On the fringes of the current election campaign, Yvon Deschamps is “dissatisfied with what is happening in politics”.

He spontaneously used this expression at the beginning of an interview with The Canadian Press on the current election campaign.

At the peak of his 87 years, the comedian with a bright eye and a sharp mind didn’t hesitate to comment on politics as he has often done in the past, and his remarks are both scathing and sad, he sees.

Independent but apolitical

“I don’t know why we’re campaigning. I don’t think anyone will take the place of CAQ! There are no other parties that can do that at the moment and that’s terrible.”

You have to have followed Yvon Deschamps’ intervention history to understand that he is not critical of the CAQ because of this. The comedian, who has always been independent, has nevertheless always defined himself as apolitical, believing that the issue of independence transcends parties. Approached by many parties, the only position he ever accepted was as head of Action démagogique du Québec in Les Parlementeries on the stage of the Théâtre St-Denis in 2008.

“I do not like it at all”

What worries him is rather the place that the Coalition avenir Québec is occupying, or rather the place that its opponents are not occupying: “We want to have a democracy. We would like to have strong counterparties, but here the CAQ is on its own. I do not like it at all. I’m worried about it.”

In this regard, he recalls the time when the Progressive Conservative Party had split with the formation of the Reform Party, which would become the Canadian Alliance before remerging with the Conservative Party: “It was like the federal level for a long time , when the Conservatives split into two gangs and quarreled among themselves instead of dealing with the affairs of state, the Liberal Party (of Canada) could do whatever it wanted. No big deal, there was no resistance!”

“I wouldn’t want that here. I hope that the political parties will take matters into their own hands, that they will wake up and find out how to find the hearts of Quebecers, how to get them,” he continues.

“I don’t know what we want”

Like everyone else, he notes that the old sovereignist-federalist duality is no longer central to political life and that, in his opinion, this obliteration of the national question has created a void that no one has been able to fill: “In reflection, I myself can don’t define what we want. I don’t know what we want. I don’t know anymore.”

“It was easy before. We want to separate, we are working on it. Working on it, we took the animal’s hair, we did things, and even if there was no separation, it doesn’t matter; it got us further. It was something that kicked us in the ass to say: you have to prove you can do something on your own, so get your ass off.

“It seems that we don’t have a goal, something that drives us all. We don’t even know where we are anymore!” he concludes.