I remember ? Michel used to say: “Our motto is ‘I remember’, but we’ve forgotten everything, ostie…” Boutade? Not really. Septuagenarians, we are regularly surprised by our collective oblivion. Readers of the major Montreal dailies, apart from the saga of the deer in Michel-Chartrand Park in Longueuil, we find that it is rarely a question of him, his convictions, his values and his struggles from 1949 to 2000.
Even the city of Montreal, where he was born, lived, worked and led the most important union grouping of the CSN from 1968 to 1978, the Central Council of Montreal, has not yet succeeded, despite a petition from 5000 people and very many steps for years to dedicate a park with trees to it… When is the Michel-Chartrand park in Montreal?
In a small tribute book made of testimonies, published in 2016, Down with the bird killers! (available free of charge on the Classics of Social Sciences website), his godson, the doctor Alain Vadeboncœur, wrote “Michel is not just a simple memory, he is an active force. Like all true heroes. A man who is part of our collective memory. Few union leaders have touched Quebecers so much in 70 years.
The sinews of war is education
He said he played the role of the corypheus in the Greek theater and applied himself to it. “Capitalism is amoral, asocial, stateless”; “it cannot be reformed, cannot be tamed”, he proclaimed, starting in the 1970s. It must be abolished. You can hear it in the movie A man of his word, of our brother Alain Chartrand and our dear sister-in-law Diane Cailhier (on the NFB website). The fight against this system of exploitation and oppression will be long, very long, a story of generations. Moreover, he had until his death in 2010, a deep confidence in youth. The sinews of war, he repeated, is education.
We who have spent our working life… and even more, in education, are still convinced of its social importance. Michel, our father, gives us the strength to continue working so that the education system is what it should always have been with a school that offers quality education to all regardless of wealth, culture, region and identity. A school that prioritizes its cultural function, that transmits to everyone a set of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values. We are aiming for the realization of a public school, common, but plural, which creates solidarity and social cohesion.
Here are some words we addressed to him in Down with the bird killers!
“I carry within me precious legacies that give me an appointment at a source where I can drink. Source of valorization, source of openness to the world, source of intellectual curiosity, source of reflections to remind me that benevolent, warm action and listening strengthen others, encourage them and contribute to the happiness of our fellow human beings. I speak secretly to my dear departed. I solicit them in the silence of the heart, believing in the hope of knowing that they listen to us, protect us and watch over us with love. »
Some of your children, your grandchildren, your longtime friends or acquaintances and people who did not know you, but whom you inspired, testified to their admiration and their love for you. We even transformed your multiple faults into qualities. In your lifetime, you would have been embarrassed by it and yet we are all convinced that it is very little.
You were born in 1916 and died exactly twelve years ago today. We miss you immensely, on occasion, painfully. So, we laugh at your jokes and ramblings and we imagine drinking glasses with you. Sometimes, we are even happy for you that you are no longer of this world.
“Man of combat, indefatigable”, you have been described as loving life and nature; attentive to its fabulous wealth, from the most prosaic to the most grandiose; tender, generous, warm with your loved ones; free, upright, courageous, sincere with yourself; indignant and revolted in the face of misery, injustice, oppression. A giant, they say…
But what we are most proud of is that you were “a man among men”.