Tag: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

MONTREAL — Since arriving back in Montreal after nearly three decades abroad, one of the most striking changes I’ve noticed has been the seeming retreat of the separatist movement here. So as I began my Quebec road trip this week in my hometown, I sought out Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, a charismatic young proponent of Quebec’s independence from Canada. “Quebec needs to change the rules of the game, and that is not possible when Canada is based on a system in which Queen Elizabeth is the head of state and the constitutional system is centuries old,” he told me on Monday over a coffee in Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie, a gentrifying working-class neighborhood. Moreover, he argued that Quebec’s independence would help neutralize the province’s simmering far right by expunging easy nationalism and xenophobia in favor of cultural affirmation and human rights. I’d be interested to hear what younger Canadians think of the separatist movement today. Political apathy was not an option. It is bling bling.” Mr. Nadeau-Dubois said the most emotional moment of the 2012 protests came when a young Lebanese-Canadian woman in a head scarf approached him at a protest where 300,000 people had massed in the streets. He said the young woman told him that, while the strike had divided her family, her mother had come to appreciate its importance as a struggle for accessible education for everyone. Ms. Nottaway is a passionate advocate for Indigenous rights, and I plan to talk to her about the anguish after the killing of Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Indigenous man shot dead by a Saskatchewan farmer, Gerald Stanley, who was found not guilty of murder. She and I will join my colleagues from The New York Times’s Race/Related team in a Facebook Live chat at 9 p.m. Eastern Time.