Paul St-Pierre Plamondon's somewhat cringey response to Mark Carney regarding the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (part 2)
Gandhi and Mandela to the rescue.
Since Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s speech in answer to Mark Carney’s own speech on the Plains of Abraham was only available on video, I transcribed it for posterity. I took the opportunity to add a few comments… which turned into a lot of comments.
Politics loves slogans. Reality prefers nuance.
The first part is here. The rest is below.
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PSPP: British colonialism is based on the idea of leaving a certain amount of power to the population that is dominated. It will buy off the elites so that they collaborate with the regime’s propaganda and lies. And then it will explain to the population that everything good and prosperous that happens to them is thanks to the British regime. That is the essence of British colonialism. Whereas in reality, colonialism is unjust enrichment. Enrichment based on the domination of others.
Patrick: I see a contradiction in the argument. On the one hand, sovereigntists spend their time saying that federal money goes everywhere except Quebec. Now you’re saying that the regime “buys off the elites.”
Speaking of enrichment, Quebec also receives approximately $20 billion each year in excess payments from public administrations. In other words, what we receive from Ottawa minus what Quebec sends to Ottawa. I don’t know if this represents “unjust enrichment,” but losing that tidy sum would dig quite a hole in Quebec’s finances. For example, Quebec’s education budget is about $24 billion.
PSPP: And it’s true that humanity has always suffered [from colonialism]. And the best person to explain this to us, and to help us understand it in our context, is Gandhi.
Patrick: Gandhi? Where have Papineau and Lévesque gone?
PSPP: Gandhi understood. And he pointed out that, in the case of India, British colonialism did not stop at the possession of territory, it also involved the possession of the mind. Namely, the British tried to make the Indians believe that their civilization was superior and that they had to adopt it, this British civilization, if they wanted to progress. He said, and I quote, “The British rule us because we accept their rule.” They consider us incapable of governing ourselves, and we ourselves have largely accepted this idea. The British Empire is not an empire maintained by physical force so much as by the cooperation, voluntary or otherwise, of the governed. It does not depend on the bayonet as much as on the willingness to collaborate with that regime. He also had another very interesting comment on slavery. He said that there is nothing worse for a people than not to be slaves, but to be slaves while having the slight impression of being free. He said that this is the worst form of slavery.
Patrick: Are we really talking about colonial India and slavery to explain Quebec’s political context in the 21st century?
PSPP: So, let’s get back to Quebec.
Patrick: Sure hope so.
PSPP: In light of Gandhi’s words.
Patrick: 🤦🏻♂️
PSPP: Quebec owes nothing to British rule. What we have achieved has nothing to do with Canada’s supposed benevolence, quite the contrary.
Patrick: Actually, it does. Just bear with me. Other countries, for instance France, chose to suppress languages other than the national language. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t that long ago. Stéphane Dion talks about it here. (Yes, I know, he’s not your favourite, but the guy sometimes makes fairly good points.) In that sense, despite several missteps, the federal government—even the British regime—has at least shown a certain level of tolerance. I’m not saying it was always exemplary. Only that, by the standards of the time, it could have been much worse, as it has been in countries that we look up to.
PSPP: It’s a miracle that we managed to endure and build so much in such a context. But Mark Carney stepped into this tradition of British colonialism last Thursday. That’s what makes him a colonialist. That is to say, he has maintained a very British tradition of falsifying facts and history, of constantly feeding us lies through federal institutions in order to make us believe that it is to our advantage to be subordinate and dominated.
Patrick: We’re talking about one sentence in a speech, which is probably an ill-advised metaphor because Carney did mention the attempts at assimilation and emphasized the resilience of our ancestors. Also, no one “believed” Carney when it came to the plains. The backlash was unanimous. Even the Globe and Mail thinks he messed up.
PSPP: And this isn’t some theory put forward by an independence supporter, because obviously, we might want to put things into perspective. Jean Chrétien himself said as much a few months ago. Jean Chrétien reminded us, in the wake of the 30th anniversary of the 1995 referendum, that he had lied to Quebecers throughout the referendum campaign. That he had no problem with that. That, even if there had been fraud, it would not have changed the outcome. And above all, if despite these maneuvers, the YES side had won, Jean Chrétien had already prepared lies and other tricks to impose his domination on Quebecers.
Patrick Déry: We agree, but we’re not sure Chrétien’s scheme would have worked if the YES side had won, whatever he says. And Jean Chrétien is himself a Quebecer, not a British fifth columnist (or is he?) That being said, would we really have wanted a country that was created by a few decimal points? And possibly having a majority of people regretting the result, as the British are currently experiencing with Brexit?
PSPP: Just like Pierre Elliott Trudeau lied to us during the first referendum when he said, “There will be change.” It turned into a night of long knives.
Patrick: Between you and me, I have a problem with this expression, even though it is well established in Quebec because it refers primarily to a purge carried out by the Nazis in Germany to consolidate Hitler’s power, which resulted in at least 85 deaths, possibly several hundred, and led to the perpetuation of a regime that attempted to conquer Europe in a conflict that claimed tens of millions of lives. Applied to our situation, it feels a bit hyperbolic.
Still, I agree that Quebec should not sign a constitution that has been imposed (even if, in reality, it makes less and less of a difference, as I explain in the first part of this text).
PSPP: Canada is founded on lies, and the problem with passively accepting this environment of colonial lies is that it leads to our decline. It leads to our erasure. It’s boring, it’s sad, but it’s as simple as that.
Patrick: There hasn’t really been a “decline,” as I told you before. I detailed this here. The numbers are generally less prone to soaring rhetoric, but they are unequivocal.
PSPP: So, Mr. Prime Minister of Canada, Mr. Leader of the NO camp. You tell us that Canada does not exist because of the United States. Very well. You tell us that medium-sized states should never subordinate themselves to larger states, that they should always choose sovereignty. Very well, we hear you. Mr. Carney, Quebec does not exist because of Canada. In fact, Quebec has survived in its difference and specificity despite Canada. It has survived and accomplished great things despite Canada, despite all attempts at sabotage and assimilation. And these attempts are not just in our distant history; they are recent. They are happening right now.
Patrick: What are these “attempts at sabotage and assimilation” that are “happening right now”? We’ve named plenty that date back several decades, even centuries, but what about ongoing ones? Can you name at least one or two?
PSPP: So no, Mr. Carney, Quebec has never had a partnership with Canada. We need only look at certain key moments: we were never consulted or gave our consent to the Act of Union, the Constitution of 1867, and even less so to the repatriation of the Constitution in 1982.
Patrick: You have a point with the Act of Union. Still, Lafontaine, a former leader of the Parti Patriote, allied himself with Baldwin to eventually obtain responsible government shortly thereafter. There certainly was a partnership between those too. Also, after becoming Prime Minister of Canada East (Quebec), Lafontaine delivered his first speech in French, defying the Act of Union’s ban on the use of French in the legislative assembly. A glass ceiling was broken.
The Confederation was a different story. It’s true that there was no popular consultation, but Quebec politicians were involved, and several of them were among the fathers of Confederation, foremost among them Cartier (Georges-Étienne, not Jacques). Regardless of one’s contemporary political preferences, it was beginning to look like a partnership.
PSPP: And it was certainly not within the framework of Meech or Charlottetown that collaboration was achieved. Unfortunately, it was a rather lamentable failure.
Patrick: Meech came very close to passing. Brian Mulroney worked hard for this, and almost everyone agreed in the end. If it hadn’t been for Elijah Harper…
PSPP: There has never been a partnership for all these reasons. But above all, there is no partnership because a people does not need to be subjugated. It cannot be under the domination of another and then talk about collaboration. It’s the opposite. This domination is unhealthy and must stop.
Patrick: Are you really saying that we are still “dominated”? Even “subjugated”? It’s starting to get a little cringey.
PSPP: And so, the Prime Minister of Canada can choose to invite the King of England to his parliament in Ottawa to open parliamentary proceedings. It is a colonial gesture par excellence. It’s his choice. He can also choose, against our will, to deny our rights, to deny our democratic choices, in particular by using our own taxes against us, by attempting to invalidate our National Assembly laws in court.
Patrick: I suppose you’re referring to the challenge to Bill 21 under the 1982 Charter before the Supreme Court. There’s just one problem here: the Quebec Charter contradicts, or at least contradicted Bill 21, since its application is even broader than the Canadian Charter (the Quebec Charter also applies to private relationships).
The Legault government therefore chose to do two things. First, it amended the text of the Quebec Charter to prevent the rights and freedoms it protects from contradicting Bill 21. Then, to be on the safe side, the government also suspended sections 1 to 38 of the Charter with respect to Bill 21 as a preventive measure.
This is not insignificant because these amendments were made under a gag order, whereas historically, amendments to the Quebec Charter had always been made unanimously by the parties represented in the National Assembly, and always to add rights, never to remove them. René Lévesque was particularly proud of our Charter, which was adopted before the Canadian one.
In other words, if the Legault government had not axed the Quebec Charter, Bill 21 would probably be illegal. The same goes for Bill 96. I would be tempted to add that minority rights should not be decided by the majority, but you probably know that, as shown by this discussion you had with Mathieu Bock-Côté before becoming his BFF.
PSPP: Mark Carney can also choose to disregard Quebec’s areas of jurisdiction and thus disregard Quebec democracy by abusing the federal government’s illegitimate power to spend our own tax dollars. He can also choose to impose a migration policy that makes the survival of the French language and access to housing virtually impossible…
Patrick: In fact, the Carney government has done the opposite by significantly reducing the number of temporary immigrants. The Quebec government even finds this too harsh. That was before the federal government further reduced the thresholds!
PSPP:… while having the nerve to appoint Mark Wiseman, the financier, one of the architects of this insane immigration policy, as U.S. ambassador to speak on our behalf? He can do all that.
Patrick: He does not, as just mentioned, but he could do all that largely because he received 43% of the vote in Quebec. That’s more than any elected government in Quebec has received in over 20 years, by the way. That’s why it’s called “representative democracy.” I have serious reservations about “majority” governments that get a minority of the vote, but that’s how it works for now: people elect a government, then said government does more or less whatever it wants. René Lévesque didn’t worry too much about the fact that he only got 41% of the vote in 1976. You know what we say back home: what’s good for the goose…
PSPP: But, following the principles he himself set out, namely that we must choose sovereignty without ever consenting to subordination, we are going to break with British colonialism and create our own country.
Patrick: Quebec has not been a British colony for ages…
PSPP: History must have meaning. There are generations of supporters who tell me they are happy to still be with us to see this. History must have meaning, and I want to quote, because Mark Carney was in Davos in front of the billionaires of Davos.
Patrick: “The billionaires of Davos” is Pierre Poilievre’s line. Would you have preferred that the Prime Minister of a G7 country pass on Davos?
PSPP: [Mark Carney] quoted an important philosopher, Vaclav Havel [a Czechoslovak dissident who eventually became president of his country after it gained independence from the USSR]. Havel essentially asked the question, which [Carney] presented at Davos: how could such a toxic political regime have lasted so long? What are the mechanisms that lead to this? And what Havel tells us, and what Carney tells us, because that’s what he quoted, Havel’s answer is simple. The reason is that there were citizens who engaged daily in rituals and messages that they knew were false. So Mark Carney was referring to shopkeepers who, every morning, put up a sign in their window saying, “Workers of the world, unite,” knowing full well that it’s nonsense and that the regime is toxic. So Havel, as quoted by Carney, tells us that there is a price to pay for lies.
Patrick: Havel wasn’t talking about the British regime, he was talking about the Soviet Union and the communist regime imposed on his country when Czechoslovakia found itself behind the Iron Curtain. There was no longer any civil or economic freedom, let alone elections. The regime had also been established following the invasion of the country by the USSR and its satellite states with thousands of tanks and tens of thousands of soldiers. The comparison with contemporary Quebec might be a bit overstretched.
PSPP: And if you want a very concrete example in the Quebec context of someone putting up a sign knowing full well that it’s not true, look at how many Liberal Party of Canada MPs and ministers came out in 48 hours to explain to us, each in their own way, that truth is relative. That what Carney said is no big deal. That it all depends on interpretation, that the intentions were probably good. That what matters is Canadian unity. In short, they all found a way to put the lie on display.
Patrick: It’s called controlling the political message. I’m not a fan, but pretty much all parties do it when they realize they’ve screwed up. The Parti Québécois does it too. And it rarely works in a country like ours, precisely because we have a free press, as was demonstrated by Carney’s blunder. Which reminds me: do you still think Trump was right and that we’ve been “bad neighbours”? Because that wasn’t true either.
PSPP: And I’m going to answer them with what Mark Carney teaches us. According to Havel, there is a price to pay for lying. That price is that there are many problems and much suffering that result from tolerating lies because it essentially means consenting to the abuse of power. So, according to this philosopher, we essentially have a choice: to participate in the lie, or to stand up and demand an end to the charade, an end to the abuse of power, an end to institutions that do not represent us democratically and too often work against us. We can demand freedom, justice, and democracy.
Patrick: That includes the freedom to vote for whomever we want, right? I mean, is it completely inconceivable that Quebecers could choose Canada with full knowledge of the facts? We have to be able to accept that. Besides, are federalists also Quebecers? I’m asking for a friend who is the leader of a sovereigntist party in Ottawa (please see here, at the very end).
PSPP: And that’s basically it, to the Quebecers who are listening to us, that’s simply our message. We can choose a healthy democracy, and we can choose to no longer live in institutional falsehood. This sequence begins with this surprising speech, delivered, it should be noted, on the Plains of Abraham.
It’s a starting point, and there will be other steps. I think we will triumph fairly easily over the initial lies because they are so crude, they are so easy to undo.
But there will be other stages. We know this because history repeats itself and we have already been through this before, so we know that, in the next stages, there will be defamation and fear. You are familiar with defamation if we think of Lévesque, Parizeau, Lucien Bouchard, Pauline Marois. They will want us to believe all sorts of things. About the leader or the party. But the goal here is to divert attention and, above all, to avoid having a debate about whether independence is a good idea. We’ve seen this movie before.
Patrick: Who’s avoiding what? We’ve been having the debate about Quebec’s independence for the last 60 years. It’s not going away, whatever Carney or anyone else wants. But it’s possible that the answer may still be no. Will you accept that?
PSPP: We will also fall back into fear; it has already begun, so there are federalists who have already started talking to us about Russia invading Quebec.
Patrick: That was silly.
PSPP: There has also been talk in the media about the very likely invasion of the United States.
Patrick: It’s not “likely” yet, but it’s no longer completely far-fetched. Talk to the Venezuelans and the Greenlanders.
PSPP: They even tried to make us believe that, without Canada’s military shield, we would be in danger.
Patrick: Well, if Quebec was without an army in the aftermath of a referendum, it would still be a little easier to invade than today. I agree, though, that it wouldn’t make much of a difference, maybe a few hours.
PSPP: And so, as we face these challenging months ahead, dear supporters, I think we need to turn to Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela, who told us, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to overcome it.”
Patrick: Oh boy. Mandela? Where did that come from? Overcome what?
PSPP: There will be fear. There will be fear.
Patrick: Since you brought Mandela into this, what about Yoda? Because fear leads to the Dark Side, which may be even worse than colonialism. Or so I’ve heard.
PSPP: We’re going to use that kind of argument, but we are capable of standing up and we are capable of overcoming that fear. When we have a Canadian Prime Minister who is trying to falsify our history, we all collectively have not only a duty to remember and to be rigorous, but also a duty to ensure that this remembrance serves a purpose.
Patrick: Like, for example, not cherry-picking history for rage farming?
PSPP: We are faced with this toxic environment of lies, abuse of power, waste of public funds…
Patrick: If we look at our budgetary history, an independent Quebec is not exactly a guarantee of sound management.
PSPP: …and colonial origins, the lingering traces of colonialism, the responsibility to change the future. Change the future to give more to the next generations. To ensure that they don’t have to live through this. So, we have a responsibility to succeed. It’s a responsibility. We can no longer be content with fleeting indignation on a case-by-case basis.
Patrick: Like evoking the Battle of the Plains eighteen times over a half an hour speech? Okay, too tempting, sorry! It’s about time that this ends.
PSPP: [Short-lived outrage] does us no good; it leads nowhere. The CAQ has just spent eight years proving that to us [actually, it’s seven. Pat]. We don’t deserve decline. We don’t deserve the same decline that the federal government has reserved for all Francophones in every other Canadian province. We deserve better.
Patrick: I know I’m repeating myself, but the situation of Francophones in Quebec has nothing to do with what has happened elsewhere in the country. New Brunswick has not been predominantly Francophone for over 200 years, Manitoba for over 100 years. In contrast, things are going pretty well in Quebec. Really. Please read this.
PSPP: We must recognize that migration, cultural and language policies and all the encroachments on our areas of jurisdiction that the federal government has imposed on us in recent years are what this is all about: planned decline. The duty to remember is, therefore, also a duty to act, because after all, what good is this memory, as our motto says, if we do nothing?
Our great national poet Gaston Miron said, “We will never be human again if our eyes are emptied of their memory.” I told you that the YES camp will be the camp of truth and hope. Let us remember that the truth is sometimes not joyful, and it is not easy. We do not choose our past at birth. We therefore do not choose the past we must face.
When I raised the issue, at another national council, that there had been hangings and deportations in Canada, remember how many people said how radical, toxic, and dangerous I was.
Patrick: Maybe not “dangerous,” but certainly a bit demagogic: the Canadian federation did not yet exist when the Acadians were deported and the Patriots were hanged…
PSPP: Sometimes there is a price to pay for the truth, because the truth, even if it is not rosy, remains what it is: facts.
But even if it is demanding, this reality has value, and Gandhi, like Mandela, would ask us to do so without any hatred. There is a way to serve the truth and then serve the advancement of society, to have conversations that are demanding, sometimes a little dark, but without ever embarking on hatred. And we are capable of that. At least, that is what Gandhi and Mandela would ask us to do.
Patrick: It still feels a little uncomfortable bringing up colonial India and apartheid South Africa when talking about our problems. Gandhi and Mandela might disagree. Also, a note to your speechwriter: the pivot from rage farming to no-hatred-please feel a bit rushed and tacked on.
PSPP: And since they were successful, it might be a good idea to listen to them. So, the truth, but in the spirit of seeking lasting peace. Also, in the spirit that Canadians hear what we are saying and are capable of the same judgment and the same search for truth. I disclose in advance that I am not Gandhi.
Patrick: Thank you for clarifying that.
PSPP: And to my knowledge, we are not related. But I think there are foundations there that we can simply modestly serve to the best of our abilities. So, I offer Quebecers a difficult truth, while Mark Carney offers a comfortable lie. But there is a price to pay for comfortable lies, and I am confident that Quebecers will choose the truth. It is up to us to give meaning to the past, to give meaning to our history, to win and, ultimately, to make Quebec a country. Thank you.
Patrick: My pleasure. See you around!
[Everyone stands up, “Le Québec, un pays! Le Québec, un pays!”]
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This text is a bit over 4,000 words, or about 16 pages of a book. The first draft of the speech transcript was done using software. Editing the transcript, fact-checking, and writing more or less impertinent comments took me about four days, including the first part. It also left me with a constitutional headache.
My name is Patrick Déry. I write for a living. I also enjoy calling out politicians who get carried away by their public persona. If you enjoyed reading this text, you can encourage me by buying me a coffee. Commenting, sharing and “liking” are always appreciated.
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