Chris Selley: Quebec’s fever-swamp politics are getting worse under Legault

Politicians daring each other to say the N-word, while denigrating immigrants and admonishing anglo NHLers

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Thursday evening’s debate among Quebec’s five major provincial party leaders, in advance of the Oct. 3 provincial election, featured something of a landmark moment in the history of Canada’s Two Solitudes: Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon and TVA moderator Pierre Bruneau demanded to know of Québec Solidaire spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois whether he would utter the full name of Pierre Vallière’s 1968 polemic “N–res blanc d’Amerique” (“White N—ers of North America”).

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Essentially: Would he say the N-word on live television?

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The answer was yes: Nadeau-Dubois said it, while implicitly scoffing at the silliness of the exchange. (The topic of debate was supposed to be “health, family and education.”)

It’s a stretched analogy — no one ever likened the plight of British Columbians or Saskatchewanians to that of African Americans — but anywhere else in the country, the episode would have been portrayed in Friday’s papers as a potential career-ender for all involved. In Quebec, Nadeau-Dubois actually avoided controversy by saying the N-word. It barely rated a mention in Friday’s news.

Increasingly, one wonders how on earth Quebec politics can exist within the same universe as Canadian federal politics. And one wonders how new Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre will navigate this situation — better, he will have to hope, than his two immediate predecessors, who saw Justin Trudeau (of all people) eat their lunches in Quebec despite their downright obsequious outreach to nationalists.

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Certainly there are areas of joint concern between federal Conservatives and Quebec nationalists. One of them is academic freedom, for which the N-word in Quebec is a sort of proxy. There was much outrage in Quebec two years ago when University of Ottawa professor Verushka Lieutenant-Duval was disciplined for using the N-word in class as an example of a “reclaimed” racial epithet.

But that’s not something any leader in English Canada wants to be seen defending. Reactions at the bilingual university divided pretty cleanly (though not entirely) along linguistic lines.

It’s tricky, too, because many people who claim to embrace academic freedom — any sort of freedom, really — are often inconsistent about it. Quebec’s growing concern about academic freedom has certainly not occasioned a rethinking of the 2017 effective mob-firing of Andrew Potter as head of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, for the crime of writing an impolitic column about Quebec society. An anglophone academic writing such a piece today should expect worse treatment from his or her university and colleagues, not better.

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Other notable moments in Thursday’s debate, from a Rest-of-Canada perspective, included Quebec Conservative leader Éric Duhaime briefly speaking English, to attack Quebec Liberal leader Dominique Anglade for having presumptuously abandoned the anglophone community’s concerns.

In the ancient times — 2018, for example — there were sometimes even English-language leaders’ debates in Quebec. Efforts to that effect were abandoned this time around when CAQ leader François Legault, along with Plamondon, declined to participate. And one doubts we’ll see another English-language debate again anytime soon. Legault apologized last week for allowing a single English-language document loose on the party website, boasting of his government’s accomplishments. “Insane” is not too strong a word for it.

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The biggest gap between Quebec and Rest-of-Canada politics, conservative and liberal alike, is probably on immigration. On its face, Quebec needs immigrants for the same basic reasons the Rest of Canada does: Labour shortages, notably in health care; an aging population; a sluggish birth rate. Instead Legault wants to cut immigration, on the theory that “integration” has become a serious problem.

Legault let that mask slip last week in Victoriaville, Que. in fairly astonishing fashion, when asked to elaborate on the “challenges” he said immigrants posed to Quebec. “Quebecers are peaceful. They don’t like bickering, they don’t like extremists, they don’t like violence,” he said.

He later apologized, but that’s clearly what he thinks. And it’s bonkers. Demonstrably, the problem with integration in Quebec is with those who are already there, not those arriving from abroad. The sudden interest in laïcité over the past 15 years has made targets of (primarily) Muslims who were only fulfilling what used to be the social bargain in Quebec: Learn (if necessary) and speak French, work hard, and you’re one of us. Suddenly they can’t be schoolteachers if they wear the hijab, and language hawks are obsessed not just with whether people can and do speak French in public but whether they speak it at home. In the Rest of Canada, conservatives would be first to say that’s none of the government’s damn business.

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Speaking of which, Quebec’s parties are united in the belief that new Montreal Canadiens captain Nick Suzuki, who hails from London, Ont., needs to improve his French and demonstrate that improvement. That’s not new: Every non-francophone Habs captain — which is to say all of them this century — faces those questions. And hey, why not? The Habs are a large company. By law they should all be speaking French, no matter where they come from.

Of course, we’ve never seen goons from the Office québécois de la langue française raid the dressing room — and we won’t even under Bill 96, which declares war on other languages in the name of protecting French. If only such lenience were available to lesser Quebec businesspeople.

The whole situation is absolutely maddening. The great promise of the CAQ was that they would set aside the separatist-federalist wars and focus on real issues. Instead they’ve managed to make the separatist-federalist wars look like the good old days. If there’s a message in all that mess for Poilievre and the federal Conservatives, perhaps it’s this: Stop pandering. It undermines the brand, and it doesn’t work.

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