Graeme Hamilton MONTREAL -- He was the man who led Quebec to the brink of independence in 1995, but since his 2001 retirement from politics, former premier Lucien Bouchard has steadfastly avoided public comment on his once-cherished cause.
On Tuesday evening, however, he decided he had bit his tongue long enough. In remarks that dominated the province’s political news yesterday, Mr. Bouchard told a Quebec City audience that he does not expect to see a winning referendum in his lifetime. And he assailed the Parti Québécois’ obsession with protecting the Quebec identity from outside forces, saying the party has broken with the welcoming spirit of its founder, René Lévesque.
On the front page of Le Devoir, the nationalist newspaper that organized the event at which Mr. Bouchard made his remarks, the verdict was succinct: “Sovereignty is not achievable, Bouchard says.”
Pauline Marois, leader of the PQ opposition, was thrown on the defensive. As is so often the case, her party’s most damaging critic was a supposed friend. She took solace that Mr. Bouchard still considers himself a sovereigntist, even if he believes independence will remain a dream. “This wish for sovereignty can be practised in different ways,” she told reporters in Quebec City. “It can be done in a more passive way. Just because it is now difficult doesn’t mean we should not put our project forward. It’s the project of a people ... and the project of a people does not die.”
In the National Assembly, Premier Jean Charest, who sqaured off against Mr. Bouchard in the 1995 referendum and the 1998 provincial election, cozied up to his former nemesis. Ms. Marois led off question period by asking the Liberal government to withdraw proposed changes to the school calendar that would allow private orthodox Jewish schools to teach on Sundays.
Mr. Charest invoked Mr. Bouchard, who on Tuesday complained that the PQ was veering toward “radicalism” in its approch to accommodating ethnic and religious minorities. He told Ms. Marois that she had been “called to order” by Mr. Bouchard. “Her former leader, former premier of Quebec, is reminding her that it is not a good idea to try to take over from the radicalism of the ADQ in these matters and to resort to demagogy on such an important question,” he said.
A succession of PQ MNAs came forward to distance themselves from Mr. Bouchard. “If he is too tired to continue the battle, I say to him that I will continue it with Ms. Marois and my PQ comrades to achieve the independence of Quebec,” Bernard Drainville said. Bernard Landry, who succeeded Mr. Bouchard as leader, said his predecessor is wrong. “Often great men make great mistakes,” he told the RDI network.
It is not a great surprise that Mr. Bouchard is fed up with his former party, or that he considers elements within it intolerant. His 2001 resignation was prompted in part by a feud with PQ hardliners over how to deal with Yves Michaud, a prominent party member who had made comments interpreted by some as anti-Semitic. Mr. Michaud had said in a radio interview that Jews were not the only people who had suffered in history, and in an appearance before a public commission, he had highlighted the failure of Jewish neighbourhoods to vote for sovereignty.
“I still don’t understand how the linguistic debate could have turned into a comparative quantification of the suffering of the Jewish people, and the intolerance that some Quebec citizens would have displayed by not voting for Quebec sovereignty,” Mr. Bouchard said in his resignation speech.
His harsh words this week appeared to be partly motivated by the PQ’s reaction to the 2008 report on the reasonable accommodation of minorities, prepared by his brother, the historian Gérard Bouchard, and philosopher Charles Taylor. At the time, Ms. Marois mocked one of the report’s recommendations as sounding like something the ridiculous Quebec film character, Elvis Gratton, would have said. Before the report was even completed, Ms. Marois proposed legislation that would require immigrants to Quebec pass a French test before they could run for elected office.
Lucien Bouchard complained of Ms. Marois’s Elvis Gratton crack and denounced a current within the PQ that is suspicious of new arrivals to Quebec. “I think of René Lévesque,” he told reporters. “René Lévesque was a man of generosity. He didn’t ask such questions. He was not afraid to see immigrants arriving.”