With sentiment for Quebec separation at an all-time low, former Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe chose this year’s Canada Day to praise the “unity” of the country he has spent more than 20 years trying to break up.
“What makes the strength of Canadians is their unity, above partisan divisions,” he wrote in a June 29 column published in the Journal de Montreal.
“What continues to make the weakness of Quebec is the division among Quebecers about the national question.”
The column is entitled “It’s been 35 years that I’ve celebrated July 1st,” and carries the twist ending that July 1 is the birthday of Mr. Duceppe’s son, Alexis. Like all other sovereigntist leaders, of course, Mr. Duceppe does not celebrate Canada Day.
Nevertheless, with all apparent earnestness — and even a slight twinge of envy — Mr. Duceppe wrote that he “admires Canadians.”
“I understand why Canadians celebrate July 1st, because Canada is a grand and beautiful country,” he wrote.
Mr. Duceppe added that while Canada’s “federalist” parties do not agree on many things, “these divisions are brushed aside when the time comes to honour their country, Canada.”
Since 1995, the House of Commons has made a weekly habit of singing a bilingual version of O Canada every Wednesday at 2 p.m. Mr. Duceppe and the other Bloc MPs would quietly sit out the anthem, but the experience appears to have had an effect on the separatist leader.
“All the MPs of these parties sing, by heart, the national anthem. I admire the spirit of unity that guides them when the word Canada is uttered,” he wrote in the column.
Canada’s 147th birthday comes at a historical low for Quebec separatism. In the April 7 Quebec provincial election, the Parti Québécois was handed its smallest share of the vote in 44 years, with many election watchers blaming the party’s decision to make sovereignty a campaign issue.
Mr. Duceppe’s former party still has only four seats in the House of Commons, and is poised to lose two more following the party’s controversial June election of Mario Beaulieu as leader. Mr. Duceppe, 66, led the party from 1997 until 2011.
One Bloc MP dismissed Mr. Beaulieu as an anti-English “clown,” and the new leader earned immediate condemnation from Mr. Duceppe for delivering a victory speech containing the words “nous vaincrons,” a phrase closely association with the terrorist FLQ.
“I can’t associate myself with people who yell, ‘Nous vaincrons,’” Mr. Duceppe told the CBC.
The tattered state of Quebec separatism figured heavily in Mr. Duceppe’s recent column, as he bemoaned the sharp socio-economic splits between different branches of the separatist camp.
Most notably, Mr. Duceppe’s own son Alexis, who shares his birthday with Canada, publicly defied his father’s support for the Parti Québécois in 2012 and sided with the centre-left Option Nationale. “Never, never, never,” the elder Duceppe told a reporter at the time when asked if he planned to follow his son’s lead.
“The Canadians have built a unified country,” Mr. Duceppe wrote on Tuesday.

“Quebecers must build their own on a solid foundation, not on the repudiations we propose to federalists.”

Quebecers must build their own on a solid foundation, not on the repudiations we propose to federalists
Of course, the column was not all pro-Canada. Mr. Duceppe ended with a battery of grievances against the federation: He was “saddened” by Canada’s treatment of its francophone and Acadian minorities, “shocked” at its treatment of First Nations and recoiled at its links to the British Crown.
Since the 1990s, in the lead-up to previous Canada Days, the Bloc has regularly taken the opportunity to complain about Quebec’s share of federal Canada Day spending.
Most recently, in 2009 Bloc MP Carole Lavallée pointed to $3.2-million earmarked for Quebec’s Canada Day celebrations and called it evidence of Ottawa’s “desire to force-feed Quebec like some sort of goose.”
Despite the political divisions among the Duceppe family, the former Bloc leader said he loves Alexis “profoundly” and had prepared “feverishly” for his July 1 birthday.
National Post