What sort of distinctiveness or freedom does the Bloc Québécois propose for an independent Quebec?
Perhaps Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet has a hidden, grand vision of a sovereign Quebec, strengthened with a muscular cultural nationalism as a bulwark against the grey, homogenizing forces of globalization.
It would certainly be at odds with the party’s public platform.
If fulfilled, the Bloc’s independent Quebec would amount to little more than a smaller, francophone version of Justin Trudeau’s Canada. It would be a French-speaking, socially liberal and environmentalist state that prioritizes pensions above all else, if Blanchet’s wheeling and dealing with the Liberal government is any indication.
Blanchet is effectively extorting Trudeau to transfer more wealth to people over 65 who are already Canada’s wealthiest demographic. After the NDP’s bloodless withdrawal from their supply and confidence deal with the Liberals, Trudeau has turned to the Bloc to pass legislation and survive confidence votes, with a boost in pensions being Blanchet’s first demand.
Pierre Trudeau is rolling in his grave, and former Quebec premier René Lévesque’s ghost is laughing at him. However, one of the strongest voices opposing Blanchet’s conditional support for the Trudeau government is current Quebec Premier François Legault, whose Coalition Avenir Quebec has come to embody conservative nationalism in the province.
Legault has strongly urged the Bloc to vote with the federal Conservatives in Ottawa to defeat the Liberals in a confidence vote and trigger an election.
Trudeau and Legault have sparred repeatedly over the past year, with Legault attacking the federal government for overstepping into the province’s jurisdictions and refusing to address the growing number of asylum seekers and temporary immigrants in Quebec.
In the past, Blanchet, too, has called for more powers being devolved to Quebec regarding immigration but evidently does not consider it a matter worthy of bringing down the Trudeau government. On Saturday, Legault went even further by resharing a post on X accusing Blanchet of being an accomplice of Trudeau.
In Lévesque’s true spirit, and in contrast to Legault, Blanchet is an old-school sovereigntist, whose vision of Quebec nationalism is mostly a combination of social democracy and the French language.
Ironically, Blanchet appears not unlike people of his age in the rest of Canada, who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s with a distinct culture that endures in their social circles and can be taken for granted, unlike those who were raised in 21st century Canada.
Older conservatives in Canada are often beset by the idea that the Canada they know and love can be preserved by tax cuts and deregulation, just as Blanchet appears to believe the Quebecois can endure with the bones of high taxes and richer pensions.
Fortunately, the Bloc no longer holds a monopoly on nationalism in Quebec, and has not for more than a decade. A great cleavage broke nationalism in two, with the rise of Legault’s CAQ government, which is culturally nationalist but not sovereigntist.
The CAQ has strengthened the French language laws in the province, while actively investing in new institutions like a museum of the Quebecois nation in Quebec City. The government has also not shied away from defending controversial historic leaders like Maurice Duplessis. Furthermore and most controversially, the CAQ have been near- uncompromising defenders of secularism in Quebec amidst debates over religious headgear and symbols in the provinces’ public sector.
While the CAQ’s nationalism is firmly undergirded by a strong sense of the nation as a cultural and historical concept that must be actively nurtured and defended, the Bloc’s can only treat the Quebec nation as an economic entity.
Despite being a federal party, the Bloc would likely play a key role in forming the government of a sovereign Quebec. Blanchet and the Bloc itself may not be a post-nationalist party by intention, but Quebec would be exactly that by outcome if the Bloc helped lead it after independence.
From the onset of the sovereignty movement, its proponents have made common cause with the global left, and expressed solidarity with the decolonial revolutionaries of the third-world. Do they seriously expect that the global gang who enjoy toppling statues of “colonizers” and would “decolonize” colonoscopies if they could will treat the Quebecois as part of the team?
Europeans in Europe itself are being assailed by the decolonial movement, so do not expect the European diasporas to be spared, regardless of their former solidarity with Algerian or Latin American revolutionaries.
What would Blanchet do about the fact that Quebecois students in Montreal high schools are already being mocked by students from other backgrounds. According to the testimony of many current and former students, the Quebecois are assailed by the same accusations that they amount to little more than invasive, colonial “settlers”.
A Fleur-de-lis as a national symbol, and cities bearing names like “Trois-Rivières”?
Their axing would be among the first propositions in an independent, post-national Quebec, just as there are calls for Manitoba’s flag to be replaced and Kitchener’s Victoria Park renamed because it is too “colonial”.
Blanchet himself stated that conservative values are not Quebec values, thereby excluding a huge swath of nationalist Quebecers on the right.
Herein lies Blanchet’s naïvety. While remarkably unique, an independent Quebec would not be immune to the trends of left-wing governments around the world, nationalist or otherwise.
Whether it be the Bloc, England’s Labour, or the Scottish Nationalist Party, left-wing parties have boiled their vision of national identity down to social democracy, and little else, even if they are nationalist.
An English university recently ignited a firestorm by scrubbing their curriculum clean of the term “Anglo-Saxon” in a bid to “decolonize it, in England. Ask the average Labour voter what makes them proud to be English and they’ll probably reply with the National Health Service (NHS), and little of their cultural, political, or martial history.
Jean Luc-Melenchon, the French firebrand who leads the largest party on France’s left, has come out against the historical and cultural concept of his own country. Language is no barrier to this anti-national wave, which goes far further than post-nationalism.
The simple fact is that in this world of globalization, the state needs to defend cultural identity to the hilt for a distinct people to survive. A Bloc-led independent state would simply result in a unilingual, Quebec-sized version of post-national, Liberal Canada, whether they like it or not.
In Quebec, it would mean endless, groveling apologies for historical wrongs, delivered in French; textbooks, also in French, portraying the Quebecois as colonial “settlers”; and most importantly, French-language administration of pensions.
Just as the NHS makes the average Labour voter proud to be English, pensions would become the symbol of Bloc’s pride in a sovereign Quebec, and nothing more.
National Post