Tag Archives: Québec Sovereignty

Review: C’est Moi, C’est Chocolat!

Andrew Searles

Passed by Theatre Sainte Catherine to catch the opening night of Andrew Searles‘ headline show C’est moi! C’est Chocolat! after a long and trying week at work; I was in need of some comic relief and Andrew certainly did not disappoint.

I’ve known Andrew at least since 2000 as we went to the same high school in Pierrefonds; if I recall correctly we became friends during the production of Riverdale High School’s rendition of West Side Story – I was a Jet and he was a Shark and I think we shared all of a dozen words of dialogue in the entire show.

Andrew was a naturally-gifted comic all those years ago, keeping us in stitches behind the scenes as we dealt with the overbearing drama queen extraordinaire who directed the show.

A few years later I found myself regularly attending open mic nights at diverse local comedy clubs as he was just breaking out onto the local scene. Andrew was also a regular at the insular country club in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue where we found ourselves attending CEGEP, opening for the many local comedians who would come perform at the Agora for all those students so eagerly skipping class.

It’s curious now looking back, John Abbott has always been a preferred local filming location as either a typical American high school or rural college setting – I wonder if the sight of all those trailers didn’t subconsciously encourage students there to perform – as a school it’s turned out a lot of local artistic talent. In any event, hard to believe that was all ten years ago.

Ten years of dedicated work has its payoffs – the show was sold out and packed with fans, not bad for a guy from Pierrefonds. Here’s a bit of Andrew performing in Ottawa a couple years back.

Opening acts included Guido Cocomello and Rodney Ramsay, with host Franco Taddeo. I had a bit of fun with the host when he asked if there were any Francophones in the room, to which I responded with a bien niaiseux Ouay! As he had immediately prior been ribbing some guy in the front row whose name was Martin (who I suppose had strong enough French Canadian features so as to compel the host to label him token Francophone in an otherwise culturally diverse though predominantly Anglophone audience), when he asked my name I responded with a properly regional pronunciation of Martin. Got a good laugh, but as always, you had to be there.

Politics, society, culture, race, religion – everything pertinent was discussed. It’s good fodder for comedians, as there’s just so much absurdity, contradiction and idiocy to report on. Sometimes I feel the service best rendered by comedians is to simply report all the crazy, ridiculous shit we deal with on a daily basis. All four comedians did just that, rather expertly too, last night.

Theatre Sainte Catherine is located just west of Saint-Denis along one of several stretches of Sainte Catherine’s Street where the various linear poles of attraction and gentrification have yet to meet and interface, and as such retains some of the character we once associated with The Main. Close as it is to Berri-UQAM, speaking openly in English, to my surprise, elicited the attention of those walking past – no words exchanged but glances nonetheless. That said, during intermission as I was enjoying a puff outside, the biggest, scariest looking bouncer I’ve ever seen walked right up to me and politely asked my for directions (in English) to a club just down the block. He was a close-talker with a Christian Bale-era Batman voice. He nodded casually at two prostitutes who walked by.

Earlier, as I exited the public-transit Ellis Island Métro hub up the block I remarked on the fascinating juxtaposition unfolding before me, of well-dressed red-squared UQAM students passing down the corridors lined with well-appointed shop windows, buskers tuning acoustic guitars and a pants-less, underwear-less homeless man pulling his knees under an extra-wide shirt, babbling incoherently to himself.

It occurred to me – we haven’t lost our red light district at all – it just moved East. Our city’s two-fisted-rialto survives unscathed.

What can I say – it’s a good spot for a comedy show. I saw Sugar Sammy at Olympia a little while back in the same neck-of-the-woods (and on that note, Olympia is an excellent venue – highly recommended). An exciting part of town, but one where you keep your guard up. Not a place to stop and gawk.

The small venue was filled with transplanted suburbanites, friends and acquaintances from high school, now grown-up, modern Montrealers, mixed, mulatto, Métis – a racial, linguistic and cultural gray-scale of integration that permitted comedians who, despite vastly different backgrounds, could entertain an equally diverse audience with satire and parody that easily, deftly, transcended the barriers largely being erased within our own community. The Montreal brand of racial humour seems to have more to do with pointing out (even if obliquely) our similarities rather than differences, or at least reminding us of how differences are truly no more than skin deep, and that making a big deal about how different you are, why you and your people might deserve special treatment, simply isn’t cool.

As you might imagine, Pauline Marois was the public enemy number one of the night.

It quickly became apparent this theatre was filled with ardent federalists and committed Anglo-Québécois, a new generation that learned French and knows where their home is.

As host Franco Taddeo put it, “this show features two Blacks and two Italians, throw in a Jew and the OQLF would shut this down in a heartbeat.”

Though contemporary Québec politics and society were the favoured topics of the night, the show was ultimately wide-ranging, with reflections on the oddball demands of significant others, snotty children and their oblivious parents and why the Pope has the most boss funeral.

One of Andrew’s fortes as a comedian is spot-on impressions of the various peoples of the Caribbean (he himself is of joint Barbadian-Jamaican ancestry); his Caribbean Space Agency skit made my facial muscles hurt, his bit about how unintended sexual innuendo as a result of his mother’s broken English was one of the highlights of the night; quite nearly brought the house down.

Also of note Rodney Ramsay, another Riverdale alum, closed his opening set with a ditty where he read Craigslist casual encounters personals. Gut bustingly funny, though I really hope he was embellishing. Rodney also got on the anti-OQLF bandwagon with a series on ‘language cops’, which you can see here:

He’s also collaborated with local comic Mike Paterson on the Anglo video, which you can watch here:

All told – highly recommended, a lot of talent in a fascinating, exciting part of town. Shows tonight and tomorrow, see it if you can and buy tickets online as these shows are anticipated to sell out very quickly.

An Incomprehensible Display of Political Incompetence: Amir Khadir Must Resign

The slovenly and unkempt Paul Rose, attempting to demonstrate his solidarity with the world's oppressed.
The slovenly and unkempt Paul Rose, attempting to demonstrate his solidarity with the world’s oppressed.

Earlier today perennial last-place contestant Québec Solidaire issued a statement pertaining to the death of the convicted terrorist, felon and murderer Paul Rose.

Further still, MNA Amir Khadir insinuated that he will table a motion before the National Assembly that something be done to recognize Rose’s efforts – as an activist and militant separatist, Rose was also involved in several parties that would eventually become Québec Solidaire, a party I once honeslty thought I’d support. According to Khadir, it’s all about paying tribute to those who helped shape Québec’s identity and history.

Right – this sounds curiously similar to Southerners who parade around Klan memorabilia and Confederate flags as innocent tokens of ‘a spirit of independence’.

The FLQ, a terrorist organization that sought to secure Québec independence through armed insurrection, bombings, robberies, kidnappings and, eventually the murder of Pierre Laporte, has been given a similar treatment by modern day separatists, so fuelled by piss-poor revisionist history they refuse to put the issue plainly.

Too many times they have asserted that Laporte simply died, that his kidnapping and beatings at the hands of a gang of illiterate thugs had no impact on his demise, that he suffocated on his own crucifix, that he had tried to escape and got cut up so badly he bled out.

And now Québec Solidaire is going a step further in what can only be described as the worst kind of political opportunism, seeking to pick up a little more support at the expense of the vastly unpopular Parti Québécois.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Québec Solidaire would call for tributes for a man convicted of murder, there’s the bigger issue in that QS is by extension advocating violence as a legitimate method of either forcing a political issue to the fore or of accomplishing a political goal of one kind or another.

Does it give anyone else the willies QS polled so high amongst student activists? The very same militant students, in fact, who refuse to negotiate and who are equally unwilling to even try and keep their ranks calm during their monthly protest marches.

What shall we do as a society when the next FLQ rears its ugly head? Will Amir Khadir be responsible for a kidnapped education minister?

***

I’m a combination of too tired and too mortified to make much sense here. I honestly cannot believe any self-respecting individual, a doctor and father no less, could possibly have anything positive to say about this horrible man. For the record, I believe in rehabilitation, and I’m more than willing to accept that people can change fort he better. But that requires remorse, something Paul Rose never showed.

We should remind ourselves that René Lévesque set the stage for peaceful political negotiations by coming out, during the height of the October Crisis, and joining his arch-rival Pierre Trudeau in savagely denouncing the FLQ for what it was – a group of uneducated schmucks, petty criminals, who killed and maimed janitors, maids, night watchmen and other working class types before finally killing Laporte. Lévesque made his point clear – he didn’t want to lead a new country if that country couldn’t come into existence without violence. He set a high moral standard most of Québec society agreed with.

After all, Laporte may not have been the most popular politician according to the fringe separatist/anarcho-syndicalist/Marxist-Leninist types who composed the FLQ back in 1970, but he didn’t deserve to die in such a way.

When they kidnapped him from outside his modest suburban home, he was playing football with his adopted son. Paul Rose organized the Chenier Cell’s kidnapping operation.

What a monster eh?

I wonder if Mr. Khadir has ever feared being kidnapped by political extremists while enjoying quality time with his children? I shouldn’t think so.

Politicians and activists get kidnapped and killed in his native Iran. He moved here the year after the October Crisis, so perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt – politicians aren’t typically terribly knowledgeable about e=historical events, even if they were alive while they happened. Fuzzy memories…

***

I’m calling on Mr. Khadir to renounce violence as a means to achieve political goals and resign, immediately. Obviously there’s little hope he’ll do the right thing, but what the hell – it needs to be said, he has no right to represent any Québécois.

It’s grossly hypocritical, inconsistent and so devoid of logic, rational thinking or even a basic understanding of Québec social and cultural norms you’d think these statements came from a recent Republican immigrant from the most inbred counties of West Virginia.

But no, Mr. Khadir is a self-styled progressive, doctor, and seems to be interested in running an independent country. This is what an apparently educated man thinks.

I’m at a total loss. People wonder why I have no interest in being a politician…

Québec Solidaire is dead to me as long as this clown retains his seat.

Separatism is a Scam

20120814
Not the work of the author, though this author would gladly high-five the illustrator for a job well done

This article was originally published on Forget the Box.

I was remiss to discover that a recent poll suggests maybe as many as 42% of Anglo-Québécois thought of splitting the province and moving elsewhere when the PQ got elected back in September.
And a few days later another poll suggested 58% of Anglo-Québécois said they feel comfortable and integrated into Québec society, enough so, I would imagine, that they feel no urge to leave.
This number needs to be far higher, but it takes a community – a real, tangible community – to do something about it. A community that doesn’t exist by virtue of handouts from various levels of government, nor to please care-taker cabinet ministers, one which carves its own path as it sees fit, secure in its ability to fund and stimulate its own growth and development. If Québec’s Anglophone community can do this, we could secure Québec’s place in Canada.

And why not, what’s not to like? Québec is a good place to live, despite the corruption and high taxes. We have an evolving social state that can provide immense benefits you simply won’t find elsewhere in Canada. We live with tangible public freedom, safe and secure from too much external pressure. And if we figure out how to become masters of our domain we can and will achieve a prolonged economic resurgence, one immeasurably beneficial to all strata of our society, further serving to position Québec in its rightful place within Confederation – the voice of progress, the province of the future.

Québec has potential. Québec is a safe bet.

Besides, with every new generation of Anglo-Québécois, we become more integrated and better adapted to this society, and our inherent integration better suits us to the evolving global village in general – we become international citizens by virtue of the society of our birth. This, in conjunction of what we perceive to be an unstable socio-political situation at home convinces some to leave permanently; our numbers have indeed been reduced by roughly a quarter-million people over the last forty years. But for those who stayed, our acceptance of bilingualism has quite frankly put us in an excellent position to reap the benefits of multilingualism and multiculturalism as personal lifestyle choices.
So why not choose to be Anglo-Québécois, the quintessential example of the culturally integrated Canadian?

Somewhat paradoxically, if you don’t feel your French is sufficient enough to live and work in Québec, it’s likely more than sufficient for a wide variety of well-paying government posts throughout the vast expanses of our immense nation. And doubtless you’ll find not only Québécois ‘ex-pat’ communities in all major and minor Canadian cities, but local Francophone populations as well.

And yet despite all this we’re to believe that the French fact in Canada is under immense pressure to assimilate into, get this, a vast and apparently omnipotent Canadian identity, clearly defined as the opposition to everything that Québec is.

The Québec sovereignty movement defines itself in how it is not Canadian, but curiously it also assumes the monolith of Canadian identity, one that simply does not exist.

There is no ROC from which the separatist movement can define itself against, and separatism for that and many other reasons is quite simply a scam.

A nationalist movement based on a snake-oil salesman’s understanding of history, as opportunistic and omitting as you might expect.

***

As a person who has worked for two non-profit academic organizations that dealt expressly with the articulation and popular development of Canadian identity, culture and society, I can tell you there is no single, definitive Canadian identity. At our best we’re cognizant that ours is an evolving identity striving for a broad set of rights and responsibilities common to all citizens as framework for a modern political identity, but at our worst we define ourselves in terms of what or who we are not. You’ve doubtless heard the warning before – Canada cannot be defined in terms of how un-American we are. So too for that reason, Québec cannot define its character and identity in terms un-Canadian it is. When you look to see what lies tat he heart of Québec society, you find the very roots of Canadian progressivism, and that from which all of Canada grew.

And we’re expected to believe the trunk will live long and prosper while the roots are ripped from the soil; it astounds me how a political party has been able to convince so many of us of the seriousness of their message without ever producing any kind of plan for exactly how they propose to remove an already sovereign province from Confederation.

The PQ tells us not to worry about it – we’ll figure it out as we go along.

It’s not just that the PQ is both inept and lackadaisical in their efforts, it’s that they haven’t really ever bothered to explain to the public what they would do in a simple and straightforward manner. It’s as if they don’t even believe in the likelihood of separation, so much so that they wouldn’t bother wasting the time or energy to draw up a ‘to do list’ of sorts. No, no of course not – under promise and over deliver, right? Keep it vague; keep it emotional.

Ours is tabloid politics. Sensational. Scandal-plagued. An ad-man’s wet dream, presto plastic pop politics, delivered straight to the heart like hot lead from propaganda machine gun. We don’t have a government; we have a bullshit machine that feeds the media, keeping us distracted from the fact that we who disdain and decry the mindless election of the federal Tories have subsequently elected a government with a leader of similarly dubious charismatic qualities and a profound lack of innovative, imaginative spirit or long-term vision.

The students are learning this lesson quite literally as we speak.

So are all the small-business owners who have felt the sting of an inebriated sense of entitlement by a marauding gang of over-zealous ‘language cops’ – have you ever heard of anything quite as absurd as this?

Remove steak from the menu.

Remove WC from atop the washroom door.

Pasta is an unacceptable term in an Italian restaurant.

Use masking tape to cover the On/Off button on your microwave.

And chew on this while we’re at it – the OQLF has a budget of $24.7 million – enough to pay full annual tuition for nearly 9,000 students.

The PQ wasn’t happy at how quickly world media picked up the story and was hypercritical of the current, temporary separatist government.

In her efforts to garner international support, Marois has come up flat, embarrassingly so.

***

But back to us, those who are smart enough to brush this off and say to hell with it, I’m going to ride this out. How long can idiocy of this magnitude really last?
We can’t speak for all of Québec and we might not be able to do much at the moment to change things on the whole, but we can at the very least determine to coalesce into a more cohesive whole.

If we stay and grow we don’t just secure our own social and cultural survival, we’ll gain economic and political power too. If we stay we’ll eventually attain full acceptance from the Francophone majority, if not full integration. And if we stay, succeed and grow we will also fundamentally change the social and political balance in Canada, for there will be a post-modern Métis society concentrated in South-western Québec, as Québécois as they are Canadian, sustaining itself.

But make no mistake, the people who keep the peoples together will have no choice but to support themselves completely. There’s no White Knight coming to save us; if we don’t save ourselves, by finding our own opportunities, developing our own charities and eliminating out-migration, no one will.

***

Over the last few weeks the Anglo-Québécois community has felt the sting of a vindictive and comic government hell-bent on the destruction of Canada via the removal of Québec – the original Canada, the place from which all of Canada grew, from where all the money, labour and intellectual capital flowed for the hundred or so years prior to and immediately after Confederation. The PQ will have you believe that Québec has no place in such a nation, and further still has so little in common with the Confederation that it must go forward as an independent country. They’ve been beating this drum for more than forty years, and it’s been about that long that Québec has generally been on the decline in terms of political influence in Ottawa and economic influence nationally.

As the movement developed over the years it moved from the original goals of a) securing the French language through legislation (mission accomplished by the way – Bill 101 as it was written in 1977 is more than sufficient to guarantee the supremacy of the French language in Québec forevermore), b) minimizing the revenue waste and corruption of the previous Liberal and Union Nationale governments (again, job well done – Lévesque’s government from 1976 to about 1981 was one of the least corrupt in Canadian history) and c) re-negotiating Québec’s place in Canada (again, kudos – though the 1980 Referendum was a Federalist victory, Trudeau made good on a campaign promise to repatriate the Constitution and develop a civil rights charter, itself based on the PQ-written Charte des droits de l’homme; the original referendum question was to do just this – re-open Constitutional talks, not independence, so again, I doff my hat in memory of Oncle René).

But as many go-nowhere independence movements, the PQ has transformed into something far less inspiring, and polls continue to suggest that interest in separation is still far too low amongst Franco-Québécois, meaning that regardless of Pauline Marois’ narrow-minded vision, the so-called winning conditions still elude us.

And as such we’re stuck in an interminable limbo.

In the meantime the PQ government has no choice but to feed the machine as it were, and as they backtrack on various campaign promises and make horrific cuts to healthcare and education (something that affects all Québécois, regardless of mother-tongue), and so, true to form (because we’ve seen this many times before), they push increasingly unnecessary, needlessly divisive and draconian legislation designed to fight a war of political attrition against a non-existent enemy.

Enter legislation to eliminate government funding for Anglophone CEGEPS, of which there are five out of 48, with roughly 30% Francophone enrolment.

Or legislation such as Bill 14 that seeks to eliminate the bilingual status of a number of small ‘historically English’ communities throughout the province.

Or another bit of legislation, designed to require many small enterprises to function in French.

You see, the Anglo-Québécois are viewed as suspect requiring such legislation – it’s all too often about making it clear English won’t be tolerated so long as the façade of French linguistic annihilation can be maintained for all the good it does for our overly sensitive local media; geographically almost exclusively found adjacent to the Ontario and American borders they almost exclusively vote against referendums and the PQ. They can’t be swayed to vote in favour of separation, and so because nothing of substance can be done about it, a joker, a halfwit troll enters the arena as custodian of the Anglophone community of Québec. And his office churns out saccharine pop-propaganda, cutely entitled ‘Notre Home’ to remind us we’re Québécois too – that we belong.

It’s insulting, it’s juvenile and transparent in the worst possible ways, but it’s no need for alarm.

To borrow a line from the Simpson’s, the PQ is as impotent as a Nevada gaming commissioner.

Somewhat to his credit, Stephen Harper hasn’t bitten. The alarmist press claims its delicate and conscientious leadership on his part but I see it as simple dismissal. Harper takes the approach of a successful Second World War Battle of Britain bomber pilot – they never bothered learning the names of the green new pilots in their squadrons until at least five sorties, as the chances of a new pilot going down in flames the first time out was so unbelievably high. Harper’s not going to take Pauline Marois seriously until she either does something incredibly drastic (like a Unilateral Declaration of Independence) or has survived several elections and established a majority.

Neither of these scenarios seem likely to me – Marois and the PQ are filling a vacuum until a real party is established. And let me be perfectly clear – the PQ is not a party; it wasn’t created as a party, merely a protest movement to get Québec the recognition and respect it rightly deserved. Today it perpetuates old stories of racial and linguistic divides to perpetuate it’s very own raison-d’être. There’s no vision in reactionary, stifling social policy; Harper will learn that lesson himself in 2015. We can only hope Marois takes off long before that.

In the meantime the Anglo-Québécois needs to keep its collective head.

We cannot become a Diaspora. We don’t nearly have enough self-confidence. At best, if we do nothing, we die out slowly, a cultural oddity of no real significance.
And many of us think that way – tell a minority they’re the cause of the majority’s problems often enough and they tend to believe it. Those who have the means leave, and those who don’t grow sad, hold grudges, begin to hate, etc.

We’ve seen it a thousand times before. We’re human, and not too highly evolved either, because we continue that which does not work, that which has failed so many times before, and we keep it up because it’s all we know – we’re used to it. We’re so unimaginative and easily swayed by mere propaganda we habitually miss the forest for the tress, unable to grasp the reality of our situation.
We’re an odd minority, that’s certainly one way of looking at it, and more often than not it tends towards questioning how we ever came to be in the first place. We’re told we’re rich, powerful, conservative, monarchists even, regardless of who we really are and we truly do. We’re a scapegoat and a political tool. What’s ironic is that those of us who stayed – and who continue to stay – are those who lack the means to adequately safeguard our society and culture against unwanted, coercive assimilation.

The WASPs left long ago, Westmount shed its Rhodesians, and the language of corporate Montreal is most assuredly French.

But most importantly, and never forget this, French hasn’t disappeared, and neither have we.

But we’d nonetheless be very wise to not let the PQ bother us, to simply carry on with what we’re doing, living our lives as we see fit.
T
he question is not about whether Québec will separate, but rather how long it will take the PQ, as occasional agent of minor governance, to make this province uncomfortable for anyone who doesn’t see eye-to-eye with them, Anglophone, Francophone and Allophone alike.

They’re trying to shore up their position not by attracting new supporters, but by pushing people out of the contest altogether.

The only suitable response for those who have no interest in being dictated to is to learn French, integrate and bring our point to ‘les autres’.

Ultimately, ours is the position of open acceptance, and it’s the only way forward.

The PQ: Destroying Québec’s Reputation, One Scandal at a Time

She was that kid in school who wasn't exactly a top-performer, but she was always really keen to be hallway monitor and snitch to the principal.
She was that kid in school who wasn’t exactly a top-performer, but she was always really keen to be hallway monitor and snitch to the principal.

I found the following statement posted to Reddit’s Montreal community page. It’s not entirely clear where or what the original source is, but it’s nonetheless attributed to Dr. Joe Schwarcz, a well-respected local chemist, professor and published author. Schwarcz is a mainstay of Montréal’s vibrant intellectual and academic class; he keeps a regular column in The Gazette, runs McGill’s Office for Science & Society, and is a frequent guest on CJAD and the Discovery Channel.

He rose to prominence as a popular ‘de-bunker’ of magicians and mentalists (such as Uri Geller) by demonstrating that there are simple, scientific explanations for myriad phenomena. In other words, hardly the type to make rash judgements based on emotional (and unnecessarily so) political decisions.

Consider for yourself, I think the man has an excellent point:

“Within the last ten days I’ve been in New York, B.C. and Washington.

I was there to talk about various issues in chemistry but in each instance the topic of conversation with my hosts quickly focused on “pastagate.”

I felt ashamed to be from Quebec. We have become the laughing stock of the world. It is sheer lunacy that with numerous legitimate issues to be addressed, the narrow minded Quebec politicians worry about the French language losing its eminence because of what they see as a treacherous restaurant menu.

And it’s equally disturbing that while the Parti Quebecois commits these linguistic atrocities, the Federal government just stays silent.

The simple-minded critter who was in charge of the language police, and that is the proper description, claims that her heart was in the right place. Maybe so, but it is her brain that is missing.

Our infrastructure is crumbling, our education system is a mess, our emergency rooms are stressed to the limit and we are funding the Office Québécoise de la Langue Francaise to the tune of some 30 million dollars a year.

This is a crime!

A colossal misappropriation of public funds. We are actually paying people to go around measuring signs and telling stores to cover up “on” buttons on microwave ovens.

It is time to disband this foul operation and put the expertise of the employees to use in measuring the depth of potholes. Filling them probably lies outside their capability. It is truly amazing that Minister Diane de Courcy, when announcing the resignation of the head of the OQLF and declaring that questions in English would not be entertained, did not recognize the irony of standing in front of a sign declaring “Un Quebec for Tous.” Surely that rusty brain needs some oiling.

Educated Americans used to be ashamed to say that George W. Bush was their president. Compared with our premier, he was an intellectual giant.

– Dr. Joe Schwarcz

The OQLF – Still Ridiculous After All These Years

The OQLF is a joke.

There is simply no threat to the stability and sanctity of the French language in Montréal, Québec or Canada, nor is there any doubt whatsoever of the predominance of the French language in the public sphere of Montréal. English has been chiseled off the façades of our heritage buildings, bilingual signs covered up and monolingual ‘À Vendre’ and ‘À Louer’ signs are now far too predominant on our city streets.

It’s quite frankly a crime, a deceit of profound public irresponsibility, to campaign and dictate social policy based on the fabricated notion not only that the language of the majority of Québecois and Montréalais would be threatened with extinction, to the point of cultural genocide, but further that a small minority of English speakers are somehow holding Québec back from it’s place in the sun.

There are at present some seven million speakers of Canadian French, representing about 22% of the national population (it should be noted as well, somewhat astoundingly, that there are several small pockets of those proficient in our variety of French in the Northeastern United States), of which roughly 6.2 million speak the Québec variety as mother tongue. How many more have at least basic knowledge of conversational French, or who understand it perfectly while being unable to speak it (for whatever reason) likely puts the total number of people familiar with the language and it’s socio-cultural implications far higher.

There are at present some 661,000 Anglo-Québecois, with about one million calling it their first official language, out of a total population of eight million Québécois. Roughly 40% of the Québec population is bilingual to one degree or another in both Official Languages, while 53% of Québécois are monolingual Francophones.

The largest the Anglophone population ever got in this province was just under 800,000 people, in 1971, when they represented 13% of the population. Today the Anglo-Québécois community represents about 8% of the Québec population. It has been growing, modestly, since 2001, after an equally steady thirty-year decline immediately prior to that.

Political instability in Québec since 1970 has resulted in a net out-migration of 400,000 people, of which 285,000 compose the Anglo-Québécois Diaspora.

In Québec, Bill 101 has so far mandated that all immigrant students be educated in French regardless of mother tongue or at-home language proficiency. All businesses with more than fifty employees must conduct all official business in French. Government services are to be first and foremost in French, though with limited English services for communities where the Anglophone minority is prevalent. And all this to guarantee the supremacy of the French language in Québec.

It worked. There is simply no question French has been guaranteed forevermore in Québec. The Anglophone community is no threat – they’re no longer in control of everything and sitting on all the money. In fact the most successful among us split some time ago, taking their money with them.

There’s no question whatsoever that Québec is a French province, a robust and still far-too homogeneous nation of Francophones on the not-entirely Anglophone and increasingly inter-cultural North American continent. I’m glad it worked – I’ve benefitted from it personally. I am the product of cultural integration, bilingual by choice, mixed by birth. I know why Bill 101 was important, why it’s still relevant, and how it has positively impacted parts of Québec society.

But the party that was never supposed to be more than a movement to secure constitutional talks with the federal government (another success for Lévesque – he helped push repatriation and the Charter more than any other premier, even if he didn’t sign it, he succeeded in making Canada more sovereign – federalists owe him that much) has fallen on bludgeoning an already dead horse. A non-issue conjured to life like a modern-day Golem to scare the Anglophones out of Québec (again).

Now the PQ says Bill 101 needs to be strengthened. It needs teeth. At a time when we have to cut healthcare and education spending (resulting, as expected, in a raise in tuition despite all the campaigning to the contrary), it pushes for more OQLF inspectors (something the PLQ was planning on doing principally to mollify the soft-nationalist vote) and sets them lose amongst the small-business classes, a challenge to civic harmony if i ever dared imagine one, and hopelessly inept at containing bad PR as witnessed recently by the appropriately named pastagate – the suffix ‘gate’ so overused and meaningless it now appears to be entirely fitting when covering anything to do with the over-zealous law school drop-outs and philosophy minors who constitute the rank and file of the tongue troopers.

It’s a kind of political theatre. The appearance of actually doing something to fix a problem that doesn’t actually exist.

If Québec French was actually threatened with disappearance ‘within a generation’, as the PQ and other linguistic-supremacists sometimes imply, UNESCO would have a local office working round the clock to create a full record of the language and would have provided funds for local French-language schools. If that seems ridiculous I’m glad – it is. Such a thing would happen if there were fewer than 10,000 local speakers. Canadian French is a growing language that ranks roughly among languages such as Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Xhosa, and Haitian Creole in terms of number of native speakers. These languages, much like Canadian French, can sustain themselves, and are not about to disappear.

The video above is from 1998 and features commentary by the incomparable Mordecai Richler. Richler first brought the world’s attention to our idiotic and obviously punitive linguistic laws back in the 1980s and 1990s in some articles he had written for the New Yorker, irking the separatists to the point where he is typically today lambasted as ‘anti-Québécois’ in the same manner that he might have accused some elements of the separatist elites of being anti-Semites.

It never ceases to amaze me how the mere mention of his name in certain circles will produce a torrent of denouncement from people who, by their own admission, have never read any of his books and thus for that matter can’t give you any examples of the apparently rampant ‘Québec bashing’ strewn throughout his prose.

As a fan of Richler’s, I haven’t found it either.

In any event – just a few thoughts on a festering, oozing sore. Enjoy the video, it seems clear to me Morley Safer found the whole thing rather amusing, least of all because of Louise Beaudoin’s near-hysterical defence of Bill 101’s excesses (such as the language cops). It’s quaint seeing how a recently neutered PQ government, such as it was in 1998, returned to using the OQLF to give itself the appearance of legitimacy. Fifteen years later and we’re in just about the same situation.

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Final thoughts – why doesn’t the OQLF do anything to support Francophone communities elsewhere in Canada? Why do they send language inspectors after small-business owners and restauranteurs when, by virtue of their own protocols and operating principles, they refrain from adopting a standardization of the French language in Québec? Curiously, I suspect the answer is in fact that they want Québec French to be as mutually intelligible and malleable as possible, and thus refraining from standardization will facilitate integration with French-speaking immigrants. Ergo, linguistic integration, but only as long as you don’t speak any English.

Anyways, I have to cut this short. Presentement, je prend un cours de français et je dois terminer mes devoirs. Cet semaine je re-lis ‘Les Aurores Montréales’ de Monique Proulx, un livre assez impréssionante comme collage de petits vignettes des vies de divers Montréalais dans les années 90. Un analyze socio-culturelle assez profond – un livre clé pour comprendre la société et l’histoire récent de Montréal.

Changing the Game

Admittedly, not our proudest moment as Montrealers
Admittedly, not our proudest moment as Montrealers

We need to change the question of Québec independence.

From the ground up, in fact.

For nearly forty years Montréal has been on a veritable decline – in terms of economic security, long-term investment, population growth and relative political power among others – and the single driving force of this decline is the as-yet unresolved (and I would argue fundamentally dishonest, historically inaccurate and politically hypocritical) issue of Québec separation.

We’ve been lucky – the decline has been steady and, at the best of times, appearing to be on the way out. It certainly helped that, since the creation of the Parti Québécois most of the significant prime ministers – Trudeau, Mulroney, Chretien and Martin – have Québec roots and strong personal connections with Montréal. But alas, it’s 2013 and the City of Montréal finds itself in a perilous state. Now the prime minister is a schmuck, a mail-room clerk with a spending habit, decidedly anti-Québécois in manner and speech. We also have a separatist dimwit premiere trying to impose austerity measures, something I would have figured ran counter to progressive, perhaps even historically Keynesian economic approaches valued by the PQ. A considerable portion of the local population is now thinking about greener pastures elsewhere, a brain drain is occurring, militant student protesters clash with police in our city’s streets, we have no faith in municipal officials and our initial enthusiasm about Ms. Marois (thinking she might, at least, focus on the economy, progressive social values and seek to run a corruption-free government) has all but disappeared as we begin to see her true colours as a vindictive and short-sighted wannabe iconoclast.

We have a place-holder mayor and our public focus, of late, has been on the over-zealous actions of a state-sponsored public annoyance while we wonder whether the Charbonneau Commission has anything more than quick wit and a sharp tongue-lashing in store for the criminal shit-stains who have robbed us of an immense wealth in tax-revenue with kick-backs and socks stuffed with cash.

Our city isn’t just held hostage by an unstable political situation, it’s that such a situation is being purposely maintained, and has been for quite some time in fact, quite to the benefit of the organized crime element in the city. As long as the political situation remains unstable, political parties of every shape and size will seek to attain some new leverage by feeling compelled to bend or break rules to secure a militant voting base.

Is it any wonder our best and brightest refuse to involve themselves with politics? It’s a losing proposition, particularly if you actually value clean government over whatever bribe might get waved in your face. The altruistic among us leave – if we can’t get our shit together here why even bother trying to create a more perfect and just society, we were best suited to make it happen, and look at us now. Forty years of stasis.

At the provincial level it seems as though one party is in bed with the mob while the other is in bed with the unions that work for the mob. The rest don’t owe anyone any favours and thus aren’t likely to get elected, even in a province as progressive as our own. This situation trickles down to municipal level, especially when it concerns Montréal – that from where nearly all the money flows. Either way you slice it, it’s the people who wind up fucked.

This has been going on for far too long, and I know I can’t be alone thinking we fundamentally need to change the question, change the political situation, so at the very least it is the people of Montréal who force and shape the issue.

As long as the question of Québec independence remains unresolved, we cannot hope to grow, to develop, to progress as a city. We’ll remain stuck between the apparently competing interests of Québec and Canada. We’ll remain hostages.

If the twentieth was the century of nation-states, then the twenty-first shall be the century of great cities; already we’re seeing the development of an entirely new network of key cities that focus the world’s cultural, social and political development, a trend that will assuredly grow as cities begin to implement new methods to lessen their negative environmental and ecological footprints. A lot of progress will flow forth from cities the world over, and I want Montréal to regain its position as a global city, a leading city, a city that defines itself and future orientation, rather than one caught between outside interests attempting to settle scores from a quater-millenium ago. Our greatness cannot and will not be denied.

An illustration of the maturity of progressive Québécois politicians
An illustration of the maturity of progressive Québécois politicians

I want the brain-drain to end, I want an end to the instability. Most of all, I don’t want our city to continue having to go hat in hand to various levels of government seeking funds to grow. Enough is enough, we have nearly two million people within the city and another two living in bedroom suburbs that simply would not exist without the city’s economic power. Why are we not in control of our own destiny?

Is it not time for us to be masters in our own house?

I propose we change the debate – permanently – so that Canada and Québec work for us, and we cease to be the battleground for this ridiculous war of attrition. Let’s be real – don’t tell me these student demos concern the rise in tuition exclusively – this is just as much an expression of extreme public distaste for the Harper regime and the ‘out-of-left-field’ development of a socially-regressive and economically incompetent conservative element in Canadian politics.

But we cannot be a permanent political battleground, which is why we must forge ahead and seek to do what is best for ourselves first and foremost. I’m not advocating that Montréal seek to make itself a sovereign and separate entity – far from it – but it wouldn’t hurt us to steer the conversation, and possibly seek to create new revenue streams and strategic wealth reserves so as to throw a bit of weight behind our demands, our interests as a city and metropolis.

So how do we change the conversation?

Either Montréal will become Québec’s metropolis and economic capital or it will be rejuvenated as Canada’s cosmopolis and international city. But it’s high time the matter is settled permanently so that we can get on with our lives and start planning our city’s future.

That, of course, is far easier said than done. The spineless Parti Québécois has so far fell so short of numerous campaign promises it is now focused nearly uniquely on punitive measures designed to limit the Anglo-Québécois community to a permanent underclass. Provisions in Bill 14 to change the bilingual status of numerous ‘historically Anglophone’ communities is quite literally erasing their existence and making it impossible for their presence throughout much of Québec to be sustained.

Hitting Montréal right in the pills are the provisions that demand all entreprises over ten employees to conduct all official business in French. For the innumerable start-ups and small businesses that actually drive the local economy, this may prove the final straw; why stay here when your clients are all in Silicon Valley?

The PQ wants to go further still by making it impossible for Francophones and Allophones to attend bilingual ‘Anglophone’ post-secondary institutions (literally telling adults where they can go to school, and what languages they can choose to be instructed in). And despite massive cuts to education and healthcare, there’s apparently more than enough money to continue funding the OQLF, who rather than do anything to encourage people to speak French, send petty, short-sighted zombies to harass local small businesses, charging them if they dare display a sign in English (which now includes the On/Off switch on microwaves, signs that say WC above the loo, the words pasta, caffé, steak).

Used Without Permission
Used Without Permission

All of this isn’t just bad for Québec’s Anglophones mind you, it’s bad for Montréal as well. Montréal’s future as an integrated cosmopolis is largely dependent on how the Francophone majority interacts with the Anglophone minority, and how both communities seek to pursue enhanced cultural integration. The inter-married, multicultural and multi-lingual among us should be particularly prized as a clear sign of the future – languages can coexists, even at an official level, with no cultural loss or societal deterioration. Those come about when we retreat into our silos and define ourselves in terms of opposition. It screws up literally everything we’ve been working towards over the course of the last 371 years.

Quick aside, I was overjoyed to see how quickly all this OQLF bullshit went viral, attracting international scorn and further serving to remind the world of what a pathetic laughing stock the PQ really is.

For a party that claims to wish to defend the ‘European’ or ‘Latin’ in North America, it’s remarkably poor at recognizing most Europeans have openly accepted multi-lingualism and it hasn’t had any negative effect whatsoever on the sanctity of the myriad languages spoken in Europe. For a party that suggests it is emblematic of a bright future for Québec, it’s remarkably poor at understanding modern communications and social media technologies as well. Perhaps this explains their inability to recognize our nascent high-technology start-ups, the ones that function principally in English and are focused on international business development, are so crucial to our future economic success.

In any event I digress. The future of Québec and Canada is a question Montréal wants solved, needs to have solved, in order to free us to grow, to become the great leading city we’ve always been destined to become.

I call on our potential mayoral candidates to state not a cop-out position of official neutrality on the issue of Québec separatism, but rather state a defined position that the problem must be solved immediately, and that until the issue is settled, Montréal will do what is best for its own citizens.

A member of the RRQ makes a compelling and insightful argument for the merits of an independent Québec state.
A member of the RRQ makes a compelling and insightful argument for the merits of an independent Québec state.

I would go so far as to recommend Montréal begin setting aside money as a permanent source of capital (much like the current Mayor of Atlanta did, setting aside a $100 million war chest of sorts to use as equity for a variety of long-term development projects). But we should take it a step further, seeking to unify all school boards into a single city-administered public education department and finally desegregate our schools, followed by mandatory bilingual public education (French being the majority language of instruction regardless of mother-tongue) in addition to taking a leadership role in maintaining decentralized public healthcare services. We already know superhospitals are an obsolete concept, and we should reconsider gutting our historic hospitals and selling them off to condo developers – these are our properties, our resources, and they ought to be ours to administer and use as we see fit.

Montréal must do what is best for its citizens, first and foremost. If we are unique amongst Canadian cities we should be cognizant as well of our uniqueness among Québec’s cities too.

Remaining in the middle, caught between competing interests gives us nothing but fodder for our media, and countless reasons to hate on each other, returning to solitudes and silos, something we once turned our backs on as regressive, counter to our nature.

Our city will only succeed when our own citizens recognize their inherent, personal sovereignty, and the sanctity of our own society and culture.