In the gardens of the National Assembly, seven years to the day after his death, the unveiling of the monument honoring former Prime Minister Jacques Parizeau takes place. He will come to recall his incalculable contribution to the emergence of modern Quebec.

He will also say that in 1995, Mr. Parizeau was the only one to have brought Quebecers to the gates of their independence. Since then, the Parti Québécois has wandered from bend to bend and from leader to leader. So much so that in the ballot of October 3, he risks disappearance.

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, perhaps its last leader, therefore implores Quebecers to save the PQ. The answer will be up to the voters.

In fact, the mourning of what was once a great political party promises to be more complex than one might think. Will we even try to understand the reasons for its long decline? Yet it is necessary.

After 1995, the PQ's gradual abandonment of its own option had a lot to do with it. What was this party for if it was not to continue to advance its country project?

The ultimate existential question was already there. However, very few sovereigntists dared to pose it directly and publicly.

Move of mercy

And the coup de grace? Without a doubt, the charter of values. Proposed in 2013 by the minority government of Pauline Marois and preceded by far by the so-called identity turn that she had initiated at the PQ in 2007.

This turn, let us remember, was intended to outdo nationalism in the ADQ of Mario Dumont. Which, taking advantage of the so-called crisis of reasonable accommodation, saw its support climb within the French-speaking electorate.

I first substantiated this hypothesis at length in 2012-2013 in a series of analytical posts in L’actualité and following my arrival at the Journal in October 2013. This analysis, I believe, still holds water.

I explained how the PQ had dropped the prey of independence for the shadow of a pseudo-secularism now erected as a new sacred pillar of Quebec national identity.

I say “pseudo” because this secularism was based above all on a rejection of ostentatious religious symbols, particularly the Muslim hijab, in a Quebec where the extremely rare wearing of religious symbols in the public service had never posed a real social problem.

Dethroned option

The charter of values ​​nevertheless proposed to prohibit them through the public and parapublic, Quebec and municipal service. Faced with the independence option overshadowed by the heated debates surrounding the PQ charter project, the sovereignist movement, including the Bloc Québécois, split between the pro-charter and those who, on the contrary, were worried about it.

Among the latter was Jacques Parizeau. On October 2, 2013, in the pages of the Journal, he sounded the alarm in turn. This charter, he wrote, went too far and even risked seeing the people it targeted find their true defenders among the federalists. What happened.

From the first turn in 2007, even at the PQ, his own Political Action Group for Quebecers of Immigrant Origin had denounced him. In the pages of Le Devoir, its members were already worried about seeing the PQ "missing the real power: sovereignty".

I wrote it and I persist: to compete with the ADQ on the ground of identity, the PQ had sacrificed its independence project on the electoral altar of the charter of values.

Result: in the media and political space, the sovereignist option has ended up withering away in favor of the mirror to the larks of a trompe-l'oeil secularism. The CAQ, nationalist and post-sovereignist, is it not the logical continuation?