Imagine a Sovereign Québec

ik - Bravo!!

Fabrice P. Rivault, Director, Communications and Policy, PLCQ

« Imaginez le Québec souverain sans Stéphane Dion, le Québec souverain sans Pierre Pettigrew, le Québec souverain sans Jean Lapierre, le Québec souverain sans les libéraux ! »

(Michel Gauthier, Presse canadienne, 30 octobre 2005)

Beyond the colourful dream of a sovereign Quebec which the Bloc Québécois is asking us to imagine, hides a real political strategy aiming at frightening Quebeckers about their political, economic, cultural and linguistic future within the Canadian Confederation. Indeed it is not unusual to see Members of Parliament from the Bloc Québécois desperately trying to convince Quebeckers that, outside of Quebec, there is no future for French or French Canadian culture.

For instance, Radio Canada recently reported that the Leader of the Bloc Québécois, Gilles Duceppe, while reacting to the recent speech on national unity made by the new Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, asserted that the city of Ottawa and that of Moncton are not really bilingual.. Shame on him! Who is Mr. Duceppe to criticize Canadian bilingualism when his party does not even have the decency of offering a website in English for the hundreds of thousands of English-speaking Quebeckers?

Imagine a sovereign Quebec…Fortunately, the comments made by Mr. Duceppe did not go unnoticed among Quebeckers, Acadians, French-speaking Ontarians and all French-speaking Canadians. They notably show without any ambiguity the minimal, if not inexistent, room left for Anglo-Quebeckers and French-speaking Canadians in the separatist’s agenda. In front of such blatant fact, how could one believe the Bloc when it self-proclaims itself the main defender of bilingualism and of the French language in North America?

Once more, the Bloc shows its lack of interest for multiculturalism and its deep misunderstanding of the Canadian French-speaking cultures, out of Quebec.It actually may be time for the Bloc’s spokesperson on International Francophonie and Official Languages, MP Paule Brunelle, to come out of her inertia to give a lesson to her Leader on the importance of bilingualism to the one million French speaking Canadians who live outside of Quebec.

But of course, we understand Mr. Duceppe is probably much too busy criticizing the advantages of federalism and plotting with Mr. Harper so as to destroy the most beautiful success known on the American continent regarding bilingualism.