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POLITICS


Exploring the existential nature of nationalist sentiment

The PQ's national council meeting reveals a deep malaise in the sovereignty movement

Mar 16, 2008 04:30 AM
Sean Gordon
Quebec Bureau Chief
Toronto Star

MONTREAL–The St. Patrick's Day parade in downtown Montreal today will feature more than green beer and ersatz leprechauns: A fringe group of hard-line indépendantistes will also be on hand, waving fleur-de-lis and Patriote flags and distributing tracts.

Organizers declined to allow them to participate formally – they missed the application deadline – but the Résau de résistance du Québécois, which routinely accuses the Parti Québécois of being soft and weak-kneed, insists it won't be deterred.

The group, led by blogger and magazine publisher Patrick Bourgeois, aims more to tweak the noses of Anglo federalists than engage in the type of active provocation that heightens tensions between the province's solitudes.

But the RRQ's attempt to make a splash at the parade can also be seen as part and parcel of a deeper malaise in the complex political diaspora that is the sovereignty movement.

In recent weeks, some hardliners have been waging a rearguard action against PQ Leader Pauline Marois' proposal to replace a commitment to hold a referendum with a vague promise of a "national conversation."

The backlash, though strident, hasn't exactly provoked a groundswell of opposition in the PQ. That, in turn, has sparked angst among some die-hard sovereignists.

"This proposal is a white flag, a demobilization of the troops, a refusal to believe in the forces of change," Maxime Paquin-Charbonneau, a former member of the PQ youth wing executive, despaired in an open letter to La Presse last week. "Crypto-federalists, fake sovereignists and opportunists must leave," the text continued. "The final battle begins."

For all the opposition, a meeting of the PQ national council today will formally approve Marois' proposal to suspend a 2005 clause in the party platform that ordered a referendum be held "as soon as possible in the first mandate of a new government."

Could it really be that the idea of sovereignty as people like Paquin-Charbonneau think of it is dead?

"Absolutely not. If that's the case, the PQ dies and we can all pack up and leave, and that's not happening," said Marc Laviolette, an influential former union activist and president of SPQ Libre, the PQ's left-wing party-within-a-party.

"It would be a mistake for anyone to think that," added John Parisella, a longtime provincial Liberal who advises Premier Jean Charest. "It's not dead, and anyone who thinks so is going to be in for a big surprise."

It's a perilous business indeed to proclaim that sovereignty is kaput in Quebec, although the PQ has forsaken the idea of holding a referendum any time soon.

And no wonder. Polls suggest support for sovereignty is at low ebb – only about 40 per cent of people would vote "Yes" if a referendum were held today – and the party is still trying to recover from a third-place showing in last spring's provincial election.

"People have to appreciate that when we put the referendum obligation into the party platform in 2005, the Liberals were basically beaten, and support for sovereignty was above 50 per cent," said Laviolette. "The situation has clearly changed."

The language of "national conversation" is borrowed from the Scottish National Party – which, ironically, has patterned much of its past strategies on the PQ – and describes a broad effort to reach out not only to sovereignists but to the voting public.

Another Scottish example, the Declaration of Arbroath, penned in 1320, reveals the existential nature of the nationalist sentiment there, and is a handy, if somewhat extreme, analog to how a healthy portion of Francophone Quebecers feels. "For as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom," reads the declaration, emblazoned on T-shirts everywhere in Scotland.

Despite a vastly different historical context and political circumstance, the basic sentiment in Quebec is not that different – language and identity remain primordial, and the political battle is not over.

The official opposition Action démocratique du Quebec roared past the PQ in the last election on the strength of identity and language issues, crystallized by insecurity over the accommodation of religious minorities.

But since her election as leader last summer, Marois has chipped away at the ADQ's electorate, and has proven amazingly astute at reinventing her party.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to sovereignists. In the speech launching her leadership bid, Marois was open about her wish to put the "referendum obsession" on the back burner.

The strategic shift is not qualitatively different from former premier Lucien Bouchard's "winning conditions" argument on referendum timing – although Marois has thus far avoided the bitter internal dissent that eventually chased Bouchard out.

She has also sought to mollify criticism within the restive PQ by proposing a series of 11 "gestures of sovereignty" she would take upon winning power, including the creation of a Quebec citizenship and the repatriation of federal powers.

Speaking to the national council in Saint-Hyacinthe on Friday night, Marois concentrated on those points and didn't mention the words "national conversation" – not a surprise given the snickers the term provoked in Quebec's punditocracy.

At the same time, she left no doubt as to where her government's priorities would lie: "we are sovereignists and we will govern like sovereignists."

"When the time comes to choose, which I hope will happen as soon as possible, Quebecers will be with us. There will be no more missed opportunities . . . we have a country to build," she said to a thunderous ovation. Marois' critics have been quick to lampoon the "national conversation" – and companion "national cooperation" of sovereignist allies – as a return to the doomed policies of failed PQ Leader Pierre Marc Johnson.

Montreal Gazette columnist Don MacPherson was especially cutting in likening the "national conversation" to Johnson's ill-fated and disastrously named 1987 listening tour, Opération grandes oreilles – or Operation Big Ears.

The criticism prompted the party's council to officially withdraw the phrase this weekend in favour of "engaging a debate."

But despite apparent missteps Marois has shown a gift for confounding the skeptics. As hard as her detractors try to drag her into the discredited "national affirmation" territory that spelled the end of Johnson, or paint her citizenship plan as an exercise in xenophobia – it proposes to exclude immigrants who don't speak adequate French from some elected offices – Marois is climbing in the polls, and sits poised to win the next election.

Francophone voters in Quebec's far-flung regions are clearly the audience Marois is aiming at, and her effectiveness has nudged the ADQ and the Liberals into a more militant stance on protecting French and promoting Quebec culture.

"The next fight will be in the regions, and language and identity are issues where we will be competing with the ADQ and PQ, but we can't do it by adopting their policies," said Parisella, a former key adviser to late premier Robert Bourassa in the 1970s and '80s. Charest has recently dredged up a Bourassa-like message on the economy, and the PQ also appears to be returning to the past with a pledge for good governance and ardent defence of Quebec's culture.

"It worked in the 1970s for (René) Lévesque; maybe they think it can work again," Parisella said.

Perhaps even more important than electoral positioning is Marois' desire to rebuild the sovereignist coalition, which has splintered since the narrow 1995 referendum defeat, and which has been threatened by the populist ADQ appeal among so-called "soft nationalists."

In the last election, the "autonomist" ADQ made serious inroads in the nationalist electorate, Francophones who live in the hinterland and middle-class suburbanites in their 20s and 30s.

One theory to explain why swing voters and soft nationalists have steadily turned away from the PQ is that the vision of an independent Quebec has lost some of its lustre."I think a lot of people have given up on the dream. They've retreated to a simple defence of language and identity," one former PQ candidate said in an interview last fall, exchanging candour for anonymity. "That seems to be enough now."

Marois also clearly senses that the rationale for sovereignty has become muddled as the arguments have focused on referendum strategy – federalists would argue that the original motives no longer apply in a post-Bill 101 era where Quebec wins almost all its arguments with Ottawa.

Laviolette disagrees.

"(Sovereignty) has to happen. It will happen... I think the dominant psychological effect comes from the fear that people have of losing (another) referendum," he said. "That's why we need to return to a formula that gives us the strategic initiative."

Laviolette allowed that the "national conversation" wording "might not be the idea of the century," but that it is not entirely without merit.

He also added an important caveat. "But we need to have a conclusion to this conversation. We can't allow our opponents to exploit any vagueness," he said. "We can't just talk about it."

But it's not clear that Laviolette and his ilk will get their way.

This weekend the SPQ Libre's proposal to have the party institute a public registry to kick-start the referendum process – once 10 per cent of voters signed, a PQ government would be mandated to enact a referendum law – died before it could reach the plenary floor.

Unusually, it was Marois herself who stepped up to a microphone during the national council's sovereignty workshop Saturday to kill it off – and in a break with the PQ's fractious past, no one walked out in a huff.

So it would appear the conversation will be allowed to continue indefinitely, vague or not.

As Marois said Friday night, the debate will be "not about a referendum, but about the reasons that push us to want a country. That seems pretty clear to me."