Efforts to link PQ, Villeneuve are propaganda
Mario Beaulieu, PresidentChristian Gagnon, Vice-president
Parti Québécois of Montréal-Centre
Lettre publiée dans The Montreal Gazette
Saturday, January 26, 2002
On Dec. 2, 2001, the Parti Québécois's Montréal-Centre regional organization launched the Montreal Coalition for Sovereignty with a rally that gathered supporters from the PQ, the Bloc Québécois, the Société St. Jean Baptiste, Génération Québec, Les Intellectuels Pour la Souveraineté and many other groups and individuals. Since it was an assembly open to the public, no identity check of any sort was done at the doors, as a crowd of more than 1,000, including Raymond Villeneuve, rushed inside.
As reported by Le Soleil's Michel Corbeil, Mario Beaulieu, president of the PQ, Montréal-Centre region, went up to Mr. Villeneuve to tell him he strongly disagreed with his violent approach. But interrupting the ongoing musical performances and speeches for a confrontation with him was out of the question.
The way Gazette columnist Don Macpherson then used Mr. Villeneuve's unexpected and undesired presence at the rally to associate Bernard Landry with intolerance and violence (Column, Dec. 4 "Landry and his friends") absolutely stunned us. Liberal MNA Jacques Dupuis misinterpreted Mr. Macpherson's article and in the National Assembly wrongly accused Premier Landry of having shared our rally's platform with Mr. Villeneuve. That declaration infuriated Mr. Landry, who protested that he wouldn't even recognize Mr. Villeneuve and that he strongly rejected all forms of violence.
On Dec. 8, Mr. Macpherson wrote another column, "Pact with the devil," in which he again made a close link between Mr. Landry's PQ and Mr. Villeneuve's violent record. We find this process totally dishonest.
Mr. Villeneuve's recent threatening letter to Mr. Macpherson and others then gave The Gazette the opportunity to ask its readers a very tendentious question in its Jan. 17 Daily Poll: "Is the PQ doing enough to distance itself from Quebec's terrorist past?" We see this as a disgusting overexploitation of the presence of an uninvited and unwanted man in a large crowd.
And as if that were not enough, The Gazette's Jan. 18 editorial, "No room for terrorists," demanded Mr. Landry clearly and strongly dissociate himself from Mr. Villeneuve and violence, which is exactly what he did when he vigorously answered Mr. Dupuis's false accusations in December.
To us, The Gazette's efforts to convince its readers of an existing connection between the party forming Quebec's democratically elected government and Mr. Villeneuve's terrorism have more to do with the ugliest kind of propaganda than with respectable journalism.
