There’s no relief in sight for those of us overcome by fatigue and annoyance at the antics of the Bloc Quebeois. In large measure, that’s because this nettlesome hive of allegedly separatist parliamentarians, with 49 seats in the Canadian House of Commons, continues to strain the limits of credibility with talk from both sides of the mouth. And none more so than the BQ leader, Gilles Duceppe.
Duceppe contends that during a forthcoming commemoration of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, a lunatic separatist manifesto should be read aloud, before whatever audience may choose to attend, because it’s a part of Quebec history.
Well, maybe so, but let’s refresh for a moment. That manifesto, an exhortation to armed insurrection against Canada, was composed in 1970 by the Font de Liberation du Quebec, or FLQ. Inasmuch as battle was joined at the Plains of Abraham in 1759, there’s admittedly a leap in time here, but bear with me because the earlier date is a clear precursor to the later.
Actually, the first evidence of the FLQ’s grisly work emerged in Montreal in 1963, when it started planting mailbox bombs. One of them exploded as a Canadian army warrant officer named Walter Leja was attempting to disarm it: he was grievously wounded, maimed for life. Seven years later, after writing its rabid manifesto, the FLQ kidnapped a British diplomat named James Cross, and then murdered by strangulation Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte. He was, by the way, a federalist whose contorted body was discovered jammed into the trunk of an abandoned car.
Now there, in a sense, was your armed insurrection, but Duceppe says the wretched FLQ manifesto which provoked it should of course be a part of the weekend observance because to exclude it would be censorship. And we must not, says the Blochead, be censors.
But the man then argues there should be no re-enactment of the Plains of Abraham battle itself: it would be demeaning to Quebec. No point in bringing up that part of Canadian history, he says, by which Duceppe reveals a determination to impose censorship of his own. Selective, to suit his fallacious ends. Gagging the federalist goose is fine, but not the separatist gander.
It so happens I don’t think theatrical staging of an old battle in which a lot of men, English and French, were killed was an especially bright idea: leave the fifes and drums and musket smoke to the Americans as they bang and thunder away to this day at Valley Forge. But it’s supposed to be a fact of democracy that stupid ideas are given some light of day, with argument and resolution to follow. That’s a thesis carrying no weight, though, with the Blochead who would censor before the fact and by so doing throttle all debate afterward.
Now to the continuum: we’ve worked though the leap in time mentioned above, so the parallel tracks are now in view leading from the initial date, 1759, to the 1960s and 1970s, and on to a point of convergence in the present with the vacant droning of Duceppe. Because the English defeated the French in the battle of the Plains of Abraham on the ramparts of Quebec City, a course was charted back then toward a society which was foreseen as primarily Anglo. But with victory on the one side, the seeds of embittered resentment were planted on the other and reached full flower with the FLQ.
The violence of Quebec nationalism has subsided, of course, and we can only hope it never returns. But xenophobia, if no longer a call to guns and dynamite and the garrotte, still finds expression in the rhetoric of Gilles Duceppe and his braying collaborators, although they don’t worry about the inherent contradictions revealed in the denunciation of censorship on the one hand, and endorsement on the other. In fact Duceppe doesn’t worry about contradiction at all.
To the nub: you wondered perhaps about the reference at the outset of this piece to “allegedly separatist parliamentarians.” Well, separatists they would be if anything were to be gained, but the blunt truth is the Bloc Quebecois is now a paradox in Canadian politics, entrenched in Ottawa for 16 years and grown wholly content to feed at the federal taxpayer trough. It’s a slop pail to which all of us contribute, of course, whereupon Gilles Duceppe and his posse gratefully sup on salaries, pensions, perks.
Because their political table has been set in this fashion, the BQ ravings about separatism have subsided to the point of disappearance. Therein lies the primary duplicity of Gilles Duceppe: he preaches separatism no more, because to do so would place at risk his comfortable life in a federal system in a federal capital city. So he contents himself instead with revisionism, racketing away at the edges of Quebec nationalism while staying removed at the greatest possible distance from its core.
I think it tragic that years of Quebec and especially BQ whining, to which the response has invariably been federal coddling in the pursuit of political gain, has caused the rest of Canada to become resigned, if not satisfied to let Gilles Duceppe get away with it. More’s the pity because he hasn’t the courage to admit he’s become the great pretender and we haven’t the backbone to call him on it.
I don’t play poker, but I’m thinking that’s what we should do, because the BQ is holding deuces. Then again, we have a Prime Minister from somewhere called Calgary who needs Quebec seats, as many as possible, to hang onto power.
Coddle on, Mr. Harper.