Federal Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has waded into the Quebec election campaign, saying it’s time for Coalition Avenir Quebec Leader François Legault to stop dividing Quebecers into “us and them.”
Rodriguez was responding to comments made by Legault at a campaign rally Sunday that non-French-speaking immigration to the province is a threat to “national cohesion.”
“It’s the first time that I’m considered as a threat. I didn’t speak French when I came to Canada. I was eight years old. I didn’t speak a word of French or English,” the minister, whose family immigrated from Argentina, told reporters outside a federal Liberal caucus meeting in St. Andrews, N.B. “Are my parents a threat? They didn’t speak French when they came in.”
The minister told reporters outside a federal Liberal caucus meeting in St. Andrews, N.B., today that he wonders whether Legault would have considered him and his parents threats because they spoke no French when they immigrated to Quebec from Argentina.
Rodriguez, who is the prime minister’s Quebec lieutenant, noted that his family learned French and his parents became professors at the French-language Université de Sherbrooke.
“I think we have to stop talking about us and them. The second a person comes to Quebec, devotes his life to Quebec, raises his kids in Quebec, that person is a Quebecer,” Rodriguez said.
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Quebec Liberal Leader Dominique Anglade, whose parents were Haitian immigrants, told reporters in Laval, Que., that Legault’s comments were “pathetic” and accused him of deliberately trying to turn people against each other.
“It appeals to the basest instincts. It nourishes the fear of others,” she told reporters in Laval, Que.Anglade said the comments make her think of her parents, who immigrated from Haiti.
“Every time I hear Francois Legault saying these things, it really gets to me, because it’s a lack of understanding of how Quebec was built,” she said, adding that immigrants from around the world contributed to building the province.“Inclusion is a choice and is the choice that Liberal party of Quebec is making. Francois Legault wants to exclude. We’ll never build a strong Quebec with that approach, never.”However, Anglade said the province needs to do more to ensure that immigrants are able to successfully integrate and speak French.Responding to Anglade’s comments, Legault said immigration benefits Quebec, but the province’s capacity to accept immigrants is limited if it wants to protect the French language.
Legault said Monday that one reason Quebecers followed COVID-19 measures more than people elsewhere was because of Quebec’s “national cohesion,” describing the province as a “tight-knit” nation where people share “certain values.”
“To have national cohesion, you have to have a nation, a strong nation. For the Quebec nation to be strong, we have to protect French,” he told reporters in St-Lazare, Que.
During his visit to the Montreal suburb, Legault promised $100 million in funding for respite care centres to support the families of children with disabilities if his party is re-elected on Oct. 3.
Meanwhile, Conservative Leader Eric Duhaime was in Quebec City, where he promised to create a publicly accessible registry of sex offenders if his party is elected.
Elsewhere, Parti Quebecois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon visited a dairy farm in Ste-Gertrude-Manneville, 600 kilometres northwest of Montreal, where he said his party would announce its full education platform after the first televised leaders debate Thursday.
-With files from Mia Rabson, Jocelyne Richer and Frederic Lacroix-Couture.
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