Last week, my wife's cousin in Montreal sent her a link in an e-mail. It was a column by Josh Freed, who writes for The Montreal Gazette. It reminded us of how different Quebec is from English Canada. Freed writes:
Throughout English Canada, especially Ontario, most columnists, editorialists and letters-to-the-editor are outraged and practically crazed about the PM’s behaviour.
They’ve demanded he resign, “dissolve Parliament” and call “immediate elections.” They speak of the “worst scandal since the 1873 Pacific (rail) Scandal” and talk of feeling “embarrassed” for Canada on the world stage.
You’d think Trudeau had done something no other world leader would ever do — like paying hush money to a porn star he had sex with.
Meanwhile, here in Quebec, the whole affair has been greeted with a collective shrug. Yes, Trudeau badly mismanaged events and communicated like a marionette — but more out of “amateurism” and “maladroitness” than malice, say most opinion-writers.
Trudeau and his minions may have pestered former attorney-general Jody Wilson-Raybould too much about SNC-Lavalin — and failed to understand her no meant no. But as La Presse’s Lysiane Gagnon put it: “It’s hardly scandalizing to learn that in closed-door meetings politicians discuss … politics.
Freed's column reminded us of how much the province we grew up in is different than the province we live in. As kids, we grew up on the English side of the Two Solitudes. Montreal was roughly divided in half by St. Laurent Blvd. West of St. Laurent, English was the predominant language. East of St. Laurent, most people spoke French. And, as kids, we rarely crossed what we used to call "The Main."
That has changed. In the neighbourhood in which I grew up, both languages flourish side by side. But the divisions were -- and are -- more than just linguistic. As a university student, I read two accounts of the Battle of The Plains of Abraham -- one by the English historian, Douglas Creighton, and one my French historian, Michel Brault. They were two different narratives -- a tale of two countries.
We tend to forget these days how the history of this country has been about bridging The Solitudes. But we would do well to remember that now.
Image: Wikipedia
8 comments:
Montreal is a great city and between Toronto and Montreal there is no comparison. We have had an apartment in the Plateau (St.Joseph/ Papineau) for ten years so both my daughters could study in Quebec and gain proficiency in French. One daughter remains to this day working and living East of St. Laurent. You haven't lived if you haven't experienced life in Quebec and those that haven't should be wary of passing judgement.
I concur wholeheartedly, zoombats.
I grew up in a part french Canadian home. My mother was french Canadian and fluently bilingual. She came from a large french Canadian family with 13 brothers and sisters. They all lived in hamilton, so I had alot of cousins which was great. My mother and all of my aunts and uncles never taught their children french. I asked my mother when I was older why she didn't teach us french. Her answer was "We were taught to feel ashamed of our language." She would tell me stories about seeing signs outside of factories advertising jobs that said "French need not apply." This would be said from a British factory owner having immigrated here, to French Canadians in their very own country.
Going to Montreal as an adult, I had gone many times as a child, I realized that culturally Toronto did not compare. I agree completely with what zoombats said. I think Pierre Trudeau understood that French Canadians were considered second class Canadians. He once said "English Canada does not have a culture, I'm going to give it one."
The law in Quebec (the French Civil Code) is different than in the rest of Canada (British Common Law) The different legal systems cause a great deal of misunderstanding, Pam. It's just another example of the divergent perceptions between the two cultures.
Yesterday I wrote that I don't much care about Lavalin - as a scandal. However I see in Lavalin, as we all saw in General Dynamics Land Systems (the Saudi arms deal) and the KPMG/Isle of Man tax evasion scam, a common thread of favouritism based on wealth and influence. This didn't begin in Canada but it's part of the contagion of neoliberalism. All three of those occurred in this same government's first term in office. And let's not forget the "cash for access" affair.
Paul Manafort gets four years for cheating the American government out of millions in taxes yet a pleb caught with a bag of weed is banged up for life.
What we witnessed both in Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau as well as in other nations is a decline in democratic governance and the ascendancy of a corporate state. If you take these failures individually it's much easier to conjure up explanations or excuses. Taken collectively they present a much darker, more worrisome picture.
I agree, Mound, that these are not isolated incidents. The problem is that we now view all of this as "normal." And that is exactly how the movers and shakers want us to see things.
We get very little news about Quebec in the general English media.
Particularly the CBC ignores Quebec almost entirely while reporting on Mrs Alberta's every fart in excruciating detail.
If one doesn't specifically hunt for Quebec news, and preferably read the French newspapers online, one knows next to nothing about Quebec. The default position is to know nothing about Quebec outside of Quebec.
It's been that way for a long, long time, ffd.
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