Testifying in his trial on drug-trafficking charges this week, Tony Conte, a 47-year-old Montreal native, said he could not understand certain text messages that he had received that were alleged to concern a drug transaction because he doesn’t understand English.
Conte, an actor, testified that he has even had to turn down roles because of his lack of English.
For this heroic personal sacrifice, and for his exemplary, lifelong resistance to English assimilation, I nominate Conte for the next “patriot of the year” award of the anti-English Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal.
Now if only he’ll be available to attend the award ceremony next November.
By then, he might merit serious consideration for the award, if the renewed war in Quebec on English and those who speak it continues to escalate. Consider some recent developments.
The enemy is no longer only the gradually vanishing anglos who still don’t speak French. Now it’s also those who do, but are deemed not to speak it well enough.
A commentator on Montreal’s most popular radio station, Benoît Dutrizac, invited municipal politicians Michael Applebaum and Marvin Rotrand onto his show, then ridiculed their French as hard to understand.
And another commentator, Mathieu Bock-Côté, complained in the Journal de Montréal about being greeted in Montreal businesses in accented French.
The war is also against the public use of English, even when it is still legal.
Buckling under pressure from a single reporter in the National Assembly press gallery, Justice Minister Jean-Marc Fournier announced he would stop making a brief statement in English at the opening of his news conferences, which he had done as a courtesy to English-language broadcast reporters.
That wasn’t enough for the language critic of the Parti Québécois official opposition. Yves-François Blanchet said no member of the officially unilingual Quebec government should ever speak anything but French in public, except to answer journalists’ questions in English.
Responding to complaints that he himself speaks too much English, Blanchet announced that he would no longer answer questions in English in “official” news conferences.
And Blanchet criticized the governing Liberals for being too eager to please their “English-speaking clientele” – French-speaking supporters of the PQ are called “voters” or “citizens” – and for having an “anglophile” mentality that needs to be “uprooted.”
To which La Presse columnist Vincent Marissal added the complaint that the Liberal Party has an official English version of its name.
A couple of courageous iconoclasts, however, resisted being swept up by the war fever.
On the website of the alternate weekly Voir, blogger Jérôme Lussier rejected, one by one, several nationalist “grievances for an outdated Quebec.”
For example, he wrote: “It is not being a sellout to have doubts about the usefulness of a policy of hostility toward English-speaking waitresses as a way to promote the official language.”
And in a column in Voir criticizing “nationalist mythology,” Simon Jodoin drew a parallel between the beliefs of Quebec nationalism and those of religious “Judeo-Christianity:” New France stood for the biblical Eden, and the British Conquest the Fall.
Anything English was evil, and would cause long-lasting suffering to the Québécois until it finally destroyed them – unless they found Redemption, through sovereignty.
“Will you forgive me,” Jodoin asked, “if, out of agnosticism or simple foolishness, I find it simpler not to fear my neighbour?”
Lussier is 36 and Jodoin 39. They are among the French-speaking “children of Bill 101” who grew up with classmates who weren’t of old French-Canadian stock, in a Quebec in which the French language was more secure.
Some people assure me that Lussier and Jodoin speak for a lot of Québécois, especially the younger ones who will replace the pre-Bill 101 generation that is currently in control of the mainstream media as well as politics.
It’s just that the others are afraid to speak out themselves, for fear of being called traitors.
You can understand that. After all, there is a war going on.
dmacpherson Gvc montrealgazette.com
Twitter: Gvc MacphersonGaz