PQ Knows Weakening Canada Weakens Quebec
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, the leader of the separatist Parti Québecois and quite possibly the next premier of Quebec made a very telling announcement yesterday — that Quebec would not hold a referendum prior to the end of Donald Trump’s term as president.
Aside from the questionable premise shared by many that Trump’s departure will either happen on schedule, or suddenly restore the United States to its Obama-era self as if nothing happened over the past decade, it is an admission of the fallacies underpinning the Quebec separatist movement.
If Quebec will truly be stronger on its own, why does it need Canada to defend it from the United States? If having Trump in power will prevent an honest debate on separation, what would be different under, say, Vance? What does it say about the movement, and the debate, if the occupant of the White House is even relevant to it?
The reality is that the province’s separatist movement recognises itself in Trumpism and does not like what it sees. The MAGA movement and the separatist movement are both ethnic supremacist movements built around grievances directed at the wrong adversaries, at scapegoats rather than at those who actually caused our very real issues.
The tremendous problems in our society today are not caused by people speaking languages other than French on Montreal’s West Island any more than they are caused by Spanish-speaking slightly darker undocumented labourers working for slave wages across the United States.
Having an exclusively French Quebec where non-white-francophones are pushed out through every available means will not resolve the economic problems of the region any more than having an exclusively white, English-speaking United States would. Asserting an ethnolinguistic majority will not end economic disparity, housing shortages, systemic underemployment, or even prevent degradation of the local language — oligarchs plunder and pit us against each other regardless of spoken language.
It is entirely possible to protect, invest in, and develop French language and culture without the negative overtones of ethnically exclusive policy. The European Union has more than two dozen official languages, and the people of Europe mostly speak their own cultural and regional languages while also learning fluent English — and somehow the continent has not collapsed back into the internecine wars of past centuries or seen its languages die at scale. It is only impossible if one takes the view that only an ethnically pure society can protect its own heritage.
In that, many countries succeeded, including Canada, in virtually wiping out their Indigenous languages through the imposition of majority language and culture. For the movements in question, this approach to the matter of minority language and culture has not reached its conclusion.
In that, the separatist worldview is similar to the MAGA worldview. Ethnic supremacy, the inferiority of other peoples and their cultures and languages, is the driving force. The separatists do not protect French in Canada’s other nine provinces, all of which have significant francophone communities. They do not seek to unify and protect the French language in its own right. Their narrow interpretation of their own identity is all that matters. The MAGAnauts will accept horrific economic and social conditions for themselves, provided that everyone else — anyone they see as an ‘other’ — is treated worse. They are the logical conclusion of the supremacist mindset. And the two are remarkably similar.
The PQ does understand that Quebec needs Canada to protect them from the MAGA world. They recognise that now is not the time to be dividing Canada when there is a much bigger threat south of the border that exposes their own movement by having a both equal and opposite perspective — equal on how, opposite on who. They can also see the Alberta separatist movement and its overt proximity to the Trump cult, and they know that the two discrete separatist movements are largely viewed through the same lens by those who do not support them.
They recognise that weakening Canada weakens Quebec where it actually matters. That Canada, locked in a domestic debate about its own existence cannot also survive an international debate on the same question. That given the choice of their own ethnolinguistic supremacy or being victims of the similar behemoth next door, they need their existing partnership to survive. Yet they keep the door propped open to a third referendum once Trump is gone, believing the international status quo that gives them the luxury of their imposed uncertainty will return.
So when Plamondon tells Quebec that he will not hold a referendum before January 20th, 2029, when Trump’s successor is scheduled to take charge of what is left of the United States, he is admitting that Quebec, in real terms, will not be better off on its own, that it is not equipped to defend its interests or its languages without the weight of Canada behind them, that their own ideas at macro scale will harm them, not only the oppressors they have imagined into existence.
They are maintaining the premise of eventual statehood — just as soon as they no longer need the rest of Canada to protect them. Like the American administration they hope to outlive, they are tacitly admitting to being users, taking without ever giving back.