The rebellion of the deputies of the beautiful province could be emulated in Canada and in other countries of the Commonwealth.
by Hélène Jouan (Montreal, Correspondent)
They did not cut off his head, nor have they freed themselves from its bulky supervision. But by refusing to put a knee on the ground, the deputies of the Parti Québécois (PQ), the independence party of the Belle Province, meant to Charles III, king of Canada, which they no longer considered themselves as his subjects. Their rebellion has led Quebec to stand out once again within the great Canadian federation: its elected officials are now exempt from the obligation to take the sovereign.
The Parti Québécois, founded in 1968 by former Prime Minister René Lévesque, a historic figure of the independence cause, is at the origin of referendums on the sovereignty of the province organized in 1980 and 1995. Their failure, by two once, eroded secessionist faith.
Today, the PQ is no longer electoral than the shadow of itself. The latest provincial legislative elections on October 3, 2022 only sent three lean independence to the National Assembly, the voters having largely preferred to rely on the “soft” nationalism of the outgoing Prime Minister, François Legault, still ready To fight against the federal policy of Ottawa, without considering an adventurous new referendum aimed at freeing the supervision of Canada.
a heritage of 1867
But the death, in the middle of the electoral campaign, on September 8, of Elizabeth II, a respected queen for the particular ties she had with Canada, “my other country”, she said, and the Accession to the Throne of Charles III provided independentist deputies an opportunity to revive an antimonarchical feeling more and more assertive within the Canadian population in general, in particular Quebecers. Barely elected, “the three musketeers”, as the country now calls them, have posed the principle of refusing to submit to the “humiliating” oath to the king, inherited from the constitutional law adopted by the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1867 to govern the Dominion of Canada.
During the inauguration ceremony of the new assembly, on October 21, the chief of the Parti Québécois, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, said under oath that he would be “loyal to the people of Quebec”. Without pronouncing a word to the attention of Charles III. Thunder of applause for those who affirmed, by quoting the Welsh writer Ken Follett, that “taking an oath is to put his soul at stake”, and caused an institutional incident: no oath, no armchair for the deputy – The law requiring a promise of allegiance or loyalty to the monarch to enter the House of Commons in Ottawa as in the provincial legislative assemblies, the “three musketeers” were refused access to the blue show, the equivalent of the French hemicycle.
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