English Canadians: a word about your media

The BBQ Pit
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Many of you have heard of the recent shooting at Dawson College in Montreal, which has been discussed in [thread=388036]this thread[/thread]. This event has been discussed at length by media across Canada and across the world during the last week. No one quite knows why Kimveer Gill decided to do such a terrible thing. Often, it is mentioned that these killers were constantly bullied at school for many years, and then just couldn’t take it anymore. But Gill wasn’t even a student at Dawson, and had never been. The fact that he had paranoid delusions of the CSIS and FBI sending agents disguised as goths to watch him, though, kind of makes us wonder if he wasn’t just gravely mentally ill.

Some people, though, know why it happened. Columnist Jan Wong of the Globe and Mail is one of them. In her recent column, she notices that three shootings have happened in Quebec – and in fact, in Montreal – schools during the last 17 years. There was the Polytechnique massacre in 1989 when Marc Lépine killed 14 women, blaming feminists for his failures in life. Then, in 1992, Valery Fabrikant killed four colleagues in the Concordia University Engineering department after being denied tenure. These three events are completely unrelated to each other, most people would say. But no! says Wong. Noting the fact the Marc Lépine was born Gamil Gharbi and is half-Algerian – a fact I was completely unaware of – she mentions that what all three killers have in common is that they are immigrants or children of immigrants: Lépine, Fabrikant who is a Russian Jew and Gill who was of Indian heritage. And why do immigrants commit such unrepairable crimes in Quebec? Why, says Wong, because francophone Quebecers are a bunch of xenophobes obsessed with racial purity who completely reject anyone who isn’t of the same ethnic stock as them, of course!

Now, I’m sure most reasonable people here will come and tell me that Wong was obviously out of line. After all, even regardless of the value of her argument, she is using a national tragedy as a means to build political capital. And that’s just wrong, as Airman Doors reminds us in the linked MPSIMS thread. But I must say that I’m getting increasingly disturbed by this kind of comments coming from the English-Canadian press. Just a few weeks before, we francophone Quebecers were accused of anti-Semitism by Barbara Kay, a columnist in the National Post. I wanted to start a Pit thread about it, but chose not to; I decided against actually reading her column, and anyway, we kind of expect this shite from the National Post or Sun Media newspapers. I still referenced the event in [post=7743953]this post[/post]. But the Globe and Mail is one of the most respected papers in Canada, and not from the far-right either, it has a quite centrist editorial position.

I’ve had discussions about Canadian politics with many bright English-Canadian posters here. Even if I don’t always agree with them, I often find them very thoughful. I especially want to thank RickJay, among others, for the good discussions I’ve had with him. But there’s one feature of these discussions that I feel the need to mention. Often, English Canadians feel the need to tell me that there is no or almost no hostility towards Quebec in their part of the world, that we are their brothers and sisters in this great nation, and that if I might have gotten the contrary impression, it must be due to the biased media in Quebec. Now, I must admit that, not reading the National Post or Globe and Mail, it is only through the French-language media that I peruse that I learn what they are talking about. But, and I’m sure you’ll agree, there is nothing biased in Radio-Canada’s decision to tell me that Premier Jean Charest has decided to ask for excuses from the Globe – which are withheld for now – while describing briefly the controversy. The journalists are only doing their job. And it doesn’t matter how biased you think the media in Quebec is, all I can tell you is that I can’t even imagine a columnist from Le Devoir or so making such ignorant and inflammatory comments.

This isn’t the first time that this phenomenon – which has a name, “Quebec-bashing” – happens in the English-Canadian media. It has been described at length in books such as Le livre noir du Canada anglais, which I will agree is in fact a pretty biased source. But a source nonetheless. There appears to be an effort in English-language Canadian media to depict francophone Quebec as some sort of backward, xenophobic, racist, anti-Semitic pseudo-nation of ignorants. I assume that you will agree that this image is incorrect, and if you don’t, start a GD thread and I will follow you there. Maybe this effort isn’t concerted. And I’m certain that your media also says a lot of great things about Quebec. But I would still kindly ask of English Canadians to please try to control the bloody lies that they spout against us. Not only is it tiresome, but also worrisome. You can’t claim that this malicious Quebec-bashing hasn’t coloured the opinion, if not of you, at least of some people in your part of the world.

Oh, but I notice that some of the columnists I named earlier do have ties to Quebec. In fact, Barbara Kay lives in Montreal, and Jan Wong has lived in Montreal, although she now lives in Toronto. Given that they are so ignorant about francophone Quebec, I can only assume that they lived in sheltered Anglo-Montreal where they had contact only with anglophone Montrealers. And these anglophone Montrealers seem [post=7581177]quite angry at us[/post] for reasons that are sometimes valid, other times not so valid. So angry, in fact, that I’m starting to get the idea – which I hope is wrong – that they are trying to build hatred of us in the rest of Canada, and possibly the rest of the world. No, I don’t yet think this is voluntary. But seeing how Kay and Wong can hold a people they supposedly lived close to for many years in such contempt, I don’t have any other explanation. I don’t have anything against anglophone Quebecers, I think they are a great contribution to our nation (or province, if you prefer). But I wish they would try to counter the bile coming from their angrier elements.

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You wanted to start a pit thread on a column you hadn’t actually read?

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This is why I didn’t start the thread. I knew the gist of it but decided it wasn’t worthy of my attention and emotional involvement.

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Hmmmmm

Maybe you haven’t noticed this, but when refering to the Anglo Montrealers it comes across that you think of them as outsiders in your province. Which is what Wong stated there.

As for this build up of hatred, well it ain’t working. I do not hate Quebec so obviously these attempts by the anglo press to turn us all against Quebec is pretty lame.

Oh I also love the idea that there is a “Black book of the English” because now that I know I’m part of a monolithic group I feel so secure with my English bretheren.

[sarcasm]As soon as I get my membership card I will finally get to asist in working on your assimilation. All Hail Lord Durham. [/sarcasm]

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Montreal, from what I understand, has Canada’s largest Jewish community. If Quebec is so anti-Semitic, it would be fairly effortless for most of Montreal’s Jews to just move elsewhere in the country. Has there been an exodus of Jews from Montreal?

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This is definitely not a spin that I’ve heard out here in Alberta, where you might expect to hear such things. Not a word, in any of the media - including the Sun Media chain.

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I’ve seen this from both sides of the Ottawa River, having lived (soon) half my life in the rest of Canada and half my life in Quebec.

I would say the main problems are:

  1. Quebecers hear far more about anglophone Canada than people there hear about us. My knowledge of Quebecers (and French Canada in general, despite living in Winnipeg) was incredibly scanty when I moved here, and I was the product of first public, then private schools, and assiduous attention to the radio.

  2. The portrayal of Quebec as scary and unreasonable is much overblown. I had a greatly distorted vision of the political and social scene here that has proven ridiculously far from the truth. When I moved here, I was nervous about what kind of intolerance I might face as an anglophone, which proved to be so laughably off track that it’s embarrassing. There’s a reason why I had such a counterfactual opinion when I arrived here.

One specific:

There is a segment of the anglophone Montreal population which is, indeed, very insular and has very little interaction with the rest of the province. For example, of the anglophone Montrealers I know who speak no French, part are those who have just arrived and part are those who have lived here all their lives. Uber-anglo singers Bowser and Blue once described the joy of living in Westmount as “I can pretend Quebec doesn’t exist.” Having lived in Westmount, I can see where he got that: there are places on this island where you can go without ever culturally or socially interacting with the rest of Quebec.

The rest of Montrealers whose first language is English actually are involved in the cultural, social, and political life of Quebec. They enjoy living in Quebec and feel that its cultural life and in particular the French fact enriches their own lives. I believe this group is in the majority and I believe it describes me and my family and friends.

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I’ve experienced Quebec-bashing firsthand, being labeled “Frenchie” by sneering jackasses in Toronto, simply because I was chatting in French with my friend while we sat eating ice cream. Not representative of the opinion of everyone in “English Canada”, I know, but it still hurt quite a bit. It was soon after all that fun referendum business, and I was told by the sneering jackasses to “just separate and fuck off already”.

But then, as little kids growing up in a suburb of Montreal, my sister and I were yelled at and had gravel thrown at us by other children, because we were speaking English.

So I’m basically screwed either way, aren’t I. There are some areas of Montreal in which I feel very uncomfortable speaking English, and I’m hesitant to pull out my French when I’m outside Quebec.

Moral of the story: Some people don’t like “different”. And every culture/race/group has some of those people who enjoy ruining it for the rest of us.

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As matt_mcl mentioned, there is a part of the English-speaking community of Montreal that actually takes pride in being outsiders in their own province. I wouldn’t think of them as outsiders if they didn’t want me to. I assume (without proof) that this segment of the English-speaking Montrealers are the people from whom Wong and others got their opinion of French-speaking Quebec.

But I should have mentioned explicitely that other anglophone Montrealers, such as matt_mcl, aren’t reactionary in this way. They want to be part of the greater Quebec community. However, I did say

which pretty much says it.

And no, that’s not quite what Wong says. She says that immigrants, and the descendents of immigrants who are not able to pass as “ethnically pure” will never be accepted by a large part of francophone Quebecers. Not that francophone Quebecers will always consider anglophones, and especially those who don’t speak French, as somewhat foreign. The latter is acceptable. The former is a blanket accusation of racism, and false at that.

Doesn’t work on you, sure. But people get their opinions from the media they use, like it or not.

That’s not my point. Maybe it was partly Normand Lester’s (the author’s) point, I don’t know, but then again, he’s extremely biased. But as I saw it, it was an attempt to find examples of hatred of Quebec in English-Canadian culture, and especially media. It doesn’t matter if you don’t agree with these sentiments, many other English-Canadians don’t. But they still exist.

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As a southern New Brunswicker (“english half”, though still bilingual), I have heard my share of Quebec-bashing growing up. Even back in elementary school it was “common knowledge” that Acadians didn’t get along with those “snobby, elitist” Quebecois. I heard plenty of “personal accounts” (ahem… take that with a huge grain of salt) about how whenever one of us Acadians goes into Quebec, that they refuse to speak to us because they consider our french to be inferior.

I don’t know where the hell it comes from, but it’s there. Personally, I’ve never even been to Quebec, so I have no idea if any of these “personal accounts” have much merit, but having been born and raised in NB, I have a feeling there is an awful lot of exaggeration and broad generalisations going on.

Of course, I can only speak from my experiences, and I can’t possibly know every southern New Brunswicker, and I am making generalisations, too. But there does seem to be an undercurrent of *some * sort of indignation aimed in the general direction of Quebec out there. I don’t know where it comes from or where it began, but I’ve heard it all my (28 years of) life, and I’m sure it was there before I got there.

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There is something I have to mention here. Until the 60’s, education in Quebec was under the umbrella of the churches. And the Catholic church didn’t accept Jews in its (primarily French-speaking) schools, while the Protestant churches did accept Jews in their (primarily English-speaking) schools. Mainly for this reason, Jews in Quebec mostly integrated into the English-speaking community. (Similarly, a large proportion of the Irish assimilated into the French-speaking population.) So today, the attitude of Montreal’s Jews, as far as I can tell as someone who doesn’t actually live there, is quite similar to that of Montreal’s anglophones in general. And many of Montreal’s anglophones are not happy with the fact that Quebec has now defined itself as a French-speaking society and has promulgated laws to ensure this. Some of them did leave for the rest of Canada, especially when it seemed likely that Quebec would separate from Canada. I’m sure this included Jews, but they didn’t leave because of anti-Semitism per se.

This is not to say that there is no anti-Semitism in Montreal, or in the rest of Quebec. I sometimes hear reports of people throwing rocks or fire bombs on Jewish schools, or of destroying tombstones in Jewish cemetaries. But they always seem to be isolated events, and I don’t think that they happen more often than elsewhere. Montreal, all in all, is, like most large cities, quite ethnically diverse and tolerant.

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Well, I found Wong’s article to be so preposterous to be almost comical, if it wasn’t for the fact that it insults me because of which ethnic group I belong to. You don’t usually find this sentiment shown that blatantly. This said, I think you could occasionally find anti-Quebec sentiment in your media. The Sun Media chain, being specifically populist and dealing in emotions, is a place where such things can be found.

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I know you mentioned this before, but I’m curious about what kind of misconceptions you had. What misinformation had you picked up and what did you imagine you’d see once in Quebec? How did you expect to be treated? And also, if you don’t mind, how old were you? If you were very young, it could explain why you had unrealistic expectations.

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To be fair, I was 13 and we did move right before the referendum, so people were relatively keyed up. But I did expect to have anti-anglophone prejudice be a fairly common thing. In fact, in the 11 years that I’ve lived here, I have never once had a Québécois say or do anything derogatory towards me because I am an anglophone. I have heard far more anti-French Canadian sentiment from other anglophones inside or outside Quebec than the reverse.

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Actually, Montreal with about 90,000 Jews is much smaller than Toronto’s 150,000.

In the 1950’s, the populations were similar, but the rise of Quebec nationalists and the perceptions thereby engendered about the province, may have contributed to the exodus of many of Quebec’s Jews.

BTW, this nice link puts the Jewish population of Toronto at 175,000, almost double of its estimate of Montreal’s 95,000.

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I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a grain of truth in there. I’m sure you’re aware that Acadians have their own dialect, and if nothing else it can be difficult for someone speaking Acadian French to make themselves understood by someone who only knows International French (as my mother found out when we went to Europe a few years back). I’m not familiar with the Acadian dialect, but I suspect the difference is akin to British vs. American English.

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Oh certainly, no argument there - I was speaking with regard to this particular incident.

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I don’t have a beef in this fight, but Guy Fournier has a goat

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Toronto has a much greater total population, so one could say Montreal has the highest percentage of Jews of any city in Canada (or at least very close to Toronto).

I guess Wong could have her impressions “tainted” by stuff like the recent firebombing of a Jewish school. How often has that happened in the last few years? More than once, I know. Also, there’s the matter of Parizeau blaming immigrants for his referendum loss (he’s married to an immigrant, heh). That’s some pretty high profile stuff to not permantly etch some “xenophobia” onto the perception of Quebec.

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This has nothing to do with any “fight”. Fournier was already thoroughly discredited and everybody cheered his resignation. Starting this spring when he had said that Radio-Canada hadn’t done enough to promote Canadian unity, following with this summer’s interview with a Toronto radio station when he talked about the joys of defecating, and ending with this brutally ignorant comment about Lebanon, he had succeded in alienating everyone and looking completely unprofessional.

As I said, it does happen. But there are bigots everywhere. I don’t think it happens more often in Montreal than in other cities of the same size.

First, Parizeau isn’t currently married to an immigrant. I checked, and his deceased wife was Polish-born, but his current wife seems to have been born in Quebec. As for his comments, what he said, just after learning that he had lost the referendum, was that the defeat was due to “money and the ethnic vote”. While this is brutally politically incorrect, and an unacceptable thing to say, it is true that members of minority ethnic groups tend to be less in favour of Quebec independence as the majority French-speaking population. As for the “money” comment, there have been numerous books written about fraudulent or doubtful actions done by both sides during this referendum campaign. With such a small margin of defeat, he might actually have been right. Plus, he was disappointed and probably drunk at the time. And he resigned soon after, probably realizing how much out of line he was.

My point is that if people get the impression that “francophone Quebecers are xenophobic” due to the events you’re describing, it must be because they already believed it, since many other events will give the opposite impression. Hey, maybe I should think that English Canadians are also racist, from what I said I see in their media.