This week, the flippancy of Air Canada’s newest CEO, Michael Rousseau, was denounced from all quarters.
Logic was respected, the Quebec nationalists were the first to point the finger at the arrogance of a man, not only incapable of gibbering for more than twenty seconds in the language of Miron, but terribly proud, on top of that, to show off his unilingualism in front of a predominantly French-speaking audience.
Rousseau’s court dance turned out to be so shocking that even the leaders of the federalist parties sniffed the political gain within their grasp and took the opportunity to recall the great promises of the Canadian confederative project.
A few days later, if the dust settles a little, the judgment remains final: the most senior officer of Air Canada has shown contempt for Quebecers.
While the proofs of this contempt are well established, it would still be interesting to ask whether we have adequately measured its extent.
A little history
It is that once again, it appears clear that the irreverence of the week is not the work of a single man, but that it belongs more broadly to a culture of the Conquest retained in the very foundations. of Canadian business. A culture that clearly transcends the centuries as well as the promises of 1867.
From James Wolfe to Donald Gordon, the president of CN convinced that the French Canadians were a horde of notorious incompetents, passing by the president of the Montreal Board of Trade Bernard Finestone, reminding Camille Laurin that he and his law 101 were doomed to crawl in front of Anglo-Saxon finance and now a Michael Rousseau, triumphing over the top of his eighty-hour schedule, contempt follows and resembles each other.
The culture of the Conquest is that which allows precisely a company – whose head office is in Quebec – to appoint a unilingual Anglophone even after having anticipated the reaction of Quebec in its most precise expression.
The culture of the Conquest does not bother with remorse because it remembers that it has overcome the test of time. It is widely deployed each time, as this week, as much in the silence of the English-Canadian media as in the virtuous, but always ephemeral, parade of the federalist elites.
The culture of the Conquest is that of contempt which has a sense of history and which grasps the codes of all the eras it passes through. That’s why we’ve seen her apologize for years, even though it’s always late. The culture of the Conquest is that of accounting contempt, of meteorological contempt foretelling storms, but staying the course against thick and thin. It is also that of contempt that will start again next week while waiting for Quebeckers to take hold of history in their turn.
Remi Villemure, Author and master’s student in Montreal history