Aide-Mémoire

Like the rest of Canada, Quebec is experiencing a crise de conscience in relation to Indigenous people. The video of a dying Atikamekw woman named Joyce Echaquan in a Joliette hospital last September raised in harrowing fashion the question of anti-Indigenous racism, in a place that has not been very self-critical in this regard. François Legault’s subsequent denial that systemic racism exists in the province prompted a social media diatribe from a University of Ottawa professor who accused the premier of leading a “white supremacist” government, whose popularity only confirmed the widespread racism of Quebec society. Unhinged though these accusations clearly were, they prompted the Assemblée nationale to adopt a motion condemning the “hateful, discriminatory, and francophobic attacks of which the Québécois nation is the object within Canada.”

The rhetoric of outrage increasingly becomes the default position in this as in so many other issues of public...