So the English language got it’s 1,000,000th word this summer.
This, of course is one of the great achievements of the great English adventurers who travelled the world, befriended the locals with whom they shared the English language while simultaneously incorporating their lands and lexicon into the British Empire.
That story reminded me of a time I visited my grand-mother about 4 or 5 years ago.
Her place was just a short walk from my place. I was near Place St.Henri where grown men drank Molson Export before noon on weekdays with no shirt on. Thanks to some family money that will not be coming my way she was the token french lady at the Place Kensington residence for old English people and ate her breakfast two tables away from where the Senator Hartland Molson ate his own breakfast wearing a suit and a tie.
That night my grandma wasn’t seated with her usual gang. Someone had broken their hip and someone else was at a christening or bar mitzva somewhere in the States. We were seated with two other ladies I didn’t know but who seemed nice enough. We exchanged polite greatings, they commended me for being such a great grandson and then when I thought I had done socializing I ignored them and started chatting with my grandmother.
As my grand-mother was giving the waitress a quarter or something so she would bring me a double serving of white fish one of the ladies leaned over to me and asked:
-What was that language you were just speaking? Was that French?
-Yes it was, I said.
I wasn’t surprised by the question. Place Kensington has plenty of American residents who were following their sons up the corporate ladder. They just spent a couple of years in Montreal until the next transfer and rarely ventured beyond Tony’s Shoe Store on Greene Avenue. They knew nothing about Québec’s linguistic situation and they understandably didn’t care if the help spoke French or Spanish or whatever it is Philipnas speak….
-Where are you from, I asked?
-Drummondville, she answered.
Now I was surprised. Drummondville, of course, is the home of the Madrid Bigfoot Diner, the mandatory pit stop on highway 20 for travellers between Montreal and Québec and the owner of the biggest collection of slightly-smaller-than-lifesize plastic dinosaures in the world. It is also a smallish town that, today, is pretty much entirely French-speaking.
Yet here was this lady who had been born in Québec, who had lived her life, not in the sizable English-speaking enclaves of Montreal, but in a tiny rural French-Canadian village that had some farms and two or three factories and she wasn’t able to, nevermind speak, recognize the French language.
English the great language of intercultural meeting and discovery? Give me a fucking break.
Like the great linguist Alastair Pennycook said: « The notion of English as a great borrowing language also seems to suggest a view of colonial relations in which the British intermingled with colonized people, enriching English as communed with the locals. Such a view, however, is hardly supported by colonial history. »
Even my separatist-fearing grandmother would lose patience with her companions.
-She handed me a napkin! I said « merci » and she had to ask me what I meant! Seigneur! What’s wrong with these people?
This from a woman, I remind you, who spent her summers at the Royal St.Lawrence Yacht Club and read the Montreal Gazette every morning.
There was a distinguished Jewish woman from Argentina who would come over after every meal and chat for a few minutes in impeccable French with my grand-mother. There was also another woman from eastern Europe –there was a rumour she was a hungarian baronnes or countess—who would always cordially say « bonjour ». The staff, of course had been born after the Empire and all spoke French.
But I never heard an Montrealer Anglo resident so much as salute her in French.
Now I am not saying that Place Kensington was representative of today’s enlightened Québec anglophonie. I am absolutely aware that Place Kensington is where the ghost of Montreal’s past goes to die.
But don’t tell me that Québec never existed. I’ve been there.
About 10 or 15 years ago Blockbuster opened their first Montreal franchise on Ste.Catherine Street, between the Forum and Guy Metro. About every second evening me and my roommate JF would walk all the way up the hill from St.Henri to rent some videos because, a. we had no real professional or social obligations to speak of in those blissful days of our early twenties, and b. because the only commerce going on in St.Henri back then was the sale of beer and steamed hot dogs.
At Blockbuster there was this one employee that we called Tommy. Poor Tommy, we used to say, he just doesn’t get it. He wasn’t a bad bloke—although a bloke he certainly was—but he always had a look of confusion on his face and permanent hesitation in his movement.
One phenomenon that absolutely mystified Tom was that almost every single night me and JF bring to his counter a movie in English, and then proceed to address him and conduct the transaction in French.
Every single time Tom would pick up the VHS, open the box, read the title aloud, and then, with a grimace, tried to warn us: Mais… sé en Anglèse.
Je sais, I would answer. C’est cool.
Tom would then take our money and stare at us as we left the store, dumbfounded by these two French dudes who kept renting movies they couldn’t understand!
Poor Tommy. He just didn’t get it.
Mercifully guys like Tommy are rare in Montréal. We French bastards and Angry separatists are usually able to consume our hearts fill of Anglo-American pop culture and simultaneously uphold our right to be served in French simultaneously, without any problem. I can go to a downtown cinema, buy my ticket in French, buy my Pepsi and gummy bears in French, ask directions to the pimpled employees in French and even share my always entertaining and insightful commentary on the movie with my companion of the evening in French, and still enjoy the new Transformer movie in the original English version.
I don’t switch to English when I buy my Engelbert Humperdink CDs at HMV. I don’t try to order in Japanese when I order sushi. I can go to a bookstore, purchase a book in English and even discuss it with a librarian, speaking only French. Even when I go to McGill’s library to photocopy scientific papers and gawk at young girls from New Jersey I make it a point to speak exclusively in French with the staff.
Not only is speaking French not a problem at McGill, I’m pretty sure I get better service than English-speaking chumps. Staff seems to light up and come to life. It’s like it’s something new and interesting happening. Oh, French! I know this! I can do this!
Or maybe I’m just better looking than you are…
This said, poor Tommy’s are still out there.
Last week Eric Amber, the guy who runs the Ste.Catherine Theater downtown, sent out an email to all of Québec’s cultural media and institutions promoting his venue’s lineup as part of the Zoofest, a new comedy festival run by the folks at Juste pour Rire/Just for Laughs. When a few people complained that the email was only in English and demanded to be contacted in French or taken off their mailing list, mister Amber blew a gasket.
His theater’s shows were in English and, therefore, there was no point advertising them in French, essentially wrote the promoter, who, like poor Tommy, cannot comprehend that someone who has learned English does not immediately abandon his tribal language.
« You obviously can’t read English because you are an uneducated bigot », was the eloquent response of the theater to the demands for a French email. « Go fuck yourself. »
Sure, I’ll do that in a sec., but before I go I’d just like to point out to the Eric’s and Tommy’s out there that there are roughly 500.000 to 750.000 Anglophones in Québec and about 3 million Francophones like me who speak, read and consume English-language culture but still expect to be informed and to buy our tickets in French.
If you think you can run a business by only catering to « real » Anglos while four fifths of your potential market is jacking off in the shower, good luck with that.
We have our answer! As I’m about to upload this post, I learn that Eric Amber and the people at St.Catherine Theater do not want money spent by people who still nostalgically hang on to their backward cultures. He is shutting his theater down and moving on to some other city where only people who have completely abandonned their primitive ways are allowed to talk back to the Anglos, somewhere like Toronto or Singapour:
« Due to the overwhelming racism and bigotry in French society toward minorities and non-french cultures, Theatre Ste-Catherine will be closing in protest. Effective immediately TSC will no longer be accepting bookings and will closed permanently Dec. 21, 2009.»
Cool. Now maybe some uneducated bigot like Gilbert Rozon, who happens to run the biggest English-language comedy festival in the world, or André Ménard or René Angelil can buy back the theater and make some money while Eric Amber relocates to Peterborough where no linguistic and cultural bastards will try to crash his productions.
So I’m sitting here ruminating on past humiliations because, you know, that’s what we Québec indépendantistes do, and the whole « should we have people singing in english at the Saint-Jean-Baptiste/Fête Nationale » crisis—as I’m sure you all are—and even though I personnaly though it was cool that a couple of Anglo bands we’re invited to sing in Rosemont, there is one argument hear time and time again during the debate that I just can’t let pass.
It’s the « Québec should open up to English-language culture » argument.
(For those who’ve moved on I apologize. You are better people than I am. I’m a little bit slow. Despite my unrivaled mastery of useless trivia which has earned me the nickname of The un-sexy Cliff Claven, I would suck at Jeopardy. Even though we all know Alex Trebeck loves to show off his French and he would no doubt signal the Double Jeopardy to me.)
How ridiculous is this idea that Québec needs to « open up » to English language culture? It quite quite possibly could be the dumbest thing ever said out loud in the history of La Grande Chicane, our century-old dispute that has inspired an encyclopedia’s worth of dumb statements.
And I’m not even thinking about the fact that we are surrounded by English speakers and are constantly bombarded with American media and culture.
English Québec has a healthy little local scene and have made a decent contribution to the wider English-language cultural world, but with the exception of Leonard Cohen and Mordecai Richler, both of whom are old or dead, its clear that French Québec has made a bigger contribution to the world’s English language culture than all of English Québec.
Listen, I am a aware that a few Québécois of English-language expression have done good. Cohen is a legend. Sam Roberts was called the future of Rock by the head of Sony Music. I’m not enough of a hispter to get it, but I hear Rufus Wainwright and Arcade Fire sold a few records.
So what? So have Simple Plan and Pascale Picard and Chromeo, all of whom are as French Québec as signing « Hey motherfucker get laid, get fucked » during the chorus of Billy Idol’s Mony Mony.
French Québec has always been in the game.
In the 1970’s Montreal nightclubs like the Limelight and Québec artists like France Joli, Martin Stevens and Gino Soccio were not only part of, they were once the heart of disco culture.
Or if you’re more of a metalhead you certainly know that even though Metallica certainly sold more albums than any other metal band in the 1980’s, their own inspiration was Jonquière’s Voivod and that’s the band Metallica bassist Jason Newstead chose to join when he quit Metallica after realizing, 10 years after the rest of us, that his old band sucked. « I think that I’m in a band now that can kick their ass », said the old Metallica rythm-man.
And then she got together with the people at the Cirque du Soleil and other Québec artists like André-Phillipe Gagnon and Alain Choquette to save Las Vegas and give it it’s most glorious era since Sinatra and the Rat Pack.
So what was that you were saying? Y’all want Québec to « open up » to English language culture?
Québec doesn’t open up to English-language culture. Québec makes English-language culture. As well as any so-called native English speakers in Québec or elsewhere.
And then it has plenty of talent left over to invade France.
I met Jacob the hassidic bus driver in heavily hassidic neighbourhood where the streets are filled with religious bearded men dressed in black, their very bossy-looking wives and about a hundred million kids. This very close to what I imagine my grand-mother’s Montreal must have looked like. She was her mother’s seventeenth child. She pretty much grew up in a convent, only going out one week for Christmas and Easter and two weeks in the summer. They had mass every day and on Sundays she’d put on a clean dress and sit with her mother for a couple of hours on a hard wooden bench in the parlor.
Hassidic kids are golden. Compared to what my grand-parents had they live like California hipsters.
Québec’s hassidic Jews, their fights with their neighbours, their schools and their parking habits, come up in the news in Québec about once or twice a year, which is probably a statistical inevitability considering that Montréal is the home to the world’s third biggest community of ultra-orthodox after New York City and Jerusalem.
Most of the fighting is about small crap: homely lawns and zoning violations. Once in a while, though, and with consitent regularity, Montréal’s hassidics manage put themselves where they least like to be: at the center of storm. Their demand to cover up the windows of the Park Avenue YMCA gym led to the Bouchard-Taylor commission on Reasonable Accomodations and more recent reports that some of them send their children to 100% religious schools just might get the second round started. (Notice how the Canadian English-language media won’t touch that story, hoping it will go away…)
Of course there is nothing the Jews hate more than the publicity. You have to feel sorry for that humble conservative community living a life determined by a millenium old code having to deal with our fast changing times in the midst of highly cafeinated French neighbours who feel the need to turn any novelty into province-wide philosophical debates.
Me and Jacob were driving two busloads of hassidc girls to Mont-Tremblant where they were spending the day. My grand-mother also went to Tremblant when she was young. Back in her day you had to take the train and skiing cost less than a dollar. How much does it cost now?, she asked me once. What is it, like 10 dollars? Try 80$, Grand-Maman.
Jacob likes the French-Canadians, he told me. He probably has to have that conversation whith all gentiles he spends time with. The French might tell you « Maudit Juif » to your face, he explained, but that’s it. The English they’re always giving you a big smile, but then they’ll stab you in the back!
The French they get shortchanged, he went on. I rent buses to do trips to New York all the time. Whenever I can I’ll rent a Québec bus and hire a Québec driver. New York drivers would never work for what we pay Québec drivers.
I suggested that the linguistic situation limited the French-speakers’ mobility. Moving to another province, let alone the US, is emigration, for a Québécois. It means your kids will grow up in a different culture and probably won’t be able to school in their language. The English-speaking workforce has a much bigger territory it can move around in, forcing employers to pay them more if they want to keep them.
Is it worth it? asked Jacob, genuinely puzzled. Why hold on to French, then?
For real, Jacob? He sat there sweating under his black hat, beads of sweat caught in his beard, speaking English with a thick polish accent three generations after his great-grand-father bought his first home on Avenue Hutchison, a greasy lock of hair hair twisted arround his ear for the pleasure of some minor desert deity, and he didn’t get how people could be attached to a language, a heritage, a history?
Jacob lived in Montreal his entire life, surrounded by French-speaking neighbours and his Yiddish-speaking brothers and family. He speaks Yiddish to his kids. But he speaks English to his neighbours, not French.
I know it, he says, but not well. They never thought me well. I think our leaders don’t want us to learn it. If we did we’d start talking to the neighbours more, and going to their houses… And we’d do it! They have so many problems in New York because everyone speaks the same language. Here, language keeps everyone separate and they like that. Rolling his eyes and with a knowing smile he adds, they say they’re goind to start teaching the kids better French, now…
My grand-mother grew up in an ultra-orthodox religious community called Québec. The overthrow of that religious order, many people forget, was what the Quiet Revolution was about. The political stuff, the language debates, all that came after.
Some people object to the hassidics resistance to integration to wider Québec society. That’s quite rich coming from North America’s champions of difference. Christ, for all we know this insitance on their right to live according to their own rules and just do their thing without bothering anybody else is something the Hassidics picked up from the Québécois!
But I wouldn’t want to live my grand-parents life and neither would most other Québécois.
I can only hope Jacob’s children will have a choice.
Those who will not protect their right to choose will commit a crime.
My nightly newscast was positive last night: Québec is unanimously rejoicing at the sale of the Canadiens de Montréal hockey team to the Molson family. Everyone from the Finance Minister to the leader of the sovereingtists Pauline Marois and the required passersby questioned on the street were overjoyed that the hockey team was bought by Québec money and for the, quote, right reasons.
Alright, I’ll take this one if no one else will.
What would be wrong with expressing some regret that the bid by Quebecor’s Pierre-Karl Péladeau and Céline Dion’s manager René Angelil was unsuccesful? Why is it not acceptable to aknowledge that the return of the Canadiens to francophone owners for the first time since Léo Dandurand, Louis Létourneau and Joseph Cattarinich bought the team for 11 500$ would have been an important symbolic moment, the beginning of the end of the economic inferiority of the French-speaking population of Québec?
Am I the only one to feel the politically correct insistance on describing the Molson brothers as just another from-around-the-corner Québécois family, without any qualification, sounds false? This is not the Johnsons from the Point, we’re talking about. We are talking about one of the great families of the Old Order that made it’s fortune when the French were good enough to fight Britain’s wars but not to sit on Molson’s board.
Now Geoffrey, Justin and Andrew deserve the benefit of the doubt and Montrealers will decide with time if they truly share their culture or not, but to call the Molson family a Québec family like any other is denial.
Of course the integration of the Habs into Quebecor Media would have brought the size, scope and power of what we now simply call «The Empire » to truly frightening proportions. With it’s near monopoly of cable and dominating position of Internet access, the biggest newspaper in the country (that would be Québec), the most watched television network, and a slew of magazines and specialty cable channels, Quebecor already has dominating position in the circulation and distribution of Québec culture.
Add Star Academie, a partnership with Céline Dion and the Canadiens and Quebecor would have an access to Québec minds of Chinese proportions.
But it made a lot of economic sense. Hockey is content. Quebecor is in the business of distributing content. They have the ways and means to make some untolds amount of money with a hockey team. Think of all the revelations on Georges Laraque’s family life and Saku Koivu’s decoration tips you could have read about while waiting in line at the supermarket in one of Quebecor’s 12 000 magazines!
Sure it’s scary, but how is it wrong?
The Molson’s are buying the Canadiens for the right reasons, we are told. How exactly is using a professional sports franchise as entertainment content wrong? What exactly are the Habs if they are not a show, a spectacle, a diversion?
Maybe the problem is that the Péladeau family who have many friends in the Parti québécois, and the Board of Quebecor, chaired by former Conservative PM Brian Mulroney, would not have been as willing to make big trades and fire coaches any time the Liberal Party have some unpleasant news they need to drown…
As the whole World’s now heard, some English-speaking bands were kicked off a St-Jean-Baptist show – a yearly celebration of Québec culture also know as La Fête Nationale – last week before being promply re-booked, following a couple of days of heated radio talk-show action.
Here’s what happened. A couple of guys with a record label and show promoters, quite a few of whom are separatists who let the Parti Québécois host their rallies in their bar on St-Denis Street, decided it would be cool to put up a St.Jean show for those between, say 7 and 49 years old, as opposed to the family show usually held in Parc Maisonneuve.
On the bill, next to the very worthy Malajube and Les Dales Hawerchuck, a couple of lesser know Montreal Anglos called Lake of Stew and Bloodshot Bill.
Apparently, the idea of English-speaking performers at the St.Jean show upset a few board members of the sponsoring neighborhood group and a few people at the Société St-Jean-Baptiste, the show’s main sponsors. The idea being that people performing in English at a show celebrating Québec’s uniquely French culture would out be of place, like Garth Brooks at a Black Pride Rally or Jerry Seinfeld hosting the Latin Grammy Awards.
Not wrong, just irrelevant.
Montréal’s ultra-patriotic English-speaking press, well known for turning any issue, from municipal elections to the colour of margarine into issues of ethnic confrontation, was overjoyed by the (supposed) ban. The familiar series of editorials carrefully balancing seething bitterness with anglocentric self-rigeousness followed with their familiar 3-point structure: 1. Evoque the myth of the perfect society that existed before the separatists got the French-Canadians excited 2. accuse French-speakin nationalists of systematically excluding Anglos (no questions about the Gazette’s support for separate English schools and hospitals, please) and 3. blame the Parti québécois.
« An ancient holiday, once celebrating the summer solstice, then a saint, then all French-Canadians, was converted by the Parti Québécois into a subsidized festival of nationalism. For some, this means no English need apply – though we are allowed to pay taxes to subsidize such events. (We’re almost afraid to ask the people who hold that view : would anglophones performing in French be acceptable ?) »
What the Gazette’s editorials fail to tell you is that the separatist Parti Québécois publicly supported the Anglos right to play. « Maybe their intentions were good, the PQ’s culture critic Pierre Curzi said, « but they need to reconsider this bad decision. I think it’s great that anglophone bands want to take part in the Fete nationale. It shows that our society is open. »
Guy A. Lepage, the openly separatist host of the « big » St-Jean show, also publicly spoke out for the Anglo’s right to play. « I’ve always lived in Montréal and I’ve always been a sovereigntist. I’ve seen my city welcome Anglos, Haitians, Chinese, Arabs and Jews. I’ve seen my city transform itself and I love it. I love its multiethnic reality and I believe the only possibility to one day get the nation we deserve is if we make all Quebecers trip out on our opinions. »
Louise Harel, the former PQ minister and separatist running for mayor of Montréal who’s been the victim of a very ethnically divisive and partisan slander campaign by the Montreal Gazette, also said she thought the Anglos should be allowed to play.
By the way, if the Montreal Gazette had ever bothered to cover any St-Jean show in their (very) long existence, they would know that many Anglos who enthusiastically partake in Québec’s French culture, artists like Paul Cargnello and Jim Corcoran, have performed many times at the celebrations.
In the end the various separatist sponsors of l’Aut’ St-Jean had a conference call and it turns out almost none of their members had any problem with the concept of Anglos at the show. In any case, the separatist promoters of l’Aut’ St-Jean were very clear that either their Anglo friends were going to play, or they were going to cancel the whole thing.
Of course there are some angry ultra-nationalists who were, and are probably still, upset about the shows not being pure reflections of their vision of Québec.
The Gazette gave them a soapbox. The real leaders of Québec’s separatist movement told them to shut up.
And in the end, it’s the separatists that saved the show and stood up for the Anglos.
But don’t expect the Gazette to ever tell you that story.
I believe Québec should be an independent country. I’m convinced. I’ve thought about it long and hard. I’ve discussed it through and through, with both true believers and fierce opponents. I’ve pondered the implications from a bar stool in an NDG tavern, in a yurt near Ulan Baator, and perhaps most significantly, walking down Sniper Alley in Sarajevo. Every time I’ve come to the conclusion that, as long as it is done right, it is the most simple and elegant solution to many political and cultural challenges Québec faces.
Robert Lepage, one of the most famous playwrights and scenographers in the world, was on TV the other day. This is not a nationalist firebrand. He was reminiscing about how he grew up sharing a room in Québec City with his adopted English-speaking brother and how he has nothing but admiration for English-Canada, one of the great small L liberal societies. He then casually mentioned that he was a sovereigntist, notheless. He’s reached the same conclusion I have. I’m on the good side, I thought.
Then Guy A. Lepage, once Québec’s most merciless social critic and a man who is not known to have much patience for fools—although he’s now a much nicer man as host of Tout le Monde en Parle on Radio-Canada—agreed to MC Québec’s Fête Nationale this summer. He is also a sovereigntist. I thought, if he thinks Québec’s independence movement is for real, I’m not being taken for a ride.
Then Pauline Marois, the leader of the Parti québécois, unveiled the grand master plan that will take us from here to there, the roadmap independence and I thought, that’s it. I’m done. I’m moving to Toronto.
What’s wrong with these people, tabarnak? How can they take a project that inspires even our most inspired men and just turn it into 10 kinds of frustration? Why does building a country, a hospital, a goddam highway, have to always become the most complicated and aggravating project in the history of human society?
We’re here! According the the latest PQ internal poll, quoted in le Devoir, 49% of the Québécois, including 56% of those who speak French, are game! Sixty-one percent would settle for some sort of sovereignty-association deal with Canada. Two thirds at least want Québec to have a special status.
Even if those numbers are somewhat more positive than others we’ve seen recently, the trend is solid: even in this period of economic uncertainty, support for independence hovers in the high thirties to high forties.
The Conservative Party of Canada was barely able to keep up the « federalism of openess » charade a year and a half before breaking out into anti-separatist demonstrations and the more familiar calls to pacify the French with some « tough love ».
The new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada has already announced that Canada was as good as it was going to get!
The sovereignty movement has it made. There is only a few thousand votes separating them from the country. Canadian federalists have no counter offer, no vision, no dream. Canada in the country of No. The Parti québécois is the Parti of Oui. Yes we can!
Yet, they can’t.
The PQ has all this positive and entrepreneurial energy just sitting on it’s lap, waiting, itching to start building something, anything. What do they do? Do they open up the phones, start compiling projects until there is just so many fucking cool things to do that Québec will just pop out of Canada by itself?
Nope. The PQ wants to talk about shit that don’t work. Their great plan is to ask for federal powers they know they can’t get and threaten their own supporters with multiple referendums on boring ass crap like « single tax returns » just so they can pick a fight with Ottawa because, as Jacques Parizeau candidly admitted on tuesday: « To acheive sovereingty, you need a crisis. »
The PQ is stuck in a procedural dead end, wasting it’s energy on finding a gimmick instead of thinking about the way that country would work and what we could do with it.
That is the reason why the PQ usually trails it’s own raison d’être in the polls. That is also why, according to the poll published in le Devoir, only 34% of the Québécois believe Québec will ever be an independent country. Not because they don’t want one. Because they’ve come to believe the PQ is to proccupied with saving it’s own ass to ever pull it off.
Canadians have always had a hard time telling the difference between a country and professional sports franchise. They love anthems, logos, flags and little patches on their backpacks that neatly tells you which team everybody is playing for. They also, just like sports fans, have no problem whatsoever with the fact that their country shares its branding with a beer company and a major retailer of replacement wipers and cheap camping equipment.
The important thing is that they are recongnized. As long as people stop confusing them with Americans, they’re good.
Micheal Ignatieff, the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and one of our time’s great intellectual fashion victims – support for the war in Irak? Support for torture? But everyone was doing it! – apparently believes that the Québec independence movement and the forty or so years of important political upveal that has rocked the province stems from the same petty insecurity.
Speaking about the concrete effects of Québec being recognized as a « nation within a united Canada » by Canada’s House of Commons last year, the would-be Prime Minister candidly admitted that the whole idea, for which he has often claimed credit, was just a whole lotta nothing.
« The Charest government has all the powers it needs to do excellent work for the citizens of Quebec and I see no reason to revisit the issues of jurisdictions and powers, » Ignatieff told the The Canadian Press on Thursday. According to him the canadian federation is « working well and that he « sees no need to increase either the central government’s power or the power of the provinces. »
So, Micheal Ignatieff thinks that fatal waves of terrorism in the 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s, four election victories by Québec’s seccessionist party, two referendums on sovereignty, one of which came within a statistical error of being successful was only about the Québécois longing to be recognised?
This wise thinker and writer thinks that the reason every political party in the province refuses to sign the canadian constitution is not because of an unnacceptable allocation of powers or because for four decades English-Canada has aggressivly rejected any possibility of discussion or change. Nope. The professor thinks all about English-Canada. He thinks all the Québécois really want is for Canada to acknowledge that they exist, in the same sad way that canadians feel vindicated whenever Access Hollywood recognizes that Micheal J. Fox or William Shatner are Canadians.
As of today Mr. Ignatieff is on the record saying that the Canadian Federation will not change. It’s the status quo or else.
That’s what the sovereingtists have been saying the whole time.
Canada has always been preoccupied with preventing French-speaking people from handling numbers. Until well into the 20th century, the Minister of Finance’s job in the Québec government could only be given to an English-speaking gentleman and when francophones in Québec demanded the end of dicriminatory practices and their share Montréal’s many high finance and management jobs in the 1960’s and 70’s, English-Canada’s very prudent and rational reaction was to move Canada’s entire financial sector 300 miles west to Toronto.
It’s still going on today with the slow but steady purge of anyone who’s ever been associated with la Bourse de Montréal from the new « merged » Stock Exchange.
Sure, there are very good reasons for this. Business and Management are English words, aren’t they? And isn’t it a man who got his MBA at Québec’s City’s Université Laval who is responsible for the near-collapse of capitalism we just went through?
But no. The truth is much more sinister. French-speakers are kept away from the numbers because if they took a closer look, they would discover that French-speaking hockey players in the NHL are undervalued and underpaid!
This is the dark secret uncovered by Marc Lavoie, an economist at the University of Ottawa. Using rigorous statistical analysis, the scientist discovered that francophone players systematically scored 10 more points per season compared with English-speaking players drafted in the same round, which either means that there is discrimination against Francos or that participation really is more important than winning…
Mr. Lavoie also established that francophone defencemen earn 25% less than Anglophones with comparable statistics.
What’s even more interesting is that Le Canadien de Montréal, that venerable institution that turned the mythology of a scrappy band of French farm boys with only third grade education but big hearts into one of the most valuable sports franchise in the world, did not – repeat not – do a better job of hiring francophones. Even the Nordiques systematically gave Franco’s the shaft.
But then, Mr. Lavoie is a francophone. For sure he got his math all wrong.
UPDATE: Prof Lavoie kindly sent the AngryFrenchPeerReviewMob a copy of the study:
It’s so hard to find good help these days. They have no respect, run their mouths to the neighbours and think they have all the rights of, you know, real Canadians.
Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla won’t find much sympathy out there. You can’t be young, scandalously sexy, successful, represent a battleground ridding and not expect the other side to try to portray you as an evil Veronica Lake.
We all know Ms Dhalla was accused a couple of weeks ago of mistreating three live-in domestic workers hired to take care of her mother. One of them even accused the MP of withholding her passport. The accused claims it’s some kind of vast right wing conspiracy and that its her brother who was abusing the Filipina workers anyway.
When my uncle was transferred to Singapore by his company, he told me about how the apartments literally came with a live in maid who had her one little room without Air Conditioning only two two rights: to work or to leave. This is a common way of treating workers in many parts of the world. There are many countries who recruit their labourers with temporary schemes and single-employer visas. The Middle East is notorious for these emirates where 70% of the population is made up of temporary workers with partial rights who can be asked to leave the country on at any moment.
Canada has usually recruited its workers the other way: by granting those who agree to come, after some basic bureaucratic formalities, full rights of citizenship. It’s a little more expensive to do it this way, but it tends to attract better quality personnel.
But there are a few exceptions to this rule. Temporary agricultural workers, for example. Or Live-in domestic help.
Live-in nannies and maids, contrary to other landed immigrants, are only allowed to work for one employer. They are also obligated to live with this employer and do not benefit form all social services, things like CSST (work-accident protection) in Québec, for example.
This is, of course necessary because, well, do you have any idea how expensive it would be to hire three live in workers at a real salary? You have to be serious, now.
Ms. Dhalla’s Liberal Party has always won the hearts and purses of Canada’s immigrant communities by portraying the Conservatives and, above all, the indépendantistes as evil and anti-immigrant. Of course, live-in maids and nannies don’t vote, so the Liberal were quick to dismiss them and stand behind Ms. Dhalla.
Besides, anyone who’s ever walked through Westmount, Town of Mount-Royal, Hampstead and other Liberal strongholds in Québec between 9am and 5pm understands that any salary increase given to immigrant care-takers would seriously diminish the amount of disposable income these constituants would have for things like campaign donations.
People in Rosemont and Blainville, on the other hand, can’t afford that kind of help, even the imported discounted kind. That’s probably why the Bloc Québécois (with the NDP elsewhere in Canada) has been the only party actively working for the rights of these workers way back before this latest scandal made the issue sexy and politically lucrative and why they’ve had the abolition of these discriminatory rules in their political platform since 2000.
This of course is surely only a cynical ploy to win over the nanny vote to their treasonneaous seccession projects.
You know, that horrible Republic of Québec that will treat immigrants and minorities like second class citizens that the Liberal Party is trying to protect you from…
