Prime Minister Mark Carney and Bonhomme Carnaval raise their legs together in a traditional carnival kick at the Citadelle in Quebec City on Jan. 22.Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press
Although Prime Minister Mark Carney has largely dispensed with the obligatory hugs that became standard protocol under his predecessor, there was one embrace he could not resist during a stop in Quebec City last week.
Outside of the Governor-General’s second official residence at the Citadelle, the 19th-century fortress built to defend the city from invaders, Mr. Carney indulged in an uncharacteristically playful hug with Bonhomme Carnaval, even nestling his face against the mascot’s chest.
When he arrived in Quebec City, Mr. Carney was still riding a post-Davos high. His speech two days earlier before the World Economic Forum in Switzerland had won him international acclaim as the de facto leader of the anti-Trump resistance. His photo-op with Bonhomme, which quickly went viral in Quebec, was the cérise sur le sundae after upstaging the European elite at the WEF.
Alas, had he limited his local activities to hugging cuddly snow figures, the Prime Minister might not have had to skip town early and cancel a news conference he had scheduled for the end of a two-day cabinet retreat. Instead, Mr. Carney chose to make a speech that drew near unanimous condemnation in Quebec.
After his homer in Davos, Mr. Carney struck out at home.
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In his speech, Mr. Carney described the Plains of Abraham, the Quebec City site of the 1759 battle that precipitated the fall of New France to the British, as “the place where Canada began to make its founding choice of accommodation over assimilation, of partnership over domination, of building together over pulling apart.”
Across Quebec, eyeballs popped.
Though he acknowledged occasional British attempts to assimilate French Canadians, Mr. Carney mostly portrayed the colonizers as a benevolent bunch who “chose a different path” to the one that typically followed military conquest. The Canada that emerged from this choice, he went on, became one of respectful coexistence that we know today.
Mr. Carney’s characterization of history is problematic on many levels. Suffice it to say that, if Canada now accommodates its francophone minority, this accommodation did not begin on the Plains of Abraham. It was obtained the hard way through countless political battles conducted over more than 250 years.
Even Charles Milliard, widely expected to become the next leader of the federalist Quebec Liberal Party, felt obliged to set the record straight after Mr. Carney’s speech, writing on X: “The survival of the francophone nation in North America does not rest on a ‘chosen partnership’ with British administrators, but on the resilience, determination and spirit of resistance of French Canadians and Québécois.”
Luckily for Mr. Carney, who remains very popular in Quebec despite his shaky grasp of both the French language and local history, an over-the-top reaction to his speech by Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon quickly served to shift the focus from the Prime Minister’s faux-pas to the PQ chief’s knack for overplaying his hand.
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In a long rebuttal of the Prime Minister’s speech delivered before party members at a PQ policy convention on Sunday, Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon accused Mr. Carney of belonging “to a long line of colonialists who apply, point by point, the techniques of British colonialism.”
He also drew an analogy between colonial-era India and Quebec, claiming to cite Mahatma Gandhi: “He said ‘there is nothing worse for a people, not to be enslaved, but to be enslaved while having the impression of being free.’”
A similar quotation is attributed to 19th-century German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who lived a century before Gandhi’s time. Regardless, the quote does not remotely apply to Quebec today. Few Quebeckers, even among sovereigntists, would compare their situation, even during the colonial period, to that of early 20th-century Indians living under British rule.
Exaggeration of this sort is nothing new for Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon, however. Just last month, he accused artistic groups who congratulated Marc Miller on his nomination as federal Culture Minister of “servility” toward Ottawa and “lacking loyalty” toward Quebec.
Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon did make one important point regarding Mr. Carney’s Davos speech that appeared to play into the hands of sovereigntists. In calling for the creation of new alliances to represent their interests in the face of great-power rivalry, Mr. Carney insisted that middle powers such as Canada “must act together, because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.” The same logic, the PQ Leader riposted, must apply to Quebec.
The next Quebec referendum campaign, should it come, will revolve around the question of how best to protect the province’s interests amid the dangerous new order that Mr. Carney described in Davos. The Prime Minister will need to dispense with the specious history lessons and prove to Quebeckers that they do indeed have a seat at the table.