PQ can’t have it both ways on diversity plan

If there were any doubt that Quebec’s sovereignty movement remains largely rooted in ethnocentrism, many Parti Québécois members reminded the province this past weekend that they are unwilling to take concrete steps to change that.

Former PQ leadership candidate Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, a progressive lawyer and youth advocate, was tasked by leader Jean-François Lisée last year with pursuing strategies to increase party membership among minority communities. Both men seem sincere in their shared desire to have a more diverse PQ, but both also seem rather naïve about how inherently unwelcoming the sovereignist movement continues to be for linguistic and ethnic minorities.

Plamondon recruited nearly 5,000 new members during his leadership race last year. Imagine the disappointment of some of his former delegates, believing the PQ had turned a corner and was becoming a more open party, watching Sunday’s national council meeting as members voted down two inoffensive motions that would have finally made room for new perspectives ahead of next year’s provincial election.

PQ members rejected Plamondon’s motion on firm quotas for youth representation among 2018 candidates (one third would have been under 40) and, more worrisomely, another to simply try to ensure that there would be at least one person belonging to a minority cultural community on each riding executive. It is evidently too much to ask of the PQ to even attempt to find one qualified person per riding who isn’t a white francophone to aid in executive decision-making.

It’s not as if Plamondon asked that members of minority communities be represented in proportion to their numbers in Quebec, or anything close to it; he was just asking the party to follow through on its diversity rhetoric with a bare minimum of outreach.

Quebec’s leading sovereignist party is unambiguous about its reluctance to cater to minority voters. Giving lip service to tolerance and diversity is about as far as the PQ seems willing to go.

The diversity decision came about following a show of hands in an open assembly; Plamondon said later he “thought that it passed” as the result seemed unclear to some, including a Le Devoir reporter in attendance, but was quickly deemed rejected by the meeting’s chairperson.

Lisée then committed to at least attempting to find 20 minority candidates (out of 125) to run in the election, which would be representative of Quebec diversity.

As a (mostly) modern liberaldemocrat leading a sovereignty movement propped up by the sheer stubbornness of socially conservative baby boomers, Lisée is the PQ’s tightrope-walker-inchief. As he advocates for diversity, Lisée simultaneously outlines his desire for a new state based on the “common values, history and language that defines us.”

The PQ simply can’t have it both ways. Either it is leading a sovereignty movement based on the uniqueness of Québécois ethnicity in North America as it has unsuccessfully for four decades, or it acknowledges the reality of diversity in Western democracies, razes the establishment’s noxious ethnocentric power structures and crafts sustainable policies based on ideas over identities.

Questionable leadership places péquistes squarely on the losing end of the world-wide globalism vs. nationalism debate, perpetually wary of diverse perspectives, foreign and domestic. The party’s efforts to continue building a nation in the image of the cultural majority imply a rejection of diversity.

Following the failure in 2013 of its Charter of Values publicsector dress code, the PQ chose for years to avoid apologizing for having insulted Quebecers whose religious customs mandate certain garb. The party implied through its proposed law that members of religious minorities were more likely than Catholics to allow their faith to interfere with the way they carried out public duties.

The sovereignty movement’s lack of diversity needn’t be a mystery; the PQ’s diversity plan is a symbolic gesture from progressive-minded leaders who don’t seem to be aware they are trapped in an inescapably regressive movement.