Lisée starting to sound more like Parizeau on separation

Jean-François Lisée began his public career in politics with Jacques Parizeau. At the end of a 1994 interview with Parizeau, who was then Parti Québécois leader, Lisée dropped all pretence of being a journalist and offered to come to work for Parizeau, an offer that was accepted.

Lisée distanced himself from Parizeau after the latter bitterly blamed the sovereignists’ narrow defeat in the 1995 referendum on “money and ethnic votes” and abruptly resigned as premier and PQ leader. But in one respect, Lisée has remained true to his former boss.

Parizeau held the Machiavellian belief that the ends, in his case Quebec independence, justify the means. After he left active politics, he said he believed Quebec would only secede from Canada without the latter’s consent. That would be a revolutionary act, though Parizeau intended it to be a nonviolent one.

And Lisée, in spite of his efforts to position himself as a moderate nationalist since his election as PQ leader last year, implied this week that he, too, is prepared to make a unilateral declaration of Quebec independence if necessary.

This would follow a sovereignist victory in the referendum Lisée has committed himself to holding some time after 2022, in the second term of a PQ government first elected next year.

As reported by L’actualité, Lisée, while visiting the Spanish region of Catalonia, urged its secessionist government to take advantage of poor relations with Madrid to hold a referendum on independence, in defiance of Spanish law.

Concerning Quebec’s situation, he reiterated in his Frenchlanguage interview with Catalan television his preference for an agreement with Ottawa on the wording of a referendum question before holding the vote.

Such an agreement between the Scottish and British governments before the former’s referendum in 2014 is “the gold standard,” he said.

Ultimately, however, “(it’s) international laws that apply,” he said. “We don’t have to get tangled up in a Spanish constitution or a Canadian constitution, since it’s a nation trying to achieve an international personality.”

Now, unlike Spanish law in the case of Catalonia, the Canadian Constitution does not forbid Quebec from consulting its population on whether it wants the province to be politically independent; it’s already done it twice in the last 37 years.

So Lisée’s reference to the Canadian Constitution makes sense only if he is implying that Quebec, like Catalonia, has the right to defy the country’s laws in the pursuit of independence.

(By the way, he’s wrong about international law: the argument sovereignists once made that it gives Quebec the right to make a unilateral declaration of independence has been so discredited, even in this province, that their leaders rarely bring it up anymore.)

Back home, the PQ leader doesn’t talk much about Quebec seceding from Canada without the latter’s consent. But his remark in Catalonia is more than a spontaneous gaffe on the part of a travelling politician carried away with the excitement of being among people who really do seem to want independence.

It’s consistent with what Lisée has put in writing, in the proposed new PQ policy program.

The first section of the “main proposal,” as it’s called, is about independence, and goes on for seven pages. But while it devotes nearly a page to the negotiation of “convergence” among proindependence parties before an eventual referendum, nowhere does it mention negotiation with the rest of Canada after a Yes vote.

There’s no mention of an offer to the rest of Canada of a postsecession agreement, as there was in the 1980 and 1995 referendums.

And while it doesn’t say Quebec has the right to try to secede without Canada’s consent, it doesn’t rule out such a possibility, either; it simply doesn’t mention it at all.

If Lisée did commit a gaffe in Catalonia, it was in drawing attention back home to the fact that the apparently moderate new leader of the PQ is as much of a revolutionary as Parizeau was.