The former heroine of the Charbonneau Commission had attracted public sympathy through her close confrontation with witnesses such as Julie Boulet, Nicolo Milioto, Michel Arsenault and Gérald Tremblay. It was in 2012.
A few years later, she was elected MP for the riding of Champlain in Mauricie under the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) banner. Since June 2020, she has been Chairwoman of Quebec's Ministry of Finance. In this role, she leads most negotiations with public sector employees in the province. It is also thanks to this feature that it became one of the favorites of the Quebec memorosphere just before Christmas.
Fun fact: Before the famous commission of inquiry into the awarding and administration of public contracts in the construction industry, Ms. LeBel was secretary of the Association of Crown Prosecutors of Quebec, a union that was in labor dispute with the Quebec government in 2011.
Today she is the one sitting on the other side of the negotiating table.
Did you say “meme”?
Since Champlain holds such prestigious positions in a democracy, it is normal for the member to be open to criticism. The designers of political memes usually do not hesitate to mock power by using new technological tools accessible to all.
Memes are images and slogans reproduced ad nauseam that spread across the Internet, creating an Internet-related popular culture with its own characters or directed at well-known personalities. These are generally humorous but can go viral and be shared widely, particularly via social media.
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“The aim is to create a community, to be able to express your opinion, to denounce a situation, so that a feeling of community is created that allows you to express yourself visually and quickly,” explains Mireille Lalancette. Professor in the Department of Letters and Social Communication at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières (UQTR).
“Memes are rarely positive. It criticizes, it illuminates the contradictions, the paradoxes, the negative sides.
“[…] The more we see on social media, the more viral these memes become,” she adds.
“The same thing is taking images from the internet, adding text to them and giving them a different meaning. It's often about the misuse of images,” emphasizes the administrator of the Facebook page L'Actualité en memes, Maxime Larrivee-Roy.
“We also need to look for the common paradigm in the same thing, that is, we need something that people recognize, like an image or iconography.”
:quality(100)/cloudfront-us- east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/lescoopsdelinformation/6B4HTLBDSNESJJTHDEEGYZHZ6M.jpeg "When the memosphere develops an aversion to Sonia LeBel – Le Nouvelliste 6")
The one who has been creating this type of content since 2011 believes that the recipe for a good evening is the result of two main factors: comedic talent and timing. “The sentences and the image really need to be worked on so that there are as few words as possible to say as many things as possible without necessarily providing the key to understanding the same thing.” We sometimes have to let people work a little, to understand where we want to go,” he continues.
Modern cartoonists
“We can often draw parallels between the cartoon and the meme. The process is similar, that is, we will highlight the problematic side, we will laugh, we will look at the situation critically.
— Mireille Lalancette, Professor in the Department of Letters and Social Communication at UQTR.
“It's similar in that respect, but it's certainly more popular since anyone can create one, even compared to cartoons, which have a much more elitist side and are also approved by people in the magazine,” adds the woman who did it has studied topic for several years.
“After talking to cartoonists about it, their mission is getting closer and closer to the meme as well. It's a bit like when the news went digital, meaning we no longer wait for the newspaper to get the news. “The caricature is still a bit in this mode,” adds Maxime Larrivee-Roy.
:quality( 100)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/lescoopsdelinformation/ZISCDUPGZNDDDDAEY7B23X3DXY.jpeg "When the memosphere develops an aversion to Sonia LeBel – Le Nouvelliste 7")
The latter even states that he has seen a comic drawing in the media several times that directly took up a concept that he had previously published on the Internet. For him, this is further proof that the production of memes and that of caricatures are moving closer together with technological progress, but the former remain significantly more decentralized.
A tool for social mobilization
Thanks to his experience, the content creator ensures that memes reach peaks of popularity during times when the population takes to the streets, such as the recent public sector negotiations or the student strike of 2012 and even the famous Freedom Convoy.
“Every time there is a social movement, the popularity of memes increases again. People have things to say, they often have to go through frustrations, ideas, a struggle that they have to endure in some way.”
— Maxime Larrivee-Roy, administrator of L'Actualité en Memes
“It is a means of expression, it is a political discourse, it aims to look at politics from a certain point of view. “So the more there is a crisis, the more something happens, the more measures there are, the more we feel the need to express ourselves,” agrees Professor Lalancette.
:quality(100)/cloudfront- us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/lescoopsdelinformation/Z2KXE7BMRZAANAUFL5TO3KIBGQ.jpeg "When the memosphere develops an aversion to Sonia LeBel – Le Nouvelliste 8")
However, politicians like cartoons are unlikely to engage in memes or have a major impact on their careers. “In some cases, some will test the water temperature with it, but I'm not sure they will make it a central part of public opinion.
“It is certain that politicians look at what is said on social media and derive their sensitivities from it,” adds the specialist in this type of communication.
Sonia LeBel, the “Darth Vader” of negotiations
So why did political meme pages take advantage of negotiations with state officials to target the member for Champlain?
“The person who is most in the public eye on this issue is Sonia Lebel. She's the one negotiating, so she's the target. We didn't miss François Legault either, but it is she who represents a little of Darth Vader in this story,” explains Mr. Larrivee-Roy, while at the same time regretting “the practical absence of Bernard Drainville” in the debate.
“In these moments we need a bit of a Turkish face. What's different with Sonia is that we don't necessarily play with the looks, but rather attach a label or an image to her, like the cassette, the peanut or a character trait, that she's a little stiff.”
— Maxime Larrivee-Roy, administrator of L'Actualité en Memes
“He is someone who is very present on social media. She has a precise way of negotiating. “There’s something interesting about all of this,” emphasizes Mireille Lalancette. “We talk about her attitude, we talk about her approach, the fact that we want negotiations, that she gets out of her habit, that we want more than just peanuts.”
“Unlike other memes, in many cases we will see it as it is. We see them smiling, putting their hands in the air and so on. […] We still show it in a good light. In other cases, however, we use photos that are even more discrediting.”
— Mireille Lalancette, Professor in the Department of Letters and Social Communication at UQTR
For Maxime Larrivee-Roy, the refusal to attack the physical integrity of the president of the Treasury can be explained by a more feminist sensibility of content creators in Quebec, compared to, for example, their American counterparts, who are much closer to the extreme right of the Incel movement in certain cases.
“What's funny compared to the rest of the memosphere is that in Quebec the meme pages are much further to the left than elsewhere. […] So there are many sides that concern them because the unions are dealing with slightly more progressive issues,” he claims.
As evidence, he cites the emergence of several sites with memes in the course of public sector negotiations, such as Lutte syndicale mémé, La salle des profs or L'Affront Commun.
Sonia LeBel did not want to answer questions from Le Nouvelliste for this article. Your constituency office is informed that it will not grant interviews in certain cases in connection with the ongoing negotiations.