Celebrate what?

I might just be a bit of a party pooper.

Credit Wikimedia Commons.

(Texte français disponible ici.)

Today, Quebec is celebrating. That usually means lots of blue and white flags and lots of music.

I’m not usually a big fan of flags, but I do like our fleur-de-lis flag. For the royal blue—my favourite colour. For its uniqueness, just like the nation it represents. For what it’s meant to inspire, because a flag is ultimately a symbol that evokes an ideal.

I love our music, the soundtrack to our Fête nationale. I’ve worn out my left wrist, my right shoulder, and all ten fingers trying to play along with Piché and Bélanger. I’ve put Ferland and Charlebois through far more than they deserved. And I still hope to be able, one day, to play En Berne by the Cowboys Fringants at the same frenzied pace as Jean-François Pauzé. Or to sing like Leonard Cohen. All of these artists—and others—will be performing all over the place today. And in my heart, too.

Over the years, I’ve come to wonder what exactly we’re celebrating on June 24.

Why do we wave flags? Why do we gather in parks or around bonfires all over Quebec every year, six months before Christmas?

Yes, “we” exist. Some would say against all odds. For my part, I’d say with everyone. As in all those who were there before Jacques Cartier planted his cross in Gaspé, and also all those who came afterward and who continue to arrive even now, and who allow us to carry on. Because without them, we’d already be quietly dwindling away.

Yes, “we” are happy—one of the happiest peoples in the world, apparently.

But we can’t even agree on what we’re celebrating today.

For many of us, June 24 is a perpetual dress rehearsal for the big night that will see Quebec become a country.

For many more of us, it’s the celebration of a province that’s a little different from the rest of an imperfect country to which it must nevertheless continue to belong.

For the vast majority of us, June 24 is, thankfully, a celebration for all those who consider Quebec their home.

For far too many of us, unfortunately, it is merely the celebration of those who can say “poutine” and “tabarnak” without an accent, who venerate the same saints as our ancestors, who blend into the crowd at the Saint-Jean parade without drawing too much attention.

For far too many of us, including some politicians, it’s a celebration for those who answer our eternal existential question—one that will likely never be resolved—in the same way they do. The rest of us will just have to celebrate a week later.

We pretend not to notice these differences too much while we wave our fleur-de-lis flags and listen to music together. Politicians of all stripes wish everyone a happy National Day, even if, deep down, they still secretly resent those who don’t see things the way they do.

This generally turns la Fête nationale into an occasion for an over-the-top display of somewhat hollow tributes to a glorified past. It’s also, to some extent, in the hope of an optimistic—though somewhat vague—future that not everyone envisions in the same way.

But, in practical terms, what are we actually celebrating?

Quebec has consistently had the highest high school dropout rate. Since education is the main determinant of just about everything else, I have a hard time celebrating that.

Our roads, our hospitals, our schools, and our entire public infrastructure are falling apart because we’ve been too foolish to maintain them properly. It would take at least $50 billion to fix everything up.

Recently, we learned that we need to add to that the cost of maintaining our drinking water system, which is leaking everywhere and is in such poor condition that tens of thousands of housing units can’t be built. That’s another $50 billion—so at least $100 billion in total—for all our infrastructure. You wanted to sing? Well, now dance!

And that’s not even counting the fact that the entire system continues to deteriorate faster than we can repair it. In other words, next year, the figure will be even higher. I’m having a hard time celebrating this, too.

Our healthcare system hasn’t been able to properly care for us for a long time now. But while the wait drags on and patients die on waiting lists or are forgotten in the ER, we keep finding all sorts of bonuses to add to our doctors’ paycheques—doctors who are already among the highest-paid in the world. That, too, tends to dampen my national pride.

Six years after a pandemic that was devastating for our seniors, thousands of our most frail elderly are spending the final years of their lives in double, triple, or even quadruple occupancy in a long-term care facility, waiting to die while staring at the ceiling of their room. I’m not sure they’re in the mood to celebrate either.

I could also talk about the way we (mis)treat the most vulnerable our youth in the DPJ—before abandoning them to their fate at age 18, only for them to swell the ranks of our homeless population.

Or how we always find a way to cut the meager funding for community organizations—which do everything the government won’t or can’t do—and thus barely keep our social solidarity afloat.

Or the hundreds of millions wasted every year on botched projects, and the millions more paid out as bonuses to those responsible for the waste. Surprisingly, there’s always money for that.

Meanwhile, just about everything I’ve mentioned above is going to get worse because there will be fewer people to deal with the problems and more problems to deal with—especially because Quebec is aging very quickly.

Instead of planning for this highly predictable and now very imminent future, our politicians’ priority has all too often been to stir us up on one side or the other of a country that will never come to be.

In recent years, a party that was neither for nor against Quebec independence had the “genius” to find a common bogeyman that united both federalists and sovereigntists alike, spending eight years pouring gasoline on the fire of our linguistic and identity-based fears. Anything that isn’t catho-laïque-franco-pure-laine has thus been portrayed as a threat, even though many of these aspiring Quebecers are the backbone of our hospitals and schools, in addition to holding jobs essential to the functioning of our society.

I realize I’m a bit of a party pooper for always focusing more on problems we can measure than on those we like to imagine.

Still, when I see blue and white everywhere on Saint-Jean’s Day, I now tend to wonder whether we’re waving our colours to forget or out of sheer ignorance, and I’m a little less inclined to stand in a park with my fleur-de-lis flag.

And I tell myself that maybe we should replace our flags with shovels and picks, and put on work gloves, because we’ve got quite a chore ahead of us.

It would be nice if, by this time next year, we’d made progress on two or three things.

We could at least celebrate that.

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My name is Patrick Déry. I’m a French-speaking Québécois trying something different here. If you enjoyed reading this text, you can support me by buying me a coffee. Comments, shares, and “likes” are always appreciated.

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