The Message Is The Same

Quebec’s nationalists are in overdrive trying to dissociate themselves from an overtly white-supremacist rally in Shawinigan over the weekend — but the slogan “I remember a white Quebec” is not far from the Bloc’s own “Quebec is us” campaign featuring almost exclusively white francophones, and their anger is profoundly disingenuous.

It was the Bloc’s own social media post disavowing the racist slogan of the protest that first crossed my news feed. Then the deeply separatist St Jean Baptiste society’s post condemning, without irony, all forms of intolerance and racism. The leaders of the Parti Québécois, the premier, and every Quebec nationalist ever to sow the divisions underlying the slogan jumped on the bandwagon over the weekend. Their own urgency to dissociate from a slogan that did not mention them helped it spread far more widely than it otherwise would have.

In 2015, I ran in the rural Quebec riding in which I had grown up, believing that the orange wave of 2011 had proven that the province was finally ready to move on from this type of nonsense and discuss real issues. That, though fluently bilingual, I was and would always be, and be seen as, an anglophone, but that it would finally no longer matter. I was born in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts and even as I had lived in other places, I had always been proud to be a Quebecker, with my own heritage documented in the province going back to 1647.

Language Politics: False Division

I won my seat in that election by a thin margin. A week earlier, I would probably have lost to the collapsing NDP. A week later, I would probably have lost to the rising Bloc. But I was sworn in on November 10th, 2015 and received an overwhelmingly positive reception across a riding that had spent a generation being among the safest Bloc seats in the province. We got to work showing that the federal government could, in fact, do something.

Through my first years in office, the Bloc was a dead issue. It had all but collapsed. The small caucus of 10 people itself cleaved into two caucuses. Quebec society had moved on, and we were fixing badly overdue problems like rural telecommunications infrastructure that were leaving the regions behind. There were still overtones of the nationalist debates, of course, especially around secularism in the public service as the provincial government fanned the flames over visible religious symbols in the public service. It hadn’t gone fully away. But locally, I could do the job I was elected to do — bring the concerns of my community to Ottawa, and get them addressed.

Then the Quebec National Assembly, nervous across party lines about a federal government actually achieving for Quebec, had their ridiculous ‘Bonjour-Hi’ motion. The province was bending over itself to explain how being greeted with a bilingual question, leaving the door open to the customer’s choice of language of service, would destroy Quebec society and set French back generations.

Late one evening in that period, without premeditation, I flippantly said ‘bonjour-hi, madame la présidente’ at the start of a speech in the House of Commons on campaign finance reform, and found myself in a media quagmire of my own making, with a new-found target on my back.

The Bloc’s newly elected leader, Yves-François Blanchet, meanwhile, was bringing the Bloc movement back from the brink. The Conservative propaganda machine had done a number on Justin Trudeau’s reputation, turning the once-popular prime minister into a political albatross. Immigrants crossing into Canada at Roxham Road were fanning the flames of nationalist sentiment.

Identity politics were fully back on the front burner. As I went door-to-door and through the hundreds of community events that clogged my calendar, I was asked increasingly negative questions. A common one, often phrased bluntly, was: ‘what are you doing about all these immigrants?’ to which I would answer ‘like my wife?’ Such a response often left them tongue-tied. Argument won — vote lost.

As the 2019 election drew nearer, I felt a frost come over my riding. People who had expressed genuine appreciation for the work my team and I had managed to do were suddenly cold to me. Previously strong supporters were yelling at me on their doorstep about Trudeau and immigrants. Folks from towns too small for their own neighbours to find on the map expressed fear of Islamic terrorism, which they saw as the obvious outcome of letting those immigrants into the country.

The mood I remembered from my childhood, where anyone who was not seen as a pure Québécois-de-souche was not a real Quebecker, was coming back with a vengeance. The Bloc was rising, even if my own party’s Montreal organisers, insulated from rural realities and attitudes, refused to see it coming.

When the 2019 election finally arrived, the Bloc Québécois slogan was ‘Le Québec, c’est nous’ overlayed with photos of happy white francophones. For those of us who were not pure enough, it was a clear message. ‘Quebec is us’ was an exclusive, not an inclusive, slogan. It was a message of division, that Quebec belongs to a certain kind of Quebeckers, the kind seen on those posters. It was a message I took personally as support for the Bloc skyrocketed across my riding. People who had promised me their support bailed toward this divided vision as my Asian wife, whose five spoken languages do not include French, clearly got the message. I went on to lose by nearly 9,000 votes.

When the overtly white supremacist protesters, wearing ICE-style masks, paraded in a town with the decidedly non-white name of ‘Shawinigan’ with a banner reading “I remember a white Quebec,” it was not by accident, and it did not appear in a vacuum. If the province’s nationalists are genuinely as upset about it as they say, then this is their time for some serious introspection.

Otherwise, they are just upset that the quiet part got said out loud.