Who’s still afraid of Quebec separatists?
There might have been no good way for Elizabeth May to handle Pierre Nantel’s separatist outburst on Tuesday: The MP for Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, who was kicked out of the NDP in August and later joined the Greens, told radio host Benoît Dutrizac that for now he intended to fight for Quebec’s interests in Parliament; but in the bigger picture, he said, “let’s separate as fast as possible.”
There were many better ways to handle it, however, than the ones May and her minions came up with. The most obvious would have been to say they were well aware of his views, and explain why they were compatible with running under the Green flag.
Nantel’s position was no secret, after all. “I wonder what we should do, as Quebecers … when we’re sovereigntist but the climate emergency must be solved before independence,” he wrote on Twitter in August, declaring himself a “political orphan.” He joined the Greens three days later.
“The Green party believes in a united Canada, but shares with Mr. Nantel the fundamental belief that nothing is more important than addressing the global climate crisis,” May could have said. “After years of woefully inadequate action by Canada’s two major parties, it is time to set aside our differences and work toward this critical goal.”
May sort of got there in the end, albeit goofily. “First and foremost we are Earthlings,” she told reporters in Victoria. But over the course of a day of damage magnification she also tried to deny ob
jective reality: “(Nantel) is not a separatist; he’s a strong Quebecer within the context of Canada,” she said. Earlier in the day a spokesperson had appealed to a strange bureaucratic argument: Nantel was welcome in the party because not wanting Quebec to separate from Canada wasn’t one of the party’s stated “core values.” (Did it really need to be written down?) And then May said if Nantel actually is a separatist, which he clearly is, she would boot him from the party — core values be damned, apparently.
The good news for May was that her opponents could hardly try to exploit the problem. The Liberals have former Parti Québécois health minister Réjean Hébert running for them — against Nantel in Longueuil, no less. The Conservatives have actively been courting former Bloc Québécois voters, as Althia Raj of Huffington Post reported last year; no less than former Bloc leader Michel Gauthier is now a card-carrying Conservative. Not only was Nantel an NDP MP just a few weeks ago, but the party’s 2011 surge came after a very deliberate outreach campaign to Quebec nationalists. Nycole Turmel was the NDP’s Leader of the Official Opposition in the same calendar year as she was a member of the Bloc (though she claimed never to have been a separatist).
I’m just kidding, of course they could try to exploit it. Shame isn’t a thing in Canadian politics. Partisans of all stripes gleefully took their shots on social media — though party leaders don’t seem to have joined in, and understandably so. When you’re shopping for votes in Quebec and you don’t care where they come from, you don’t want to start slagging off nationalists.
What this whole little kerfuffle shows more than anything else is how totally disconnected Quebec and the Rest of Canada remain. This separatist-as-bogeyman narrative is like something from a period drama: federalism/ separatism hasn’t been a straightline schism in Quebec politics for ages. The NDP under Jack Layton demonstrated it dramatically; the Coalition Avenir Québec’s victory under François Legault, on a specific promise never to endorse a sovereignty referendum, made it official.
If Quebecers can set aside their differences on such an existential question and reorganize their political coalitions along more productive and practical lines, you would think people in the Rest of Canada would be happy to see them re-engage with federal politics as well, and redistribute themselves among the various parties as befits their views. Admittedly, Nantel’s declaration on the eve of the writs dropping was an extreme example. But his views are hardly extraordinary, and there’s no good reason for the Green party to exclude him because of them.
No reason to exclude him for his views on sovereignty, that is. As the separatist dream died, the realignment of Quebec politics produced some much uglier schisms. Civic/linguistic nationalists lost ground to ethnocultural ones. Thence came Bill 21, and we are now meeting the first crop of would-be civil servants — female teachers, so far — being denied contracts because they wear the hijab.
Nantel sought assurances from May he would be allowed to support that legislation before he joined the Greens, and May said she would allow “dissension” on the matter. Hébert, the Liberal candidate running against Nantel, proudly defended Premier Pauline Marois’ far more draconian Values Charter. It’s vastly more disturbing that federal parties would be open to such views than that they would tolerate someone who wishes Quebec could become an independent country. Clearly they would prefer we not pay too much attention to that.