Common sense makes a PQ comeback

The Montréal Gazette
Friday, May 12, 2006

Another player has entered the endless, bruising debate on Quebec independence. A new grouplet within the sovereignty movement spoke up this week, on the pages of Le Devoir, in an effort to pull the Parti Quebecois and the whole movemement back from the brink of folly. It's a message all Quebecers, including federalists, should welcome.

Nobody can doubt the credentials of the eight men who signed the Manifesto for a Realistic Approach to Sovereignty. Jean-Roch Boivin was a close adviser to Premiers Rene Levesque and Lucien Bouchard. James Wilkins worked for Bernard Landry. Marc Briere, first among equals in the byline, was a founding member of the PQ.

These veterans of the independence wars - they're being called "lucid sovereignists" - are arguing that the PQ's current hardline independence blueprint means trouble, that a narrowly won referendum wouldn't be worth winning, and that it would be suicidal for the movement to rush into a referendum. This amounts to a repudiation of the PQ platform adopted last June, which promises a referendum "as early as possible within the (party's) next mandate."

Along the way, the manifesto also denounces the vocal party minority that claims a PQ election victory should lead to sovereignty without a referendum at all.

The PQ platform pledges any new PQ government to limit itself to only those actions "absolutely indispensible" to the march to sovereignty. Mario Dumont, leader of the third party Action democratique, says Quebecers are not really aware of how extreme this PQ commitment is; when the voters awaken, Dumont suggests, they'll be seeking other parties to support.

That's the analysis of these lucid sovereignists. They are, unlike Dumont, unhappy with the probable consequences of the 2005 PQ platform. "What really scares people," they say, "is not so much independence as the excesses of some sovereignists."

They've got that right. Some federalists will be dismayed to see a strain of relative common sense claiming a place within the PQ's thicket of hyper-zealous true-believer sub-groups. Such federalists might prefer to see the flagship party of separatism sail straight ahead into an electoral Bermuda triangle.

That's one way to look at it. But the future of Quebec is so important - to us all, in Quebec and across Canada - that the sooner the most dangerous excesses of the movement can be repudiated, by the movement's mainstream, and pushed far away from office, the better.

In the unlikely event that a clear majority of Quebecers ever does vote for independence, everyone involved will need to keep calm and work something out. The current PQ program, and the wasps' nests known as "political clubs" within the party, offer the polar opposite of calm, and of common sense.

This week's manifesto, we can hope, signals the beginning of the end for some dangerously unreasonable ideas.