Earlier this year, Liberal MP Justin Trudeau got into trouble for suggesting that he understood some of the resentment of Québeckers opposed to Harper's Canada, then backtracking after accusations that he was a closet separatist. I feel a little sorry he did so, as I feel as he probably did before he retracted. If ever it really did look like Québec was coming close to separation, I'd move back in a flash. There'd be no way I'd let the province secede and me be without my home and the Péquistes be without the thorn of me in their side. But I'd also be there because I like what Québeckers are demanding.
But separation isn't going to happen. My own recent experience in Québec has been of Francophone Canadians speaking without prejudice and actually quite enthusiastically about the rest of Canada in ways that put prior territorial anxieties about identity in the shade -- about Toronto and Vancouver as places of opportunity, and Ontario, would you believe (as happened to me in Montreal's Jean-Talon Market) as the place to find Canada's best artisanal burrata.
Don't discount this little foodie detail. Haute cuisine in restaurants or the terroir have always provided Québeckers a way of feeling superior and even a few years ago it would have been unimaginable that a cheese seller would have spoken admiringly about an English-Canadian product. For a long time now these accompaniments to separatist sentiment have been receding before most of the province's more confident, integrated sense of place in the world -- and Canada. The memory of having to speak English at Eaton's is not a personal one anymore, but a popular fable dying with the older generations that tell it. Today it is not separation that Québeckers want, but a better society, a better representation of their views.
But, as Pauline Marois is about to find out, this is not so easy to achieve. Indeed, the politician's handsome pension aside, I can't imagine how anybody in their right mind would actually want to be in power these days. Such a fractious time it has proved, even before the looney tune Richard Bain decided that knocking off a couple of Péquistes (and perhaps even newly elected Pauline Marois herself) would somehow settle Québec's divisions. This last election can feel like yet another tedious lap in a contest of civic attrition in which the end game is finally to be achieved by defeating the country through sheer ennui. Still, though I might be placing my bet from Québec, I'd still put my money on Canada.
Of course I would. I'm old enough to remember November, 1976, when Réné Lévesque's Parti Québecois won their first majority and, stoned out of my mind at the time (and practicing my "joual" for the new epoch at a concert in Montreal's Plâteau), the excitement for the "avenir" of what was also a left-leaning party that filled the political air with the fresh breeze of new faces.
Sure, the PQ were separatists, but the citizens of la belle province understood -- and Montrealers, most of all -- that voting in Canada was a matter of negotiation, of setting up a good federal-provincial fight (and throwing in a crooked mayor if, say, Olympics were in the offing) and that the effect of a federal system in which authentic opposition occurred along provincial lines had contributed to their victory.
And truth be told, Québeckers of all stripes knew they were different no matter what language they spoke. Quebeckers, we told ourselves proudly as kids, consumed more hash (not weed) per capita than Canadians from other provinces, we played more entertaining hockey, we ate better and later and listened to and made much, much better music.
The struggle for Canada's soul that was being waged by a French-Canadian in Ottawa, Pierre Trudeau, and his nemesis at home, Réné Lévesque, left most Québeckers feeling privileged. Both were idealists, though also clever and pragmatic. Both were of fiercely individual character. It was a level face-off and a compelling situation. It was not a bad time to have been a voter, really -- before, that is, Camille Laurin and Bill 101 soured it all up and the unfinished Olympic stadium became a sign of Québec's moral and financial collapse.
Now we live in a different, more prosaic time. So much is about "efficiency." The face-off is about as compelling as a hockey game between two teams of dull New Jersey Devils. Each leader is clever and pragmatic, but their play is brutish and wearing, not entertaining. And each is the opponent that the other deserves. Prime minister Harper, whose office and party have distinguished themselves in their refusal to consider, let alone engage with dissonant views -- whose office and party evidently decided long ago that a portion of the electorate in the mid- to high-30s was more than enough to have their way and to hell with the rest -- now faces in Québec a sovereigntist party that can behave that way with impunity. The Tories have provided the example.
Québecois voters will have to negotiate their way around this new situation of two leaders whose tactics (of piecemeal purchases of a critical one or two per cent of the vote) will be similar but who otherwise cannot possibly be reconciled. And likely they will do so as dexterously as they have always done.
I admire Québeckers. They're discursive. They're engaged. They consider the landscape and vote on the basis of a calculus that is infinitely more sophisticated than, say, the sports team mentality that drives a majority of Albertans in federal (if not civic) elections. Alberta's ludicrous matrix is one in which the imagined slights of more than 40 years ago, Pierre Trudeau's 1980 National Energy Policy, chief among them -- slights that occurred before most voters in that province were even born -- mean that saying you're a liberal or a green in that province is to risk (remember the Wildrose Party) a Southern Gothic shower of hellfire and brimstone.
But what's true of Québec is also true of Alberta, which is to say that there is a massive portion of the electorate, a lot of it recent and young, that simply is not represented by the generations that make their way in politics and end up speaking for each province. The circumstances that led to the dumping of Jean Charest and his provincial liberals and the slim Péquiste victory are a continental phenomenon, the same that have that supported the Tories in federal elections and Tea Party Republicans in the United States.
The biggest of these is blowback on the part of mostly white, wealthy, and conservative communities -- as can be found in Taber, Alberta, though also in rural Ontario or in Montmagny, Québec -- voters suspicious of cities and the baffling, unwanted social changes that are brewed in them (multiculturalism, same-sex marriage, green activism, welfare politics, tweets). Another is the desire simply to dump politicians who have appeared to overstep the bounds: as Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin's Liberals did, long ago, vis-à-vis the "Sponsorship Scandal," as Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc Québecois did with their endlessly disruptive but also pointless complaints, and as Jean Charest appeared to do with his insufficiently probing inquiry into corruption in Québec's construction industry.
As a whole (the idiot Bain not worth discussing), Québeckers still have confidence in the democratic process. More than that, they expect something from it, and palpably, as voting, historically, has benefited the province much more than any dalliance with more violent protest, or guns.
Canadians used to be impressed by this, and still should be -- that change, should it happen even to our borders, would occur in Canada at the ballot box. Anglophone Canadians can rant about Québec or pontificate from lofty Bay Street heights about what it is costing the rest of the country to satisfy the province and do so until the cows come home (or, as Marois puts it, until the conditions are right), but the truth is that Canadians are mostly jealous and miffed by a society that repeatedly shows how it is distinct, most of all, in getting its way.
In fact, the rest of the country would do well to consider what it might learn from Québec. All the rage and haughty impatience that was directed towards the student protests in Québec (a variety of the smug posturing towards the troubled countries of Europe during the ongoing economic crisis' effected by the same Anglo-Saxon champions of visionless "efficiencies") shows just how distinct Quebeckers can be in their expectation of what politicians should provide.
Substitute, for instance, the word "principle" for "entitlement" as it used by the Rest-of-Canada critics of the student protests -- or of unions, labour, health or day care -- and you have the perimeter of an entirely different argument about the fair society that Québeckers, perhaps on their own, are having. And, to their credit, the debate is one that, now we can legitimately say "repeatedly," they do not shy from delegating young people to conduct. Aged 21, the savvy leader of the student protests, Leo Bureau-Blouin, a natural politician (that, not altogether a compliment) is now a Péquiste MLA.
Bureau-Blouin was put into office by people much older than him, the youth turnout for the last vote having been, again, very small, just as, in the last federal election where Québec voters sent a bevy of youngsters, some of them students and one of them a 20-something single mom, to Ottawa to mind their interests without, I think, any particular expectation that these bright kids were somehow not capable or would embarrass themselves and their constituencies.
So, not wanting to be a spoiler, but because I love Canada and all that it used to stand for -- the peaceful resolution of differences, most of all -- I can say that I find the Québec election result tremendously encouraging. The spectre of separatism is exaggerated, though we should also be relieved that the PQ did not have a more popular leader and benefit at the polls from that. The province wanted a change of leader, and hence the good man Jean Charest's ouster.
Fair enough. But fervently I wish that the numerous detractors in the rest of Canada of Québec's independence of thought would realize just how tired their own views are. The Globe and Mail, for Christ's sake, has been relying on the views of just one Francophone, Lysiane Gagnon, to interpret goings on in the province for more than 20 years!
This, just as it turns to the same handful -- David Bercuson, after the Wildrose Party's surprise defeat -- to explain Alberta to Canada, a territory being changed every bit as much by its youth as Québec is (and possibly more so, as young Albertans don't have to leave the territory to find a job).
Where is the effort on these institutions' part? Where is the curiosity of our country's tired, eroded, establishment? We could do worse than look for an example to a territory that, using whatever tools circumstances have placed in its reach, demands the change that elections can bring and turns to new parties and the young for fresh faces and views.
Mr. Richler seems to approach Quebec from a romantic or poetic point of view, not a practical one. Artisanal what? Foodies? Huh? Discursive? Does that include banging on pots and pans? Even the fabled Habs are affected by racist pols and journalists. The "students" and their supporters don't seem to discuss how freezing tuition fees when Quebec has a huge debt and deficit is absurd.They point to Denmark's free tuition, but obviously don't know how heavily Danes are taxed. How many Quebecois discuss or acknowledge the $926 (2011) per person they receive in equalization payments from Ottawa (or should I say Alberts)?
but can you please stop threatening to run away from home to get it -----the ROC is not standing in your way --and the threats are counter productive
pretty close to what i said to my teenage kids a few years back
In any event, the paradox is that while on paper a province like Qc may be officially unilingual while one like Ont is bilingual, the reality ( not the paperwork) is quite different. Most Quebeckers can speak/ understand English, while most Ontarian would mistake French for Polish ( true experience), let alone be able to talk/ read etc. one further manifestation is that these kind of debates ( as in the comments column) count active participation by obvious francophones as well as anglophones. Being able to read/ understand French, i can say that you cannot find any broad and similarly active debate where anglophones would comment ( in French as it would be written in French) in the francophone press. This is not due to some massive interdiction by law, but simply there isn't that many anglophones who can speak French ( heck you find more proportionnaly in NYC than TO!), ( except in Quebec where by and large we are all functionnally bilingual).
This is a fundamental flaw in this country, which means Qc and ROC will further drift apart into an unilingual ROC and a de facto bilingual Qc
I fully agree. No point to learn French in BC. Heck BC is like totally different country from Quebec. Culturally Qc is closer to Massachusetts, BC is closer to Washington/Oregon culturally But we all speak English (and Mandarin too). That's my point...it is silly to try to hold on to some "national" construct which nobody wants, nor feel patriotic about...
The French/English bilingualism logic emerged 150 years ago, when there were more francos than anglos and how to make a country lead by anglos stick together (and not be absorbed by the US). This never happened. It's now too late. BC will never need to speak French. better go with Mandarin (Which by the way I also speak, and another language too....so you and I can speak English or Mandarin, instead of French.
(of course, I would doubt that the majority of BCans, will jump wholeheartly in learning Mandarin and want to merge their culture to become Anglo/Mandarin...my guess, you will just displace the same opposition to bilingualism towards Mandarin instead of French....so in the end you have a ROC which only strives to be like the US melting pot, with English as the only denominator...not bad either...and why not just join the US then?....but good luck! 中文也是未来！...I'll keep on visiting my friends in Seattle and Vancouver and speak English or Mandarin with them, and when in France or Switzerland speak French).
let's go!
Canadians on future, speaking Mandarin tongue!
Why not speak English and French like Canadians?...
As usual and as usual it's not. Consider this. Had Charest been elected there would have been a strong chance of him bringing up "the signing of the 1982 Constitution". Now, with these results: that can't happen.
Incrementally, we (Canada and Quebec) are moving forward towards... separation and a more efficient Québec (and Canada), better overall relations and a better understanding and confidence of what makes us unique in the world.
Who in Canada today wants to spend the Billions that were spent over the last 40 years in GOV publicity, sponsorships "Love in's" and the like just to KEEP Quebec in the federation regardless of if it makes practical sense?
An interesting underlined image in the article to take in is this one:
- Quebeckers, particularly Montrealers, but also many more, are pretty much bilinguals ( both anglos, francos, allos ) and feel more and more as Quebeckers as per the description in this article. ( speaking english or french is really not your issue when your fluent in both!)
- the other part of the image is based on the fact that "what Canada used to stand for", this is also where the rift is widening fast between Qckers and ROCs, as these humanist values seem to actually live on more strongly in Qc, and to continue developping there in that direction ( environment, etc). I would even contend that this is actually a much greater fault line between Qc/ROC, with no french / english divide within Qc on this dimension.
You can't say people in China are Canadians except for the fact they live in China and speak Chinese.
Quebecers are not Canadians who live in Quebec and speak French... though you'll find some Quebecers who "feel" Canadian... I'm sure you'd find some people in Europe who "feel Canadian"... it gets a bit silly don't you think?
Oh... and Palestine. So... get used to it.
Great article - I don't mean "great" in the colloquially shallow sense, but great as in "great books of the western world".
Quebec does indeed not really want to be a true separate (miniature, imbalanced, surrounded) country: they simply want to preserve their culture. Canada needs to trump the separatists: we should not just preserve Quebec culture but embrace and adopt it. Quebec shouldn't have language laws - instead, Canada should have French everywhere. Wouldn't you love to have Montreal's food culture in your city? Where I live, public transit is a sad, pallid thing, asphyxiated by idolatry of the personal automobile.
This is highly political, of course. Harper is leading us into an American future: driven into vapidity by a blind, tasteless, unprincipled search for "efficiency". Oh, Harper is not unprincipled - he stands resolutely for certain things like "Get Your Hands Off My Stuff" and "Get Thee To Jail, Thou Nonconformer" and "They'll Pay Us To Ruin Our Land, So That Makes It Right".
Mostly, Canada needs a national dialog about what Canada needs. Do we want to spend $35B on amazing jet fighters? Yes, they're really cool, but what would we use them for? Yes, they help us seamlessly interoperate with the US, but do we really want to be their Auxiliary Air Force? Most of all: is there something ELSE we want MORE that could use that $35B? For $35B, we could teach French to every Canadian and have a little left over for
Six times larger than France, bigger in population that about half the world's country and surrounded by the rest of the world?
No, please understand it makes financial sense to have our own country in order to, for example, have more efficient and finely tuned investments from our taxes. The same goes for Canada.
Would you have Canada become part of the US as long as they respected Canadian culture? Of course not.
Teach French to Canadians? Hmm tall order. We should rather support political independence for the aboriginal nations. Teaching all the aboriginal languages to every Canadian doesn't make sense. Keeping them in Canada against their will doesn't either. One nation, one language, one representative. It's complicated enough already before we have some nations speaking on the behalf of others.
your message is exactly the kind of baiting that encourages Canadians in Quebec to vote for sovereignty, even if they do not actually want Quebec to have its own, say, ambassador to India.
Long live our mixed blood and our joual speaking nation! I even welcome anyone and everyone who doesn't give a crap about race purity to come join us here in Quebec and make the place even better(and more Metisized).
"...but the truth is that Canadians are mostly jealous and miffed by a society that repeatedly shows how it is distinct, most of all, in getting its way."
...and...
In fact, the rest of the country would do well to consider what it might learn from Québec."
Really?
What Quebec has done is codify in law the segregation of its citizens into two separate and distinct civil rights categories: one neighbour cannot do what his next door neighbour can do.
Bill 101 is a race law and a hate law.
There is nothing that I or other Canadians can learn from this other than to oppose such xenophobia in all its incarnations.
So can Swahili or Portugese speakers.
What all of the above groups cannot do (or, at least, should not be allowed to do) is use government-funded monies to promote their own particular group. And, yes, that is racist.
And once you move into the area of using one's parents and what one's parent's classification is in order to determine civil rights, then you have a discrimination procedure pretty much identical to the Indian Act (adjudicated from the Supreme Court on down as a race law) and the former Apartheid system of South Africa. Both employ, as does Bill 101's language of education provisions, the test of descent to determine rights and placement in separate civil rights categories.
By the way, Trudeau said that we needed Quebec to balance out Harper's vision and values. Which values? Banning minorities from wearing religious symbols, taking away parents right to send their kids to English schools and sicking language police on businesses to regulate which language is spoken around the water cooler? Not to mention a complete disregard for government contract transparency and fiscal responsibility. If these are the Quebec values you're talking about, we don't want 'em.
Jean-Philippe Léger.
Is that how you think bill 101 works?
Whats next , i suppose we take the poor english citizens to send them to French detentions camps?
Please stop wasting people's time by talking about things you know nothing about.