Legault's Desperate Distraction

On The Tuition Hike And Cultural Understanding

“In all its glory and all its contradictions.”

Whether or not you understand Montreal and Quebec at a core level, I’m increasingly convinced, is whether you get it because of the contradictions of it, or in spite of them. I’m an evangelist for the city, for the indescribable energy that comes when you’re in that city, the weaving of cultures into a place where the sum is truly better than the pieces. Downtown is both oppressively English and yet so fucking not, all in the span of a city block. It is everything good in the world. It is also a complete accident of history, an unplanned outcome that could have become a disaster at so many times in so many ways.

The reason Montreal is such a marvel is that it’s become a city strengthened by its divisions, not torn apart by them. Despite the prospects of Parizeau’s famed “money and the ethnic vote” line to be an enduring fault line, Montreal is now even less concerned with its own divisions. It is a testament to the fact that the people of Quebec are much smarter than the politics of the province have assumed, and that there’s a true capacity for multi-lingual, multicultural, diverse living.

It's also true that the nationalist movement in Quebec has had a complicated understanding of its own province. In the 70s, Levesque went to great lengths to protect minority English rights even as his own voters wanted to drive the English thoroughly away. Had the hardliners in the PQ gotten their way, there’s no way my parents would have made it to the late 80s in the province, but Levesque understood Montreal at some level. Parizeau clearly never did get it, content to view Montreal as a hellscape of Anglos and Jews that weren’t real Quebecers.

The reason I’m thinking about this history is that Leger came out with a poll showing the PQ in first, confirming a Pallas poll from last month, and it came out that out-of-province applications to McGill are down 10% since Legault’s government announced their punitive doubling of tuition at McGill, Concordia, and Bishops. I’m thinking of all of this because of what comes next, and the very basic truth that it really seems like Francois Legault doesn’t get either Montreal, or Quebec, at a fundamental level.

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Legault’s attempt to shaft the English universities is at its core a great example of the disease that has afflicted every non-Liberal government in Quebec since Levesque – the constitutional wars or the cultural stuff or whatever whipped up fake frenzy of the week only go so far to distract Quebecers from when their governments are going stale. Pauline Marois got elected in 2012 with exactly zero actionable purpose, wasted 18 months, and then hit the button marked racism to try and distract everyone from her uselessness. That PQ government was about Charest’s corruption and his general uselessness, but the PQ had no answers. It’s why they had fallen to 3^rd in 2007, and why it only managed 54 seats and a weak minority against Charest.

Bouchard (and then Bernard Landry) were similarly taken down for the same reason – once the constitutional battles were waged and won by the federalists, the PQ lost their overarching reason for existing. Charest won the popular vote in 1998, the Federal Liberals won it (and came within 2 seats of winning a majority of seats) in 2000, and eventually the PQ tipped over meekly. Without the bright lights of an existential crisis, support in Quebec can be quite fickle.

Legault was able to ride a four way split in his opposition to a big majority in 2022, but at the end of the day his support was always a mile wide and an inch deep. It took him three tries to win despite polling in the lead for much of the pre-campaign period up to 2012, and now that we’re back in “normal” times again – and he’s having to deal with normal political issues and not a fucking pandemic we graded everyone on a curve with, he’s in trouble. And so, he picked a distraction to try and save him. Will it work? Probably not, because the act of having to play this card is generally an iron clad sign you’re in deep, deep shit.

The problem for those who claim to be a defender of the French language is that all the actual protection of the French language you can do by regulation has been done. There’s no more you can do by decree to protect the language, whether you accept that any of the last two decades of it has done anything. At this point the language wars exist only as a pretext to attack the English. The problem is, your options to attack the English are either comically byzantine, like how the City of Montreal’s website had to run a disclaimer that only certain persons are technically eligible to read their site in English, or the decidedly diabolical, neutering three higher ed institutions that serve the province well.

The problem for Legault is that this attack on the English isn’t working, for a simple reason – the public don’t think Anglo university students are the reason that Quebec isn’t what it used to be, or why it’s not functioning properly. Every time a nationalist government starts playing variants of this card, they are signalling that they have nothing useful to say or do on the issues that Quebecers care about. And that’s why I don’t think Legault gets Montreal and Quebec right now.

The fact that Legault has gone to the card of attacking two Montreal institutions (and Bishops) is a distinctly 90s approach to a modern problem. It’s the card you play when the rest of Quebec views Montreal as a squalid pit of Anglo scum, not when your antipathy has faded as it’s become much easier to speak French everywhere on the island. It’s a solution fitting the government Legault served in the 90s and early 2000s, but one that won’t work now. But if he doesn’t back down it could be a symbol of his misunderstanding.

This time last year Legault made the political weather. Now every move he makes to avoid the storm threatening to wipe his majority away is failing. Legault’s attack on McGill, Concordia, and Bishops is not just a policy disaster, but a sign he doesn’t understand his province, and its relationship to Montreal, anymore. And now, there’s no end to the nonsense he’ll propose to obscure that basic fact.