Legault and Lisée seek votes by appealing to xenophobia

The Quebec feminist, television personality and politician Lise Payette, who died last week, once compared televised election debates to contests between little boys to see who can pee the farthest.

But in the campaign for the Oct. 1 Quebec election, François Legault and Jean-François Lisée couldn’t wait until the first debate on Thursday to show voters who could be tougher on minorities.

Since Lisée’s Parti Québécois is fighting for its survival against Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec, it was inevitable that the two nationalist parties would compete over identity.

And with even slight PQ gains threatening a Coalition majority, Legault reached for his “go-backto-your-country” immigrantexpulsion proposal.

Nothing further needs to be said here about the inhumane proposal itself. But Legault’s timing in pulling it out the day Payette’s death was announced proved unfortunate for him.

To justify his proposal, Legault said Quebec is so overrun by immigrants that he was afraid that “our grandchildren will not speak French.” At a grandfatherly age 61 himself, Legault should know better.

His hyperbole recalled that Payette had once co-written and narrated an alarmist antiimmigrant documentary, titled Disparaître (Disappearing), warning that within 25 years, “the French-Canadian nation will be dying.” That was in 1989.

Legault panicked Lisée into responding two days later, on a Saturday morning. Lisée answered Legault’s promise to defend French Quebec against invading immigrants with an offer of protection against anglophones already here.

In Quebec, that end justifies a major party leader’s proposing a language policy apparently inspired by Mao Zedong ’s Cultural Revolution in China, when urban youth were sent to the countryside to be “re-educated.”

Chairman Lisée would temporarily exile young anglos from Montreal, where most of them live, to distant French-speaking regions for some sink-or-swim immersion.

Anglo students in English-language CEGEPs would be denied their diplomas, and therefore admission to Quebec universities, unless they had spent their final session in French-language colleges, “preferably in the regions,” Lisée told reporters. At least there is no CEGEP in Arctic Ungava.

This is different from the voluntary exchanges for both English- and French-speaking CEGEP students proposed in the PQ policy program.

The party policy says anglo CEGEP students would be “strongly encouraged” to take an enriched-French course including a session in a Frenchlanguage college. But the policy stops short of making it compulsory, and allows the students to choose a local CEGEP.

Lisée’s discriminatory scheme, however, would single out anglophones as young as 18 for punishment for the crime of being anglos.

He would sentence them to at least four months mostly away from home, family and friends, to study in a second language, in a strange school in a strange town. And that’s regardless of whether they were ready and willing to go.

At least, that’s what he says now. But, as with Legault’s expulsion of immigrants, it’s unlikely that Lisée’s exile of anglos will ever occur.

Analysts have demonstrated that Legault’s plan is unworkable as well as undesirable and unnecessary.

So are Lisée’s chaotic annual migrations of hundreds of students between English- and French-language CEGEPs in different regions, with the need to place them in the right classes and find lodging for them.

Lisée’s brainwave was so hastily improvised that he was unable to say how much it would cost the government, how it would work, or whether anglo students would have to pass the same final French test as francophones.

But neither Legault’s immigrant expulsions nor Lisée’s anglo exiles look like an actual policy to be applied by a government. Rather, they look like entries in a peeing contest to show nationalist voters who will go farther to put the minorities in their place.

This will test the theory that the former PQ government was defeated in 2014, not because of the referendum issue, but because of its anti-Muslim “charter of values,” proving that you can’t win a Quebec election by appealing to xenophobia.

Obviously, Legault and Lisée don’t buy it.