Election Day in Quebec!

Audre Lorde put it most eloquently when she argued that “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Situated at the intersections of so many categories, we wanted to see where we fit in the grand scheme of things, vis-à-vis, the political landscape that characterizes this province.

So, some of us, at the Intersectionality Hub, took CBC’s Quebec provincial election’s quiz Vote Compass. According to their site, “Vote Compass is a tool developed by political scientists that calculates how your views compare with those of Quebec’s political parties.” You can take see it here: https://votecompass.cbc.ca/quebec/

Vote Compass asks one’s view on several key questions addressed by the different parties in their respective campaigns. These include issues such as taxation, social benefits and services, environmental issues, secularism, and immigration. It then tabulates the answers and shows where one is positioned in relation to the major parties in this election.

At the Hub, the research team consists of diverse women – allophones, francophones and anglophones – with intersectional social locations and identities – that span, race, religion, sexuality, immigration status and communities of affiliation. In the interests of anonymity, we have changed our names, but the composite portrait of our political orientations shows that we are nowhere near the major political parties running in this election!

To be sure, we are just 5 of many, but the exercise just points out that in the fault lines that thread across this indigenous territory, we remain on the margins!