When François Legault founded the CAQ, a majority of Quebecers responded. Because the new party made it possible for the sovereignist and nationalist Quebecers in particular, who had fallen into a depression after the referendum, to find a way out.
In François Legault’s view, economic success would give Quebec the means to impose its neo-nationalism. We had to get as rich as Ontario, he told himself.
A rich Quebec, thought François Legault, would allow us to affirm our new identity. Then we would have the opportunity to defend our language and to negotiate greater powers with the Ottawa government, not to be dependent on it, particularly with regard to immigration.
Indeed, all Sovereignists, disappointed after the two failed referendums, were attracted to the vision proposed by the CAQ, which in hindsight, however, seems simplistic and naïve. Nationalist Quebecers sought a way out of their collective discouragement.
Trudeau and Canada
Like François Legault, they underestimated Justin Trudeau, whose identification with Canada has always been stronger than that of his father. To a certain extent, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his Quebec politician friends, all brilliant, somewhat cynical intellectuals, treated English Canadians with arrogance, even with a form of hidden contempt.
But the times have changed. Justin Trudeau is an actor who feels more comfortable on a political stage than a theatrical stage. Your seduction has the efficiency of a laser. Especially since he is like a fish in water with the Woke ideology, for him a synonym for progressivism, openness and rejection of outdated values from the time before his birth.
Justin Trudeau will no longer stamp his feet in the face of the “ludicrous” ultimatums of a Quebec that, in his fair eyes, is still steeped in a narrow-minded and vindictive nationalism.
His future ties to Quebec have just been brutally revealed. Justin Trudeau found the way out in Initiative of the Century, that lobby of high-profile financial leaders proposing a Canada of 100 million people by 2100 thanks to the contribution of immigration.
Whatever his immigration minister said yesterday, he sees it as a way to quash once and for all the inclinations of a Quebec mired in its myths and stifled by its dusty history.
Assimilation of the Francophones
Justin Trudeau, who doubts that he read the Durham Report published in 1839, appears to have adopted the British lord’s recommendations to hasten the process of assimilation of French Canadians into Anglo-Saxon culture. However, post-national Canada of 100 million people by the end of the century will no doubt be an atomized world with a fragmented culture, with only a few individuals speaking a patois that will come to be called “little French”.
Is the nation of Quebec, or at least what remains of it, capable of rebelling in a final nationalist outburst against a fate that condemns it to die without pain, without revolt, and without dignity?
So, with spring, let’s take to the streets of Quebec’s towns and villages to save our honor and loudly express our desire to live with respect for our collective identity, which is being diluted… annihilated.
