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| "Appel au peuple du Québec", 1980 - Extrait de la nouvelle entente Québec-Canada, Gouvernement du Québec, 1980. Reproduction autorized by the Editeur officiel du Québec, in Rene Levesque, OUI, Les Editions de l'homme, Montreal, 1980, pp. 167-178.
| | #REDIRECT [[Québec-Canada: A New Deal. The Québec Government Proposal for a New Partnership Between Equals: Sovereignty-Association]] |
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| [[Image:Rene-levesque.jpg|thumb|René Lévesque, founder of the PQ, Premier of Quebec from 1976 to 1985]]The moment for decision has arrived. | |
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| For generations we have maintained, against winds and tides, this identity that makes us different in North America. We did it in the aftermath of defeat, and then in the [[Assembly of Lower Canada]]; we did it despite being overwhelmed [[in 1837]] and under the [[Act of Union]] -- all of which aimed at reducing us to insignificance. And then, still, in a federal system which presses us more and more into the status of a minority.
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| Besides, all along that historic path, others have taken us seriously only when we have stood up for ourselves and hung onto our goal. What would they say and what would they think of us if, this time, we were to pull back? For forty years, at least, we have been the cause of the crisis in the federal system. [[Duplessis]], [[Lesage]], [[Bertrand]], and [[Bourassa]] who we elected could only accentuate the crisis. Even when they slowed the movement or grew feeble, the push from Quebec society prevented them from slackening. That is because, without letup, Quebec continues to evolve and to find itself, and to be more able to take care of itself.
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| But if after so many years of growing labour, our mountain can only bring forth a mouse, any national pretence Quebec has won't be taken seriously for very long. It wouldn't be the end of the world. No doubt of that. It would be, simply, the brutal stop to a healthy climb -- one which leads a people, as it leads an individual -- to maturity. We would have nothing else to do but fall into the ranks, and for a good spell of time we would also fall into a state of forgetfulness. People would grant us that in a charitable fashion, watching us going on our path to our fulfilment.
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| Federalist, but at the same time disappointed and uneasy, [[Robert Cliche]] counselled us in his last public statement on the subject to take great care: "In my opinion," he wrote, one of the gravest dangers now would be a NO in the referendum. English Canada would then believe the crisis is over and would return to its lethargy."
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| Some invite Quebecers, as a people, when we face the referendum, to lose face. They are working for a defeat! Their watch-word consists of recommending to us, before anything else, before all eventual negotiations with English Canada, to make a demonstration of political weakness, a show of weakness...That is exactly what is wanted by those with whom Quebec will negotiate tomorrow.
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| Strange, eh? To wish that we Quebecers, in the tight-knit group that has lasted for two centuries, place ourselves in the weakest position of democratic power. We should prepare our own enfeeblement and then present ourselves at the negotiating table!
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| They have said what they can to the contrary, those who preach the NO to the referendum. They would tie us literally into the [[status quo]], lifting from us all foreseeable chance to leave or even to ameliorate things substantially. They speak of our existence as that of the past -- even when they always hold in reserve, without mentioning it -- this supreme weapon which is recourse to the people. How can they really listen to the possibilities of the future if they are willing to invalidate the supreme power by surrendering it?
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| Political thought which would presume to impose upon itself behaviour from that direction -- so sunk as it is in fog and ambiguity -- isn't able to do anything but completely betray itself. The deepest basis of this argument is that Quebec would be too small and too weak to undertake anything by itself. And that, anyhow, it would be premature to try. In three, five, or ten years, maybe that would be the time to make such a move they argue -- when there are several months still to haggle, hoping to make the government hold up the referendum until next spring!
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| We believe, quite to the contrary, that we have the maturity, the self-confidence and the energy required to take on our destiny. Because that is the truth of our situation.
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| The Quebec [[nation]] is a family that will soon be four hundred years old. Long before that age, in both of the Americas, the [[English]], [[Spanish]], and [[Portuguese]] gained their brakes on our [[emancipation]]. But it has not prevented Quebec society from maturing and laboriously we gained the capacity to progress, to administer and to govern ourselves.
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| Through the years we have little by little gathered the essential experience. To begin with [[parliamentary]] experience, we have made it our own for two centuries -- this central exercise of [[democracy]] -- well before other peoples. No doubt our [[National Assembly]] isn't perfect and it often works too slowly, as do all democratic parliaments. As good as any other, our administration risks forgetting sometimes, in the proliferation of paper, that it is at the service of the citizen: as are all such administrations in the world. Our courts also have the virtues and faults of courts elsewhere. In short, we are neither more nor less able than anyone else to conduct our political lives for ourselves. And if it were necessary to pass an examination, we wouldn't be among the worst -- far from it.
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| This political maturity, the sum of progressive -- often ground-breaking legislation, and even the multiplication by our government of green or white papers, is there to bear witness to our plans: education, energy, housing, scientific research, the economy, etc. Nothing of human concern is any longer foreign to us as a collectivity.
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| As to Quebec's capacity to succeed in all other spheres -- is it conceivable even to have doubts? By an heroic effort of catching up we have passed in 21 years from one of the lowest to one of the highest levels of formal education on the continent. There are still holes to fill. There are always problems, but a performance like ours is, even now, without equal. As is equally that of our artists and writers who, in one generation, have bequeathed us a modest but undeniable renaissance.
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| What people notice the least, though, is that an analogous phenomenon has been produced equally, and does not cease to grow, in the economic sector. Because, during the 20 years, [[Hydro-Quebec]] has also become one of the largest and best energy companies in the universe. They told us it was impossible. As they continue to try to proclaim that, with asbestos, our unique vocation is to dig holes... As they would completely deny us an automobile insurance system that -- right from the start -- is in the vanguard of the continent.
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| A short time ago, they made fun of [[Desjardins]] and the pioneers of the [[cooperative movement]]. That didn't stop it from attaining the size with which we are all familiar. Just as they recently made fun of the [[mutual help fund]] of which the daring as well as the growth are already proverbial. Thus, always, the nay-sayers occupy themselves denigrating those who've got the courage to push ahead. And, thus, happily, they continue to be proved wrong. | |
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| They're the ones who'd refuse to see what the [[Beauce]] people have gotten under their belts. They're the ones who 'lord it' before the dynamism of [[Saquenay-Lac Saint Jean]]. The ones who find [[Abitibi-Temiscamingue]] too far away for them to be interested in the explosion of vitality which is sweeping the region. And they're the ones who only look from the small end of their opera glasses at this beating heart which is the old and completely young valley of the St. Lawrence.
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| They're the ones who still carry on saying, for example, that Quebec is too small and that her resources don't permit her to hold up in the chorus of nations. Too small, this country which has the physical size of the greatest? Too small, this people of six million, of whom the equivalent call themselves [[Norwegians]], [[Swedes]], [[Swiss]], [[Danes]], [[New Zealanders]]. Deprived -- this incomparable reservoir of forests, of minerals, of hydraulic riches, and even, on condition that we take great care, of food-growing potential?
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| What does a people have to do to succeed in following the course of its destiny?
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| Very simply it has to have the free right, in its own way, to guide that course, freed of the shackles of a [[political system]] which everyone agrees is out of date.
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| We Quebec men and women are a nation, the most deeply rooted on the continent. On the immensity of our territory, everywhere our old memories and our new living presence remind us that this people is perfectly at home in its ancestral place.
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| And so it is of vital importance that this hearthland henceforth belong to us completely. The time has come to be masters in our own house. The dependence of a minority which has never been healthy for anyone could be accepted as making sense as long as we did not have the means or even the idea of getting out of that dependence. It will, nonetheless, have cost us much in delays. It will have left us with a solid [[inferiority complex]] which constitutes the only motivation for our hesitations. Now is the time, finally, to be rid of it. We don't have the right to let the opportunity go by.
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| Because that burden is diminishing progressively, and [[Ottawa]] can now live very well without [[Quebec]]. We know that our present shackles can only become increasingly aggravating.
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| * They are made of those who limit our chance of advancement to a particular rung on the ladder, and have made us in our own place -- we, the majority of Quebecers -- one of the lowest earning groups in society.
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| * They are those who oblige us after years of demands and procedures to bring about finally, practically exhausted, the things that are granted in every normal country: like the right to speak French to each other in our own country.
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| * They are those outside our community who keep the last word on central questions -- even on questions of our day-to-day existence, such as immigration, justice, family, and social policy.
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| * They are those who make it so difficult to balance all Quebec policies of importance: accommodation, pulp and paper, agriculture, fisheries...
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| * They are those who perpetuate odiously, as in the business of sales tax, this powerful right which permits -- finally -- the theft of literally tens of millions from the Quebec treasury -- (and even more, for many years now, for police services).
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| * They are those who hold on stubbornly outside our community to the regulation of the air waves; that is to say, to the most powerful instrument of communication in our time.
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| * They are those who force us to seek permission as soon as it concerns showing ourselves abroad. We must see that permission refused sometimes arbitrarily, and in other cases, submitted to a nasty supervision.
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| All that goes along with duplication of employment, overlapping of programs and of overhanging measures which are terribly costly in the expenditure of energy and loss of efficiency, if not, as well, of money.
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| Without ever counting it in, since the beginning Quebec hasn't escaped the classic condition of minorities: the condition which, from one era to another, has deprived us of our fair share of railways, of marine activity, and now of air connections. The only time when Ottawa drew off a little less than it provided in return -- some brief years since the [[petroleum crisis]] in 1974 -- is coming to an end. Soon, whatever the reason for it happening in the first place, we are going to pay the same price for gas as all the others. And the federal government will continue, as always, to direct the large expenditures generative of economic progress towards the West according to an order of priority contrary to ours.
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| The new entente that we propose would, first of all, end all these hindrances, these cramping roles for so many people and for all of our people. It would end the manipulations and imported exploitation. It would end the insecurity of a minority. It would be the end of permissions we have to beg for in order to act or communicate.
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| Like a hundred and fifty other peoples in the world, we can -- we, too -- be in full possession of our country. A country in which eventual recognition will not impoverish anyone, since it is we who have pioneered it, enriched it, developed it, and who are its inhabitants. It will be a country where we will be able to live as a majority with an incomparable feeling of security, of normalcy, which will flow from our condition.
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| we will make laws according to our own lights, in relation to our needs and our aspirations, without constantly having to upset ourselves about either external constraints or interventions. We will spend in our community and for our uses the taxes and all the other revenues which are perceived as belonging to the collectivity, and we will be able to put them to use for our growth.
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| We will accept in full liberty all those who, from throughout the world -- accept to come here in order to build with us, conforming to our plans and our way of seeing and saying things, a society that is unceasingly more productive, more just, and more humane. A society more open and tolerant than ever, assured as it will be of its completeness and its security of tenure.
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| In this society, there will not be blockages imposed from without. We can deploy to their limits our gifts, our energies, the direction of invention and the taste for excellent work of which we are as richly supplied as anyone.
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| Besides, our most remarkable progress to the present -- isn't it in products made in sectors where we were left to ourselves, without having to ask or be told? In sectors where we are dragged back, with very few exceptions, that is the result of the federal system which inhibits or complicates our pace. Sovereignty will be the liberation of Quebec initiative in all the workplaces of the present and the future.
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| Above all, it will be the assumption of [[responsibility]], the supreme synonym of [[liberty]]. This is what frightens those who recoil before the idea of having a country of their own. It's as if they have a fear of good health! Because responsibility gives to people as it does to individuals an increase of vigour and of pride in order to grow in their own eyes, as other people do.
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| This sovereignty places us in a new order with a new association with Canada, inserting us thus more and more in the universal evolution of the modern world. It is a world teeming with members who are part of the club of sovereign states, but whose borders tend to lower constantly and to fill in the deepest divisions that history has made. It isn't the condition of a [[utopia]], but of the independence that all peoples must eventually admit and manage among themselves.
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| It is the condition that only exists between people who are fundamentally equal, whatever be the size of power of each. In the [[Benelux]] countries, the first model of contemporary associations, it is as equals that they work on essential questions between tiny [[Luxembourg]], with fewer than a million inhabitants, and of [[Belgium]] or [[Holland]] who are 25 or 30 times more populous. If they hadn't maintained the principle of equality between peoples, the experience of the Benelux countries wouldn't have led to the vast economic community that we find today made up of nine completely different countries. The [[Nordic Council]], moreover, would never have seen the light of day.
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| Equal to equal, therefore, is what we want to propose to our partners in the rest of Canada as a new entente. It is an entente based on the formula of free association between sovereign states, which tends to replace the old federal mould where the national minority groups are never able to know real security or full development.
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| This association will permit us together to keep all that is mutually advantageous to us. It is an economic space the dislocation of which would be as costly to one of us as to the other. It will be a common market and will have a joint monetary policy. It will have the free movement of people and goods. And in an additional range of things, we could envisage progressively enlarging service industries without impediment: postal services, railways, international air routes, fairness for minorities. In all the things that don't impinge upon fundamental liberty for each person, we can make appropriate law, dispose of our natural resources sensibly, and live as masters in our own house.
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| Thus a sovereign Quebec, instead of being a barrier, will constitute rather a hinge between [[Ontario]] and the [[Maritimes]], permitting the federal system to continue as well, and to evolve freely in the rest of Canada.
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| Evidently, all that won't come about today or tomorrow. It's going to be necessary to negotiate. Still. This time, however, there won't be sterile palaver where our claims perpetually break their teeth against the wall of a system which, for a hundred and twelve years, has refused us any major evolution and still refuses the least important reform.
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| There is, finally, on the table, this essential breaker of blockage: a collective wish, clear and categoric.
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| The hour will come soon for the Quebec people to express this democratic will and, at the same time, give to its government the mandate to take the most decisive step in all our history.
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| The choice ought to be easy, in effect, both for the heart and for the head. It's enough to think a little of our long fidelity in the past and of all our present vigour, and to think as well of those who will follow us and whose future hangs so greatly upon this moment.
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| And then we will clearly choose at this great crossroads of the referendum the only way which can clear the horizon and assure us a free, proud, adult, national existence. The key to open the way for us Quebecers from today and for tomorrow is the little positive and fine-sounding word: Yes.
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| * http://www.ola.bc.ca/online/cf/documents/CWlevE.html
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| == See also ==
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| * [[Presidents of the Parti québécois]]
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| [[Category:René Lévesque]]
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| [[Category:20th century]]
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