Phil Carpenter
_ Photograph by: Phil Carpenter, Montreal Gazette
What is your ‘Quebec moment?’
When did you feel most like a Quebecer? Share your story by sending it to djohnston@montrealgazette.com
By David Johnston - MONTREAL - What is the most proud you have ever been to be a Quebecer?
Have you ever felt like more of a Quebecer than a Canadian?
What do you identify most with when it comes to Quebec?
Tell us. With St. Jean Baptiste Day just around the corner, tell us stories about your emotional attachment to Quebec, and we will publish the best of your submissions to help mark next week’s June 24 holiday.
To be sure, asking an audience composed mainly of anglophone federalists to describe their emotional feelings toward Quebec is an exercise sure to spark different responses depending on the political circumstances of the times.
If we had asked readers these questions in 1988, after the government of Quebec refused to accept a Supreme Court ruling in favour of English on public signs, or in 1995, after the last referendum on sovereignty, feelings of anger and depression would have been dominant emotional themes.
But times have changed. The political and linguistic climate has become more stable and tolerant. The anglophone population in Quebec is growing again, after decades of decline. And the absence of hot-button political flashpoints provides us with an opportunity to get a purer sense from anglos – and from members of other minority groups in Quebec, be they religious, ethnic, racial or religious – of their own Quebec identity.
We’re not asking for long essays; short vignettes describing moments of personal epiphany on the question of Quebec identity would be just fine.
Here’s one of my own:
The very first time that I felt like more of a Quebecer than a Canadian was in the summer of 1976, when I was a 19-year-old CEGEP student and I went out to Alberta to look for a summer job working on oil rigs.
I went out with six other anglos from Notre Dame de Grâce. We landed in Edmonton and we separated from there. Within a couple of days, word within the group had spread; there seemed to be some hard feelings out there toward Quebec, and so don’t advertise the fact you are from Quebec while looking for work.
I took a room in Medicine Hat and went for an interview with the boss of a gas rig. And sure enough, he asked me, “You’re not from Quebec, are you?” and I said no, I was from New Brunswick. I got the job. But then he hired somebody from, as fate would have it, New Brunswick, to work with me. He wasn’t a nice guy and it didn’t take him long to figure out I wasn’t really from New Brunswick. I feared being exposed. A couple of days after he was hired, our crew went to pick him up at the old Royal Hotel, where he was staying. But he wasn’t there in the lobby waiting. We went up to his room and saw him lying on the floor in the corridor, drunk and bleeding from his head. He had fallen and hit his head on the radiator. The rig driller who was the head of our crew stood over him and fired him on the spot. We left for work, and my secret was safe.
Looking back, I don’t feel proud of having concealed my Quebec identity. But I can see very clearly now that it took a personal experience involving prejudice against Quebec in the rest of Canada to make me feel like a Quebecer first and foremost for the first time in my life.
Two years later, I returned to Montreal and experienced a more rationalized, more Cartesian variety of discrimination than I had seen in Alberta. This was, of course, Bill 101, which introduced restrictions on English that were justified by the proposition that restrictions were required to support the fragile position of French in North America. In general, courts have supported this proposition, and intellectual arguments can be marshalled to explain why. But on an emotional level, Bill 101 was tough to take. It made anglos feel like outsiders in Quebec society.
Maybe that’s why I know a lot of anglos in Montreal who say they consider themselves to be Montrealers first and foremost, in terms of their primary identity. On the one hand, we can see when we travel through the rest of Canada that we are different from other English Canadians; on the other hand, we know that here in Quebec, when a crowd yells “Le Québec au Québécois,” they don’t mean us.
But it isn’t just anglos in Montreal. Last year, I read something in which an anglo in the Laurentians said he considers himself to be more of an anglo-Laurentianer than an anglo-Quebecer. I know anglos in the Gaspé and Eastern Townships regions who feel the same way about their own regional identities.
Last year, I heard a story about someone in former Premier Bernard Landry’s entourage who used to say that there was no such thing as an “anglophone community of Quebec.”
I originally found that suggestion to be insulting. But now I’m not sure. Given the strength of regional identity among anglophones living in Quebec, I’m wondering whether it’s more accurate to talk about the “anglophone communities of Quebec,” in the plural, than some community in the singular that has some shared emotional bond with the myths and ideals of Quebec.
I do think, though, that it is hard to have a strong sense of Quebec identity if you don’t speak French or have not travelled in Quebec. We have all heard the cliché about the Quebecer who goes out west and is changed by seeing the majesty of the Rocky Mountains. Well, there are equivalents to that in Quebec. I’ve travelled widely in this province for work. And anytime I am up on a hill in the Charlevoix region looking down at the St. Lawrence River as it widens out to the sea, I see this great river that runs through our province and through our history, and I really do feel like I am a part of it.
How about you? Tell us – as we prepare to mark la Fête Nat ... I mean, St. Jean Baptiste Day.
djohnston@montrealgazette.com
Twitter:@DavidOJohnston