HIS party has just suffered once of its worst ever election defeats. And its ultimate goal, Quebec independence, has been written off by a lot of outsiders.
So you might expect Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, leader of the Parti Quebecois, to be downbeat.
But when I met PSPP – everybody uses the abbreviated form of his name – in Edinburgh late last month he was anything but.
In fact, the Oxford-educated lawyer was rather chipper.
Now politicians can put on a good face for journalists. I have seen some of the poor souls greet hacks they cannot stand with the enthusiasm of war wives meeting their men home from the front.
And, of course, there is also something about an international jaunt that raises spirits of leaders – and helps them think about big pictures away from the needling on the minutiae which these days so often dominates headlines anywhere.
READ MORE: What Quebec really teaches us about Scottish independence, writes David Leask
Yet PSPP’s positivity was striking. So were the reasons he gave for it. In fact, I think it’s worth both sides of Scotland’s constitutional divide thinking about why a Quebec sovereigntist would be quite so perky right now. There might be lessons here for us.
But first a bit of a refresher. When in power the Parti Quebecois – like its leader often referred to by its abbreviation PQ – has twice held independence referendums. It lost the second, in 1995, by a whisker.
It has formed governments since but is currently in opposition. With the party’s sub-20% core vote evenly spread across the “nation within Canada”, it is failing to break through a democracy based on Britain’s dodgy first-past-the-post system.
That does not mean “nationalists” as we might call them are out of the picture. In fact, they are in power.
A former PQ minister called Francois Legault and his CAQ party were re-elected last year with a whomping majority. This mob are passionately pro-Quebec but politically federalist. In other words, they think the long-standing objectives of the PQ – protecting Quebec interests, especially its language and culture – can be met within the Canadian state.
Mr Legault – who also benefited from a Covid bounce – somehow manages to convince pro and anti-indy Quebeckers to support his party. There are a few folk in Scotland – I am one of them – who have wondered where such anti-independence nationalists might be found. In Wales, Labour is still pulling off this trick. Well, arguably. Maybe.
So why is PSPP chipper in the face of such a formidable cocktail of political federalism and nationalism? Because he does not think it is working.
The PQ leader thinks that Mr Legault cannot deliver what he promises – above all the best interests of Francophone Quebec – inside the Canada. The federal government does not need to worry about Quebec, he says. Because a ruling party does not need the province to win (anglophone Canada is much bigger) and it has no need to make concessions because CAQ has taken independence off the table.
And if the Francophone majority in Quebec cannot rely on CAQ to be its protector, PSPP’s logic goes, they will turn back to sovereigntism. Is this wishful thinking? We shall see.
A good few Francophone Quebeckers do feel the need for protection. Other French-speaking communities in North America, after all, have been assimilated. There are still Francophones in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Ontario (some who worry they would be worse off without la belle province). But think, PSPP says in a familiar refrain for pro-independence voices, of what happened to New Orleans. It has turned anglophone.
PSPP has a big point. Sorry to be so slow to get to it. He thinks too many English-speaking Canadians, even those in power, treat their French-speaking fellow citizens with “contempt”.
READ MORE: Quebec nationalists look to pro-indy alliance with Scots and Catalans
“In Canada, the only form of socially acceptable discrimination and racism is against francophones,” Mr St-Pierre Plamondon said. “Any group that is deemed to be an ethno cultural group is treated with a lot of care and thought over how to respect their differences. But the amount of Quebec bashing I have witnessed in my lifetime shows that there's a social acceptability to talk against francophones in Quebec.”
This is not just politician talk. One of the weirdest things about reporting from Canada is asking “nice” anglophones about Quebec.
Suddenly, even lily-livered liberals can end up saying the most bizarre and nasty things about people they sometimes still casually label “pea-soupers”. There is even a topsy-turvy logic where people standing up for minority language rights are called Nazis. This is not true of everybody, of course. Plenty of Canadians have friends and family across languages and cultures.
There are also plenty of Quebeckers, French and English speakers, who see Mr Legault’s brand of anti-sovereignty nationalism as chauvinistic. For what it is worth, PSPP does not (I asked him). The PQ leader also thinks the word nationalism is unhelpful; he describes himself, rather like the SNP does, as social-democratic.
Mr St-Pierre Plamondon has a theory about the contempt of anglophones for Francophones. It stems, he believes, from cultural imperialism, from the way the British rationalised their seizure of New France and then continued control of what became known as Quebec.
Was not New France a colonial enterprise, I asked him. Sure, he acknowledges. But PSPP still thinks of Francophones as the victims of empire.
Polls show support for a Quebec state is rising – but still well behind. The sovereigntist vote remains split across PQ, CAQ and a lefty-green pro-independece party called Quebec Solidaire. The PQ leader reckons Canada can be relied upon to do something to rile Quebeckers. They always do, he said.
This should be food for Scottish thought.
Here a robust No to indyref2 has the Yes movement in self-destructive disarray. Could a Scottish CAQ emerge from the fall-out? And can the UK avoid the kind of contempt for Scotland that PSPP sees in Canada for Quebec?
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