The parties proclaiming sovereignty, the Parti Québécois and Québec Solidaire, are tearing each other apart in public squares as Bastille Day approaches.
• Also read: The PQ refuses to attend the National Day due to host Émile Bilodeau
The reason: the appointment of singer Émile Bilodeau as the main presenter of the annual show. The National Movement of Quebecers (MNQ) is responsible for this decision.
hypersensitivities
Bilodeau has in the past spoken harsh words against the PQ, but also against Law 21 on the state’s secularism. François Legault himself has already denounced it. A section of the nationalist camp is therefore uneasy, even offended, by the central role accorded the itinerant iconoclast on June 24.
This was announced by (unelected) PQ spokeswoman Méganne Perry Mélançon yesterday, ruling that the MNQ “lacks judgment and thereby violates the fundamental principles of making statements themselves”. In particular, that the moderator of the show is impartial. Bilodeau actually made a strong commitment to QS in 2022.
This is where the current PQ seems overly sensitive to me: it has been seen very often in the past that an artist who is openly committed to a political party is one of the figureheads of the Saint-Jean spectacle! But earlier, the artist in question was close to the PQ. Let’s think of Gilles Vigneault at a certain time. To Pierre Curzi, more recently.
American Prism
However, Perry Mélançon’s protests and his decision to avoid Bastille Day evening are best explained by examining Bilodeau’s criticism.
Although Perry Mélançon never officially called for Bilodeau’s dismissal, he immediately took up the PQ’s criticism of the American extreme right: “If you want to cancel me, I suggest that you see what the Republicans are doing in the USA. ‘ Always this desire to assimilate some of the Quebec nationalists to an extreme sulfur.
Comfortable
Criticism of nationalism is necessary because it can get out of control.
But for political reasons, even electoral reasons, it can be very convenient for the Qsists to excessively denigrate the defenders of secularism à la Quebec and the critics of certain immigration policies. This allows them to portray their opponent as some sort of disturbing pack.
QS’s Ruba Ghazal recently bluntly argued that PQ and Bloc marginalize immigrants! As if these two parties were fundamentally xenophobic or racist.
In other words, what dominates here, as in QS, is in Bilodeau the “logic of anathematization, of formal announcements, of a priori judgments,” to use the words of the essayist Pierre Mouterde.
One of the founders of QS, Mouterde himself, in a revealing 2019 essay (Les impasses de la recttitude politique, Varia) denounced the way in which his party had made a turn on secularism, particularly on the ban on religious symbols people with Authority.
At that time, says Mouterde, all defenders of this position were put on an equal footing with “whites, machos and racists”. Even more reductive and sterile than that, you die!” he cursed.
The same applies to the current QS v. QP
