Under François Legault, Quebec’s Catholic past is front and centre again

Konrad Yakabuski is a Globe and Mail columnist based in Montreal.

Since early May, fans and otherwise curious Montrealers have been streaming into the Centre Pierre-Péladeau (named for the late media mogul and Quebec separatist who founded the tabloid Le Journal de Montréal) for Sugar Sammy’s latest bilingual show – titled, franglais oblige, You’re Gonna Rire 2. The choice of locale is a delicious twist given the homegrown comedian’s reputation as a bête noire of Quebec nationalists and Le Journal’s conservative right-wing columnists.

True to form, Sammy’s new show pokes fun at La Belle Province and its collectivist quirks, from its obsession with protecting French (with little regard for the quality of the language spoken) and its incestuous star-system to the province’s awkward struggles with diversity. He even takes a jab at the Journal. Sammy, the son of Indian immigrants whose real name is Samir Khullar, throws in a few jokes about anglophones who remain blissfully ignorant about French Quebec. But they get off easy compared with the province’s other solitude.

An outspoken opponent of Quebec’s laws on language and secularism, Sugar Sammy gets downright serious at one point during his show when he criticizes Premier François Legault for wishing Quebeckers “Joyeuses Pâques!” (Happy Easter) on Twitter this year. “Either you celebrate everyone or no one,” he says in French, pointing out that Mr. Legault did not extend Ramadan greetings to Quebec Muslims. What’s more, Mr. Legault followed up his Happy Easter tweet a day later with another paying tribute to Quebec’s Catholic heritage. Quoting from a Journal de Montréal column by Mathieu Bock-Côté, the Premier tweeted: “Catholicism has engendered in us a culture of solidarity that distinguishes us on a continental scale.” Sugar Sammy responded, sarcastically: “Secularism is important except once on Twitter.”

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As Quebeckers prepare to celebrate their June 24 Fête Nationale with parades and concerts, Mr. Legault’s tweets raise questions about just who, really, is invited to the party. Under the current Premier – whose Coalition Avenir Québec seeks more autonomy for the province within Canada and promises never to hold a referendum on sovereignty – Quebec has embraced a peculiar form of separation of church and state.

In short, the province’s Catholic traditions are seen to be an integral part of its identity – to be cherished and celebrated – while other religions are unwelcome in the public sphere. The CAQ has banned teachers from wearing religious symbols, and prohibited schools from setting aside prayer spaces for Muslim students, all in the name of secularism. Yet, the Premier’s encomium to Catholicism on Twitter suggests that not all religions are considered equal in his eyes, or those of the state he represents.

The June 24 holiday was long known in Quebec as St. Jean Baptiste Day, in honour of the cousin of Jesus, designated as the patron saint of French-Canadians by Pope Pius X in 1908. The holiday’s religious overtones waned with the onset of the Quiet Revolution, as Quebeckers began abandoning the church in droves and discovered a new form of communion in separatism. In 1977, sovereigntist Parti Québécois premier René Lévesque changed the holiday’s name to La Fête Nationale, as a gesture of inclusiveness aimed at encouraging a sense of civic nationalism in Quebeckers of diverse origins. Mr. Legault has challenged that legacy with rhetoric and policies that evoke nostalgia for an earlier era of cultural homogeneity and unbridled ethnic nationalism.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in his approach to secularism, known in Quebec as la laïcité. Many analysts saw Mr. Legault’s Easter tweets as a dog whistle aimed at the CAQ’s conservative and nationalist base. They were that and more. “François Legault’s electoral base is largely among francophone Québécois who, even though they are no longer practising Catholics, adhere to a form of cultural Catholicism,” offers Jean-Philippe Warren, a sociology and anthropology professor at Concordia University. “Even if the secularism law upends some customs, his tweets signal to his base that the law is not meant to be a repudiation of Quebec’s identity.”

Indeed, on the contrary. To purists of secularism, Mr. Legault’s tweets were a clear violation of the spirit of the CAQ government’s own Bill 21, the 2019 law officially known as the Act respecting the Laicity of the State. The law imposes a requirement of religious neutrality on the government. It was passed after more than a decade of heated debate about how (or whether) to accommodate religious minorities in a province where Catholic symbols – from the built-in brick crucifixes on (formerly Catholic) public schools to the giant illuminated cross that sits atop Mount Royal – remain an inescapable fact of everyday life.

The answer, contained in Bill 21, was to prohibit public employees in a position of authority, including public-school teachers, from wearing outwardly visible religious symbols, such as the hijab, kippa or crucifix. Opponents charge the law disproportionately discriminates against Muslim women and fans the flames of Islamophobia. The legislation, they insist, is not really about secularism at all. It is about exploiting fears among francophone Québécois about their cultural survival in order to win votes. To secularist purists, la laïcité has been twisted into little more than a tool of wedge politics by the CAQ.

Years before the CAQ came along, a religious-symbols ban had been sought by Quebec feminists, who had experienced the church’s pre-Quiet Revolution oppression of women in the province. They were joined by immigrants from majority-Muslim countries where the veil had been imposed by law or social norm. After a failed 2013 attempt by the PQ to adopt a sweeping ban on religious symbols throughout the public sector, the CAQ rose to power promising a more limited prohibition on religious displays in the public sphere.

The CAQ policy is best described as asymmetrical or cafeteria secularism. To wit, the crucifix that had hung in the National Assembly for eight decades until 2019 is now encased in glass just outside the legislative chamber, as an unavoidable reminder of the province’s Catholic heritage – and an affront to bona fide secularists. Mr. Legault does not seem to care much what they think. After all, he shrugged off critics when, on a trip to California in 2019, he told Governor Gavin Newsom “all French-Canadians” are Catholics.

Cultural Catholicism provides Quebeckers with a spiritual connection to their past without imposing upon them the obligations of the faith that made living under the yoke of the church so tedious for so many, especially women. In 2021, almost 54 per cent of Quebeckers reported being Catholic. While the proportion dropped substantially from 75 per cent a decade earlier, and more than 80 per cent in the 1980s, it remains astonishingly high considering that precious few of Quebec’s Catholics attend mass on a regular basis. Even Mr. Legault describes himself as a “non-practising” Catholic.

What explains this attachment to a faith so few Quebeckers actually exercise? In the column cited by Mr. Legault, Mr. Bock-Côté, or MBC as he is known, not only credited Quebeckers’ unique sense of solidarity to their Catholic traditions, but asserted that this heritage had also led them “to today resist the disaggregation of our society under the pressure of multiculturalism.”

It is not surprising a nationalist politician such as Mr. Legault would agree. It helps him rally Quebeckers around a shared identity – or what Prof. Warren describes as a “culture of convergence” – with a mission to ensure their survival as a distinct people.

It also serves to distract attention from areas where the government has failed to deliver improvements in Quebeckers’ lives, such as health care and housing. Mr. Legault has won two majority governments by tugging on the nationalist heartstrings and stoking fears of cultural annihilation, vowing to protect Quebec’s language, traditions and values. After tabling his religious symbols ban, in 2019, he told Quebeckers in a televised address: “It is time to establish the rules because, in Quebec, this is how we live.”

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In many ways, Mr. Legault has revived the defensive, pre-Quiet Revolution conservative nationalism that the church initiated. In its heyday, the Catholic clergy ingrained in French Canadians the idea that they were imbued with a divine mission to preserve their faith, language and way of life. Even as Quebec society opened up in the 1960s, the collectivist ethos instilled by the church did not disappear. It morphed into something new.

“Having created the abstract concept and the rhetoric of ethnic survival, the Roman Catholic Church left as a legacy the Quebec independence movement,” author Ron Graham wrote in God’s Dominion, his 1990 book about religion in Canada. “Where else did their notions of community and idealism come from? What else conditioned their ideas of authority and tradition? Who else preserved the dreams and memories of French Canada for 200 years and provided so many of the images and obsessions of French-Canadian culture?”

The writings of Mr. Bock-Côté embody this idea. The 42-year-old sociologist has emerged as an influential thinker on the political right in both Quebec and France. His career outre mer took off in 2021 when he was chosen to replace anti-immigration polemicist Éric Zemmour as a commentator on CNews, France’s version of Fox News, after Mr. Zemmour entered politics.

In Canada and France, Mr. Bock-Côté is seen as championing the ideas of the billionaire business titans who own the media he works for. CNews is controlled by industrialist Vincent Bolloré, a fervent Catholic with ties to Opus Dei. Le Journal de Montréal, along with its sister Quebec City tabloid and the TVA and LCN television networks that feature Mr. Bock-Côté's commentary, are part of the Quebecor empire controlled by former PQ leader Pierre Karl Péladeau.

Mr. Bock-Côté's writings on immigration, language and identity have spawned a cottage industry among intellectuals on the Quebec left, who have dedicated essays and books to challenging his ideas. One of them, sociologist Mark Fortier, author of Mélancolies identitaires: Une année à lire Mathieu Bock-Côté (Identity Melancholies: A Year of Reading Mathieu Bock-Côté), believes Mr. Legault’s references to MBC’s writings (which he has praised on other occasions) are mainly a political tactic aimed at keeping nationalist voters – and previous PQ supporters – on board.

“MBC has been beating the drum of conservative nationalism for 20 years. That has earned him a certain influence in such circles, which are quite present within the CAQ,” Mr. Fortier explained in an e-mail. “There is however an important difference between MBC and Legault. MBC is an ideologue, a radical conservative, a fast thinker, a polemic factory … Mr. Legault is above all a down-to-earth man, who, a bit like [Ontario Premier] Doug Ford, dreams of wealth creation.”

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Just where the ideas of Mr. Legault and Mr. Bock-Côté diverge is a matter of debate. MBC makes no secret of the fact that he aims, through his writings, to help revive support for sovereignty in Quebec. He has warned of the “programmed disappearance” of the Québécois people at the hands of federal policies on immigration and multiculturalism. “We now know what fate awaits Quebec in the [Canadian] federation,” Mr. Bock-Côté wrote last month as Le Journal ran a series of articles on the Century Initiative, an organization that promotes policies aimed at increasing Canada’s population to 100 million by 2100. “In short, the Québécois people will be drowned or condemned to political insignificance.” He insisted Mr. Legault, a former PQ cabinet minister, had a “moral obligation” to once again take up the sovereigntist cause.

On both sides of the Atlantic, Mr. Bock-Côté rails against what he describes as attempts by the “woke left” to impose its “racialist” ideology on Western societies. His latest book, La révolution racialiste et autres virus idéologiques (The Racialist Revolution and Other Ideological Viruses) was described as “luminous” by former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Mr. Zemmour, too, is a fan.

Mr. Bock-Côté rejects Islam as fundamentally incompatible with Western democratic values. In a 2018 Journal de Montréal column, he denounced the Muslim headscarf as “an instrument of political combat [that] serves to mark the presence of political Islam in the public sphere. It does not matter if certain women wear it voluntarily, as is assuredly the case. For our societies, it represents a logic of apartheid applied to women in the public sphere, as if it is necessary to mark them and confine them to their religious community.”

While he rejects charges that his writings echo the Great Replacement theory of French writer Renaud Camus – which posits that white Europeans are gradually being “replaced” in their own countries by racialized non-Christians owing to the complicity of political and intellectual elites – Mr. Bock-Côté's columns in Le Journal de Montréal and the Paris daily Le Figaro invoke similar warnings about mass migration and the eradication of the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western societies.

“Everywhere, the South is rising toward the North, by way of the masses, who demand to go wherever they desire, and settle according to their conditions,” he wrote this month in Le Figaro, after a Syrian man granted refugee status in Sweden stabbed four children and two adults in a playground in eastern France. “Without saying so, [Western societies] believe less and less in integration, given that the migratory pressure is so strong.”

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Mr. Legault likely understands that Quebeckers have no appetite for more divisive referendums. Yet, he rarely misses an opportunity to test Quebeckers’ nationalist reflexes. Whether or not he still secretly caresses the dream of making Quebec a country, his rhetoric and policies suggest a politician who is hedging his bets.

His immigration policies appear designed mainly to appeal to francophone voters outside Montreal who cling to their traditions. In advance of the 2022 provincial election, Mr. Legault warned of the “Louisianisation” of Quebec unless the province wrenched full control over immigration from Ottawa; he also told an audience of businesspeople desperate for workers that increasing immigration levels above 50,000 a year would be “a bit suicidal” for Quebec. Like MBC, he has denounced the Century Initiative as a threat to Quebec’s cultural and political survival within Canada.

Under the impetus of business groups and Immigration Minister Christine Fréchette, considered a moderate in the CAQ cabinet, the Legault government last month proposed increasing the number of permanent residents the province accepts each year to 60,000 by 2027. The proposal is conditional on accepting only economic immigrants who speak French before arriving in Quebec. Meeting that goal will force Quebec to rely even more heavily on mostly Muslim immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa, where French is spoken as a first or second language. The number of Muslims in Quebec soared by 73 per cent in the decade to 2021, to about 420,000, with Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Cameroun, Syria and Ivory Coast among the most popular countries of origin for newcomers.

The face of urban Quebec is changing rapidly. First- and second-generation immigrants with no ties to the province’s Catholic past already account for 46 per cent of the population in the Montreal Census Metropolitan Area. While the proportion is still much lower than in the Toronto (80 per cent) and Vancouver (73 per cent) CMAs, it remains far higher than any other city in Quebec, according to Statistics Canada data compiled by Environics Analytics. In the Quebec City CMA, only about 15 per cent of residents are first- or second-generation immigrants; in Trois-Rivières, the figure is below 10 per cent.

As a result, the political divide between Montreal and the rest of Quebec is growing. Mr. Legault deftly exploited the province’s first-past-the-post electoral system (which gives disproportionate weight to rural ridings) to win back-to-back majority governments by appealing to conservative francophone voters outside Montreal.

In many ways, he has now become a prisoner of this electorate. His political fate depends on keeping these voters on board, a task that risks becoming harder as the PQ shows renewed signs of strength under its energetic new leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon. If anything, Mr. Legault will need to double-down on the CAQ’s nationalist politics to prevent the PQ from gaining more ground.

Sugar Sammy likely need not worry about running out of material any time soon.

More reading: Konrad Yakabuski on Quebec politics

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