Mathieu Bock-Côté (translated from the original French Facebook post): Reading what’s been said on social media since the Terrebonne by-election, I see that the political consequences of demographic changes are now being recognized within the independence movement—not that we didn’t know, but we pretended not to, because simply naming the reality risked being labeled a racist.
We finally recognize that beyond a certain demographic threshold, the presence of immigrant communities makes a riding inaccessible to nationalists—I’m not saying that this is already the case in Terrebonne, let’s be clear, even if the community vote, to use a different term than the one previously employed, certainly played a role this time, and as always, benefits the Liberal Party, whether it’s the LPC or the PLQ. Terrebonne isn’t yet a Laval riding: it’s becoming one. The 450 will sooner or later become, if the trend continues, Liberal and Federalist ridings.
Let’s be clear about one thing: the federalists know what they’re doing by promoting mass immigration: they’re creating the demographic conditions for a one-party state, where the national question will be structurally suppressed. The sovereigntists and nationalists, who share the same interests, should act with the same candor, openly advocating for an end to mass immigration, quite simply, insofar as it leads to the demographic erosion of the historical Francophone majority and, more broadly, the political and democratic dispossession of the Quebec people in their own country. They should dare to say that this is a matter of survival. Francophone Quebecers never voted to become a minority in their own land. This is the result of an authoritarian policy, never democratically validated. This, too, must be said.
Of course, we can integrate this historical Francophone majority, but this obviously implies adopting its linguistic and cultural norms, its customs, and also appropriating its history. Simply mastering French as one of the two languages of communication in bilingual Canada is not enough. And for that, we will need to implement a genuine and substantial integration policy. You might say I’m repeating myself on this subject: true. I’ve been saying this for 25 years, and I wasn’t the only one. But now that we feel capable of naming this reality, I hope we will act accordingly.