Quebec is a different place than it was last weekend. Until 8:30 the following Monday, when the TVA television network declared the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) would form a majority government, Quebec was caught in a 50-year time warp, finding itself divided less along linguistic lines (though there was certainly this as well) than on how it would vote in a referendum on its sovereignty.

As a gentle reminder, Justin Trudeau was all of nine years old when Quebec first went through this exercise in 1980. The last time, in 1995, took place when Justin Bieber was still in diapers. This is less atrophy than mummification, resulting in an enduring and dysfunctional political equation: no one liked the Liberal Party of Quebec much, but no one wanted another referendum more. The Liberals exploited this equation to the hilt, becoming an unkillable morass of corruption and entitlement in the process.

In this sense, the overwhelming victory of the CAQ, a soi-disant conservative alliance of disaffected federalists and sovereigntists, is a very good thing. By winning last Monday’s election, the CAQ has formed a government utterly divorced from the machinations, implications and threats of further referenda. By taking a majority of the province’s seats, CAQ leader François Legault has ensured this experiment will live for at least four years.

With sovereignty off the table, Quebec becomes a little more like its neighbours: a battleground pitting left against right, urban against rural, and the province’s burgeoning multiculturalist reality against the CAQ’s rock-ribbed nationalism.

It is also increasingly francophone versus non-francophone. The Liberal Party, forever the receptacle of choice for anglophone and immigrant votes, has effectively been reduced to a Montreal-centric rump afloat in the pale CAQ blue ocean of Quebec’s electoral map. The Parti Québécois and Québec solidaire, the upstart socialist party, make up the detritus.

By taking just two of Montreal’s 28 seats, the CAQ has demonstrated that it can win Quebec with barely a nod to the province’s biggest city. The implications of this are at once familiar and alarming. Montreal is a crucial economic and demographic wellspring in a province that often finds itself short on cash and long in the tooth.

It is in many ways wildly different than the province beyond its shores — a bacchanalian hellhole where English, French, brown, black and white collide on a daily basis. Scapegoating Montreal will be easy work for this government, particularly given the baked-in resentment on the part of much of Quebec toward its resolutely weird cultural capital.

In fact, the scapegoating has already begun. On Tuesday, in the name of “secularism,” CAQ member of national assembly Geneviève Guilbault said the government will ban religious symbols from the bodies of Quebec’s public servants, with summary firings for the stubborn hijab and kippa wearers. Legault then said he would invoke the notwithstanding clause in the event of an effective court challenge to this blatantly unconstitutional move.

Though Legault’s law would be devised, debated and voted on in the overwhelmingly white confines of Quebec City, its effects would be borne by Montreal. This isn’t anodyne; Montreal is home to roughly 85 per cent of the province’s immigrant population. The city’s French-language school board, the largest in the province, finds itself on the receiving end of budgetary cuts and the teacher shortage.

Among the problems it doesn’t have is religious indoctrination. There hasn’t been a single complaint of such a thing since the advent of non-denominational school boards in 1997, according to the province’s teachers’ union federation.

In the coming days, François Legault and Justin Trudeau will share an airplane to Armenia, where they will attend the 17th Francophonie summit. It will be an auspicious face-to-face meeting for the two politicians, in which immigration, not sovereignty, is the burning identity issue in Quebec.

It’s a long flight. Here’s hoping Trudeau can talk some sense into him.

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