I spend too much time on X, I confess. But that’s where the first clue dawned on me last year. An Internet user reported that one of his old boyfriends, a primary school teacher in a multi-ethnic school, had left the island because he could no longer stand hearing his students refuse, he claimed, Quebecois identity. If he told them that, most of them born in Quebec, they were Quebecois, he triggered, in this version, general hilarity and even contempt.
Certainly, I thought, this is an isolated case or a teacher with hypersensitive identity skin. However, comments along the same lines appeared on the thread. Astonished and incredulous, I wanted to find the teacher and the school, without success. The author of the post has since disappeared from X.
I put it all away in a corner of my computer until I read The cultural duel of nations (Boreal) by Emmanuel Lapierre. The work, both scholarly and personal, explains how the experiences of theorists of the concept of nation permeate their conclusions. It also demonstrates how the dominant nations, all of them intrinsically ethnic and civic, make the small ones, who are just as dominant, feel guilty. Lapierre is a teacher. He writes: “In all the schools in the Montreal region where I have worked over the last 15 years, I cannot believe the attitude of contempt or shame towards language and culture. Quebecois. »
English dominates the corridors
Then, at the end of January, I made the mistake of asserting, in my column “Abnormal School”, that French was the common language in Montreal’s private schools. Teachers attacked my email box to disabuse me.
That of a highly rated private school in Montreal, with long French-speaking roots, testifies: “Although French is the working language, in the corridors, the common language is increasingly English. The management and teachers try no matter how hard they try to turn things around, but nothing works. English predominates in this very multi-ethnic environment. Most of our non-French-speaking students don’t care about French (a good number of French-speakers do too, in fact). »
To avoid reprisals and preserve the reputation of an institution to which he is very attached, he asks not to be named and not to designate the school. Two of his colleagues subsequently confirmed his findings to me.
Four current and past teachers from Regina Assumpta College, in Ahuntsic, want their school to be named. After many years of service, the first wrote to me that she had resigned, notably “because of the increasingly present denigration of French-speaking Quebecers. […] We speak English in this school. Even students whose parents are French-speaking, native or immigrant, no longer speak French as soon as they set foot, or even the first foot, in this college. » His three colleagues also observe a shift towards English.
I spoke to the general director of the college, Julie Duchesne, who disputes their reading. Corridor conversations, she assures me, are “mainly in French”. She adds that her students “are all proud to speak, study and live in French” and that all interactions between the staff, on the one hand, and the young people and their parents, on the other hand, are “unilingual French-speaking “. Especially since the institution “promotes Quebec culture, traditions, and Quebec works hold a large place”. Some of the students have the right to enroll in the English-speaking school, but “choose to do [leurs études] in French,” she recalls.
Contempt for the “Kebs”
My sources do not dispute the fact that French is the official language of the college, but deplore that these efforts are not bearing enough fruit. And they point out another phenomenon: “Students hate French speakers. We make life very difficult for those who want to speak French and defend the French fact: they are humiliated and denigrated in person and on social networks,” says one of them.
As part of her course, still at Regina Assumpta, another teacher had to address the theme of identity. She says: “While we were in the middle of a discussion about our values as citizens, one of the two native students in my group raised his hand to speak. That’s when the whole group started laughing and booing saying that the Kebs had no values and that our girls and women are actually sluts (I’m using acceptable vocabulary here […]). I quickly intervened and was cut off by a tall guy of North African origin who said to me: “Madame, you cannot understand because the Kebs, you have no culture. You do white people’s things like go to the cabin and go skiing and you don’t educate your children.” »
She continues: “What can we say about my little “native” student, a musician in the school string orchestra, who dared to play a little rigodon to brighten up our Christmas activity in class? The students started laughing at him, insulting him and throwing objects at him. Later, that same day, Lebanese music was heard in the level room where all the students gathered and where several began to dance the dabkeh to the applause of the delirious crowd. »
She continues: “And how is this French-speaking Quebec student doing today who, in class, dared to say that French-speaking Quebecers had suffered discrimination in the past? [Elle] was insulted and threatened on social networks for his comments which the other students considered racist and inappropriate since, according to them, French-speaking Quebecers had not really suffered. » A student in this class confirms the incident.
Another teacher reports that on Halloween, “about five years ago, [un] student of 4e high school student showed up to college dressed in a Glad garbage bag for clothing. He had made a small poster which he stuck on his stomach on which was written “Culture Keb”. It took two or three periods before an adult asked him to take off his costume.”
Regina Assumpta’s management refuses to confirm or deny the existence of these anecdotes, or even to indicate whether facts of this kind have been brought to its attention. But she assures that “no hateful, racist or intolerant gesture, comment is tolerated”, that the situation is “handled by a member of staff” and that “there are always interventions that are made”. Asked to give her opinion on the very existence of this problem, to estimate its importance, its rise or decline, the general director refused to get involved in this area.
Intolerance on both sides
In Regina Assumpta always, in a group of 2e secondary, a speaker from the “Caravan of Tolerance” asked the question: who here feels Quebecois? Out of 36 students, 34 said no. This organization is now called Together for Respect for Diversity. Each year, he leads approximately 1,000 workshops on tolerance in Quebec schools, public and private, reaching nearly 30,000 students per year. I mentioned this result to its general director, Rafaël Provost. His reaction: “It’s something that happens to us very often. »
I then read him the anecdotes reported by the teachers. He considers them all to be probable. This contempt for Kebs, he said, “we see it and we hear it in schools”.
The last Sociocultural portrait of students enrolled in public schools on the island of Montreal reports that 56% of their students were either born abroad or born here to two foreign parents. Out of a total of 447 schools, 165 public schools (primary or secondary) on the island have a proportion of 66% or more students from immigrant backgrounds. Among them, 111 have 75% or more, 43 have 85% or more.
The minority of natives can create conditions conducive to the spread of contempt, but it does not constitute the cause. Mr. Provost mentions several reasons which can explain this. “No young person is born racist, homophobic or intolerant: it is something that is learned. » A young person who grows up in an immigrant family whose integration is successful will have a positive image of Quebec and its inhabitants, while parents who feel rejected and devalued will pass on their frustration to their children. “If parents don’t feel like they’re Quebecers themselves, it’s difficult to convey [l’attachement au Québec] to their young people. »
But intolerance, says Provost, is not one-sided. “Many young people in Montreal do not identify as Quebecers because they say they do not have the right to feel like that,” he explains. They are told they are not. » Who is this “we”? “Young Quebecers who tell others that they are not Quebecois [car] to be Quebecois, you have to be white, French-speaking, born here. » These are the kinds of comments he hears today in Montreal schools. And it is the task of its organization to deconstruct these prejudices, on both sides.
I asked him if this phenomenon is progressing or declining. He notes a general rise in intolerance, in all areas: identity, racial, sexual orientation. “There are young people who raise their hands now in classes – and this happens to us regularly – to say “I am racist”, “I am homophobic and that is freedom of expression”. They verbalize it. So imagine those who think it without saying it! » His services are more in demand than ever and he says he feels the school teams are overwhelmed by the increase in tensions of all kinds.
Internalize contempt
It remains that the atmosphere thus created on the specific question of attachment to Quebec is deleterious, including for the identity health of French speakers. Author and teacher Emmanuel Lapierre believes that some of them “adopt the same attitude as other Canadians towards French”. “They speak it out of politeness among their own, and speak it badly. Unconsciously or consciously, they disdain their own language, their own identity. »
In short, something important and worrying is happening today in French-speaking schools, private and public, in Montreal. Tired of war, some teachers choose exile, in another school or outside Montreal. Young people do not have this option. Neither the Kebs nor the others.
Here I have only been able to lift a corner of the veil on this dynamic. It seems urgent to me to better document it and better understand it, to find effective ways to blur this unhealthy dichotomy, because what is unfolding before us is the unraveling, even tearing, of the fabric of Quebec identity.
Columnist, Jean-François Lisée led the PQ from 2016 to 2018. He has just published Through the mouth of my pencils. [email protected].