Sovereignty dream remains alive, Lisée says
The Parti Québécois might have put the referendum on hold, but make no mistake about it: the ultimate goal is still independence, party leader Jean-François Lisée said Friday.
And despite attempts by the “self-proclaimed prosecutors,” in the Liberal party to portray the PQ as intolerant, the party will never apologize for trying to make Quebec a true secular state and ensure a real integration of immigrants.
But he offered an olive branch on the thorny issue of language and CEGEP finances. Lisée said he believes it is possible to woo francophone and allophones into the French system by improving English teaching there and not necessarily turning off the tap for the English system.
“It is possible to learn English without becoming English,” he said running down the list of former PQ leaders who were bilingual and even (Bernard Landry) trilingual without giving up their identity.
Ironically, at an earlier workshop, delegates defied his appeal to not nitpick on language and voted for a fresh crackdown on English, including a return to French-only signs. The motions are unlikely to survive the full plenary vote Saturday.
In a long meandering speech to 1,500 péquistes opening a party policy convention and one day before a critical confidence vote on his leadership, Lisée tried to hit all the right notes to appease the hard and moderate wings of the party.
Front and centre was a long introduction on everything the PQ has done to improve Quebec in the years it has been in power.
But he offered the troops something to dream about, too, now that the party under his leadership has read the writing on the wall and shelved a referendum until 2022.
“Some are surprised to hear us talk about independence on every occasion since the referendum is not imminent,” Lisée said. “I say to them: get unsurprised.
“Independence is a solution to our immediate problems, not just the historic ones.
“We are indépendantistes (for independence) each and every day. We are not réferendistes (pushing referendums) each and every day.”
He said if elected in 2018 the PQ will spend the years leading to 2022 to “prepare and inform Quebecers on the independence deal of 2022.
“As a government, we will give muscle tone and pride to Quebec,” Lisée said. “As a movement, we will painstakingly prepare our independence proposal for 2022. We have to get over the first hump. That is the election of October 2018.”
And to crank up pride in the troops, Lisée asked people who voted in the 1980 and 1995 sovereignty referendum to stand up before he segued into a section saying his arrival as leader has sparked a new generation of sovereignists from diverse backgrounds. And that includes anglophones. Switching to English, he said: “We know how disappointed you are by the current Liberal government. It’s time for a change. For a good, clean, green government.”
Then, tongue firmly in cheek, Lisée added: “And there’s one thing of which you can be certain. With the PQ, the anglo vote will never be taken for granted.”
The remark drew loud applause and plenty of chuckles. The Coalition Avenir Québec opposition uses the same line to woo anglos in its “Join us,” video.
Lisée’s speech was a key moment of the day. As of Saturday morning, delegates are to start voting on his leadership. Lisée has only been leader a year, but the party’s antiquated statues require a confidence vote after every election.
Appearing calm as he arrived at the Palais des congrès in the morning, Lisée insisted he is not worried and would not speculate on the number he hopes to attain. “I feel confident,” he said. But without the sovereignty issue to kick around, delegates fell back on language.
In the afternoon, language hawks Friday seized control of debate in a party workshop, pushing through a series of hard line language measures, including a return to unilingual French commercial signs and applying the Charter of the French Language to daycares.
Despite Lisée’s message the party should avoid nitpicking on the small stuff, the mood of the workshop swung the other way.
Not only did delegates vote to scrap the current formula allowing French and English on indoor signs as long as French is predominate, they said a PQ government would use the controversial constitutional notwithstanding clause to override the Charter of Rights and make signs French only.
The workshop also adopted to extend charter provisions to Quebec’s public daycare network.
And they departed from party doctrine on small- and mediumsize businesses. While the party used to say firms with 25 to 50 employees would need francization certificates under a PQ government, the workshop voted to toughen that and apply it to mom and pop firms with 10 employees and up.
All this and the workshop didn’t even have time to debate a package of other motions on English CEGEP financing, which is the area where the party brass thought it might have trouble.