Nationalism divides us into good and bad Quebecers
It’s easy to dismiss Finance Minister Carlos Leitão’s attack this week on the “ethnic-based” nationalism of the Coalition Avenir Québec party as a sign of desperation on the part of a Liberal government threatened with defeat in this year’s election.
When Leitão gave up a comfortable living as a respected economist to enter active politics four years ago, he said it was to oppose the divisiveness represented by the former Parti Québécois’s proposed anti-hijab “charter of values.”
But that didn’t stop him from voting last October for the Couillard government’s own contribution to that divisiveness. That’s Bill 62, the “bare-face” law that, if upheld against a current court challenge, would deny public services to a tiny minority in Quebec of Muslim women wearing facial veils.
And it’s debatable whether the CAQ’s nationalism is, as Leitão said in an interview for the West Island edition of the Montreal Gazette published on Wednesday, based on ethnicity.
“The kind of nationalism the CAQ proposes is, in my opinion, an ethnic-based nationalism,” he said.
“I’m not afraid of the words. This is what it is. They view the French majority as being under attack from all those foreigners out there.”
In response, the CAQ accused Leitão of calling it racist, which he denied.
Leitão would have been on more solid ground if he had said that the Coalition’s nationalism, like Quebec nationalism in general, is based on language and culture, rather than ethnicity.
But the uproar over his reference to ethnic nationalism diverted attention away from the fact that for once, a Quebec politician had acknowledged a serious problem in the province’s politics: the poisonous divisiveness of Quebec nationalism.
Mainstream Quebec nationalism pretends to be inclusive. In fact, it divides Quebecers between good ones and bad ones. Only the division is linguistic and cultural rather than ethnic.
The good Quebecers are those who at least speak the right language at home, and preferably have it as their mother tongue, and have the right “values.” The bad ones are those who don’t, even if they speak French at work and in public.
And as Leitão said, nationalists see the bad ones as outsiders, and as threats to the language, culture and values of the majority, which must protect itself through the government and the legislature it controls.
This becomes apparent whenever new statistics on language are released. In the 2016 census, 94 per cent of Quebecers reported that they could speak French, and 87 per cent that they spoke it at home.
But even La Presse, editorially the least nationalist of the major French-language dailies, expressed alarm at a decline of six-tenths of a percentage point, over five years, in the proportion of Quebecers with French as their mother tongue.
In particular, nationalists see the Englishspeaking community as an enemy to be contained. Not only do its members resist assimilation, nationalists see the community as competition for the integration of immigrants.
Apparently, the CAQ thinks the Liberals actually played into its hands by drawing attention to its policies.
On Thursday, it kept the controversy alive by proposing a motion to have the National Assembly declare that none of the parties represented there advocates ethnic nationalism. The Liberal majority blocked the motion, but the CAQ got the attention it wanted.
But it stopped playing the victim later that day, when it posted a YouTube video in which party leader François Legault defiantly touted its proposal to expel immigrants who fail tests on French and values after three or four years.
“I’m proud of the kind of society that our ancestors left me,” he said, sounding like, well, an ethnic nationalist, “and I think we have a duty to protect this society.”
And he promoted the video in a tweet in which he vowed that “we are going to stand up for our language and our values.”
He didn’t say against whom. He didn’t have to.