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March 25, 2014 - No. 32 For a Sovereign Quebec Which Defends the Rights of All! There Is an Alternative to the
Anti-Social,
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We hear these days talk of
sovereignty without borders
or political sovereignty in a borderless economy. As a people fighting
for sovereignty based on the affirmation of the right to
self-determination in the context of the struggle for an independent
Republic of Quebec since the nineteenth century, this notion
is difficult to comprehend. However, let us see what this could mean
for the neo-liberal world.
With such opportunism, one
would be tempted to see here
nothing but an attempt to salvage his party which is in free fall in
the polls. The elite seems to have discarded Legault as an option to
lead the restructuring of the state. Indeed, both the PQ and Liberals
openly say they want to capture the CAQ electorate,
which is decisive in the election's outcome as either a majority or
minority government. All these manoeuvres would be laughable if they
were not an attack against the working class and people.
A new direction for the
economy
must:
| National Capital |
Mauricie |
|
 Normand Fournier Charlesbourg |
 Claude Moreau Jean-Lesage |
 Jean-Paul Bédard Laviolette |
| Montérégie | |||
 Linda Sullivan Châteauguay |
 Normand Chouinard La Prairie |
 Pierre Chénier Marie-Victorin |
 Hélène Héroux Sanguinet |
| Montreal | |||
|
Acadie
|
 Claude Brunelle
Bourget |
 Christine Dandenault
Hochelaga-Maisonneuve |
Garnet Colly
Jeanne-Mance--Viger |
 Peter Macrisopoulos
Laurier-Dorion |
 Yves Le Seigle
Lafontaine |
 Diane Johnston Mont-Royal |
 Rachel Hoffman Notre-Dame-de-Grâce |
 Geneviève Royer Pointe-aux-Trembles |
 Stéphane Chénier Rosemont |
 Fernand Deschamps Saint-Laurent |
|
|
 Serge Lachapelle Sainte-Marie-- Saint-Jacques |
 Eileen Studd Verdun |
|
| Outaouais |
 Pierre
Soublière
Chapleau |
 Alexandre
Deschênes Gatineau |
Gabriel
Girard-Bernier Hull |
 Louis Lang
Pontiac |
(Authorized by Christian Legeais,
official agent for the Marxist-Leninist Party of Quebec)
Position of Marxist-Leninist Party of Quebec
on Urgency to Declare a Free and
Sovereign State of Quebec
The Marxist-Leninist Party of Quebec (PMLQ) was founded in 1989 with more than 1,000 members under the law governing political parties. This happened at a very important moment in the political life of Quebec, in the midst of the debate on the Meech Lake Accord that took up Robert Bourassa's proposal for renewed federalism.
The PMLQ, like many of the sovereigntist forces, had campaigned against the Meech Lake Accord because it reduced the Quebec nation to a "distinct society" and therefore did not recognize Quebec's right to self-determination. Following the failure of the Accord we wrote:
"Our Party is of the opinion that with the failure of Meech Lake, it can now be said with certainty that the solution to the problems confronting the people of Quebec can no longer be sought within the confines of a constitution based upon the British North America Act. We believe that the people of Quebec need a new constitution, one which only they can decide upon without any external interference, one which is democratic and expresses the popular will and will serve the building of a future or the nation." (Brief of the PMLQ National Council, November 2, 1990)
On the issue of Quebec sovereignty, the PMLQ's position to realize a free and sovereign Quebec was clearly stated:
"1. Quebec is a nation constituted by all the people who live in its territory;
"2. Quebec, as a right, has the right to self-determination including secession;
"3. Quebec, at this time, must exercise its right to self-determination by holding a referendum in which the people of Quebec are called upon to 1) abrogate the British North America Act and elect an assembly specifically to draft a democratic constitution; and 2) call upon the rest of Canada to do the same." (Ibid)
It stated:
"Like any nation, the Quebec nation has its inherent sovereignty, in particular its right to national self-determination including secession, if the people of Quebec so decide. For more than two hundred years the people of Quebec have been seeking precisely how this sovereignty should be expressed, how this self-determination ought to be exercised. We believe that the exercising of the right to self-determination by the Quebec people, acting as a sovereign nation, is a necessary prelude to the solution of all the other problems besetting the people, and an indispensable precondition for building a future for the nation." (Ibid)
Beaudoin-Dobbie Report's Falsification of History Opposed
After the failure of Meech Lake, the federal government continued to seek ways to maintain the status quo with regard to Quebec by making it acceptable to the people of Quebec and the Canadian people. When the Brian Mulroney government in its final term returned the charge with the "Special Joint Committee on a Renewed Canada" (the Beaudoin-Dobbie Committee, who later prepared the Charlottetown Accord), the PMLQ reiterated that all attempts for the renewal of Canada would fail if the refusal to recognize the right of the Quebec nation to self-determination persisted.
"Even though the entire document promotes the idea of a Renewed Canada, once it does not recognize the right of the nation of Quebec to self-determination, it fails. It opts for recognizing the status quo and merely takes up the problem of how to make the status quo valid for our times. The Joint Committee does this by upholding the status imposed on Quebec by the British colonialists in the Quebec Act of 1774, which it says 'responded to French Canada's demands for the preservation of its laws and customs' and the Constitutional Act of 1791 which 'divided Quebec into two parts corresponding to the linguistic and cultural divergence of its inhabitants.' The Joint Committee correctly points out that 'These two statutes acknowledged and provided the political framework for a distinct society in Quebec with institutions, laws and culture quite different from those of other political communities in North America.' It goes further to point out that when the Canadian state was established through the BNA Act in 1867, it enshrined this practice of the British. The Joint Committee writes: 'In 1867, Confederation recognized and re-established Quebec's distinct society as an autonomous political community while it embraced the principle of linguistic duality in the political institutions of a new country that would eventually span a continent.'
"We couldn't agree more. This is precisely what is called suppressing the nation of Quebec and denying its right to self-determination. By the time the British fought their intercolonial wars with the French, the 'French settlers,' whom the Joint Committee recognizes as a mere abstraction, had forged a new society. They had produced an indigenous population, born and bred in the new territory, partly of French parentage and partly born of the inter-marriage between French settlers and the Native Peoples. This indigenous population forged a new economy, through its own labour, blood and sacrifice. These people developed their own trade and commerce and set out to forge the political, educational and legal institutions they would require to administer themselves. All the while, they remained a colony of France, ruled by the French colonial power and its institutions. In other words, Quebec had become a nation by virtue of its common territory, population, language, psychology and economy. The fact that the British won the inter-colonialist wars against the French and gained Quebec as part of the Paris Treaty of 1763 simply meant that the colonial ownership of Quebec was transferred from the French to the British. While the people of Quebec, consistent with the times, were ready to embark on the road of modern nation-building, in the manner of either the French, who, in their Revolution of 1789, ended feudalism and set forth on the road of a modern bourgeois republic, or of the peoples of the Americas, who won their independence from colonial rule, the British imposed their own colonial rule over Quebec and suppressed the emergent nation of Quebec. Quebec has been a suppressed nation ever since, denied the right to self-determination." (National Council of PMLQ, March 1992)
Federal Referendum on the Charlottetown Accord -- 1992
In the federal referendum on the Charlottetown Accord in 1992, an attempt to divide the people of Quebec with the notion that Quebec is a "distinct society" and a blatant refusal to recognize the Quebec nation and its right to self-determination, the PMLQ actively campaigned for the No camp. During the campaign, it explained the failure of the arrangements of the empire builders of the nineteenth century that the Charlottetown Accord sought to maintain in all its essentially anachronistic elements. It also published important theoretical texts on the history of the nation and political power, as well as a modern definition of rights and the distinction between citizenship and nationality.
National Campaign for a Modern Constitution and
Democratic Renewal -- September 1994
In September 1994, the PMLQ launched a national campaign for a modern constitution and democratic renewal with a series of conferences on the future of Quebec. The campaign's goal was also to not permit the political discourse to be disinformed by the false discourse of the federalists on "national unity." The PMLQ judged that the question of vesting in the people the power to decide was more important than ever. The campaign's slogan was "For a sovereign and independent state of Quebec."
Referendum on Quebec Sovereignty -- 1995
The PMLQ actively participated in the 1995 referendum campaign on Quebec sovereignty from its launch in September that year, with the slogan: "For the people's yes!" The Party considers it played an important role in the formation of Yes Committees and it held conferences at several universities, colleges and cities to encourage everyone to participate in the referendum campaign for the Yes side.
Even before the campaign, the PMLQ organized extensive internal and external consultations on the position to take in light of the referendum question and submitted a brief to the Commission on the future of Quebec.
The PMLQ said about the referendum:
"A great opportunity exists for the working class of Quebec to lead the project of nation-building in a manner which leads to the formation of a state in Quebec on the basis of its own model. [...]
'In nation-building, we have to be careful not to found the nation on 19th century concepts of ethnicity as the British did in formulating the BNA Act.[1] On the contrary, we should begin with the modern definition according to which a modern polity is established which recognizes the collective rights of all the people of Quebec and vests sovereignty in the people.'"
We proposed that the Preamble to the Constitution of the Republic of Quebec read in part as follows:
"We, the people of Quebec, exercising our inviolable and inalienable right as a sovereign people with collective rights irrespective of the languages we speak, the religions we practice, the ideologies and political opinions we hold on basic values and social objectives, or other attributes such as skin colour, national background, gender, age, lifestyle, ability, wealth or social position, hereby declare the formation of the Republic of Quebec, a modern nation-state and polity in which all citizens enjoy equal rights and duties and all minority rights based on concrete objective reality are recognized as inviolable and inalienable.
"In this
modern nation-state and polity, our collective rights reign supreme,
and the rights of individuals are protected by passing legislation
which harmonizes them with the general well-being of society.
"In this
modern nation-state and polity, the people are sovereign and set the
fundamental law and govern themselves
as we have done by means of the referendum through which we expressed
our collective will to establish our modern nation-state and polity.
"Our
action from now as a sovereign people is to collectively establish
state structures according to this law of the land, the Constitution of
the Republic of Quebec, and begin
to govern ourselves on the basis of this Constitution."
Since the 1995 referendum, the PMLQ has continued to argue for the necessity of a sovereign and independent Quebec. "The Marxist-Leninists," said PMLQ Leader Pierre Chénier, "have always defended a principled and consistent position on the national question, which the Canadian establishment and its representatives in Quebec keep using to divide the people and prevent the political unity required to solve their problems and those of the society."
Conferences on the Future of Quebec -- 1998
In 1998, the PMLQ organized a series of conferences on the future of Quebec with the aim of organizing workers and youth to take up the national question. The conferences had as their theme: "The working class must constitute itself the nation and vest sovereignty in the people." The main challenge was not to permit the propaganda that said that the economy required integration with global markets and the abandonment of the principle of a sovereign nation-state to pass:
"Today, the issue of nation-building concerns the people of the entire world. The neo-liberal offensive to sell out all the resources of nations, especially the human and natural resources, to serve the aim of making the monopolies competitive on global markets has put this issue on the agenda of the peoples everywhere. The issue is of great urgency. This concern cannot be dismissed by portraying everything to do with nation-building as an issue of separatism versus federalism or which equates separatism with sovereignty and so on, as the federal Liberals and their fellow travellers are doing. Whether or not Quebec opts for independence, the approach towards nation-building will determine the future of Quebec. Today the interests of the bourgeoisie are not identified with those of the nation. They lie in selling out all its resources, in using the state power to seize the entire social product produced by the working class to hand it over to those who invest it to make maximum profits for themselves. This is why the working class must constitute itself the nation and lead society so that it can advance."
Opposition to "Clarity Act" -- 1998
When the Jean Chrétien Liberal Party, in the
context of making Canadian monopolies "number one" in the world, tried
to put an end "once and for all" to the national question in Canada
through the "Clarity Act" that dictated the Canadian government's terms
for holding a referendum in Quebec, the
PMLQ participated in the opposition campaign. It published the document
"Quebec Case for Sovereignty Before the Supreme Court" in February
1998, which addresses the problem from all angles. (Marxist-Leninist
Party of Quebec, February 16, 1998)
Harper's Motion on the Quebec Nation -- November 2006
In the wake of the Sponsorship Scandal and the defeat of the Liberal Party of Canada in Quebec, intense competition once again broke out among the political parties of the rich for the conquest of the Quebec electorate. While rejecting any discussion of the need to renew the arrangements that had their origin in the Canadian federation and choosing not to respond to the rejection of the Charlottetown Accord, they declared they had a plan to fix the problem. The reason was simple -- so long as the Quebec issue is not resolved, no political party can claim "to govern Canada from coast to coast."
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative government joined the dance in November 2006 by filing a resolution in the House of Commons stating, "the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada." The motion passed, thwarting a long-standing strategy of the Bloc Québécois to submit resolutions to the Parliament of Canada recognizing the Quebec nation.
Harper's motion does not recognize Quebec's right to
self-determination or any rights whatsoever based on the fact that
Quebec is a nation in itself. First, the motion gives no power to the
nation that Parliament is said to recognize. Quebec is a nation insofar
as it "forms a nation within a united Canada." On the
other hand, the Harper motion once again
tries to establish the Quebec nation along ethnic lines, which is
equally condemnable, with the
deliberate goal of creating division in Quebec. Thus, the English
version of the resolution reads that "the Québécois form
a nation within a united Canada," which reveals the intention to cause
trouble as concerns the refusal to recognize all Quebeckers as forming
part of the Quebec nation so as to deny its right to
self-determination.
Lawrence Cannon, Stephen Harper's former Quebec lieutenant, later gave the interpretation of the motion by declaring to reporters who asked whether the term Québécois included all Quebec residents, whatever their origin, "No. Four hundred years ago when Champlain stepped off and onto the shores in Quebec City, he of course spoke about les Canadiens. Then, as the debate evolved, we spoke of French Canadians. And in Quebec now we speak of the Québécois who occupy that land, America." This means that the Conservatives want to perpetuate divisions based on an ethnocultural basis, blocking the modern definition of the nation and the ensuing rights. It was intentional; it could be used to promote the partition of a sovereign Quebec.
These days, the PMLQ is touring Quebec to ensure that Quebec's interests are defended especially against the measures taken by the Harper government, which is selling off Canada's natural resources and integrating the Canadian Armed Forces into U.S. wars of aggression.
One of the specific projects that the PMLQ takes up on a constant basis is the study of the experience of the Patriots of 1837-38 and the dissemination of Quebec history from the people's perspective, not that of the British or the federal state. The Party often brings groups of youth to the Patriots Museum in St. Charles so they may be inspired by the role that the Quebec people played at the height of the wars of independence in the Americas in the nineteenth century. It is also to show them that the Republic was suppressed by the British at that time, leaving no other choice but ultramontanism and liberalism, which explains the origins of the so-called reasonable accommodations of the federal government in the twentieth century, the so-called Laurier century, that is now in crisis.
The PMLQ's position is that the question of Quebec's identity should be used to unite the people to pave the way for society's progress.
Note
1. The Patriots' conception or way of thinking and acting considered anyone fighting the occupation, domination and oppression of our people and our country by the British Empire as Canadian. In reality, during the years 1834-1840 there was no "French Canadian" or "English-Canadian," except in the words and writings of Molson, McGill, Moffatt et al. The members of the economic oligarchy, the monopolists of the time -- the Molsons, McGills and Moffatts -- with their supporters and their bureaucratic administrators, organized societies that were not at all national societies, but societies that they controlled to divide citizenship on the basis of national origin, language and religious beliefs. These sectarian societies were organized in direct opposition to our citizenship and its movement and the Patriot Party. This is why they created at that time the St. George' s Society, the St. Andrew 's Society, the St. Patrick's Society and the German Society. On January 28, 1835, these were grouped under an umbrella organization: the Constitutional Association of Montreal, which would establish "a paramilitary organization of the English party," the party representing the interests of the English Empire. On December 16, the organization took the form of the British Rifle Corps.
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