The Montreal daily La Presse recently published an op-ed by former Quebec City Mayor Régis Labeaume criticizing certain aspects of the foul campaign that the province’s national-autonomist (Quebec First) Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government has waged against immigrants and religious minorities.  

However, Labeaume’s main target was the Parti Québécois (PQ), Quebec’s main pro-independence party. For years, the PQ has competed with the CAQ in making strident chauvinist appeals scapegoating immigrants for the housing crisis and collapse of public services and accusing religious minorities, especially Muslims, of threatening “Quebec values.”     

Labeaume is a Quebec sovereignist who sought to contest a Quebec City riding under the PQ banner in the 1998 provincial election. Before serving as mayor of Quebec’s second-largest city from 2007 to 2021, he was a CEO in the mining industry and a corporate administrator and consultant.

Entitled “No, we will not hate immigrants and Muslims,” his La Presse op-ed reflects the fears of some sections of big business that overly restrictive immigration policies could reduce access to cheap labor and slow Quebec’s economic growth. It was also a warning to PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon that his virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric and calls for further discriminatory measures against religious minorities could exacerbate social tensions and harm the cause of Quebec independence by discrediting its already badly tattered “progressive” facade.

The fact that a right-wing nationalist politician like Labeaume felt compelled to openly criticize the PQ’s Quebec chauvinism highlights the complicit silence of the Quebec “left” and its main political representative, Québec Solidaire (QS).

Since the election of St-Pierre Plamondon as party leader in October 2020, the PQ has adopted an ultra-nationalist policy. Firmly positioned to the right of the big business CAQ government, the PQ attacks immigrants and Muslims in venomous language and accuses them of being responsible for all manner of social and economic ills.

In a Quebec version of the far-right “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, the PQ portrays supposedly “excessive” immigration as an existential threat to the “Quebec nation.” And it promises to reduce it “drastically” by adopting policies inspired by the European Union’s “Fortress Europe,” under which thousands of desperate refugee claimants die every year, because they drowned or were murdered by brutal border police.

As the Trump administration in the United States demonstrates, this unbridled anti-immigrant chauvinism is the spearhead of political reaction. Used by the ruling class to justify the massive expansion of the repressive powers of the state, an explosion of militarism, and an all-out offensive on democratic rights, it paves the way for dictatorship.

Québec Solidaire occasionally criticizes the crudest aspects of the PQ and CAQ’s xenophobic agitation. However, as a party representing privileged layers of the middle class, QS cannot and will not expose the fundamental class interests underlying the ruling class’s turn to Quebec chauvinism as an ideological weapon to divide the working class and impose its pro-austerity, pro-war agenda.

QS is especially conciliatory and friendly towards the PQ, whose reactionary perspective of creating an independent capitalist République du Québec it shares. QS legitimizes the PQ’s chauvinist rhetoric and agitation by fraudulently claiming that St-Pierre Plamondon’s party “is not intolerant.” and camouflages the rise of the far right within the Quebec sovereignist movement by declaring that the “debate” over immigration and discriminatory laws attacking religious minorities is not “far right,” but a legitimate, “healthy and peaceful” discussion. It vehemently denies the increasingly obvious parallels between the PQ leader and far-right figures such as Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump.

QS itself proposes a reduction in immigration thresholds and accepts, to use it own words, “in part” the fraudulent claims trumpeted by the Quebec chauvinist right and far-right that immigrants are responsible for the housing crisis and a myriad of other social problems.

QS did not officially respond to Labeaume’s criticism. Its parliamentary leader and chief spokesperson, Ruba Ghazal, shared his article on her X account as a warning against “the identity drift of the right,” while carefully avoiding to mention that the separatist party with which QS is allied was its main target.

This omission is all the more remarkable given that Labeaume—who was mayor at the time of the mass shooting perpetrated on January 29, 2017, at the Grand Mosque of Quebec City by the young Canadian fascist Alexandre Bissonnette—specifically warned the PQ that its “strategy is totally irresponsible and dangerous for social cohesion, and will cause damage for a long time to come.”

To this the PQ replied that it will continue to engage in inflammatory rhetoric “regardless of the level of demonization it will be subjected to.”

St-Pierre Plamondon’s claim in response to Lebeaume that it is the PQ with its incessant attacks on immigrants and Muslims “that is promoting social peace” is more than a hollow rejoinder. It is meant to cast those defending immigrants and minority rights as acting in defiance of the “will” of the majority, and will be used to blame the victims if and when the Quebec chauvinist agitation next results in violence. Significantly, when anti-immigrant riots erupted in Britain in the summer of 2024, Mathieu Bock-Côté, the most prominent far-right Quebec indépendentiste ideologue, placed the blame squarely on the left and the “establishment” for ignoring the supposed sentiments of the “nationalist” majority.          

Québec Solidaire is clearly not interested in pointing out the danger of fascist violence associated with the xenophobic hysteria displayed by its PQ ally, for in the final analysis, Québec Solidaire is the “left flank” of capitalist politics in Quebec. Its role is to keep social opposition confined within electoral politics and futile attempts to pressure the capitalist establishment, and to provide political cover for the PQ as it turns to more extreme forms of Quebec chauvinism and national-exclusivism.

Returning to Labeaume’s column, it reflects the viewpoint of a faction of the independence movement which, as expressed by former Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard in an interview with Radio-Canada, opposes holding a third referendum on Quebec independence in the short term, because it considers the current political context unfavourable. Labeaume voices the fears of sections of the sovereigntist movement that the PQ’s chauvinist, far-right turn could harm the independence cause by exposing the fiction that it has any democratic, let alone “progressive,” content.

At the same time, the former Quebec City mayor speaks for sections of big business that view the drastic reduction in immigration levels—a policy shared by all levels of government in Canada—as undermining economic growth and a threat to their “right” to exploit immigrant workers for juicy profits.

Anti-immigrant chauvinism is not limited to the Quebec elite. Under pressure from the dominant faction of the Canadian ruling class, Ottawa has moved since 2023 to massively reduce the number of new arrivals and temporary residents in Canada. The federal Liberal government of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau amended the reactionary Safe Third Country Agreement between the United States and Canada to prevent migrants persecuted by the Trump administration and its immigration Gestapo, ICE, from finding refuge in Canada. The Carney Liberal government recently introduced Bill C-12, which brutally attacks the rights of refugees, a particularly vulnerable group of immigrants.

Like his brutal austerity measures and massive increase in military spending, Carney justifies his clampdown on immigrants by citing the supposed need for national unity— “Canada Strong”—to fight Trump, his tariffs, and his threats to annex Canada.

Canadian nationalism, like its Quebec counterpart, is an ideological tool to divide French-speaking, English-speaking, and immigrant workers in Canada and across North America, and to strengthen the capitalist elite’s political grip over the working class. Workers in Canada, wherever they live and whatever their origins, must oppose the orgy of anti-immigrant chauvinism coming from all factions of the ruling elite and unite their struggles in a mass movement against capitalism, which is the cause of mounting social inequality and economic insecurity, fascism and imperialist war.