“We must be concerned about the growing gap between Montreal and the RdQ (the rest of Quebec), bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet essentially confided to the Canadian Press. Is he right?
This kind of divide exists everywhere, at least in the West. An English philosopher, David Goodhart, already pointed out at the time of Brexit that the United Kingdom was no longer divided so much according to the nations that made it up (Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, English), but above all between “people from everywhere” and “people from somewhere”.
The latter are “localized and often less educated”; while people from nowhere are “urban and left-wing, ultra-mobile”.
New phenomena
Certainly there have long been rooted and uprooted people in our countries, but new phenomena have highlighted and changed these two poles.
A French journalist, Brice Couturier, has already suggested a list of them. He noted that an American author, Thomas Friedman, explores a growing divide between “the people of the wall” and “the people of the Internet” (I would add the “TV people” and “the Netflix people”). In France, “Europeanists” believe that “sovereignists” (in the sense they have in France, namely wanting to defend the components of state sovereignty) are regressive; while “sovereignists” instead believe that nation-states are necessary for solidarity. “The French geographer Christophe Guilluy contrasts peripheral France with the bourgeois bohemianism of the metropolises,” noted Couturier.
All of these phenomena of our hypermodernity can be found to varying degrees in today's Quebec. We can even say that they overlap, widening the gap between Montreal and RdQ even further.
“Small Nation”
There are also Quebec-specific dimensions.
Unlike the United Kingdom or France, Quebec is a “small nation” in the sense of the author Milan Kundera, that is, it always knows itself to be fragile and in danger of disappearing.
Furthermore, she is semi-sovereign. It develops in a federation that only partially and ambiguously recognizes it as such.
This poses an additional challenge in Quebec, and here Blanchet's call resonates. In the past, with a law like Bill 101, we wanted to make French a melting pot of integration. De-ethnicize this language. Like English in Ontario or the United States.
This system has had undeniable successes (Children of Law 101), but has collapsed and appears to be overwhelmed by new trends such as temporary immigration. Regularly, “people from nowhere” are outraged by any measures that aim to strengthen or even modernize this 101 system, as if they represent an attack on “openness” (even though it is a tool for diversity). The gap between Montreal and the RdQ is being systematically widened by the current Canadian constitution and its eulogists, and here the bloc is right.
Obviously, we need to be careful not to demonize “people from nowhere” as much as “people from somewhere.” They are two sides of today's world, both have legitimate concerns, but these can become pathological if taken too far.