Sad decline of the party of Rene Levesque
Two solitudes: the PQ’s reality of separation and image of inclusion
Monsieur would like a word. “Until now,” Jacques Parizeau writes in Le Journal de Montreal, “the question of religious clothing has never been the subject of regulation.” Why, then, has the Parti Quebecois proposed to prohibit the wearing of religious symbols in the public service? And why do so many Quebecers support it?
“I think there is only one explanation: Islam.” While public support for such a ban is “understandable,” given the images of violence that are “about the only contact most Quebecers have with the Islamic world,” it would be “preferable” to limit the ban to police officers, prosecutors, judges and others with coercive powers, “for the moment.” As written, he warns, the proposal allows federalists to present themselves as the “real defenders”
of Quebec’s minorities. Quel
horreur!
For this mildly worded admonition — ban Sikhs and Jews and Muslims from working as cops, but hold off on firing all the minority doctors and teachers and daycare workers because you’re making the federalists look good — Parizeau is being hailed on all sides as the voice of reason, the conscience of the party, the champion of religious tolerance. Why, his name is even being mentioned in the same breath as those famous advocates of liberal pluralism, Lucien Bouchard and Bernard Landry!
If nothing else, Parizeau’s intervention will cement an emerging media narrative. By promoting what amounts to a policy of institutionalized discrimination in the public service, runs this line, the PQ is breaking faith with its own traditions of tolerance and open-mindedness. Years of efforts to reach out to the province’s minority communities are being squandered. It’s a sad decline for the party of Rene Levesque.
T hus is the party exonerated, even as it is being convicted. This is not the “real” PQ. It is some other PQ, an impostor perhaps. The real PQ apparently exists in another dimension, where it does not propose measures to harass and confine minorities; where it does not speak freely of “nous” to mean, not the whole of the province’s population, but only the French-speaking, overwhelmingly white majority; where it does not harbour members who point out that, écoute, c’est John Charest on his birth certificate, or fulminate about self-pitying Jews, or propose limiting future referendum votes to Quebecois de souche. You just can’t see it.
The suspension of disbelief this requires is not possible without some quite heroic historical revisionism. It isn’t only a few cranks among the grassroots, after all, who have nurtured the party’s reputation for chauvinism. It is its leaders. If it is rich to see Parizeau transformed into a beacon of liberalism, he of the notorious “money and the ethnic vote” outburst (watch the clip, and hear the roar of the crowd in response), it is no less curious to see it said of the others.
Landry, who now says he disagrees with the ban, was just lately defending it: in any case, is this the same Bernard Landry who was heard abusing a Mexican-born hotel clerk (“it’s because of people like you that we lost”) the night of the 1995 referendum? Bouchard may have finally broken with the party over the Yves Michaud affair (“I have no desire to engage in any kind of discussion about the Holocaust and the vote of ethnic and cultural communities”), but was it not the same Bouchard who declared that “Canada was not a real country” — not real, because not based on the same ethnocultural vision as his own? As for the sainted Levesque — surely not the same Levesque who inveighed darkly against “Westmount Rhodesians,” who accused Pierre Elliott Trudeau of following “the Anglo-Saxon part of his heritage?”
But, well, Parizeau was probably drunk, and Landry was frustrated, Bouchard was speaking off the cuff, and that wasn’t the real Levesque ...
Quite so. When they were on their best behaviour, shaved and sober and conscious of appearances, all were capable of sustaining the PQ’s preferred self-image as a liberal, inclusive movement dedicated to creating a harmonious multi-ethnic state that just happened to want to break up the most successful modern example of it.
It seems to me the party of Pauline Marois is not so different from the party these men led, nor is a law requiring the signs of religious minorities be hidden from view so very far out of line with its historic approach to the signs of linguistic minorities. All that’s changed is the frankness: what was implied in the others is overt in Marois.
There is a basic, unresolvable incompatibility between a pluralist, open, civic nationalism and a nationalism devoted to the interests of a particular ethnocultural group. No amount of careful obsequies can paper this over. Once you have freed yourself from the obligation, incumbent on governments in every other liberal state, to govern on behalf of all your citizens equally — once you have decided, frankly and unashamedly, to speak of and for “nous” — you have made your choice.
If the province’s ethnic minorities have failed to respond to the PQ’s entreaties, that may explain why. If, after all, it were really about an inclusive nationalism, with equality for all, if that were the society you were trying to create, what need would there be to separate?