Published on this site, August 17, 2007

 

Totalitarian Toddlers
by
Pierre Lemieux

Last weekend, the Youth Commission of the Québec Liberal Party held a convention in La Pocatière, Québec. These 16-25 years old boast of “having the highest decision making power in any Canadian political party”. Watch the results. Their orientation document, from which the adopted resolutions were drawn, contains one “ban” or “prohibit” (or their derivatives) on every three pages. It’s full of grandiose and meaningless gibberish, like: “It’s the will to build an inclusive identity which is a reflection of, and inspired by, our history, with the goal of building a future that looks like us, putting the Québec nation at the forefront.” “As a society”, “we”, and “us” are mantras of these toddlers’ social engineering. “One people, one vision, one nation!”, they chant. The environmental religion occupies an important place in the program and in the adopted resolutions, but it is the “our identity” issue that could provide the best material for the next Just For Laughs festival in Montréal. “The French language,” the document declares, “is the main foundation of our Quebecer identity, and it allows the Quebecer people to express its identity.” They immediately go on to make a gross grammatical mistake. A few pages before, they had tried their (no doubt, national and collective) hand at a subjunctive and failed miserably. Is there a “Québec identity”? If one considers history until a few decades ago, a meaningful answer could perhaps be given. A large majority of the French Canadians were Catholics, conservatives, and spoke a common French dialect. The spirit of many was marked by the experience of settlers, explorers, and the individualistic and disobedient coureurs des bois who took to the woods to trade fur with the Indians. Although this point must not be exaggerated, the French Canadians were probably characterized by a joie de vivre contrasting with North American Puritanism. The last point is illustrated by Conrad Black in his book Duplessis: “Duplessis was always a little amused at the expression of concern from the bishops about pornography, prostitution, gambling, and laxity in the enforcement of the liquor laws. Duplessis was anything but a puritan […] as a rule, Duplessis felt that the Attorney-General’s department, and the police in particular, had better things to do, more useful tasks, than being the custodians of national morality.” Except for the French dialect (in France, some Québec films have French sub-titles), little of all this remains. Catholicism has crumbled and churches are being converted into condominiums The descendents of the coureurs des bois now beg for laws and bans, one day in Québec City, the next day in Ottawa. The environmental religion and the anti-smoking jihad have been imported and adopted with a vengeance. The main role of the police forces is now, indeed, to enforce national morality, whether “national” means Québec or Canada. The only thing the new Québécois, as opposed to the old French Canadians, have in common is to be the subjects of the Québec state (or quasi-state). Nearly half of them want Québec-only tyranny, while the other half call for the same sort of Tocquevillian “administrative tyranny” but want it to be administered in Ottawa. The preamble of the Liberal youth’s orientation documents said it in a naively charming way: quoting former Premier Robert Bourassa about Québec as “a distinct society … able to control its destiny”, it states that this is “the very basis of our identity”. In other words, our state controlling our identity is the very basis of our identity. The real criticism of all these elucubrations is that the very concept of national or collective “identity” is at best flawed, at worst totalitarian.