Hundreds of Montrealers were seen marching in the street on Saturday, hoping that one day they will live to see Quebec become its own nation.
The march through the city center comes ahead of the 30th anniversary of the 1995 referendum on October 30.
Camille Goyette-Gingras, president of OUI Quebecone of the groups behind the demonstration, said that every day they see more young people getting involved in the movement.
“Generation Z is looking for systemic change, and for them, independence is exactly that,” he said.
The Federalists won the 1995 referendum by a narrow margin, with 50.58 percent of the vote. A previous vote, also called by the Party Quebecers (PQ), occurred in 1980, with 40.44 percent of votes in favor. The party, which is ahead in the polls a year before the next provincial elections, maintains hope of holding a third referendum in 2030.
Goyette-Gingras said what she is witnessing today is a non-partisan, citizen-led movement, one that she is confident could lead to another referendum in the coming years.
“You can feel like it’s the beginning of a big movement,” he said.
Goyette-Gingras said many young people see independence as the solution to pressing problems like the climate crisis.
Young university students marched alongside those who participated in the 1995 or 1980 referendums. Manon, opposition deputy masseuse and Ruba Ghazal with Quebec Solidaire, which supports independence, joined the crowd, eager to sing along to cries of “Le Quebec un pays”, which means that Quebec is a country.
To commemorate the 30th anniversary of Quebec’s last referendum, hundreds of people gathered in Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal district to reinvigorate the sovereignty movement. Most of the attendees were young and hoped to one day see a third referendum.
Laure Fateux and Olivia Beginfrancophone university students cegep of the old man MontrealBoth said that a large part of the student population would call themselves sovereignists.
“I think it’s important for Quebec to become a country, so it can preserve its culture, its language and its history,” Fateux said.
Begin said his parents and grandparents voted for Quebec to become a country in both 1980 and 1995, adding that it’s clear the movement is reviving under his generation.
Leonard Vidal also studies at the same university and said he feels independence is the only thing that will allow Quebecers to escape the status quo of the Canadian government, which he described as a “colonial and oil state.”
Catherine Lamoureux-Schmidt, who studies at L’University of Quebec in Montrealagreed, stating that “the only way to do it is to become a country.”
Both she and Vidal are behind a coalition of student groups across Quebec that hope to see Quebec as a free nation. They said the coalition has grown from five clubs to 22 in about a year. It is a strictly nonpartisan group, the two said.
Lamoureux-Schmidt said she supports the notion of a “nation-to-nation” relationship with Quebec’s First Nations, saying “we don’t want to build another country without listening to them.”
Like many other attendees, he also said he anticipates seeing another referendum in his lifetime.
“It’s more than half the nation that hasn’t been able to say what they think about it, so I think it’s more than necessary for that question to come back to the public,” he said. “We want to have our future in our hands.”
Quebec Liberal Party leader Pablo Rodríguez, speaking from the party’s members’ assembly in Trois-Rivières, said an independent Quebec would be viable but impoverished, echoing warnings from his predecessors.
“We would not be in the same economic position, we would not be part of the G7 and we would have to renegotiate our free trade agreements,” said Rodríguez, a former federal minister.
