Dying generally sucks, but you do get a few perks: things like a 24h VIP direct line to a nurse you can call when weird things start happening to your mother’s cancer-ridden body.
The thing is, at night the system is rigged up so that you have to go through the Montreal General Hospital’s internal operator to get to the nurse. Not the public operator used to communicating with the taxpaying public. The internal switchboard lady.
Dispatch. What service?
This being one of Montreal’s « bilingual » hospital, in-house communications are in English. It takes a few seconds for the operator to switch gears into French and a little bit longer for her to figure out French acronyms and terminology.
Selles? Selles? Shit! What are selles?
Eventually I get the nurse on the phone. The situation I’m describing is kind of gross and she recommends I take my mom to the emergency.
My mother used to be a patient of the Montreal Neurological Hospital’s Docteur Olivier, the French-speaking successor to the legendary Dr. Wilder Penfield who revolutionized brain science, and the living proof that Montreal’s English hospitals are, according to the Montreal Gazette, nothing but a « mischievous myth ».
« There are French ones and there are bilingual ones », they explained after former Québec Prime Minister Jacques Parizeau was admitted to the Jewish General Hospital last week. « Parizeau is getting that care in French – or, at least he is if that’s what he wants. Parizeau’s English is so fluently mellifluous he might just choose to use it. »
While I’m sure the staff at the Jewish will avoid the diplomatic faux pas of addressing Monsieur Parizeau in English, those of us who haven’t managed to come as close to breaking up Canada don’t quite receive the same level of consideration.
When my mother’s name was moved from the interesting cases list to the basket cases list, Dr. Olivier passed her file on to a Czech doctor who didn’t speak a word of French. He greeted every patient in the clinic hallway with a single question:
Do you speak English?
Only about 40% of patients in Montreal’s bilingual hospitals are English-speaking so the doctor spent the first ten minutes of every second consultation sighing loudly as he fished around for an idle nurse, orderly or first year student who could translate his patients for him. I got on his good side by setting aside my modest expectation that in 2009 my mother was entitled to receive health care in French in Québec.
The Neuro doesn’t have an emergency ward so that night I take her across the street to the Royal Victoria Hospital, named for the glorious British Queen who spoke German, English, French and Hindustani. A doctor walks into our examining room wearing a hijab. This is English Montreal, a tolerant, multicultural community where people value and respect each others cultures…
Do you speak English?
Non.
Really? Are you sure?
The doctor tells me that she can take a look at my mother now or that we can wait. Mother’s been writhing in pain for about seven hours now, so I take her hand and tell her softly that it’s her turn to be bilingual.
Because my family refuses to live in Saguenay or Rosemont where we belong, we, like 1.7 million Québécois from Côte-des-Neiges to Val-d’Or — people like Jacques Parizeau, Yves Michaud, Pauline Marois, Éric Lapointe and the AngryFrenchMe — have been designated as wards of the McGill University Hospital Center.
Every single word of every single medical file of every single member of my family is written entirely in English.
Twenty-five percent of the province of Québec’s health care is administered by a medical establishment that doesn’t require it’s doctors to learn a single word of the language spoken by the majority of their patients. The Charest government just gave McGill 3.6 billion dollars, half of the tax dollars earmarked for the construction of two university hospitals in Montréal.
No need to worry, according to The Gazette. For that price they’ll even care for separatists. Me and my mom’s can be assured that Montreal’s bilingual hospitals « are open to all, regardless of language, creed, ethnicity, or political conviction. »
The day shift doctor who showed up in the morning didn’t speak French either. I don’t speak French I’m from Brazil, he told me, almost proud of himself.
I made him speak to me in Spanish. He got the point and dropped the grin.
(Now let’s have a moment of silence for the millions of Mexican-Americans who don’t have access to health care in their own language. Aren’t you just fucking proud to be Canadian right now?)
That night was a hard one, but it wasn’t the toughest yet. I spent many other long nights at the Royal Vic and the Montreal General Hospital with my mother. Tired, scared and confused by the quick succession of unfamiliar faces coming and going around her, my mother started to speak to me in English in those last few weeks of her life.
My father had started to do the same thing in the last days of his life. So did my grand-mother. So did my grand-father.
In his excellent biography of Pierre Bourgault, journalist Jean-François Nadeau tells the fascinating story of the gay veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces who lived with a pet kangaroo in his Shaughnessy village house near the old Forum and became an indépendantiste pioneer. In his book, Nadeau also recalls the separatist firebrand’s long forgotten tour of the Canadian West, early in his career.
Way back in the day, before paying lip-service to Canada’s « bilingual » nature became a litmus test of canadianess, Bourgault toured the Prairies to explain the idea of an independent Québec to hostile crowds of Westerners who had no sympathy for any « French power » or « Québec Libre » nonsense and who basically were going out to see a freak show.
According to Nadeau, Bourgault usually left the room to standing ovations.
This week the Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe launched his own Canadian Tour, but Québec’s independence is not the radical idea it once was. The idea that with Québec out, Canada will be more a more united and nimble country has much greater acceptance today than it did when Bourgault spelled it out to his unsuspecting audiences of farmers and cattle ranchers.
And Canada has changed too, since Bourgault’s time. Like the Prime Minister’s muse, Tom Flanagan, is quoted as saying in the Globe and Mail: “In the West, it’s a yawner, whether Quebec is in or out”.
Duceppe is one of the longest-serving members of the House of Commons, a familiar face to all Canadians and, even if bashing separatists who collect a federal salary is always a good for a few votes in te ROC, most people in Ottawa recognize the Bloquistes are kickass parliamentarians.
It’s hard to see what Duceppe will accomplish with this tour, or even who would come out to hear him.
One useful thing Duceppe could do, if he was so inclined, is reach out the Canadian left and see if his sovereigntists comrade Amir Khadir‘s suggestion that the Bloc and the NDP work out some sort of formal alliance has any legs.
Why, not? If the Bloc is in Ottawa for the long run, there is not fundamental reason why it couldn’t form a united opposition with the NDP, with a common social platform and separate constitutional planks.
Damn, I could even make a case that it could form a government with the New Democrats, deferring it’s votes on any constitutional or federal-provincial issue to Québec’s National Assembly, achieving a kind of sovereignty-association without changing a coma in the Constitution.
I’m not holding my breath. Big ideas are hard to sell in the age or micro-targeting. It would be surprising if anything inspiring or novel came out of Duceppe’s voyage.
Now I’m not saying Duceppe is a boring politician of that he doesn’t have any good ideas. He’s certainly one of my top 5 separatists.
I’m just saying he looks more like a dog man than a kangaroo type of guy.
What does American health care reform and the Québec government’s proposed bill 94 have in common?
Why, they’re both collectivist ploys to take away your rights and guns, of course!
This morning the Montreal Gazette prints an editorial in which it argues that bill 94, a proposed rule that would require citizens to show their faces before receiving government services, is nothing short of an attack on human rights:
On July 1 1960, proposing his Bill of Rights in Parliament, Diefenbaker concluded with these much-quoted words: « I am a Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and for all mankind. »
(…)
Quebec’s Bill 94, meanwhile, shows how « collective rights, » even so badly defined as this new right for bureaucrats to see people’s faces, can overrule individual freedom of attire. (…) Basic freedoms keep coming under attack from forces seeking more control over our lives. Ultimately laws and lawyers will not save us unless there is a strong public understanding that the limits on free choice, imposed by mobs or governments or both, will keep growing unless we all resist them.
This is the exact same reasoning the American right and groups like American Majority are currently using to convince people that Obama’s health care reform is only the first step towards the transformation of the USA into a Spanish-speaking slave labour camp:
On March 23, 1775, 235 years ago today, Patrick Henry gave his immortal speech, closing with the lines, “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”
(…)
I think the American people have a very important choice: are they going to resign themselves to the ever growing chains of government control over their lives, submitting willingly like sheep to acquire some false illusion of peace and prosperity? Or are they going to fight against the forces of statism and push back? That is the great question of the day.
From the defence of the right to hide your face to the government to the discovery, year after year, of illegal religious and linguistic schools who operate in total impunity, civil disobedience by assorted creationists to Québec’s ethics and religious culture high school course (that teaches, G-D forbid!, that all religions carry some wisdom), constant legal challenges to Québec’s elected officials constitutional prerogative to determine the language of education in Québec, the hysterical reaction to the merger of English-speaking municipalities in a united City of Montreal and Louise Harel‘s run for mayor… All this is starting to look more and more like the obscure reaches of the USA where « sovereign citizens » and « tax resisters » oppose the very legitimacy of the democratically elected government.
There seems to be, in Québec, as in the USA, a weird coalition between Anglo Conservatives and various ultraorthodox religious minorities against the very legitimacy of a State run by people who are not like them.
More than a decade ago, Josée Legault demonstrated in her bookL’Invention d’une Minoritéhow the rhetoric of « individual rights » was highjacked by so-called activists to defend the « collective right » of Québec’s english-speaking minority to opt-out of Québec institutions and build their parallel network of (fully subsidised) institutions.
Today a new cast of minorities: ultra-catholics, orthodox Muslims and and uniformed Jews, are re-enacting the fight for the right to opt-out of Québec society with full compensation, play-by-play, with English-Canada’s elites cheering them on.
That’s no surprise. The English-Canadian media has been able to come up with arguments for surprising shit, from segregation to organized crime and now to giving self-appointed clerics veto power over the laws of the land, as long as it’s been able to squeeze an argument against the legitimacy of Québec’s government and it’s democratically elected officials out of it.
In that way they are no different than American Tea Party leaders who welcome anyone, from Birthers, to Minutemen and the Militia movement to their rallies, just as long as they oppose The Government.
There is something profoundly dishonest about Canada’s English-language press coverage of the expulsion of Ms. Naema Ahmed from her French class in Montreal for refusing to remove her niqab–a form of dress apparently inspired by Star Wars’ Imperial guard favoured by ultra-orthodox muslim women.
According the Globe and Mail, Ms. Ahmed « was told to remove the niqab or leave because a student’s mouth must be visible so an instructor can work on pronunciation. » This, according to the Globe, was akin to the practices « in some Arab and west Asian countries, such as the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan » and that « empowering state agents to enforce dress codes and bar the education of women is hitherto unknown in Canada. »
Sure… Except that, as it has widely been reported in the French-language press, even though Ms Ahmed’s teacher had agreed to let her do some exercises one-on-one and give oral presentations facing away from the class, she STILL refused to remove her veil AND demanded that male students be removed from her line of sight in the class.
The student was expelled after the teacher, the school and her classmates, who also, by the way, have the right to learn French, had made considerable efforts to accommodate her. Her demands reached the point where other students were being penalized.
We could forgive the editors of the Globe and Mail who are so thoroughly isolated in the English language that they actually published an editorial last week against changing the word forefathers in the first line of the French lyrics of Canada’s national anthem on the grounds that « Forebears doesn’t really work, because it sounds like four bears. » (Actually, Forefathers and Forbears are English words and therefore neither are in the French lyrics of O Canada. In French the word is Aieux, which sounds nothing like four bears or quatre ours, but a little bit like loser.)
But the boys and girls at the Montreal Gazette certainly speak French and yet they also chose to grossly simplify a complex issue that still divides Muslim nations like Turkey and Egypt–Ms. Ahmed’s homeland–centuries after the passing of the Prophet and turn into the more familiar narrative of redneck Québécois chasing out a foreigner out « their » schools. « Your face or your faith, she was told. She chose her faith. »
Well, if it’s OK to ask that men, be denied the privilege of contemplating your holy self, if that what your faith says, is it OK to ask that, say, Jews, gentiles and infidels sit in the back of the class? Maybe that they try not to touch to many things?
Just last year the case of a woman refusing to remove her niqab in a courtroom was in the news in Ontario. No Canadian newspaper thought this story worthy of an editorial. In fact, a quick search of « Quebec +niqab » and « Ontario+niqab » on the Canadian Newstand search engine tells me that the Canada’s English media has already killed four times as many trees over the Quebec incident.
Four times? Surely the right to cover your face in court will have consequences on our justice system and society at least as important as the right to learn French with a mask.
What’s going on here is that the « French people Bad, Canada Rocks! » bit is just English Canada’s natural defence mechanism against controversial issues that it is not mature enough to face yet. But it doesn’t work. These things are complicated and repeating « Canada is bilingual and multicultural » over and over again won’t make them go away.
So, imagine you’re a twenty-something son of immigrants living in Montreal’s English-speaking and federalist bastion of DDO, a prolific hiphop artist who drops online EPs and mixtapes with a frequency that can’t be healthy, and who’s first full-length English-language album had both the Hour and the Mirror, Montreal’s English-language alt-weeklies, hyping you as one of the best upcoming local MC’s, able to combine « standard braggadocio with some intelligent introspection ».
What’s your next move?
Why, a double French-language LP and a single titled FLQ in which you give shout outs to Québec sovereigntists René Lévesque and Pierre Falardeau and spit: « Yes, I’m Québécois. No, I don’t know Canada. », of course…
Karma Atchykah drops a bomb.
You’re throwing around a lot of very charged imagery on your first single: the FLQ, giving props to René Lévesque and Pierre Falardeau. Coming from an immigrant… from the West Island… who is known for rapping in English… that confuses a lot of people who aren’t sure what you mean. Why don’t you tell me what you want to say with that song.
With that song I’m just trying to rally as much people as I can. To be in Montreal, to be a Quebecer, to me, means a whole lot more, especially in 2010, you know? I was born in the 80’s, grew up in the 90’s, I’ve been in Montreal for 28 years of my life. It really got diverse and I felt there was a need that we redefine what it means to be a Quebecer for these times. And I feel that FLQ was about Quebecer pride, but at the same time had shock value. That was the effect.
What was the reaction from Anglos, from your friends who know you from the Anglo scene?
[Laughs] The Anglos, I would have to say, focus much more on the vibe of the song, on the beat itself, the more the technical, musical stuff. And they definitely feel it’s a cool song. I don’t have any people who are… against the song, in that sort of way. Like, an Anglo station maybe might feel the FLQ reference was not something to joke about or this and that, but I really don’t have that kind of feedback going about. People definitely see that the song has that type of energy. Maybe it’s due to the fact I do music in both languages. Even though people have prejudice towards French music and say they don’t listen to French music, they’ll listen to my music and say « I don’t generally listen to French music, but I like your stuff. »
What about the other side? I was reading the comments on YouTube, and some people had retarded opinions and wrote stuff like: « It’s cool that one of our guests is representing Québec », as if you weren’t really Québécois. Do you get some of that?
I get a bit of « he’s not really Quebecer » and this and that. But what am I? I was born here, I’ve lived and worked here all my life. No matter how deeply involved I am with my origins, doesn’t change that my birthplace is still here. This is what I wanted to do with the song. It’s cool to be catchy, this and that, but you also want to have a discussion such as this. And it sparked that discussion. If you want to go down to the basics it’s really quite simple: no one is really at home here, no matter how many centuries you’ve been here, you know. I guess technically the natives are the only ones who can really claim that they were here before everybody, but even then, it’s what you do with your life that’s going to matter at the end of the day.
You have to admit, the Québécois are always a little bit insecure. A few of prominent artists have complained in the past that it’s badly seen in the Québec cultural community not to be a nationalist. Is this just your way of making friends in the industry?
I felt the need to demonstrate Québec pride for several reasons. One reason actually being the fact that this is my first French album, so I really wanted to make a strong point. I’ve always had the problem of people not necessarily knowing where I’m from. Especially the English music followers thought maybe… Ontario, or people maybe thought I’m form some part of the States and a lot of people would not know that I’m from Québec and Montreal. To me it felt right. A lot of the calculation was about what needs to be represented to make a distinct sense of this guy is from here, he’s repping here and he’s not trying to be from somewhere else. That might just be in the case of Québec, that you have to show Québec love if you want them to sense that, oh yeah, this guy’s from here.
But now you know that because you’ve rapped: « Oui, j’suis Québécois. Non, j’connais pas le Canada » [Yes, I’m Québécois. No, I don’t know Canada.], you can’t accept Canada Day gigs anymore.
If you ask me where I’m from, I’ll tell you Québec first. And that’s not a lie, not a front I’m putting up. When I was kid growing up, René Lévesque and people like that were still fresh in people’s minds and the sense of nationalism was very strong. The sense of Québec outside of Canada was very strong in my mind. As a kid growing up I wasn’t actually understanding that Québec was actually part of Canada. People talked about Québec so strongly I thought, Ok, this might be a country. I’ve always had a sense of me being part of Québec, even though I only knew Montreal. Would I refuse Canada Day? Well I guess it would be a little bit weird for me to do it, but it also depends when in my life I get to it. And I’ll still rep Québec before I rep Canada, regardless. I’m not gonna be doing Canada Day this year, that’s for damn sure, though!
You’re about 10 years younger than me. I went to a very multiethnic school in NDG where white Québec-born kids like me were a very small minority. I feel, maybe in Montreal, there’s a new generation who define identity differently. It’s not the federalist dream of a fully bilingual, bicultural Canadian nation or the old school Québécois image that some nationalists would like us to be. There is a feeling of else coming together. Do you feel that?
Definitely so. I could definitely say that for Montreal, for sure. In the rest of Québec it might be a little less diverse… and even that’s becoming more mixed.
Yeah, Québec City…
Québec City is definitely there too, but there are smaller towns, towns that are way more francophone, that are getting more diverse. Whatever it is, let it be. Whether it stays more homogeneous or it gets more diverse, I don’t really care, That’s just the natural course of things. I think it’s a cool thing, but there’s got to be an openness. There’s just got to be an openess.
How do you feel the majority in Québec is reacting to minorities? To the Immigration generation, let’s call it that? I wrote recently on how what you see on Québec TV looks nothing like what you see on the Metro. There’s something wrong, don’t you think?
I feel… it comes from both sides. If you’re the person that feels misrepresented, you still have to step it up a notch. If you want something to change, you’re better off trying to change it yourself. Perfect yourself. Be in their face, to the extent that they can’t really deny you at that point, you know what I mean? Is it fair, is it not? That’s a different question right there. But you have to do your part in order to have people notice you.
From my very first video, the 3-in-1, I got a response quicker than I expected, but on the other hand, I had made a conscious effort of making sure this thing made me proud and represented the people and got the diversity of me and my sound out there. That type of move is an example of how you get that diversity out up front.
Lots of political talk on my blog, so do you have any thought about politics you want to share? Sovereignty, independence, do you have anything to say about that? Does it matter anymore?
I don’t even know anymore if it matters. I think Québec as a culture, in Canada, is and alway will be something distinct, and you see it in the entertainment business. That’s my personal point of view, and I might be biased. I know people in Ontario might have a different perspective, but Canadian identity is a little harder to distinguish than Quebecer identity from the American and other influences. This is something Quebecers, in the present moment, have to be proud about. And keep that pride alive.
The question of an independent country really has to do with economics. If you don’t have a strong leader, to convince people about things, I don’t think Québec will ever be ready. I think one of the strongest ones was René Lévesque, ’cause he could even get an immigrant to feel concerned. I think if René Lévesque was still alive he would be convincing more people now. But who’s in the movement right now? You have to keep in mind some of the people who sort of wrecked things, like Parizeau being a sore loser… There’s some major faux-pas that were done. I’m not against it, but I’m not particularly for it, in the situation that we’re in today.
Québec signer Kevin Parent, the all-time best-selling artists in Québec music history after Céline Dion, was beat up by a mob of drunken tourists a couple of night ago while out on the town in Québec City.
The singer suffered a concussion and says he remembers nothing of the incident, but bystanders report the attackers were drunken English-speaking tourists.
As if the apparently xenophobic attack was not pathetic enough, Kevin Parent is himself an Anglo. The morons beat up one of their own.
« This incident made me understand the rage of the oppressed Québec francophone who is pissed on in his own city, in his capital, during his own carnival… », declared Parent in a press conference on Tuesday.
« I spent years building a bridge between French and English. I spent years going to the Junos to say that the Québécois are cool and going to the [French-language music award ceremony] l’ADISQ to say that Anglophones are not all boring and are good people… »
Essentially famous for his French-language albums, Kevin Parent’s mother tongue is English. Just like Mary Travers, a.k.a. La Bolduc, who became Québec’s first ever popstar during the Depression, Kevin Parent is a Anglo from the maritime region of Gaspésie who made records in French.
In a move that says a lot about the impressive vitality of Québec’s music scene, in 2007 Parent reportedly had to leave his record label, Tacca records–ironically run by fellow Anglo Donald K. Tarlton–and join Audiogram to finally record his first English language album.
The incident is reminiscent of another in 1997 when Québec legend Serge Fiori, frontman of Harmonium, was also allegedly attacked by four drunken English-speaking women in Montreal. The women were later acquitted.
Although Fiori and Harmonium are closely associated with the Québec nationalism of the 1970’s, he declared in a 2007 interview with Richard Martineau that he « functions a lot in English, writes in English », and even seriously considered starting over, in California, in English, under another name when fame back home became to much to bear.
Anglo on Anglo xenophobic violence… The English-canadian press is reportedly brainstorming ways to blame the attacks on the separatists…
Walking around downtown Vancouver yesterday I was thinking many things. I was thinking it just might be Canada’s most beautiful city. I was asking myslef if Vancouver was the first city to hold the Winter Olympics in the middle of summer. I was thinking that if I was a crackhead I would also prefer to live in Vancouver than, say, Thunder Bay. I also thought about Pamela Anderson a lot, but the fact that she is from Vancouver was only a pretext.
One thing I wasn’t thinking is : « This is a bilingual city. »
Montréal’s federalist media, Québec’s Premier Jean Charest, the Liberal Party of Canada’s Denis Coderre, the federal commissioner for official languages Graham Fraser, the Heritage minister James Moore are pissed off at Vancouver for not appropriately showcasing Canada only officially approved branding as a billingual/multicultural country during last Friday’s opening ceremonies.
« I am so proud to be a Canadian! It is with great pride that I realized that the organizers of the Vancouver Olympics truly understand the real Canada! », wrote Réjean Tremblay–in English!–in La Presse. « I am so proud that I had to put some of my emotions in writing in this country’s « superior language » so that the bosses at VANOC would be proud of me. »
See… I don’t get that.
God forbid Vancouver should present itself to the world as what it is: one of the great Pacific cities like Singapore and Hong Kong and San Francisco, born of the fateful meeting of Asia and Great-Britain, of wandering Brits, Punjabis, Cantoneses, Hans, Scots and Malays. A city where English is the common language.
Why do Canadians always feel the need to pretend we’re all living in northern Ontario, hunting moose and speaking bilingual under four feet of snow? Over two thirds of Canadians live on the Pacific Coast and in the Great Lakes area! French and snowstorms are as foreign to the culture of Canadians in Vancouver and Toronto as bullfighting yet English Canadians always seem obligated to pretend they’re living in Kapuskasing!
You hear French all the time in Vancouver. Walking the city yesterday I heard French spoken by squeegee punks on Granville and very chic Haitian ladies on the waterfront. Some fluently French-speaking Anglo hipster on Commercial was able to explain to me how to purchase a six-pack. I even talked French with a Sécurité du Québec police officer on loan to the RCMP.
But I also heard just as much Japanese, Cantonese and Punjabi. I also heard kids who’s roots could have been anywhere in the world speaking English to each other. That’s what Vancouver is: a multicoloured (the concept incorrectly expressed as multicultural in Canadian English) city where people are educated and work in the commonly agreed upon language of English.
Kind of like the society the people of Québec have been trying to build for the last 40 years, except that because it’s being done in English instead of French, British-Columbia it is considered « normal »…
Vancouver is an English-speaking City and its Olympic Games and cermonies reflect that fact. If anything, it’s the Asian aspect of BC culture that is absent from the Vancouver 2010 Olympic branding, not the French language.
Now, let’s just hope that if and when Québec City get’s to host it’s own Olympic games in 2022, the French language will be as visible as English in Vancouver…
id: 2113
title: ‘Jack Jedwab and the Celestial Association of Canadian Nonsense’
date: ‘2010-01-29T11:38:45+00:00’
author: angryfrenchguy
layout: post
guid: ‘http://angryfrenchguy.com/?p=2113’
permalink: /2010/01/29/jack-jedwab-and-the-celestial-association-of-canadian-nonsense/
categories cooked up by Jack Jedwab and his scholarly association.
Now any point of view is as valid as any other. The problem is that the Association for Canadian Studies gets several hundreds of thousands of tax dollars a year to evaluate Canadian attitudes on complex issues from the very narrow perspective of an English-speaking Montrealer in 1947 and then publishes it’s results as if they were the objective evolution of Canadian thought.
That and they never include Mermaids in their polls. Nonsense, I tell you.
Determined to make good on his ambition of providing a decent living to his children, Rémi M’ba (not his real name) moved his entire family to Ignace, a minuscule town on northern Ontario’s highway 11. The single father from Gabon and former PhD. student at the Université du Québec à Montréal was lured to Ontario by the province’s more generous pay scale and easier training for teachers.
« In Québec I would have had to study four more years for a 40 000$ a year job. In Ontario, after one year I was licensed and earning 64 000$. »
However, this monetary boon notwithstanding, adaptation to life on this lonely stretch of Trans-Canada highway has proven to be quite a struggle for the West African family. It’s cold, small and far. Hired to teach at the village’s French school, Rémi has also discovered a francophone community « completely colonized by English » where his children are doomed to lose the French aspect of their heritage.
Rémi is already planning to move south, but he refuses to raise his black children in central Toronto where, he says, the black community has been « plagued by crime, violence and gangs ». Finding a place where he, a French-speaking black man, belongs in Ontario has proven more difficult than he ever had imagined, but he vows to press on.
Rémi M’ba is hardly alone. An AngryFrenchMediaCenter analysis of English-Canada’s performance in a number of key sectors viewed as barometers of economic, cultural and political integration of minorities – inspired by a similar investigation by Andrew Chung of the Toronto Star – suggests that the bestest country in the world still has a long way to go before it can claim to be the colour blind multicultural Mecca it’s branding itself to be.
By carefully stitching together StatsCan data, carefully chosen anecdotes and the testimony of political activists we will present as independent scholars, the AngryFrenchMediaCenter will make the French people of Québec feel all warm inside by telling them what they want to hear: that they are so much better than the Anglos.
Among the self-serving facts carefully chosen to make Québec look good and Anglos like backward hicks:
Natives: The proportion of Natives in Saskatchewan’s prisons is seven time higher than in the population at large while in Québec it is only twice as high.
Politics: While a significant portion of Québec’s modern English-speaking population is composed of visible minorities, there is not a single minority mayor in the province’s English-majority towns, and only one minority councillor in all of the island of Montreal’s English-majority municipalities.
Sports: There are no Black English-Canadian goons in the National Hockey League while Québec has produced Montréal’s Georges Laraque and Québec City’s Donald Brashear, leading some people to wonder if Canadian culture isn’t teaching young black males that they are not allowed to fight back…
Culture: Despite the fact that 5 million Canadians – 15% of the population – are so-called visible-minorities, their visibility on Canadian television is… ok, that’s not fair. There is no Canadian television. Well, except for news…
Furthermore, with a quick google search that we will call « careful analysis », the AngryFrenchMediaCenter has discovered that there are only two visible minorities on the board of directors of Canada’s five big banks and no visible minorities on the board of the English Montreal School Board.
And while the number of visible minorities in Québec’s civil service is ever so slowly edging up, the number of visible minorities who work for the federal government has fallen from 9.8% in 2005-2006 to 8.7% in 2006-2007. A situation which the Public Service Commission says « is of great concern, since they remain the only under-represented designated group in the public service and their proportion of recruitment remains below their workforce availability. »
Ok… That’s enough.
First of all, let’s make it very clear, I though Andrew Chung’s Toronto Star series on Québec immigrants called A Place de Résistance was spot on at the meta level. I have written myself on this blog about the scandalous unemployment levels of Québec’s North Africans and Haitians and on their invisibility on TV.
However, I have no more patience for English-Canada’s need to constantly caress it’s inflated national pride ignore it’s own many social problems by constantly comparing itself to Québec, as if the integration of immigrants into the world’s most powerful and wealthy culture—the world’s Anglo culture—and the challenges facing a minority society of seven million French-speakers in North America could have anything in common!
Perhaps Andrew Chung could have explored the fact that every year an important number of immigrants to Québec and their children themselves strongly resist integration into Québec society, choosing, for example, to persue higher education in English, a path that effectively funnels them away from francophone social circles and institutions like le Mouvement Desjardins or the Québec civil service.
In fact, if Andrew Chung actually cared at all about Québec, Francophones and integration he wouldn’t be working for the Toronto Star, he’d be hard at work breaking down doors and invisible ceilings at La Presse, TVA and Radio-Canada.
