Peter Stockland: Extending the Authority of ’the People' Isn’t Always a Good Thing

CAQ Leader Francois Legault arrives on stage to make his victory speech to supporters at his party's election night headquarters in Quebec City on Oct. 3, 2022. The Canadian Press/Paul Chiasson

Commentary

Among my favourite unlikeliest of things is the reality of a Quebec election outcome proving Preston Manning correct.

In a late September Epoch Times column, the erstwhile Reform Party leader and current voice of political sanity argued eloquently that the political catch-alls “left, right, and centre” should be tossed from the lexicon tout de suite. As Manning put it pithily, applying the seating arrangements of the 18th century French governing assembly to 21st century ideological alignment makes less than no sense (allowing, for argument’s sake, that something can be less than nothing).

Exhibit C for Current: Premier François Legault’s party winning 89 seats in the 125-seat National Assembly on Oct. 3 and scooping up about 45 percent of the popular vote throughout the province except in the major metropolis of Montreal. And how did the Coalition Avenir Québec manage such a frontal assault on the ballot box? Why, by promising to take Quebecers back to the deep blue “right” conservatism of Maurice Duplessis’ Fortress Quebec statism that would leave today’s self-identified “left” authoritarians drooling with envy.

But wait! There’s more! The so-called centre-right CAQ promised during the campaign to hand out a second dollop of “free” inflation-assistance cash—the first came pre-election in the spring—to Quebecers earning less than $100,000 a year. On the left, Québec Solidaire (so anarcho- syndicalist that it rejects having a leader and instead has dualist “co-spokespersons”) vowed to tax the wealthy presumably to provide more public handouts for green entrepreneurs. The libertarian Conservative Party of Quebec, meanwhile, came out in favour of legislation that prohibits individuals from wearing religious clothing in some government workplaces. And the left-centre-right big tent provincial Liberal Party? It held its increasingly narrow patch of ground only by appealing to beleaguered Montreal anglophones with nowhere to hide from the CAQ’s draconian francization measures.

Right foot in? Left foot out? Do the hokey-pokey and shake it all about, politically? Or maybe, as Manning said, we should just call the whole thing off? After all, if left-centre-right doesn’t make sense even in Quebec, where everything begins and ends with language, it doesn’t hold water anywhere else in the country, either.

Think back to only this winter. The “govern from the centre” Liberals, supported by the former factory floor factotums of the NDP, lowered the boom of state emergency powers on working-class protesters in Ottawa. The political right countered the move so vehemently that even conservative Tories rushed to the aid of workin’ men and women in big trucks. And the left-liberal intelligentsia think, too, of Alberta, where professional individualist Danielle Smith seeks to lead the United Conservative Party holding high the banner of legislation that’s ripped straight out of the 1970s playbook drawn up by the über gauche separatist Parti Quebecois, which lo these many years later was reduced to three seats in Quebec’s Oct. 3 vote. Chalk up another win in the Manning analysis column.

Where the analysis does begin to go awry, however, is Manning’s call for the left-right rubric to be replaced by headings of “aristocratic pro-establishment” and “democratic/anti-establishment.” He recommends the categories be differentiated according to degrees of populist support for “extending the authority of the people.” The people? Yeeps!

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against people. Some of my best friends are people. It’s when they become “the people,” and seek to willy-nilly assert their authority, that I get the heebie-jeebies.

To use the example of the Quebec election, “the people” extended their authority via their franchise to Jean Boulet who, as immigration minister no less, said “80 percent of immigrants go to Montreal, don’t work, don’t speak French, or don’t adhere to the values of Quebec society.” More, “the people” re-elected as premier a man who, in a province with a fertility rate that has dropped well below replacement to 1.57 children per woman, insisted during the campaign it would be “suicide” for “the people” of Quebec to admit more than 50,000 immigrants a year.  These would be “the people” who allowed Legault’s two utterly unscientific COVID curfews and proposed anti-vax tax go unpunished in this election.

In fairness to my fellow Quebecers, collectives of “the people”—sometimes referred to as armed, torch-bearing mobs—have done far worse things throughout history. Many have been bloody-handed. Plenty have been downright evil. Indeed, it almost seems axiomatic that when “the people” have extended their authority to a certain point, they’ll always go one step further and invent the guillotine. Or the gas chamber. Or who knows what other devilry.

Speaking of the devil, it seems worth advancing the idea that in place of the divisions Preston Manning proposed in his column, we should label political categories on the basis of “charitable” and “uncharitable.” I mean charitable in the sense that Catholic social teaching teaches it: not as guilt-dissolving handouts but as concrete actions that express love of neighbour. I mean it in the way Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI taught in his brilliant and beautiful first encyclical Deus Caritas Est, published on Christmas Day 2005.

Anticipating some might get the heebie-jeebies over conflation of church and state, Benedict insisted it is not the role of the former to prevail in the just ordering of the latter. But, he said, as a matter of human responsibility, it is the church’s obligation to help infuse political life with charity.

“A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the Church,” Benedict wrote. “Yet the promotion of justice through efforts to bring about openness of mind and will to the demands of the common good is something which concerns the Church deeply.”

Then he added: “Love—caritas—will always prove necessary, even in the most just society. There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such. There will always be situations of material need where help in the form of concrete love of neighbour is indispensable.”

Among my other favourite unlikeliest things would be replacing left, right, centre and “the-people” with indispensable love of neighbour.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.