File photo Record Archives, 2023
By Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative
Sherbrooke residents may see a lot of MNA Christine Labrie at community events over the next year or so, but there’s one place they won’t be seeing her – on Facebook.
In a long, since-deleted post on her Facebook page late last week, Labrie announced that she planned to leave the social network. Although at the time she said she planned to keep the page up for another two weeks or so, it already appeared to be deleted when The Record checked it on Sept. 22.
Labrie told The Record that she had been questioning the platform’s usefulness for the past two years, since around the time Meta began blocking content from Canadian news outlets. “I noticed that [the discussions on my page] were a lot less interesting than before, specifically because I was no longer able to post news articles. Before, I posted news articles several times a week to let people know about issues I had commented on or taken a position on, or thought they should know about,” she said.
Over time, she noticed a “depressing degradation of the constructiveness” of the quality of debate in the comments section of her posts.
“I think there were a number of people who made articulate and interesting contributions who gave up, because they were fed up with being answered in disrespectful ways or didn’t want to get involved in long debates,” she told The Record. “There was less and less thought-out debate and constructive discussion.”
However, she said the drop that spilled the vase was a post she made in support of the Fière la Fête Pride festival over the second weekend of September. “I wrote a post about Pride and how it was important to show up there [in support of the LGBTQ+ community],” she said. The comments section “degenerated quickly, with people making comments saying things like, ‘Homosexuality is a mental illness,’” she said. “I don’t have the capacity to filter out all of those kinds of comments, and there were people who were distressed by what they read.” With rare exceptions, the comments were not directed at Labrie personally, but she felt she had to take the post down before things got worse.
She noted that there were “always some comments to mask and people to block” when she posted about LGBTQ+ issues, especially trans issues, but this time, the quality of discussion went downhill faster and more virulently than usual.
“I have colleagues in the National Assembly, like [Liberal critic for LGBTQ+ issues] Jennifer Maccarone for example, who see that a lot,” she said. “I wasn’t that surprised [by the disparaging comments], except by the scale and speed this time around.”
“We talk a lot with advocacy groups, and we see that there has been a lot of hate and rage directed toward the LGBTQ+ community in recent years,” she said, citing a provincewide study by GRIS-Montréal, a group which gives talks in schools about sexual orientation, gender identity and tolerance based on the lived experience of LGBTQ+ volunteers. The study, released in January, found that the proportion of high school students who said they would be uncomfortable if their best friend was gay or lesbian had nearly doubled between 2017 and 2024, and that levels of discomfort were similar for boys and girls across all age groups, regions and levels of religious observance.
Labrie, who was a lecturer in women’s studies at the Université de Sherbrooke before she went into politics, said she didn’t want to be responsible for creating a space where citizens went to insult each other. The second-term Québec Solidaire MNA, who closed her Twitter account several years ago and only rarely posts on Instagram, said elected officials don’t need a social media presence to do their jobs. “It’s important to be available, but there are several different ways we can do that,” she said. “Read traditional media, get in touch with us on our website, call us, write to us with any kind of questions if you want to know my position on any issue.”
She said the degradation of public debate had been one of the reasons she decided not to seek a third term. “I don’t recognize myself in the polarization of the political ecosystem,” she said. “I’ve always been uncomfortable with partisanship. I want to look for other possibilities to work with people and contribute to the community. I’ve seen enough of partisanship and I don’t want to be part of it. That’s also part of why I closed the Facebook page. I started it to discuss ideas, not to smear other people as enemies, but that’s not how social media works anymore. It got depressing.”