Prime Minister François Legault,
I’m the daughter of the lady we currently see everywhere in one of your advertisements, especially on TV. This woman who is convincing and convinced by your good work and by that which you have done over the past two years.
During the filming of this commercial on May 24, your production team had my mother sign a release for a ” vox-pop which will be broadcast on the Internet and on television. This release also stipulated that my mother would receive $250 “in the event that her image is retained”. A money order for that amount was in his mailbox on June 10.
I have worked for almost twenty years in the field of photography and copyright and I have good reason to believe that this amount is ridiculous, because it is not a simple vox-pop (contrary to appearances), but indeed an advertisement, and this, despite the authenticity of the opinions expressed by my mother.
Indeed, your team personally contacted my mother and even traveled to interview her for more than an hour at her home. Remember that my mother had previously been interviewed (and broadcast) during a (real) vox-pop during your first election campaign. It looks like you actually liked her comments then so contact her again today.
This situation is twisted and truly disturbing, because the line between documentary and publicity drawn in this case is tenuous and appears to be an unnamed blur.
I understand that it is unethical to pay someone for their political opinions, but it is equally unethical to take advantage of an elderly woman with a modest income (your team has seen the environment where my mother lives; a well kept house, certainly, but which exudes modesty and low income).
To put you in context: my mother was born in 1943 in a poor family like we saw everywhere in Quebec at the beginning of the last century. At that time, children were “taken out” of school to help support the family. My mother finished her 9e year at 18, because she had to interrupt her schooling for two years in order to help her parents by working in the kitchens of the logging camps, in misery and the black flies. She unfortunately could not fulfill her dream of becoming a flight attendant, as the training required an 11e year and that “it was the boys first”. No chance of being born in the body of a woman, then. Despite this difficult and emotionally heavy past, my mother is a courageous, hard-working woman who is determined to make her place “in this world”.
However, like thousands of women of that time, she lived under the financial yoke of a gentle and loving, but financially controlling husband. She therefore did not have the chance to become autonomous and independent.
When she had her children, my mother got up at 3:15 a.m. to work in a potato restaurant on the edge of the 132. She was also the one who prepared the meals, took care of the laundry and paid the groceries, as well as the majority of registration fees and equipment related to sports activities. All this with her salary as a waitress.
She was our security figure in the family. At the dawn of her 80th birthday, I see that my mother is still suffering from financial abuse. I’m disappointed that in 2022, in a seemingly egalitarian province, a government (moreover) is taking advantage of a poor, uneducated woman by making her believe that $250 is the right price to use this “planned” video for advertising purposes (I dare believe that you are using party funds here and not taxpayers?).
And I understand that we are still missing out on an opportunity to consolidate all the battles that our women here have waged, with courage and perseverance, in order to restore fairness in a patriarchal society where women have unfortunately lived too long in shadow and silence.
So I ask you, Mr. Legault, how many times per day, per hour (per minute?) will this advertisement still be broadcast before your values of fairness and justice are challenged?