Our sufferings make her vomit | The Press

My grandmother Jobin had 11 children. She was able to ‘stop the family’ without feeling she was a bad Catholic only after a priest told her that with 11 children she had ‘done her part’.

As for the Pedneauds, my mother’s grandmother died at 34. After having had 13 pregnancies. Of which eight went to term. Pure suffering.

Families everywhere, women everywhere, could tell similar stories. In Quebec, the Church was all-powerful, it controlled many lives and if it did a lot of good, it also caused a lot, a lot of suffering.

It would take more than a chronicle to do justice to those, and especially those, who suffered under his yoke. I will content myself with saying that it is not for nothing that Quebecers have gone in a few years from one of the most religious nations in the world to one of the least religious.¹.

It is our whole history that pushes us today to want to keep all religions away from the State, in fact as well as in appearance.

I am convinced that part of the support for Bill 21 comes from these serious injuries caused by the Church.

These sufferings, our sufferings, make Amira Elghawaby, the new federal representative for the fight against Islamophobia, vomit.

Indeed, while a University of Toronto philosophy professor wrote that French Canadians were the largest group of people who fell victim to British colonialism in Canada, Ms.^me Elghawaby was to say it made him nauseous. The sufferings of Quebecers do not count, we are the bad guys in his universe of prejudices, simplistic judgments and ignorance.

Allow me to give a small sample of what first British and then Canadian colonialism meant to us.

For two centuries, yes, two centuries, we were among the poorest and least educated social groups in North America.

In 1960, we had, on average, one year less schooling than black Americans².

We fought racist language laws, notably in Nova Scotia (1864), New Brunswick (1871), Prince Edward Island (1877), Ontario (1912), Manitoba (1890, 1896, 1916), in Saskatchewan (1909, 1929, 1931), in Alberta (1892, 1905) and in the Northwest Territories (1892). For decades we have faced the Orangemen and even the Klu Klux Klan of Canada³.

In 1961, in a 90% French Quebec, a unilingual francophone earned half the salary of a unilingual anglophone, yes, half.

Everywhere, among the bosses as among the workers, we were told “Speak White”.

I stop, I make myself nauseous.

Author and economist, Mario Polèse has written a rich and powerful book which does not list our sufferings, but which underlines the qualities that Quebecers have had to demonstrate in order to get out of this misery in which the Conquest, the Church , English Canada and their own elites had plunged them. To read to all those who, like Mr.^me Elghawaby, despise Quebec: the miQuebec squeegee, story of a traveler from here and elsewherepublished by Boréal in 2021.

One last word

During my time as mayor of Gatineau, like many Quebec mayors^⁠4, I have made considerable efforts to promote better living together in my city. It’s no small task to bring people together.

First of all, you have to be driven by a strong desire to build something with what you could call “the other” and, to get there, you need both nuance and humility (in particular to recognize our ignorance), a great ability to listen, a real interest in understanding the suffering of the other and the ability to hold difficult but frank discussions while showing respect.

Obviously, M.^me Elghawaby has none, but none, of these qualities. She is an activist who denounces and hates, not a unifier who heals. My grandmother Jobin, a nurse, would certainly tell her that evil cannot be cured by evil. She should resign, not out of respect for Quebecers, she has none, but out of respect for the cause she defends.

2. Lecture by Pierre Fortin, Montreal, May 11, 2010. Quote taken from Guy Rocher’s bibliography by Pierre Duchesne, p. 40.

4. Intercultural cities in Quebec: Inclusion practices in a multi-ethnic contextdirected by Bob White and Jorge Frozzini