Andrew Averay: Against the Liberal state, Quebec nationalists are not the enemy
Seeking to preserve the language and culture of one of Canada’s founding peoples runs against the Laurentian consensus.
Leduc County, just south of Edmonton, is today best known as the place where Alberta’s vast oil deposits were discovered in 1947. It also happens to bear the conspicuously French name of Father Hippolyte Leduc. He was a Roman Catholic priest and missionary with the Order of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate who came to the area with other French-Canadian settlers in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Many other places across Alberta, and indeed across the Prairies, bear names attesting to a similar historical French-speaking presence. St. Albert, St. Paul and Vegreville, not to mention Grande Prairie, are just some of the communities with such names in Alberta. Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, speaks to a similar history. Manitoba has communities with names like Dauphin, Portage la Prairie, and St. Boniface. The latter, which is now part of Winnipeg, is the birthplace of Gabrielle Roy, one of the most important French-Canadian literary figures of the twentieth century.
The historical presence of francophones across the Prairies is ironic, given that many Western Canadians, and especially Western Canadian conservatives, now complain of French-English bilingualism as a central Canadian imposition at odds with the realities west of Ontario. They also tend to conflate this policy, first implemented by Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government in 1969, with the Quebec government’s own policies designed to protect and promote the French language within that province.
As the argument goes, Quebec has been given special treatment by Ottawa, which has allowed it to discriminate against the use of English, and by extension against Quebec anglophones, even as official federal bilingualism imposes the use of French elsewhere.
John Weissenberger has recently advanced a version of this argument in this very publication. In his telling, the central Canadian elite’s tolerance for Quebec’s language policies from the 1960s onwards was a manifestation of the same attitude that has more recently led to its capitulation to the “woke” ideology. As Weissenberger puts it:
“What we also didn’t know was that the failure of Quebec’s Anglo leadership was actually a dress rehearsal for the cultural capitulation of the entire Laurentian Elite in the face of 21st-century wokeism. What began with the repudiation of the English Quebecers who built the province and the country ended with the toppling of statues and renaming of places and institutions. The performative self-hatred of our ostensible elite culminated in Justin Trudeau declaring Canada a systemically racist country with no “core identity”.
There is certainly some truth to the argument that the mostly Liberal Party-affiliated “Laurentian” elites based in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto capitulated to Quebec nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the argument misses the mark insofar as it imputes a common cause between these elites and Quebec nationalists, on the one hand, and suggests shared assumptions underlying Quebec nationalism and contemporary “woke” causes, on the other.
Indeed, while central Canadian elites have allowed limited forms of Quebec nationalism to assert themselves from the 1960s onwards, they have done so for reasons that are entirely their own, and which are ultimately incompatible with the aims of the Quebec nationalists themselves. If anything, the approach taken by post-war central Canadian elites towards the management of Quebec nationalism has instead been consistent with a broader divide-and-conquer strategy aimed at undermining Canada’s attachment to both its English and French founding cultures, and to substitute a more Americanised, diverse-yet-homogeneous culture in their stead.
Anglo-Canadian conservatives, including conservatives based in Western Canada, have mostly noticed the impact of this strategy on their own cultural heritage. It is therefore not entirely surprising that they have wrongly understood it to rest on an alliance between central Canadian, “Laurentian” elites and Quebec nationalists.