The end of the election campaign is the best time to challenge the parties. For this reason, the Institute for Research on Quebec (IRQ) calls on parties to engage in priority areas for national identity.
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More specifically, IRQ would like to know if the parties commit to the following in relation to secularism and integration:
– Protecting and promoting Bill 21, which is being attacked from all quarters even though it represents immense progress, particularly by enshrining a right to secular public services;
– Adoption of a framework law on cultural convergence to finally propose a truly different model of multiculturalism;
– Pursue the reform aimed at replacing the Ethics and Religious Culture course with a Québec Culture and Citizenship course, ensuring that the content of the latter falls within a perspective of cultural convergence and secularism.
Regarding French, we would like the parties to commit to:
– Protection, promotion and strengthening of the Charter of the French Language, in particular through the application of its provisions at university level;
– to make knowledge of French a mandatory criterion in the selection of immigrants, in order to counteract the trend observed a few years ago that the proportion of immigrants with knowledge of French tends to decrease;
– Call for changes to the federal language law in favor of French.
With regard to national memory, the parties should commit to:
– to increase the prominence of national history at the university, where the number of historians specializing in national and constitutional history of Québec is too limited;
– Strengthening of the teaching of the history of the country in school curricula;
– to subsidize television series on Quebec national history, because in times of Netflix and YouTube victory, it is not normal that the last major television series covering all or almost all of Quebec national history, or Epic, is directed in America by is led by Gilles Carle… more than a quarter of a century ago!
Finally, with regard to democratic institutions, we expect parties to commit to:
– Adopt unilateral measures aimed at expanding Quebec’s freedom, such as: B. Extending the application of parliamentary sovereignty provisions;
– Adopt a Québec Constitution that strengthens the sovereignty of the Québec Parliament, because all too often the ideas surrounding the passage of such a Constitution tend to increase the power of judges at the expense of our Parliament;
– Creation of Quebec citizenship, which will be a powerful symbol of national identity, in addition to the possibility of imposing knowledge of French as a condition of obtaining the right to vote.
Through their overall coherence and the resulting vision of the future, these twelve ideas constitute an ambitious policy of national recovery worthy of a second silent revolution.