Today I’m in pain. Bad for my French, bad for my culture. The 53e Juno awards ceremony dug within me a chasm into which the government seems to want to push the Canadian Francophonie. Does this ceremony, which was nevertheless intended to be festive and inclusive, reflect the fate that Canada has in store for French-speakers on its territory? If so, Quebec seems the last French-speaking bastion in hostile land. The split with the rest of Canada seems more and more inevitable to me. I barely dare imagine what it’s like to be French-speaking outside Quebec…
Since I worked in the radio field as a musical director, I make it my duty every year to watch this televised gala lasting more than two hours in order to measure the quality of my work, but also to see the Quebec artists who are there shine. selected in large numbers.
This year, the ceremony took place in the east of the country, near Halifax, Nova Scotia. As I have been listening to the Juno Awards for several years now, I tend to compare the galas. The first thing that struck me was that this year, no one made the effort to learn a single word in French as the actor Simu Liu had sensitively done. Furthermore, no French-speaking artist has taken the stage to present an award as Roxane Bruneau did in recent years or even Mitsou at one time. Worse, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Pascale St-Onge, did not even deign to make her speech in both official languages, which the Honorable Pablo Rodriguez has done many times in the past.
The supreme insult, I believe, is to have paid half-homage to the great Quebec singer-songwriter Karl Tremblay. The instrumental interpretation of success Shooting Stars des Cowboys Fringants by Alexandra Stréliski was simply masterful, nothing to complain about, but if it weren’t for her tribute to Karl before she started the piece, there would have been no French spoken during this gala broadcast in the across Canada on CBC and paid for in part by our taxes.
Is it so difficult to invite a Quebec artist to perform the poetry of the Cowboys in front of a predominantly English-speaking audience? This same audience who, earlier, acclaimed the performance in Punjabi of the artist Karan Aujla. This audience which, at times, delighted in the performance in the language of Jeremy Dutcher’s ancestors, followed by that in Inuktitut from Elisapie. Even Charlotte Cardin took the stage to perform her success Confetti in its original English version, although she nevertheless made a French version. Was it so inappropriate to ask him to make a hybrid version to include both languages?
Ironically, French has never been better. It is popular all over the world, everywhere except here, in Canada. More and more artists of international caliber are offering us French versions of their success, either by joining forces with a talent from the French-speaking world, as the American Benson Boone did for his song In The Starswith Philippine Lavrey, or by singing themselves in the language of Molière, like the Irish artist Cian Ducrot with his excerpt All For You (I who loved you so much), or the German band Milky Chance and its success Living in a Haze (in French). The Canadian megastar Bryan Adams or the famous British singer Mick Jagger are capable of telling us a few sentences in French when they are passing through French-speaking soil.
The examples which prove that the French language attracts attention all over the world are diverse and numerous. So, how can we justify the total absence of a French-speaking number in this 53e ceremony ? However, the opportunities were there. One of the groups nominated in the Best French Album category could very well have pleased Nova Scotians. We just have to think of Salebarbes or even Karkwa…
Will our artists have to get involved and use their platform to talk about the problem, as First Nations artists did before them? We can only salute their efforts since we see today to what extent opening the discussion can help us take our rightful place. We must stop tolerating the intolerable and apologizing for being who we are. Today, I am in pain, but I live in hope since I know that this illness is not incurable.