“Each little people is another sun/Beauty to the universe/It is a grave mistake and a great terror/To sting It lest it die! » – Felix Leclerc Dreams for sale or third notebook from the same flâneur

A people is like a tree: it takes root in a specific territory, it builds its trunk and branches throughout its history and it expresses itself through a common language that, like large foliage, allows it to absorb energy from the sun and the Breathing life relates to everything that surrounds it.

The common language of a people cannot be separated from its identity as a people, as a nation and as a state. A people cannot live without a common language, but neither can the common language survive without being connected to the nation. It is also for this reason that each nation gives its language a color and a life of its own.

What is currently threatening our common language is not English as such, but economic and cultural globalization and the obliteration of nations it produces in favor of a global digital culture of entertainment and material prosperity. What is at risk, especially among a small landlocked people like ours, is the adherence to and commitment to a distinct and shared national identity and citizenship.

For this reason, we believe that any effort to re-evaluate the use of our common language is doomed to fail unless rooted in a re-appropriation of our identity as a people, as a nation and as a nation-state. Giving in to the pressures of Anglicization means detaching ourselves emotionally and intellectually from our historical identity and our Quebec citizenship.

What we need to awaken and solidify if we are to re-elevate the use of the common Québec language is our very core identity.

Now a people, a nation, a nation state is defined and politically constituted by a constitution. And we don’t. We, as a people, as a nation, and as a nation-state, are but fragments of scattered constitutional provisions inherited from our colonized past, which we have never approved and which do not adhere to who we are. Canada’s 1982 Constitution binds us without constituting us because it has never been approved by the people or government of Quebec.

We Quebecers are “sans papiers” – a people without a constitution, a minority province in a multicultural country, lost in the midst of a country and America that does not speak our language. We have no identity card, no official citizenship, no title deeds: we are at the mercy of British common law, we are a peopleless democracy in which we do not decide.

At the core of our message is the urgency to give ourselves as a people, nation and state of Quebec a constitution that defines who we are and want to be as Quebecers in 2024.

And in our opinion, such a constitution can only be written by the people of Quebec themselves, in their entirety. The consultation to encourage reflection on the future of the French language, which ended April 30th, must be the result of the best possible consensus that can be reached by all Quebecers today about the status, institutions and political decisions in Quebec.

Therefore, we are asking the Quebec National Assembly to^ah On January 1, 2024, an impartial constituent town assembly, representing the people and territory of Québec and having complete freedom in its deliberations—therefore ideally by lottery—was tasked with consulting the people and proposing the text of a first Québec constitution, in which defining the terms of our political sovereignty and our relationship with Canada and the world, a text to be submitted to a popular referendum before the scheduled date of the next Quebec elections.

My people “not sovereign” / My country “not ours” / My nation “undocumented” / I appeal to you! / Dismiss the organizers of the elections without pity / Call forthwith the People’s Assembly / That will write in our hands our rights and our decisions / The Charter that will guide us / The Constitution that will define us / The papers that will define us legitimize / And allow us to tell the whole world in our language / Who we are and what we dream of.

To see in the video