Janette Bertrand speaks to an old Quebec: Macpherson.
THE PQ’S DECISION to have Janette Bertrand champion the values charter on behalf of women revealed a deeper values problem in the party
In defence of his party’s proposed “values” charter, Jean-François Lisée of the Parti Québécois pointed out to The Gazette’s editorial board on Monday that the PQ is running an “unprecedented” five candidates of North African descent in the April 7 general election.
What Lisée didn’t mention is that the five are tokens, being used by the PQ to lend cover for the charter, which would forbid public employees from wearing the Muslim hijab and other religious symbols at work, until the election is over.
None of the Maghrebin five, however, is likely to be elected to the National Assembly, since the PQ placed them in Liberal ridings.
While the PQ is placing the emphasis on “values” in the final week of the campaign, none of the five is shown in the French-language TV spots on that theme that the party has been running.
On Sunday, the PQ held a “secular brunch” on the theme of the charter in the Laval riding of one of its candidates of North African descent, Djemila Benhabib.
It wasn’t she who was given featured billing, however.
Rather, the honour of arriving with Pauline Marois on her campaign bus was given to Janette Bertrand.
She’s the 89-year-old former television personality who fronts a group of female supporters of the charter named after her but ac- tually organized by Julie Snyder, a television producer, PQ supporter and recently estranged partner of PQ candidate Pierre Karl Péladeau.
For the PQ in this campaign, controversy has sometimes stepped off Marois’s bus arm-in-arm with the leader, as when Péladeau disembarked to declare that he was running to “make Quebec a country,” raising the sovereignty issue along with his clenched fist.
If The Fist was the visual symbol of the first two-thirds of the PQ campaign, Bertrand made herself the voice and the face of its final third.
Invited to address the brunch, she spun a fantasy of imaginary foreign fundamentalists, “rich McGill students” living in her downtown building and using religious accommodation requests to take its pool away from her aquafit class, unless they were stopped by the charter.
Maybe the PQ was caught unprepared for Péladeau and The Fist, which excited elderly sovereignists who had despaired of living to see their dream become reality, but alarmed voters who dread having to live through the strain of a referendum again.
From Bertrand, however, the PQ knew what to expect when it gave her a platform.
Previously, she had said she would be “afraid” to receive medical treatment from a woman wearing a head scarf because “what if, in her religion, they don’t treat women as much as men, they let the old people go faster.”
And the PQ must have got what it wanted from her.
Marois refused to distance herself and her party from Bertrand’s remarks, which she said could not possibly have been xenophobic, since they came “from the heart.”
She even justified Bertrand’s interpretation of the charter, saying it could be used to “inspire” policies or even to launch legal challenges against accommodations in the private sphere.
There are signs that some people were so appalled by Bertrand’s remarks that they have turned against the values charter and the PQ.
And there’s no reason to doubt that the five candidates of North African origin allowing themselves to be used by the PQ sincerely believe in secularism and the equality of women with men.
But there are not enough people like them to give the PQ a majority on April 7.
It also needs the support of people like Bertrand, old French-Canadians afraid of imagined threats from the growing number of Quebecers who look and sound different from them.
Bertrand spoke to that old Quebec, and for the old political party that is part of it.