This is a translation of an article originally published in Presse gauche.
With the Parti Québécois in government, we are entering a political moment that, without a clear and radical response, risks accelerating the rise of the conservative right in Quebec.
The important facts
The election finished with an unprecedented vote distortion. The PQ came to power with only 28.02 percent of the vote, winning 59 seats and forming a minority government. The Parti Libéral obtained 40 seats with 24.23 percent, the Parti Conservateur 19 seats with 20.66 percent, and Québec Solidaire 9 with 12.42 percent. The CAQ won no seats with 13.35 percent.
Taking into account the anti-immigration policies of the PQ of Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, as well as its conservative policies (increasing the military budget,etc.), it found support with Éric Duhaime’s conservatives, thus strengthening their positions.
The role of trade unions, grassroots movements and social movements as a whole
The trade union movement and grassroots movements were particularly targeted by the attacks of the Legault government. Anti-union laws followed anti-union laws. Insufficient investments in the healthcare and education sectors led to a significant deterioration of hospital and school infrastructure. Privatizing policies in the healthcare sector reduced access to care. The government’s denial of the housing crisis was the ground on which homelessness flourished. The promises made by all political parties in the last election — with the exception of Québec Solidaire — to trim the fat of the state suggest that austerity policies will continue to punish.
The minority PQ government will be pressured by the Parti Conservateur du Québec to deepen these policies. Believing, in this context, that a PQ government will be open to propositions from unions, grassroots groups and civil society as a whole appears more and more to be a denial of reality.
And the attacks will not just be coming from the Quebecois government. Already, the grand projects of Carney’s government in the fossil fuel sector, the militarisation of the economy and the insertion of AI into every possible enterprise through the reduction of rights for labour, as made clear by Bill C-39 and the negation of the rights of First Nations.
Building a large front of resistance is the order of the day.
Sovereignty and the trap of the call for unity
Sovereignty will be a major issue in the coming period, and for many reasons. First, because it is the framework in which the project of social change in Quebec will be defined. Second, because it is also the principal component in the strategy of social change in the Canadian state. Third, because it will be the primary focus of the traps set by the PQ for QS.
The text published in Le Devoir For the construction of a progressive, independentist alliance already indicates the trap that must be avoided and the challenge of the political campaign to build. In the article, the authors, one of them the past president of the Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux, Jacques Létourneau, call for an alliance between the Parti Québécois and Québec Solidaire to achieve independence. They invite Québec Solidaire to drop the debate on secularism and to reconsider its position on immigration, a debate they consider ideological.
Québec Solidaire must not fall into this trap, which would serve to normalize and endorse the regressive policies of the PQ. QS would endure the same fate as Jagmeet Singh’s NDP, which endorsed liberal policies and lost all credibility amongst those looking for an inclusive, feminist and antiglobalist alternative.
Québec Solidaire must assume its role as a left, anticapitalist party now more than ever
It’s necessary to give meaning to the fight for independence that embraces both the perspective of the emancipation of Indigenous peoples and also addresses our relationship with progressives, trade unionists and feminists in the Rest of Canada. We must define the Canadian state in its current form as the common shackle of the Anglo-Canadian working class, of Quebec and of Indigenous peoples.
The rise of the far-right under Trump in the United States makes many progressives afraid that independence would isolate and weaken Quebec and put it in peril; they believe that, in the current context, independence must be postponed.
The position advanced by the QS leadership during their election campaign was not convincing in this regard. They spoke of the constituent assembly as the democratic way of arriving at independence, but don’t situate it as a class struggle in which we must work with allies, especially our trade unionist and feminist comrades in the Rest of Canada. Nor can the failures of the PQ regarding the repatriation of powers be forgotten.
Canada today is a state dominated by a powerful imperialist bourgeoisie. Canadian banks and companies invested $1,289 billion in foreign assets in 2018. The fight for nationhood in Quebec cannot, in this context, think of itself as the repatriation of powers. Such a conception is logically based on the reproduction of the same schemes as Canadian capitalism but with Quebecois control. This is in some sense the experience of Quebec Inc. But in the end, the rules of the globalized economy got the better of Rona, Saint-Hubert, Cirque du Soleil and the C Series of Bombardier, which all became foreign-owned assets.
The successive austerity policies of the PQ contributed to the amputation of the social project aspect of their sovereignist project in favour of the popular majority. Remember the cuts to health services, including the elimination of 12,000 nursing positions in 1996. Today, the PQ of PSPP goes even further with its famous promise to debureaucratize the state and by making the Quebec it governs less welcoming to migrants.
Québec Solidaire must fight for an independence that upholds popular sovereignty to the end.
The economic, oil and environmental crises will heighten state offensives and the intransigence of employers. These tensions will feed the far right, which looks to profit from popular anger. It will be impossible to counter this situation if there is not a left alternative. If QS doesn’t situate the fight for sovereignty in an anti-imperialist framework, if it doesn’t situate the environmental fight in an internationalist framework, it will be necessarily limited to fighting for reforms in Quebec within the bounds of Canadian federalism — a road that many have already trod.
This situation will do nothing but open the door to nationalist politics that, as we have seen in the most recent period, lead to an identitarian nationalism. This is what is proposed by the Parti Québécois in their Livre bleu: what this document shows is not a rupture with the North American imperial order, but its reconfiguration — the passage from a Canadian federalism to a formal sovereignty that reconstitutes, in a new form, the same relations of economic dependence, the same western military alignments, the same structure of domination by class and by gender and the same predatory relationship with nature.
Dreaming of a purely Quebecois strategy of social change means ignoring the power of financial institutions and corporations. Remember the fate that the European Central Bank bestowed on Greece (which is, by the way, a sovereign state).
Quebec Solidaire must defend an independence founded on popular sovereignty and true national liberation. It presupposes a rupture with the circuits of financial dependence that tie Quebec to Wall Street and Bay Street; the collective appropriation of financial institutions instead of their simple repatriation in the interest of a national bourgeoisie; disarmament instead of a race to 5 percent GDP military spending; the complete and total recognition of the sovereignty of Indigenous nations on their territories instead of the unilateral codification of borders; and a reorganization of the economy around care and ecological limits instead of around the stability of the markets.
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