MONTREAL — It was a symbolic gesture when Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois chose Trois-Rivières for the first stop in her tour after the official launch on Wednesday of the campaign for the Sept. 4 Quebec election.
The PQ candidate in Trois-Rivières is one of its star recruits, Djemila Benhabib.
It was a daring choice to run Benhabib in a swing riding that last voted PQ in 1998 and now is held by the Liberals.
Not only was Benhabib parachuted in from outside the region, she was raised in Algeria, while she is running in a riding where 95 per cent of the population was born in Quebec.
Not far into the St-Maurice hinterland is Hérouxville, the backwater town that five years ago made itself infamous at the height of the “accommodations” controversy by adopting a code of conduct for immigrants who would never settle there anyway.
Even in Trois-Rivières, a city sophisticated enough to boast a campus of the Université du Québec, people feel comfortable telling a Radio-Canada television reporter that they don’t want to be represented by a “foreigner” who is not Québécois.
So Benhabib’s candidacy says that the PQ is committed to inclusiveness. But it also sends a second message that contradicts the first.
Benhabib is an author and, until she became a political candidate, a blogger for Le Journal de Montréal who sees an Islamist threat to gender equality and Quebec’s selectively “secular” values in every preteen girl wearing a hijab.
As such, she personifies a divisive central theme of the PQ’s campaign, which is to pit the French-speaking majority against unassimilated minorities and defend the former against the threat supposedly posed by the latter.
In a statement announcing Benhabib’s candidacy, Marois expressed confidence that voters will “make the choice of a Quebec that stands up and isn’t afraid to affirm its values.”
This “self-affirmation” was the theme of a video message from Marois posted on the PQ website two weeks before the election was called.
“Let’s not give in to those who want to impose values on us that aren’t our own. Stop apologizing for what we are. We’re an egalitarian people, where men and women have the same rights.”
With uncharacteristic consistency, Marois has hammered away at this theme of “nous vs. them” since she became PQ leader five years ago.
In her first speech to the PQ as its leader, she said: “Let’s stop being afraid. … Afraid to seem intolerant. … Afraid to speak of memory, of history, of people, of identity, of culture.”
Soon afterward, she introduced a “citizenship” bill that, among other things, would have required migrants to Quebec seeking elected office, even Canadian citizens from other provinces, to pass French and citizenship tests and swear a loyalty oath to the Quebec people.
Last December, Marois issued a call to “affirm ourselves and stand up to have our Québécois language, culture and identity respected” by pushy minorities.
Her bill’s proposal for a Quebec citizenship is incorporated in the current PQ policy program, on which the party’s election platform is based.
The program would also amend the Quebec charter of rights to limit religious freedom and ban the wearing of religious symbols by public employees in the name of official secularism.
(It would not, however, remove the Catholic crucifix from the National Assembly.)
And it proposes a stricter “new Charter of the French Language” (Bill 101) that, among other things, would apply to preschools as well as CEGEPs and could jeopardize the right to a trial in English.
All this, along with the PQ’s plan to provoke crises in relations with Ottawa in order to create conditions for another sovereignty referendum, is intended to get out the hardcore nationalist vote and fend off a challenge from sovereignist splinter parties.
In an interview a year after she became PQ leader, Marois admitted that in the 2007 election, the now-defunct Action démocratique du Québec party had “pulled the rug out from under us” because her predecessor, André Boisclair, wouldn’t talk about “identity” issues.
She determined not to let that happen again, even if it means that on Sept. 4, an X in the circle on the ballot beside the name of a PQ candidate could stand for xenophobia.
dmacpherson@montrealgazette.com
Twitter:@MacphersonGaz