Is only Quebec’s majority entitled to victimhood?
Quebec is a province of minorities. Even the French-speaking provincial majority is keenly aware that it is a national cultural and political minority.
And not even political separation from Canada would change its status as a tiny minority in North America.
The insecurity of minorities explains the defensiveness of Quebec’s nationalism, which is really based on culture rather than territory, and the divisiveness of its politics, which treats other cultures as threats to its majority’s language, values and identity.
And to some Quebec nationalists, Quebec and its majority are eternal victims — of English Canada, and even of its own minorities.
Last year, using the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation to promote Quebec independence, the Parti Québécois initiated a project called L’Autre 150e — The Other 150th — drawing attention to 150 less glorious events in Canadian history.
One of the few not involving a grievance of French-Canadians was the “cultural genocide” of Indigenous people.
Like the others, it merited a single page of text in the book compiling the results of the project, the same as the creation of a commission on the “fiscal imbalance” in revenues between Ottawa and Quebec.
Also last year, nationalist parties and commentators forced Quebec’s Liberal government to abandon a public consultation on systemic racism.
They said there was no such thing as effective discrimination against minorities in Quebec, despite evidence to the contrary. And they implied that the real victims were the majority, since, said PQ leader Jean-François Lisée, the government wanted to “put Quebecers on trial.”
Last week, an editorial in the nationalist Le Devoir depicted Quebec as the victim, of the indifference of the rest of Canada to the Couillard government’s proposal last June of eventual constitutional negotiations to satisfy the province.
As usual in Quebec, the editorial ignored that the RoC has sound reasons to believe such negotiations would succeed only in tearing apart the country.
And this week, the nationalist PQ and Coalition Avenir Québec parties quickly rejected a proposal by Muslims to make Jan. 29, the anniversary of last year’s Quebec City mosque attack, an annual day of action against Islamophobia.
In the attack, six Muslim men were shot to death while attending the mosque. And while such violence was an isolated occurrence, several incidents since then have shown that Islamophobia is a problem in Quebec.
Yet, once again, nationalist politicians and commentators sympathized with the majority.
They created a straw man in the form of an accusation, which nobody had made, that all Quebecers are Islamophobes, then came to their defence by knocking it down.
“If you want to fight Islamophobia,” Éric Caire of the CAQ falsely reasoned, “it’s because you think, in effect, that Quebecers are (Islamophobes), and we don’t agree with that.”
Agnès Maltais of the PQ refused to accept that there is Islamophobia in Quebec.
She didn’t like the word because she didn’t like Adil Charkaoui, a controversial imam and leader of an anti-Islamophobia group.
And Maltais, the “secularism” critic in the National Assembly for a party that will campaign in the next election for restricting
religious accommodations, thought there had been enough debate over the place of religion in Quebec.
Maltais’s party is competing for nationalist votes — and fighting for its survival — against the Coalition.
And her leader, Lisée, vowed last year to defend “Quebecers (and) their reputation” against criticism.
Only Québec solidaire, the small fourth party in the Assembly, came out immediately in favour of the day of action. “Every May 17, we mark the day against homophobia,” tweeted Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, QS’s spokesperson in the Assembly. “By doing that, are we accusing all Quebecers of homophobia? Of course not.”
The governing Liberals hesitated to commit themselves. They’d been burned by their experience with the racism consultation.
It’s also increasingly clear, however, that on questions related to identity, while the other parties know what they stand for — and for whom — Couillard’s Liberals don’t.