last week, when Lisée met with residents of Westmount and held a news conference with the Quebec Community Groups Network.
“I never censor myself, in French or English,” Lisée quipped later when asked about the different clientèle Wednesday.
In fact, Lisée mentioned his work with the anglophone community to the diverse group of students even though some of it has made him the brunt of editorial cartoonists and columnists.
His speech also hinted about where the PQ is headed with its sovereignty plans this winter despite its minority status in the National Assembly.
For one thing, a new sovereignty “action plan,” is in the works and will be up for approval by PQ party members when they gather for a council meeting Feb. 8-9 in Drummondville.
According to Le Devoir, the plan will include the deployment of a new advertising and communication strategy designed to show Quebecers the advantages the PQ says Quebec would have as a separate country.
Inside the PQ, the strategy is known as the “sovereignty governance,” plan, a kind of soft-sell approach to awakening interest in the idea.
Lisée connected the plan to his speech when he asked students to think of how much energy is currently being wasted by Quebec fighting things Ottawa does that the province does not like.
Climate change policy is one, abolishing the long gun registry another. So are recent reforms to employment insurance. The list goes on.
“Our presence in Canada obliges us to always be on the defensive,” Lisée said. “We are at the limit of what we can do for the good of Quebec because of our presence in Canada.”
And Lisée told the students — many of whom were too young to remember the two previous sovereignty referendums in Quebec — that much has changed.
The emotional reaction seen in English Canada around 1995 has been replaced by indifference while the idea that Quebec is more a burden then an asset to the federation has taken hold, Lisée said.
Polls now show 50 per cent of Canadians don’t feel any particular attachment to the province, he noted.
In Quebec, faced with the policies of a prime minister like Stephen Harper, anglophones here feel more Québécois than ever, Lisée argued.
“We (sovereignists) need to go and get everyone, we need more francophones, more allophones, more anglophones,” Lisée said. He said there is no animosity to the rest of the country but when young Quebecers dream of their future they think more about London or Shanghai than Vancouver or Ottawa.
He predicted a soft landing for the option by comparing it to a hockey game.
“The end of the Quebec-Canada Cup will be much more seen as an inevitability that needs to be managed then a catastrophe to be avoided,” Lisée said.