BY SUSAN BERMAN
MONTREAL, Quebec - In the letters column, Robert Sheehy takes exception with the Militant's coverage of the struggle of Quebecois for their national rights and self- determination. For workers, farmers, and youth in Canada to recognize and act on the fact that the Quebecois are an oppressed nation is a life and death question.
As the Militant has explained, Quebecois are the largest oppressed nationality in Canada. Representing 22 percent of the population, they are a French-speaking people who have faced systematic discrimination in Canada on the basis of their language.
The oppression of Quebecois dates back to the defeat of revolutionary struggles of the 1830s for land, a republican form of government, equal rights for all, and the separation of church and state against British colonial rule. These struggles united French- and English- speaking working farmers, workers, and merchants
The ruling class institutionalized discrimination against French speakers to prevent another united struggle of the oppressed and exploited.
The founding act of the Canadian federation, the British North America Act of 1867, denied the national character of Quebec, significantly limiting its political powers. The constitution imposed a dual-language and religious school system in Quebec. This has been at the heart of maintaining linguistic divisions and segregation.
The maintenance of semi-feudal relations on the land for some time retarded the development of Quebec's economy.
Despite the fact that 80 percent of Quebec's population is French-speaking, until the 1970s English was the dominant language of work and life in Quebec.
The capitalists pay Quebecois lower wages. This puts a downward pressure on all wages, increasing profits for the employers. The rulers foster anti-Quebecois prejudice and chauvinism to keep workers divided and weaken our capacity to fight capitalism.
Use of military to maintain oppression
These are the conditions that have fueled the struggles
of Quebecois against national oppression for decades.
Canada's rulers have shown their willingness to use the
full force of their state to stop these struggles,
including in 1970 when the federal army was sent into
Quebec to quell an upsurge in the national struggle.
Today, Reform Party leader Preston Manning proposes using
the Canadian army again if Quebecois decide to separate
from Canada.
In the 1970s, as a result of decades of mobilizations, Quebecois won important affirmative action gains, mainly codified in Law 101, passed in 1977. For the first time French was recognized as the normal language of work and life in Quebec. The wage gap was significantly reduced and gains were made in improved social services and education.
But the oppression of Quebecois continues. Language- segregated schools and hospitals remain. French-speaking people in Canada still earn some 16 percent less than those who speak English. As the capitalist economic crisis deepens, the social gains made over the last quarter century are being eroded.
Quebec has the highest poverty rate of all the provinces in Canada, despite the fact that it is the second most industrialized. In 1993, nearly 21 percent of Quebec's population was living below the poverty level.
Quebec has one of the highest high school dropout rates in Canada. English speakers in Quebec are twice as likely to get a university diploma as those who speak French. Private endowments guarantee better quality care at English-language hospitals and English-language universities.
A struggle for equality and dignity
The struggle of Quebecois against oppression is first
and foremost a struggle for equality and dignity. It is
also a fight that can reinforce the entire working class
by strengthening our unity against the employers.
Sheehy refers to the fight for an independent Quebec as "setting up their own little racist state." It appears that he doesn't feel the same way about the U.S. or the Canadian imperialist states. "What would be your attitude to a balkanization of the U.S. and how would that benefit labor?" he asks.
The Canadian state is an instrument of class rule used by Ottawa to maintain its system of capitalist exploitation and oppression against all working people - to terrorize us, divide us, and keep us in the chains of wage slavery.
The capitalists use Canadian nationalism to get us thinking of ourselves as "Canadians," rather than as workers. Under the banner of the maple leaf, they seek to get us to fight their wars, accept their attacks on our wages and working conditions, and oppose fellow workers who refuse to bow down to their demands - from Quebec to Yugoslavia.
The working class has no interest in defending the Canadian capitalist state, its borders, its police, or its imperialist army. Our challenge is to overthrow it and replace it by a government of the exploited and the oppressed, like the one in Cuba.
History has proven that as long as Quebecois live under the yoke of the Canadian imperialist state, they will never gain equality. The struggle for Quebec's independence is inseparable from the struggle of the entire working class in Canada against capitalist exploitation. It weakens the very foundation of Canadian imperialism and hastens the day workers in Canada can bring down capitalism. Communists fully support and are part of the fight for Quebec independence.
Finally, Sheehy alludes to remarks made by Parti Quebecois (PQ) leader Jacques Parizeau that the Quebec referendum on sovereignty was lost largely due to the "ethnic vote."
The reactionary positions of PQ
Parizeau represents a layer of Quebec capitalists who
think they can get a competitive edge by gaining more
powers in Quebec. Like his counterparts in Ottawa,
Parizeau's politics are racist, antiworker, and
procapitalist. In fact, the capitalists in Quebec who
Parizeau represents benefit from the very oppression of
Quebecois.
Many Quebecois workers oppose the PQ's reactionary policies and blame them for the fact the majority of non- Quebecois voted "no" in the recent referendum. To wage a thoroughgoing fight for Quebec independence, one which seeks to win other workers as co-combatants, the working class in Quebec will have to push these misleaders and their mouthpieces in the labor movement aside. This is the same challenge working people face in all struggles today.
The capitalists use the fact that English remains the language of social advancement in Canada as a lever to turn other workers against the rights of the Quebecois. That's how they get a hearing for their claim that the Quebecois' intransigent fight against oppression - not capitalism - is the source of the deepening economic crisis in Canada, and of racist and anti-immigrant chauvinism.
But it is the Canadian capitalist government which has systematically denied Native rights, deported thousands of immigrants, and waged war against workers at home and abroad. A thoroughgoing fight for self-determination for Quebecois - that is, the fight for independence - will strengthen the hands of all fighters against national chauvinism and oppression because it will weaken Canadian imperialism, the main source of oppression and exploitation in this part of North America.
This just underscores the importance for all class- struggle-minded workers and youth to stand 100 percent behind the right of the oppressed to self-determination. In Quebec, that means the right of Quebecois and Quebecois alone to determine their future. It means identifying with the thousands of youth who marched and chanted last fall "We want a country!"
During those mobilizations leading up to the referendum on sovereignty, communists in Canada joined wholeheartedly the campaign for a "yes" vote - calling on all those eligible to cast a ballot to vote yes. We did so, recognizing that this ballot measure was not ours; it was not a referendum the working class would organize that way. It was a referendum organized by a wing of Canada's imperialist government. And it was not a clear measure on Quebec independence.
By actively calling for a yes vote, however, communists and other fighters put ourselves in the best position to campaign for independence. Campaigning for a yes vote also provided the best opportunity to draw the lessons from the fact that the measure was narrowly defeated only due to the overwhelming "no" vote by the non-Quebecois minority.
Not taking enough advantage of that opportunity left it up to bourgeois demagogues in the PQ to use this fact to play on reactionary, anti-immigrant prejudices.
Of course, if a revolutionary government, or a revolutionary mass movement were to organize a referendum, it would ensure that only Quebecois could vote on the question of national self-determination and secession from the Canadian confederation of what is today the province of Quebec.
Ultimately, the fight for Quebec's independence won't be won at the ballot box but through a revolutionary struggle led by Quebecois workers and youth in the streets. Members of the Communist League and the Young Socialists in Canada fight shoulder to shoulder with Quebecois for an independent Quebec that will open its arms to workers of all nationalities and help tear the Canadian prison house apart. The only way forward for workers throughout Canada to rid themselves of their exploiters is to join this struggle as their own.