OTTAWA —
Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet is doubling down on efforts to draw a line separating his party’s values from those of the Trudeau Liberals, particularly on the fraught ground of free speech.
Blanchet posted a tweet Sunday suggesting Justin Trudeau’s response to attacks in France that authorities have attributed to Muslim extremists did not go far enough, highlighting a “disturbing gap” in values that the Bloc leader chalked up to possible “weakness” or “ideology” on the prime minister’s part.
Blanchet said in French that Trudeau is threatening Quebec’s friendship with France. He sought to align his province with that country’s cherished “republican and secular” principles in contrast to an “Anglo-Saxon multiculturalist doctrine.”
The stern words add to Blanchet’s criticism of the prime minister’s reaction to a University of Ottawa professor’s use of a notoriously derogatory word for Black people in class.
Last week, Trudeau condemned the attacks in France as “heinous” acts of terrorism that fly in the face of Canadian values and said Ottawa “would always defend freedom of expression, but freedom of expression is not without limits.”
“In a pluralistic, diverse and respectful society like ours, we must be aware of the impact of our words, of our actions on others, particularly these communities and populations who still experience enormous discrimination,” Trudeau told reporters in French on Friday.
Three attacks in France over the past two months have come amid a growing furor over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that were republished by the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
Extremists attacked the Charlie Hebdo newsroom in January 2015, after the caricatures were first published, and killed 12 people.
Since their reprinting in September at the start of the ongoing Paris trial over the killings, France has endured three attacks blamed on Muslim extremists.
One saw two people injured outside the newspaper’s old headquarters, allegedly by a teenage refugee from Pakistan.
On Oct. 16, a teacher was beheaded outside his school for opening a class debate on free speech by showing students the caricatures.
And on Thursday came a deadly knife attack in a church in the Mediterranean city of Nice.
Blanchet is scheduled to speak on freedom of expression in a news conference Monday afternoon.
Freedom of expression and cultural sensitivity have stirred up heated debate in a Canadian context as well.
Last month, the Bloc pushed the government on a racial slur uttered in a university classroom, demanding the Liberals state unequivocally whether they supported the professor at the heart of the controversy.
Blanchet said those subjected to hateful words deserve compassion and support, but using the term in an educational context isn’t bigoted.
Trudeau had told the House of Commons that “we all need to be conscious of the power of our words.”
Blanchet’s news conference Monday comes ahead of a House vote on another divisive issue: a Bloc motion demanding an apology from the government for having invoked controversial legislation during the October Crisis in Quebec 50 years ago.
In October 1970, the Liberal government under then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau decided to suspend civil liberties by invoking the statute then known as the War Measures Act in response to the kidnapping of a Quebec cabinet minister and a British diplomat by members of the militant FLQ separatist group.
The move, which came at the request of the Quebec premier and Montreal’s mayor, led to soldiers patrolling the streets as authorities rounded up hundreds of residents under suspicion of involvement in the abductions.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 2, 2020
–With files from The Associated Press