Since when have police corps been pro left-wing, pot legalization, separatism supporters?

Saying there is something rotten in the state of Quebec because a cop shot a kid of an ethnic minority is akin to saying there is something rotten in BC because the police department let someone mass murder junky prostitutes and bury them on his farm.

Of course there is a problem! But it does not come from the source that you seem to think it does.

Police forces are never the mirror of society at large as much as they are the face of reactionnary, straight-jacket big business “elite”.

They don’t.

Most government services are offered in chinese and english, not because it is legislated as thus, but because market research says that this is the best way to reach the population, on a case by case basis. The government tries to react dynamically to a changing population without politicizing things.

There are many stores and even entire shopping malls sprinkled throughout vancouver that offer services in chinese only, or english only, or both, depending on the clientel. None gets emotional about it, or demands service in their language, they just adapt.

When I shop at T & T supermarket, noone speaks english, the signs are not in english, and you have to muddle your way through the checkout counter by reading the printout on the cash register, yet TONNES of non-chinese speaking people shop there, partly because they get off on the coolness it all. You can travel to exotic asia without leaving your neighborhood. How cool is that?

When an english speaker is confronted with a store, or even an entire mall of stores where english is non-existent, rather than get defensive, they beam with pride, because it is proof that vancouver is finally becoming the world-class city that it longs so hard to be.

English will most likely remain the dominant language of Vancouver, or i may be proven wrong. Either way it doesn’t really matter, I will continue to believe it is one of the most beautiful places on earth. And if another million chinese agree with me and want to share it with me, it validates my opinion. We are all there for the same reason, the stunning sunsets on the downtown beaches. The mountain top ski resorts overlooking the metropolis below.

There have been culture clashes for sure, but the pot-smoking hippy environmentalists have influenced the chinese, and the business-savy chinese have helped reform our government and economy to be more lean and efficient. The result is amazing. Hundreds of cranes building amazing waterfront communities along seawalls littered with people cycling and jogging between palm trees and sidewalk cafes full of people drinking italian coffees and taiwanese bubble teas. 3 new subway lines. Stunning new mountain parks. A polluted industrial wasteland that was false creek converted into an environmental paradise. These things take money, and that means foreign investment and immigration and a vision for the future.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Canada was racist, white and english only. Then something amazing happened in quebec, and all the eyes of canada were on montreal. We realized that something was wrong with canada, and we adapted.

The race riots in montreal nord should be a wake-up call that there is something wrong in quebec right now. Perhaps Montreal can look to Vancouver or Toronto as an example of something that is working, and adapt it to our unique situation here.

I don’t think eveything will suddenly turn better the next day of a Oui, but it would allow things to evolve differently from then on. It would allow our culture and our politics to more closely represent what we are (and that includes everybody living here). For instance, I can see an independant Québec moving towards some kind of pot legalization and Montreal becoming the Amsterdam of North America. I can’t see it coming inside Canada.

It would also change the relation between the two solitudes in Montreal and I think the anglophones would most benefit from this new paradigm. Right now, anglophones are often perceived by francophones as a threat, as “Canadians living in Québec” and not being “solidaires” of the rest of Québec. With independence, they would become our most precious ambassadors to the rest of North America and throughout the english speaking world. In matters of sports as well as culturally, economically or diplomatically, there would be, at last, a “Team Québec”, in wich everybody living here could identify.

And you have to wonder, with traditionnally great goaltending (maybe by italian descent Roberto Luongo), stars like Lecavalier and St-Louis but also portugese descent Ribeiro and half haitian Francis Bouillon pairing with “de souche” Robidas for great defense, we could at last show to the world what modern Québec has become. Add to this the sense of purpose of representing a newborn country and the thrill of being able to work as a whole team with the Québécois french as the common language, heck, this team could win!

At least it could try to do so by working together. That’s what would change to me. And it’s a lot.

By the way, littlerob, I can’t agree more with what you’ve written about the language we speak.

Good point. An interesting twist to this however is that the Parti Québécois is a left-wing party, whereas the Vlaams Belang is a right-wing party. Most nationalist parties (especially in Europe) are right-wing, so the lefty PQ genuinely mystifies many Europeans who follow such things.

One of the reasons I compare Brussels to Montréal is to point out that the speakers of the “invasive” languages in both cities are nearly unanimous in their suspicion of the nationalist movement in Flanders and the souverainiste movement in Québec respectively. In both places this suspicion is complicated by historical memories of people on both sides of the language divide. Québec is different in that the PQ has governed several times in the last thirty years; the VB is much more politically isolated and has not governed–yet.

I made another outraged post on this subject earlier today elsewhere on this blog, but another factor that complicates the language divide in both Brussels and Montréal is that the local languages in both places (Brabant Flemish, Québec French) vary from the standard Dutch and French languages somewhat. In other words, kids in school in French Brussels and Anglo Montréal get taught a second language that ain’t the one that’s spoken on the street. Someday, someone, somewhere, is gonna wise up about this, and then we’ll all stop worryin about what’s “proper” and start teachin these kids the language that their neighbors really use.

If one looks at history, the language-concerned people in Montreal might say that Montreal is where Brussels was in the mid-19th century. With the original population still dominant, but under pressure from the “invader language” (not my words, but I’m pretty sure that’s the general feeling).

Of course, the big difference between Brussels then and Montreal today is the fact that the provincial government in Quebec is adamantly pro-French, as are most of the chattering classes in Quebec, and the Canadian federal government is staying relatively language-neutral and really doesn’t want to get involved in this type of fight these days. In Brussels, royalty, the aristocracy and the rest of the power in place at that time were all pro-French, as was much of the Flemish elite, all of which was just too much for the Flemish language to withstand and maintain its historic place as the dominant language of Brussels.

In fact, Quebec sovereignists have never had any “extra-territorial” ambitions. The French-Canadian nationalist movement did have a pan-Canadian focus for a long time, with the goal of expanding and supporting francophone communities across Canada (and even in the New England states for that matter). There also was a concerted effort at one point to build a human bridge of francophone settlement through northern Quebec, northern Ontario to link up with the francophone brethren in Manitoba. This would counter the anglo population expansion to the south and give the English speakers a run for their money. This effort did make some progress, as evidenced by the current francophone population that crosses over from northwestern Ontario into northern Ontario along a few axes (Kapuskasing-Hearst, Timmins, Sudbury, etc.), but it never made it much further west. The effort pretty much ran out gas, the original population in Quebec being too low to begin with and also perhaps more inclined to move just across the border to the booming industrial cities of New England.

Francophones from Quebec eventually stopped dreaming of taking over large swaths of Canada, and in 1967, during a landmark conference known as the États Généraux du Canada Français (Estates General of French Canada), famously decided to focus their energy on building a French-speaking Quebec. (Since, in spite of all the efforts outside Quebec, the battle was still far from won in the only province where francophones were a majority. And the efforts outside Quebec weren’t paying off: French was rapidly losing ground almost everywhere.) Some of the delegates came out in favour of independence, some in favour of strengthening Quebec within Canada, but it was pretty much unanimous from the Quebec delegates that the situation in Quebec was what had to be concentrated on. Although about one quarter of the delegates to this conference were francophones from outside Quebec, the Quebec votes carried the day, and this is thought of as the breaking point between French speakers inside and outside Quebec.

Up until then, francophones in Canada largely saw themselves one single people, no matter what province they lived in. Older people tell me that what is today the Quebec provincial flag used to fly over francophone schools, churches and caisses populaires in places like St-Boniface, Manitoba. But post-1967, the minority francophone groups took on new identities: Franco-Ontarian, Franco-Manitoban. With their own flags of course.